Posts by Alan Brown

> I wonder how their road toll compares to ours in Australia.

It's about 50% higher.

The part that's not mentioned is whether the road had its speed limit lowered to 35mph for just the stretch in question and if the signs were obscured. (these are both common speed trap techniques).

The engineering speed of the road is another question (that's the statistical mean of free-running traffic plus one standard deviation. If it's above the speed limit then the speed limit is set wrong and/or the road is badly engineered)

Re: "raise property taxes slightly"

> There was a small town with a parked school bus as a "motorist" trap in a Rockford's Files episode.

It's been used as a plot device in a number of 1970s US TV series. I recall it being in Charlie's Angels and The Invisible Man amongst others.

Corruption across much of the USA is just as bad as various undemocratic regiemes the US government like to denounce (and so is the lack of democracy in many of these areas)

"they fail even quicker when a company uses cheaper consumer grade disks "

A lot of stats show that if anything the more expensive drives fail faster. It was certainly the case for all our scsi-UW drives.

There's at least one filesystem out there which works on the basis of "Disks are crap. Deal with it" - where loss of a drive or two isn't a big deal, vs systems with expensive raid systems and expensive disks that don't get adequate supervision and where loss of a drive is a performance-sapping event.

In any case, any outfit which doesn't have monitoring setup to send out a distress call when a RAID drive dies isn't fit for hosting other peoples' VMs.

Re: At Big John, re: Trump.

"Trump is the visible expression of a ..."

There have been 3 past presidents like Trump. In every case there was a short uptick in the USA economy followed by a prolonged and deep recession.

As you say, Trump is the visible expression but the problem runs far deeper in the structure of the current american system.

Re: I weep for my country...

"In this case your government has rightly decided it is better to butt out and not interfere with business and the market. "

That would be the same government which has for the most part passed legislation and regulation ensuring that only one business is IN any particular geographic market.

Net Neutrality rules would not be needed if there was competition for supply. Across most of the USA, there isn't and consumers are faced with legislated monopolies.

Re: I weep for my country...

> Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life

Look up "corporatism", "mercantilism" and "Inverted totalitarianism"

Incidentally, the "land of the free" is one of the least free countries out there and falls a very very long way down the list on both human rights and quality of life. It's a bit like seeing countries called "democratic republic" or "people's republic", which tend to be neither.

And that's without even going into the intricacies of a national anthem which has verses celebrating the persecution of slaves.

Re: First create the infrastructure for taxes

"The same way it works if you put biodiesel you have mixed up yourself. "

There's a specific excise exemption on biofuel production of 2000 litres per location per year. Presumably that can also be argued for home charging too.

The point that excise will come on EVs is a good one. The government is not easily going to give up a source of around £75billion/year (combined total of duty and tax load on annual fuel sales)

We may even see road user charge scaling which reflects the actual damages inflicted on the roads by heavier vehicles

Re: First create the infrastructure for taxes

"Probably they can do it a better way though, by charging a per mile tax."

Unless they make it 10000 times higher for a 10 ton vehicle than a 1 ton one, it won't be equitable.

Mind you the taxation paid by heavy vehicles is far from equitable at the moment - and vastly in favour of the heavy vehicles.

The actual ratio of damage caused by heavier vehicles is massively higher than that done by cars (it's proportional to the 5th power of axle weight and the square of velocity) with a substantial portion of urban road damage caused by busses. The rise of self driving vehicles would be a good opportunity to move to a lot more smaller vehicles (6-8 seats) that can simply park themselves in offpeak periods (they'd replace both busses and taxis)

A bus is a highly efficient way of moving a lot of people at once. A bus _service_ is a spectacularly inefficient waste of resources.

I've done that (the emergency ticket) - and found that for something filed at 8am, the callback happened at 6pm.

Re: PC LOAD LETTER

" Being in the US, we don't use A4 paper, only letter and legal."

However because postscript and PDF standards were written in the USA, the default assumption is that "If Language = english, paper size = US Letter, else paper size = A4"

It's not just an assumption, it's hard coded into every single document created, despite 3/4 of the english-speaking world not using US Letter

> when they attempt to throw all of their other issues that aren't even related to the initial issue, into the ticket, and you tell them to create a new ticket about the separate issue, and they say "How do I create another ticket?"

Worse, if you split off additional tickets for the unrelated issues, they refuse to use them.

Re: Old as the hills

"Apparently toddlers who have learned to use a touch-screen tablet then wonder why pictures in paper books and magazines don't respond in the same way."

Not just toddlers. I taught my cat a number of games on a tablet (mostly catching mice, surprise surprise) and now she clearly believes that images on paper should react the same way when tapped.

Re: If somebody does not understand...

"Babbage's inspiration was the need to improve the calculation of tables because there were too many errors in those of his day."

The orange ones of the 1980s had a significant number of errors too - but they were canonical for exam purposes.

Re: Reminds me of a story

"When the manual exchange (central) rang all the 6 phones rang. Everybody picked up their phone "

No, when the manual exchange rang, you listened to the morse code to know if it was yours or not and if it wasn't for you you left it alone.

If the calls were faint it was because someone was listening in.

Re: Reminds me of a story

"I used to think of Solitaire as the mouse use trainer."

That's exactly why it was included in MS windows.

Re: Reminds me of a story

"And when pulse dialling was the norm."

I'm younger than that and spent a few years living in a place where the phones had crank handles, not pulse dials - and 4-9 households shared the same line.

Re: Reminds me of a story

"Older people often are not as worried about not answering the phone just because someone called if it interrupts something they are doing. The youngsters often feel they must answer every call even when it "

A ringing telephone is a _demand_ for attention. That's why people hate leaving voicemail.

My grandfather used to routinely pick up the phone, say "we're busy" and then hang up. When calling, you spoke to him on _his_ terms, not yours.

Re: Reminds me of a story

(*) she hated varifocals.

So do I. But my vision isn't that bad yet.

The fact that they force you to look through a particular zone of the lens for a particular distance assumes you're sitting bolt upright and not doing anything mechanically fiddly.

I have similar problems with contact lenses incorporating high astigmatism correction. They're barely OK for walking around/driving but the moment you tilt your head or have to work on something above you, thy're a liability.

Re: Reminds me of a story

"I wouldn't blame the user"

Having had to explain how to close a window 5 times in less than 6 minutes, I would.

Re: Just very impressive.

"Well the thing about spinoff technology is that it can be of an unexpected nature."

Exactly

For an automotive example: Decades of gas turbine engine(GTE) research in cars didn't give us gas turbine cars. But it did give us the Toyota Prius.

To explain: When you change the throttle setting on a GTE, the rotational speed takes a long time to change but the torque changes instantly. In addition, GTEs are only really efficient at one rpm setting and preferably near full load.

In order to create a driveable car, Toyota developed a computer controlled CVT gearbox which allowed the GTE to stay at constant RPM but take the changed torque and translate that into velocity changes at the roadwheels.

In order to allow for multiple engines, they developed a compact multiple-input/single-output gearbox - computer controlled of course. That gearbox had to transmit power from one engine to another in order to spin the second one up and power from roadwheels back to the engines to provide engine braking.

Change one of the engines to an Atkinson/Miller cycle piston engine and the other to an electric motor-generator and you have the core of Toyota's "Hybrid Synergy Drive". It wasn't what anyone was expecting when the focus was on automotive 60kW gas turbines.

" If the driver sues GM he is hoping that GM would rather settle out of court "

That's a long bet.

GM (or any other robocar developer) will fight this tooth and nail. The Last thing they want is any kind of legal precedent - even an out of court settlement tips the scales.

It doesn't matter if the biker was lane splitting or in the lane. He moved prematurely into a gap that wasn't available yet and got twatted as a result. The human driver trying to intervene _too late_ shows that a meatsack wouldn't have done any better.

Re: I think the cyclist is at fault#2

"Just work on the basis that anyone using the road around you can and will, and entirely without warning, do something stupid"

And if you're a biker/cyclist, work on the basis that everyone is plotting to kill you and just waiting for the chance to do it. Being in the right won't hurt any less if you go under a bus.

Re: @kain preacher

"That's not true. In some states it is illegal not to move over to the right to allow faster traffic by even if you are doing the speed limit or greater."

In some countries the rule is "Use the left/right lane unless passing"

Failing to keep left/right is a ticketable offence in many countries, but one that's seldom enforced.

Re: I think the cyclist is at fault.

"Lane splitting is already a dangerous thing to do even in the best of conditions & at the best of times"

Pretty much THIS.

There's a name for bikers who lane split in moving traffic - "Organ donor"

(in stationary traffic it's a little different, but never do it with a speed difference that doesn't allow you to abort - for exactly the reason this guy ended up off his wheels.)

"Failing to yield to faster traffic is illegal"

The UK could do with a law like that. (Although it's legal to pass on the "slow" side, it's risky.)

Re: Struck off as a director

"One such reader on this forum has a company that owns nothing, everything is rented from another company a family member of their's owns."

If you can prove that (and the business connections) then you can probably have a stab at recovery (and HMRC would probably be interested too)

Re: Life changes, tattoos don't

"Whilst a dog isn't just for Christmas, it isn't for life (hopefully) ."

I hear they make a tasty lunch.

Re: reliability and endurance good to see

"This tech has been a lot more durable than my expectations."

Ditto. I have managed to kill some SSDs - but only low end consumer-grade MLC devices and only by writing well beyond their stated endurance.

"On some occasions, consent can be obtained contractually."

In such cases it must be clear and provide an opt out, not buried down on page 23.

Otherwise the unfair terms in contracts laws should apply.

But this is england, so they can get away with anything

Re: Rune reading again ...

China's HSR network is hellaciously impressive, but people forget that China is physically as large as the USA lower 48 states.

There's a need for _even faster_ transport when even HSR can take 8-10 hours to get from end to end and China's taking the long view on this (which is that groundbased transportation uses less energy than aircraft and can be electrically powered from nuclear plants) - if there's sufficient traffic to justify building that groundbased ultra-fast-rail then they'll do it.

MAS was a dispirited airline in deep financial shit, which had had a bunch of serious incidents in the maintenance shops, including a fire caused by a discarded cigarette in a no smoking area that destroyed a lot of paper records.

In the weeks leading up to MH370 there were a bunch of serious safety incidents on various flights. Basically their safety was compromised for months and things finally bit them.

As for that flight - even if the flight recorders are recovered it's entirely possible the exact cause may never be discerned. Noone had anticipated an incident which could disable the crew and leave the aircraft flying for 6-8 hours afterwards, even after the Air Hellas flight showed it can happen.

Re: 380b?

"Datsun's original production run began in 1931. "

The marketing story back in the 70s and 80s was that the original Nissan car was called the DAT (initials of the founders) and the next model was the "Son of DAT", aka Datson and they chose Datsun as looking stylistically better as well as alluding to the land of the rising sun. (which is also where the Sunny name is supposedly derived from)

https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/HERITAGE/short_story/en_p05-01.html

Re: Poor choice of words..gives Emirates the opportunity to squeeze the hell out of Airbus.

"don't forget the work into synthetic fuel production"

I'm not. It's unlikely to end up costing less than $300/barrel simply because if it's not done with algae then it's competing with food production (eg, jatophra) and there's not enough space in the agricultural market for that to be more than niche production.

In the long term we're going to need a nuclear economy - preferably molten salt for safety (20 years to commercialise) until fusion is ready (I think 100-150 years to commercialise, realistically) - and if you have molten salt nuclear tech then you have the heat to run a haber process to crack water to H2 and enough energy to tack on carbon atoms for easy handling whilst you're at it (ie, carbon neutral kerosene).

Carbon emissions are already well past the 2C tipping point and we're on track for 4C - the real danger isn't sea level rises though. People can move. Ocean acidification blowing the food chains apart and/or an anoxic event dropping global atmospheric oxygen levels down to 12-15% is the real thing to worry about. Our hungry brains can't handle low oxygen levels and our cardiopulmonary system tends to clog up if exposed to prolonged low oxygen levels, as the primary human body response is to increase haemoglobin levels by thickening the blood - which makes it much harder to pump around.

When you look at it that way, the chinese government's crash program of investigating every alternative to carbon and building a shedload of PWR/CANDU nukes in the meantime makes sense - whatever they find that works will need to be made available to developing countries at low cost as they can more than make up the any reductions the developed countries may make. Human nature means that when the shit hits the fan it will already be too late to make reductions vs going cold turkey. If/when LFTRs are ready they can eat the PWR waste.

It'd be even better and things would proceed faster if everyone put aside their differences and concentrated on getting LFTR/MSRs out the door asap. Whilst they have some downsides they're not as big a set of downsides as PWR nuclear power and we can't afford to sit around procrastinating.