Posts by Alan Brown

Re: "Hopefully not a sign of things to come for the UK space industry"

"If you work with this stuff in Stevenage (BAE) or even at Surrey Uni in Guildford then you should be wary about making long term plans."

Or at any of the UK's other space science establishments. (MSSL, RAL, Harwell, etc)

The future of most ESA-partnered programs appears doubtful, despite soothing noises from Whitehall. The UK has been felt to be laggardly in its contributions for a long time and this is a perfect opportunity to get rid of it. The academics can easily find work elsewhere but engineering staff are a lot harder to replace or rehome and their knowledge plus experience is absolutely critical. Lose them and you put things back 20+ years.

Re: The Swiss are in it

"Now England will pay a price for such self-serving petty politics, and it is anyone's guess how united the kingdom will be when the dust finishes settling."

If history is any guide, it's worth remembering that in 1971 the UK was Europe's sick man, with an economy down the shitter and a population that was in freefall - with the skilled and talented leaving in droves (leaving the unskilled and untalented behind - who make up large tracts of the aging population that voted "leave"). Joining the EU saved the country, but at cost of tearing up all existing trade agreements with former colonies, many of whom suffered very badly as a result.

Memories are long. Mother England is a distant memory. New trade agreements may be brokered, but Boris and his Etonian chums are about to find out that when you're over a barrel, the terms negotiated will not be in your favour. This isn't the old days of empire and the British Army/British Navy can't come in to enforce Pax Brittania to keep those pesky natives down and get trade deals on terms which suit the Empire.

"The thing with this crash is it's one of the simpler situations that a self driving car should be able to deal with, yet it failed so spectacularly"

A large part of this is cultural norms. I've written about this in detail elsewhere.

The short version is: 'A century of lobbying has made the USA a country which is extremely pedestrian hostile, with road rules that essentially prohibit pedestrians on the road in most states and dictate "the pedestrian shall give way to the vehicle"

That gives rise to an assumption that pedestrians won't be on the road except where authorised, which in turn leads to programming assumptions that they don't need to be scanned for and taken into account.'

This is how one creates a fleet of robotic killing machines. No malice needed, just no notice taken of obstacles. It could have been a pedestrian, or just as easily it could have been a cow - in which case we'd be reading about an Uber driver and passenger being killed.

The USA authorities have compounded the problem by blaming the victim for crossing the road - something that in most countries is perfectly legal and she did so perfectly safely. The instruments will have picked her up quite well, but the ROBOT failed to react. This is a programming fuck up and the best thing that can happen right now is for insurance companies to decline to cover any self-driving vehicle developers unless they can demonstrate their abilities to cope with these most basic of scenarios BEFORE they're let loose on public roads.

(I'm thinking that the obstacle course from "Britain's worst drivers" would be a good _starting_ point for them to pass.)

Re: Feeling Old...

"Because every packet was a broadcast. In DooM 1.0 you could have 3 computers on a network act as left / front / right views, so everything was broadcast."

Doom wasn't the only thing doing this.

NetBeui was wire broadcast. Netbeui over TCP/IP was "only" network broadcast. Any machine with netbeui installed would prefer to use it over all other protocols.

This is one of the reasons why edge switches have broadcast limit settings per port.

Re: Feeling Old...

"Then the config guy cheerfully told me he'd run "memmaker"* to ensure DOS loaded the network stuff optimally."

And you laughed as you copied the old config in from backups elswehere on the disk.

Except you didn't do that, did you?

Re: Feeling Old...

"And a card to connect the networking!"

As one of the magazines of the day put it (more or less)

One day the PC makers woke up to find a 900 Pound Gorilla sitting on their lawn. The "PC XT" was laughably slow and had a derisory amount of memory, didn't have sound or graphics and literally everything was an added-cost plugin extra. But what it did have was three magic letters on the front: "IBM"

Re: Feeling Old...

If you're even older you'll remember it as a D&D games company

Re: One meter error?

"which for GPS is geocentric and defined to withing just one metre."

Which for _NAVSTAR_ GPS is defined to within 1 metre.

Gallileo, Beidou and Glonass GPS systems all have different (and usually stricter) accuracy statements. The high precision systems use them all as well as ground based signals.

Even civilian smartphone handset use L2/Q2 signals these days - from all the above, as well as the Japanese and Indian constellations where available.

Re: One meter error?

If you need less than 1 metre accuracy you're not _just_ going to be relying on L1 band GPS, nor will you be solely using space-based positioning systems.

"Which, when you factor in the cost of helium, would still make it not really worthwhile. "

IF we had a helium economy then that might change.

We could have had access to massive quantities of bloody cheap helium for the last 40 years if Richard Nixon hadn't killed off the Oak Ridge Molten Salt Reactor experiments for political reasons, then outlawed any and all further research in order to ensure the still twitching corpse stayed in its grave (look it up, molten salt nuclear activity is explicitly outlawed in the USA)

Anything using molten sodium as a coolant ("no, honestly, we can assure you it won't catch fire this time") is a bad idea from the outset - just ask the Japanese about what happened at Monju - and that didn't even involve any radioactive material.

The huge rocket is primarily for speed, not altitude. The speed given by a launch aircraft is usually achieved by most rockets in less than 30 seconds and altitude in less than 2 minutes

Aircraft launches have huge payload to orbit penalties because the maximum payload of the aircraft is the _gross_ mass of the fully fuelled rocket. The only advantage they offer is the ability to put very small payloads in a desired orbit relatively quickly and it's not that much of an advantage considering the massive cost penalties incurred.

Re: Space Fountain!

"The great advantage is that we could build one with today's technology."

We could build a Lofstrom loop too.

"The great disadvantage is that it collapses if you turn off the power."

Ditto

Re: Prediction

"I have had a <£100 value parcel stuck in clearing for well over a week."

My record is a £10 item in there for over a month. I think they lost it down the back of the sofa for a while.

Re: Not a new scam.

Of course,. If you're stupid enough to fall for it once, you're usually stupid enough to fall for it multiple times.

Remember: Half the population has an IQ below 100.

Re: "The thing to know is that you cannot apply for a refund by email."

"No, it'll die of convenience."

And an inadequately sanitised telephone.

Re: cellphone, mobile, handy

"small countries next to big ones"

For some values of "next to"

That small stretch of water in between Australia and New Zealand represents the same distance you'll find between London and Moscow.

Re: cellphone, mobile, handy

"trousers is, essentially, a subset of pants."

Given that pants is an abbreviation of "Pantaloons", he's absolutely correct.

Quite _why_ the British universally equate pants as underwear is mysterious. Yes, I know "underpants", the question is how it got here from there and only in the last 40 years or so.

("Cellphone" comes from "cellular mobile telephone" -> "Cellular phone" in an era where non-cellular ones were visible to the masses (I had one, it was awful - but not as bad as WinCE phones). Euro-types called dumb mobiles "Handys" or "Handyphones")

Re: Buzzword Bingo

"We continued that game for 3 weeks until out cfo intervened and the meetings stopped."

But did the consultants?

Re: Given the time it's take to get the warrant...

"I'm guessing the only way the ICO can pin this one is to go through CA's backup policy"

Why would the ICO _want_ to do that?

"Rather more likely is that the ICO hurridly wrote a search application and threw it before the judge, and a discussion went something like this:-"

The ICO has been very pointedly ignoring CA's antics for the last 2 years until the C4 "expose" gave it no choice but to be seen to be taking action.

But the conversation is likely to have been close to that described.

Re: And the band played on!

"The best we can hope for with HAMR is very slow IO and 10X the number of racks to hold a given capacity."

Not to mention 200x the power consumption.

Re: WEAR WHITE AT NIGHT

Whte makes you more visible, but only from about 20 metres or so.

Those little reflective patches on the back of sneakers can be seen from 60 metres and are attention getting because they flash (as do ankle reflectors)

Re: Who sets the speed?

" When the Volvo's speedometer was showing 220kph, the Viggen was showing 200kph..."

My car _speedo_ shows about 10% higher than actual speed (reported by GPS)

The ODB reported speed matches the GPS speed.

IE: what's on the meter is deliberately reading high to encourage the hooman to stay below the speed limit.

Re: Turkey was this way.... not sure it it still is

It's not true in Turkey.

In a lot of countries the driver is fully responsible for ALL your medical costs and as those are very high they will try to ensure that if they hit you, that they kill you as this is much cheaper to pay off - to the point that many drivers will reverse back over someone they ran over to ensure that they finish them off.

In many "less developed" countries a driver who is silly enough to stop and try to help someone he's run over will be beaten to death by bystanders.

Re: Didn't see that coming

"It is more likely that it was the cyclist that made the mistake."

Virtually all road crashes require AT LEAST 2 (usually 3-4) or more serious errors to be committed before they can occur.

In this case:

1: The pedestrian crossed at an unsafe position

2: The pedestrian crossed without paying attention to oncoming traffic

3: The vehicle driver failed to notice the pedestrian on the median strip and prepare to take action if necessary or move into another lane

4: The vehicle driver failed to take emergency avoiding action when the pedestrian showed intent to move into its path

A human might have noticed the lady some distance off and decided to move to another lane. This is a fairly common preemptive move that the robot programmers hadn't considered.

Re: Clear cut...

"Alan, you seem to have more information than the rest of us. How did you know the Uber car didn't slow down for the pedestrian?"

TBH, I don't, but the statements being made make it clear that thew pedestrian was in a "non-allowed" position and made an "unexpected" move.

That, coupled with what I've seen of autonomous vehicle behaviour and the assumptions coded into it (which are limited by the cultural assumptions of humans and "road rules" without regard to the fact that we unconciously react to a bunch of other stimuli which tend to be "commonsense" such as "that pedestrian shouldn't be there, switch to high alert mode") lead me to believe that it simply wasn't coded to handle the situation and the minder wasn't paying attention until the victim had already bounced off the front of the vehicle - Google specifically modified their supervisory roles because they found the humans who were supposed to be paying attention were spending almost all of their time with eyes inside the cabin.

You can _never_ "assume" when driving and one of the most important assets about driving automation is that a robot should be paying 100% attention for anomalous items and potentially hazardous behaviour 100% of the time. Pedestrians shouldn't be on the freeway either, but it happens, as do deer. I don't want my robocar tangling with a 7 point stag because it doesn't recognise it as a hazard.

Re: Why are we only talking about the US Election ?

SCL is a trading identity of Cambridge Analytica,

Re: RDP connection from score system to home?

My WTF knob gets raised that you can GET from a secure system to the public Internet.

Re: One issue....

"Heavy loads" is relative.

Pavements will take pressures of up to 200kg or so. Cars are generally ok, 4wds and heavier vehicles are not - but a more compelling reason not to park on the bloody footpath is that it obstructs disabled users who frequently aren't able to move onto the road due to the curb.

weight damage is one of the reasons parking a HGV on a footpath is a higher level parking offence (3 points on licence) anywhere in the UK, not just in London.