Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Don't need your face mate, just the IMEI of your phone...

"clubs lately where they demand to have your ID and scan it"

on the face of it that would be a GDPR breach.

It'd be even more fun to let them scan it and then hit them with a subject access request.

The ICO will probably have words to say about such behaviour if their attention is drawn to it.

"The cameras will be mysteriously malfunctioning that day."

Whilst this might be acceptable in the USA, in the UK a judge will throw the case out.

Re: Good Luck

"But that costs money!"

Given the scale of the surveillance and storing the resulting data, it's probably cheaper than back door surveillance.

On the other hand you can't channel payments to most favoured suppliers and in return be treated to expensive sales trips to exotic places.

" I am well aware that they don't give a fuck about evidence and can't understand statistics. 2% correct identification, 25% false positive is interpreted as "we think we got 2 of the bastards."

This is best classified as "noble cause corruption" and pointed out as such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_cause_corruption

'An example of noble cause corruption is police misconduct "committed in the name of good ends"[3] or neglect of due process through “a moral commitment to make the world a safer place to live."[4]

Conditions for such corruption usually occur where individuals feel no administrative accountability, lack morale and leadership, and lose faith in the criminal justice system.[5] These conditions can be compounded by arrogance and weak supervision.[6]'

"He better watch out, the cops may decide to do a bit of stop and search, with a small bag of powder suddenly being found !"

It's not illegal to be in possession of a bag of lemon sherbert.... (yet)

"while we have a housing crisis that has priced a generation out of owning their own homes, and reduced them to nothing more than life long serfs."

If you think that immigration has had more than about 2% influence on that then you're deluded.

The size of the average UK household has gone from 5-6 in the 1950s down to 1-2 now.

That's a tripling of requirements without even needing a population increase and whilst the government knew this was coming in the 1970s when all the pensioner flats it built were immediately occupied by DINKIES, it collectively stuck its fingers in its ears and chanted "neh neh neh, can't hear you" when faced with mounting evidence of lack of housing and accelerating north-south internal urban drift (the internal population movement from north to south is a hell of a lot larger than any foriegn migration and there's housing going effectively for free in many areas up north as a result)

Sucessive governments have been deliberately selling off housing to buy votes and profit from forced sales when the buyers found they couldn't cope, or flat out inertia whilst in the meantime rampant NIMBYism has prevented sorely needed expansions taking place. The Greenbelt isn't a cities' green lung, it's a way for bankers to put a moat between themselves and the hoi-polloi.

"The EU will be harder hit than the UK since we made 90% of the hardware and software. "

Uh huh. Which is why the makers and coders have been bought up or recruited off to Europe.

The UK is claiming ownership of something which is mostly being done by private outfits, under contract and the terms are no different to losing your deposit if you walk away from a house sale.

Re: Yet another Remoaner circle-jerk on El Reg.

"What do we offer them? banking and insurance, and associated services. Hardly anything that they cannot replicate.. and they can take it away from us with things like Tolbin tax."

They don't need to replicate it and they don't need to impose taxes either.

In case noone's noticed, the City has been preparing itself to shuffle off to the mainland since the referendum. In the sake way that there are rules saying "No non-EU members get access to PRS", there are also requirements for financial institutions handing european money to be within the EU.

The song and dance about Gallileo is a distraction from things with far greater economic impact that are going on.

Re: Someone remind me

"The UK also pushed very hard for the rules that explicitly exclude non-EU countries from building any part of Galileo."

It did, on behalf of the USA, in order to remove China from the consortium and prevent them getting access to high-accuracy positioning data.

The Chinese response was to dust off Beidou and update it. With an economy larger than the USA and not spending silly money on its military, China can afford to do such things (China's spending less on its _intrastructire_ projects such as high speed rail) than the US military budget and unlike military spending, infrastructure spending has tangible results at the end of the day.

Re: In perspective, Galileo isn't important

"I rather thought 1metre positioning was needed if you are aiming a cruise missile at Saddams underground bunker. "

Navstar GPS has been adequate for that for some time.

You need far better accuracy than 1 metre if you're going to have self-driving cars trundling around.

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

"But, wait, can you see Dacre and Rees-Mogg accepting that?"

Dacre and Rees-Mogg are rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of being able to throw out the inconveniences of things like the European Declaration of human rights (penned by British and American lawyers and not part of the EU's purview anyway)

The factor that "once out, going back in will involve all those special deals that we currently have won't be on the table anymore"hasn't sprung to mind, nor that in order to trade with the EU we're going to have to abide by their rules anyway.

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

"We the British do abide by the rules, and we are punished for it."

Including the rule about "Non-EU members are NOT allowed access to the military PRS signal"

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

"Basically we have decided to get divorced, and now we are complaining that our ex would not give us the keys to the house in the beach."

And of course, we came to the marriage pretty abjectly penniless in the first place and have been an abusive partner the entire time, even when the partner was patching up our sick economy.

Re: If not doing something because it was "inconvenient" was the ciriteria for Brexit..

"The real reason is that the UK will no longer get juicy contracts to work on the thing. "

Yup and that's due to rules that the UK rammed through on behalf of the USA to keep China out of Gallileo.

You're right about Gallileo contracts being the tip of the iceberg. A _LOT_ of contracts have been ripped up and that started with any potential/under negotiation ones being ripped up the morning after the referendum.

karma is such a bitch.

Re: If not doing something because it was "inconvenient" was the ciriteria for Brexit..

"why bother making such a song and dance about being denied access in the first place?"

For the same reason that tthe EU is collectively heaving a sigh of relief that Britain's no longer involved: We can't go leaking sensitive shit to the USA anymore and as such our usefulness is majorly limited.

What? You thought the special relationship was because they liked us? You should look up Thomas Jefferson's speech where he promised to destroy the UK as an economic power - something the USA effectively did with lend-lease as the coup-de-grace.

The EU stopped thinking about the USA as a close ally a while back. Threatening to blow Gallileo satellites out of orbit if they didn't shut down when the US demanded it underscored that point, as did the screaming temper tantrums that forced China out of the consortium and got the UK to force through the "No non-EU members" rule as a proxy troll to keep them out.

If you think those premature maser failures weren't industrial sabotage then you should think again.

Re: Well

"Did you know that according to the EU (suggested by the French, could it have been anybody else) snails are classed as fish! "

They're mollusks, as are most shellfish(*) and share the same green blood There's a method in that madness.

(*) Crustaceans aren't shellfish.

Re: Well @Anon Coward

"The wonderful thing is that their words aren't readily forgotten, especially when we have the internet and archived articles to go back to."

Until about ten years ago that wasn't the case, in terms of how many people knew how to find that information and also because "reputation management companies" were starting to bury it.

Thankfully the search engines have developed a resistance to that kind of manipulation, just as they developed resistances to other forms of manipulation.

Politicians (and most civil servants) haven't caught on yet that they can't rely on whatever they said being forgotten 6 weeks later. Everyone is a journalist now and everyone is able to pull up archived data rather than just a few determined loonies.

Re: Not an "autopilot"

"It was too easy to lose concentration when the CC was doing the work - not a good idea on a 70 MPH motorway."

There's plenty going on around you. ACC is great inasmuch as you don't have to worry about having to regulate your speed, but that simply gives you more time to look out for other drivers hellbent on killing everyone around them.

Then again if you're losing concentration with CC on, you ARE one of those drivers. Don't touch the radio.

Re: Not an "autopilot"

> It's about time they banned these driver "aids".

The USA's NTSB has assessed the aids as reducing the crash rate in Teslas by at least 40% over non-assisted vehicles.

Most people regard driving as a chore and the same people letting themselves be killed by adaptove cruise controls are even more likely to be killing themselves or those around them if they were 100% in manual control.

Back in the 1980s the most common causes of fatal crashes was "Driver spent so much time fiddling with the radio and not looking at the road that vehicle crossed centreline into oncoming traffic/left road and hit a tree". Even a radio isn't necessary. For one crash I'm aware of (car drove under an 18-wheeler on a dead straight road) the driver's hand was still gripping the pack of sandwiches in the bag on the passenger seat when they cut her body out of the vehicle.

Re: Lack of LIDAR

"Tesla cheaped out by not including a LIDAR"

Which is funny, because my 15yo Nissan has one in its ACC.

Re: After the last childish outburst...

"The problem here is that it seems people treat them as though they are. Like the bell end in the UK a few weeks ago who was filmed climbing into the passenger seat of his car with the autopilot engaged. "

Climbing into the back or passenger seat has been a "thing" for quite a while - but it wouldn't be hard to prevent either. The cars have weight switches in the seats and can tell when someone's pulling this shit but it takes someone to program the things to recognise "naughty driver" activities.

Re: After the last childish outburst...

"Air France 447 flew into the Atlantic precisely because the autopilot bombed out and the human crew had lost all spatial awareness and weren't in a position to take effective control... seems familiar."

It was worse than that. the pilots were so disoriented that _they_ flew the aircraft into the deck in their blind panic.

If they'd let go of the sticks the aircraft would have returned to level flight. It was only an iced-up pitot (one of 3). They were so busy "trying to regain control" and fighting with each other that they didn't spend any time actually assessing the situation. You may as well have had Minions in the front seats.

Re: How in it done in Europe

"Dutch Rijkswaterstaat designed sophisticated crash cushions called RIMOBs in the 1980s."

Plastic 44 gallon barrels full of water (water attenuators) are much cheaper and just as effective for the most part. They're don't require complex engineering works to setup and can be replaced in minutes when someone does drive into them.

Fitch barriers (same principle but using sand) are equally effective and only slightly more expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_attenuator and http://www.plasticjersey.com/ (water filled plastic jerseys are attenutaors too. Their concrete brethren are not.)

Even if more permanent barriers are deployed/destroyed, these kinds of attenuators are often dropped in temporarily whilst replacement works are arranged. The youtube video of how dangerous the leadup to that gore is, has other shock value in that there's no kind of attenuator at all - not having one and not physically coning off the gore would be a criminal matter in a lot of countries.

Re: Aircraft autopilot ... terrain-following radar to avoid collisions.

"The Sukhoi scandal:"

The captain of the jet was Alexander Yablontsev (57), a former Russian test pilot;

Human factors to the fore again - and yet another example of why ex-military fliers are a poor choice for civil transportation. They tend to press-on regardless when anyone sensible and cautious would have diverted. Being able to safely land 95% of the time is one thing but cleanup after the last 5% is problematic and unlike a military aircraft the people sitting in the back didn't sign on for that risk.

Re: OlaM

"For them, it seems, autopilot is not the right word"

It has nothing to do with age.

_MOST_ non aviators/seamen think that an autopilot is some magical device that can handle everything thrown at it.

"BUT, it won't do so quietly."

The autopilot will.

"Trust me, you'll have all sorts of alarms and flashing lights going off in the cockpit and extremely loud voices telling you to "PULL UP. PULL UP"."

None of those are connected to the autopilot, nor will they pull up for you.

The Germanwings aircraft that crashed into a french mountain a few years back had been programmed to do it by the suicidal pilot. It didn't try to avoid the obstacle, all it did was fly in the direction and height it was told to go at.

Re: OlaM

" Aircraft autopilot follows routes"

The Dunning-Kruger is strong in this one.

The one on my old Cessna 302 simply held heading and altitude.

Anything more that is an added feature. Autopilots are very dumb pieces of kit. The more advanced ones can fly in a more-or-less straight line from waypoint to waypoint and load the next waypoint in as they reach each target Even the alttude is dictated set by pilots (unless directed otherwise by ATC, that tends to be "as high as you can fly without stalling, for best economy."). Collision avoidance is another system. Automated landing is another system too. NONE of it is a substitute for having someone at the pointy end ready to step in when the mechanisms can't cope - the systems are there because flying is mostly tedium(*) and otherwise people get bored/sleepy and do silly things.

The moment anything unexpected happens, an autopilot goes "bong" and hands control back to the meatsack - and unlike a car an aircraft with nothing controlling it will spend several minutes flying in a straight line before it needs a correcting hand on the controls. It's called "inherent stability" and all airliners are designed with lots of it built in(**). You'd be lucky to get 10 seconds hands-off in a car before you need to intervene, mostly because unlike aircraft your car _can't_ travel in a dead straight line due to roads seldom being straight (and even where they are, they have drainage crowns trying to push the car to the sides). On top of that, cars are in a challenging environment with a lot of other obstacles in close proximity(***) that are NOT being centrally monitored/directed, nor do you have comms with all the other drivers around you(****)

(*) It's 30 mins to an hour of chaos at each end. The rest is incredibly boring. A _good_ transport pilot may have 1 or 2 incidents in his entire career. Pilots who save the day due to their incredible flying skills are most commonly the same pilots who overconfidently got themselves and their passengers in the shit in the first place.

(**) Military fast jets and aerobatic aircraft are "unstable" as this is what allows them to be thrown around the sky. Some are so unstable that without a computer constantly correcting the desired flight path they'd be out of the sky in a few seconds or less. (F22 and F35 being prime examples)

(***) In "crowded airspace", the routinely nearest thing to you is tens of miles away at the same altitude, or at least 1000 feet above/below you. You have several tens of seconds to react to anything out of order. In a car, having somethere between zero and 2-3 seconds is routine.

(****) All aircraft in an area are using the same frequency, and that doesn't matter whether it's controlled or uncontrolled, All pilots hear the instructions and know what the other guys are doing, or they're telling each other what they're doing. When things start going pearshaped everyone knows to shut up, listen and get out of the way. Compare and contrast with the average fumducker driving blindly into a crashzone or causing chain reactions by rubbernecking instead of looking where he's going.

"but as explained up thread, it might not be able to 'see' stationary objects."

Tesla is explicitly clear that the autopilot is unlikely to detect and stop for stationary objects in its lane

when travellling in excess of 50mph

Autopilot is an enhanced cruise control. It's not a robot driver.

" if you're an A380 operator with similarly little regard for the comfort levels of your cattle class passengers, then a reconfigured 380 will "comfortably" exceed the capacity of even the most densely packed 777..."

There's one factor discouraging that for an A380 operator: Freight capacity.

At full passenger load the A380 only has space for 7 freight pallets below decks thanks to their luggage (vs ~30 on a 777), but can carry twice the cargo mass of that same 777, for ~2000 more miles.

Freight is more valuable than people, so it makes sense to reduce passenger density upstairs to free up pallet space below. The resulting extra cabin space is a good sales tool and you can even package some of it up as "halo" class - bump some lucky stiff into it each flight for good PR and make money hand over fist when someone is rich and silly enough to actually pay for it.

Of course if you're an A380 operator that doesn't do much freight (BA, Air France) then using this aircraft is nonsensical and you need to run 75%+ loading to keep it profitable.

Re: I's the overal experience....

"we will end up with some smart terrorist targeting one of the major airports "

It's already happened in Glasgow and Moscow.

The dickheads in power don't give a shit. Security theatre is simply an excuse to wield control.

"these early production A380's are a little over weight"

Exactly this. It's entirely expected that the first 6 out the door would retire early thanks to their extensive rewiring jobs and additional tweakage. They're more than just a little overweight.

Airbus made a grave mistake freezing and then cancelling A380F rollout in favour of getting the passenger versions fixed. The freighters could have been flying and generating income for a couple of years earlier than the passenger version, but instead all the freighter customers jumped ship and went elsewhere.

Re: This underlines one more thing

"It really only works in tight usage scenarios (Emirates with its customer demand for long-haul lines)."

Emirates and friends make money from freight. There's more money in that than in passengers (which is why they don't fully stuff them upstairs, it makes more room in the hold.)

A380s have considerably longer range at MTOW than 777s do, whilst carrying more than twice the cargo mass. The logistics of that frequently mean that it works out cheaper overall (ground crew, passenger facilities and refuelling at an intermediate stop) even if the overall fuel burn is higher.

This all changes with Next Gen aircraft of course but it's always been like that - and the proliferation of smaller airliners flying point to point is predicated on aviation fuel remaining cheap, which it won't. Remember there was a price war most of the last decade in an attempt to put frackers and other tight oil producers out of business and costs are now snapping back to where they should be.

Re: Ads were better in the good old days

"Teletypes on 80-0-80 telegraph lines were as low as 75bps "

My old Creed 7A was 50 and that was pretty common. RTTY is 45.5

Re: Targetting the ignorant?

" I'd not even have thought about making my own until you mentioned it. "

Sodium percarbonate is readily available as a cleaning supply and it's one of the cases of being hard to overdo it ("too much" will simply not break down into peroxide), but as mentioned it's usually easier just to buy it - with the caveat that you should look at the percentages as these powders range from 2% percarbonate up to 30%+ - and pricing gives no indication of concentration (the most heavily marketed ones tend to have less active ingredient, surprise surprise)

So far I've found that the best "bang per buck" is Tesco's own-brand "colours" oxy powder at 35% - but they also have a nearly identical package "whites" package which is 5% and only a couple of pence cheaper.

Coming back on topic - you could buy the lower concentration version or just use less of the other product - THIS is marketing at work - convincing you that you need 2 different products which turn out to be the same thing with different quantities of filler inserted.

Re: It's not like we don't have a micro payment rich alternative ecosystem...

"People started complaining about ads when the first flashing GIFs adverts arrived"

Those were irritating, but you could put up with them (there are options to stop animations)

What _really_ got peoples' goat were obnoxious popups/popunders and later on, adverts with SOUND when you weren't expecting it.

If you have a web site which loads up audio without warning then you're probably driving customers away in droves. It's even more annoying than animated shit.

"It takes just one bad apple to persuade a user to take the trouble to learn how to block ads"

It takes more than one:

There's the one who came up with the irritation

And the ones (plural) who failed to filter that shit from getting displayed to the enduser.

The moment you farm out your adverts to a third party (banner farms, etc), you're putting _your_ image at risk. Newspapers/magazines used to be (and still are) fairly careful about what goes into print media and take care to ensure it's not going to alienate readers. They can and will refuse inappropriate adverts. It's still your company's image at stake even if it's "only a web page"

There's _zero_ excuse for walking away from that duty of care for online publishing and if you allow an advertiser to run offensive adverts or serve up malware then it's _your_ responsibility for the consequences. Your website, you curate it.

IANAL, but I'm sure there are some here who could weigh in on the liabilties if a 3rd party banner on my website served up malware to visitors - and I'm pretty sure they'd be telling me that farming the banner content out to a 3rd party doesn't reduce my culpability if it occurs. At the very least the legal costs have a potential to be crippling.

"I guess that the people accusing others of being parasites are the ones that depend on ad revenue for employment. "

That wouldn't surprise me.

I've spent thousands on "targetted advertising" (print and online media) and I can assure everyone that a small cheap untargetted static advert in the right location will usually get better results than something large, flashy and "editorialised".

The saying that "half of my advertising is useless" is wrong. It's more like 90%

Re: Too little, too late for advertisers

"They were busy spamming the popular unmoderated newsgroups."

And email, via unsecured mailservers.

Spammers were costing ISPs thousands per month in bandwidth charges thanks to the relaying antics but the real attention-getter was when AT&T had to spend around $60million for an emergency rollout of mailservers to cope with the incoming volumes. I was surprised at that point that it wasn't treated as criminal denial of service attacks and prosecuted accordingly.

Re: The thing is... it's nothing new.

"They disable the FF key specifically."

It doesn't take much to block that.

Re: The thing is... it's nothing new.

"Their infrastructure will be set up to handle a small percentage of returns."

As are their bank accounts.

"Overwhelming that means that they would lose their genuine responses."

Or worse. Not paying Royal Mail isn't a good idea.

Re: The thing is... it's nothing new.

"and they keep the garbage/recycling bins right next to the mailboxes."

Read or not, by dropping it in your own recycling bin, you're carrying the disposal costs of their garbage.

Mailing it back to them means they get to eat the cost. Postage due is even better.