Posts by Alan Brown

Re: "used only in extreme terrorism cases"

"The French Resistance were terrorists by today's definition."

And they were called "terrorists" by the Nazis.

Meantime a good chunk of the population there actively supported Nazi points of view, to the point that France actually sent a greater proportion of its jewish population off to be exterminated than Germany did.

Remember also that Germany welcomed jewish refugees with open arms in the 18th and 19th centuries and was a bastion of enlightenment right up until the early 20th century. It only took 20 years to turn that around, which should be a sober reminder to anyone saying "it can't happen here"

Re: Ugh

"Coppers were duly called, and threatened to arrest me on terrorism charges if I didn't cooperate and give my address."

"There are 2 dozen pages of paperwork you have to fill out if you want to go that route and my lawyer will make sure you fill in every single one of them. Do you really want to be tied to a desk for at least the next 3 days?"

Re: I'm in the mood for being a downvote magnet

"I reckon the F35B will be pretty spectacular, once it's RFS."

I reckon the crashes will be, at any rate. The things are so tubby that all an opposing plot has to do is let the things fly into the ground.(**)

These were never intended as air superiority fighters(*). That's the F22's job along with enemy ground defence supression. The "cheaper" F35 was supposed to be doing ground support work.

(*)The fact that they're being sold as such to "allied countries" _and that those countries are buying that scam_ says a lot about military procurement.

(**) A war situation may well be all standoffs and missiles at 35 miles, but there are plenty of other times when aircraft get up close and personal without firing a shot. Encouraging the other guy to fall out of the sky is all part of the game.

Re: F-35A

G: For "germany" - we made it especially for those guys, with all the addons they wanted. The only fair weather fighter they need! You can call it the Widowmaker!

Re: Double edge

"The problem is that the only remedy for a failure to "abide by the rules" is to claim damages. Excepting that some jurisdictions make provision for statutory damages, this usually means demonstrating an actual loss."

Breach of GPL is copyright violation. As the copyright holder (plaintiff), you can require that all distributed infringing copies be recalled and destroyed, plus demand court and legal fees as a starting point - which the court will be minded to give, because the respondent was uncooperative.

etc etc.

"It is not a contract, at least not in the UK. A contract absolutley has to have an exchange (e.g. £1) to bind it. No money, no contract. There's no monetary exchange when you download GPL code."

in which case if you make a derivative work and fail to comply with the contract conditions you can be done for simple copyright violation.

Do you really want to do that?

Re: One point of criticism though...

The hard part about enforcing GPL is that (of course) the only entity with any standing to enforce it is the copyright holder.

In general, unless you're a large company with an army of lawyers at your disposal, if you want that to work, you need to assign copyright to the FSF.

What you _can_ do is notify the author of the code block of the violation and Cc the FSF. They do send out warning letters on letterhead and that's frequently enough to scare abusers into complying.

Re: That's different:

"The GPL says you are entitled to make a copy provided you comply with certain conditions. "

And this is why there have only been a handful of GPL cases in the world _ever_.

Attempting to argue it's not a contract (or its validity) turns it into a copyright violation case (which has severe penalties). Attempting to dispute the contract's terms invalidates it, which..... turns it into a copyright violation case.

In virtually all cases companies which have been confronted with evidence of their GPL violations take their lawyers' advice ("Settle. Now. Comply with the license.").

Many have attempted to bluff their way through it when initially confronted but when lawyers get involved they quickly realise that the more aggressively they defend the claims, the bigger the penalties are that they may face.

GPL exists precisely _because_ of abuse of Creative Commons and is expressly aimed at preventing it.

Re: "How did so many idiots get into positions of power?"

"Clearly someone is doing it wrong."

That depends if "it" is 'hiding true unemployment figures' or something else.

Padding out the Civil Service is a time-honoured way of cheating.

Re: @ Ledswinger -- £10m a year for a drone?

"The days of "Rule Britannia" ended on the first of September 1939."

More like the early months of 1914. From that point on it was simply nostalgia.

Re: £10m a year for a drone?

"That's because the bulk of your budget goes to pay for the NHS."

Ahem*bullshit*ahem*

62% of the treasury tax take goes on state pensions, with another 5-7% or so (it's hard to get straight answers from anyone) going on pensioner voting bribes like fuel allowances, pensioner housing allowances and free travel (the latter 2 going to councils for disbursement).

This figure is only going to get bigger. The majority of the Boomer cohort have yet to hit retirement age and the pensioner population will only start to peak around 2029. Meantime the number of working taxpayers continues to decline primarily due to reduced birthrates since the introduction of the pill in the early 1960s.

Everything else is paid for from what's left over. NHS costs are rising rapidly primarily due to an aging population, not because of advances in medicine(*), however the cost related to paying for pensioner medical care isn't broken out separately from the general budget and as such is nearly impossible to quantiify.

(*) The longer people live, the more likely they are to get cancer (which is expensive to treat) or other age-related diseases (which also tend to be expensive to treat) and spend more time in old folks homes (which are expensive to run). The problem is that budgetary assumptions were made for a long time based on a return to 1950s birthrates (which never happened) and people retiring at 60 then living to 68, instead of the 80-85 which was normal even in the 1970s and the 85-90 which is normal now.

Re: In five years we could have Triage AI

> Meanwhile, court lawyers (or barristers in the English system) engage in human-to-human interaction: between judges, juries, etc. Uncanny Valley prevents any non-human from being effective there

Yes, but courtroom action only accounts for a small fraction of the law. The vast majority of legal work is paper shuffling. It wasn't that long ago that the average law firm employed several people and frequently entire floors in office buildings just to hold, memorise and pull records. Then in the 1980s firms in places like New York City started scanning/OCRing everything and moving their paper to barns in the countryside because the office space was far too valuable to be tied up with stacks. Fast forward a few years and all that scanned paper was now being used as input to document engines instead of as just "photos of pages" and ended up becoming directly searchable.

As time goes on, this stuff gets crossindexed, etc etc and decisions supporting/opposing results are all tied in and the result is that someone with a modicum of legal experience can quickly find out whether a particular case has any chance in court long before it ever actually goes near a courtroom - and most cases are settled at this point. Only the fuzzy cases or new law go to courtrooms for anything more than rubberstamping. (or brain-dead clients who won't accept the lawyer's opinion)

The vast majority of this stuff has happened "invisibly". Offices continued doing the same work with fewer support staff (phone operators, typists, clerks, secretaries) as people retired. It may continue to do so into the future or it may hit a knee point as it did in other industries where entire factories or mines or tunnelboring systems are now operated by 1-2 people.

"Without both significant increases in processing power AND significant improvements in AI this isn't too likely to happen any time soon."

It's already been happening for some time, starting with electronic document filing and analysis of legal decisions, etc. Filing clerks are pretty much a thing of the past, as are runners.

A lot of office and professional work is simple algorithmical stuff. Automating it is relatively easy and cost-effective - far more so than automating low-grade, low paid work like burger flipping.

Yes, the oncoming AI and robotic revolution will make more white collar workers redundant than factory ones. You're going to see far more unemployable accountants, programmers and bank traders (or patent clerks) in the very near future than sandwich makers, drain cleaners or hairdressers.

And for what it's worth - This was predicted a long time ago. Valuable jobs with a high intellectual input and low requirement for expensive mechanical power or high dexterity have a higher incentive for replacement/automation than the mundane ones. At some point electronic brains become cheaper than wetware ones and then all bets are off.

In part this is why a plumber or an electrician is already more expensive than an IT worker. It's just going to snowball from here.

Re: yep

" presumably once finished with a mission were able to VTL as there was less weight."

They had to dump unused weaponry to achieve that though.

"The data capabilities of the F-35 seem to be a large part of it..."

If you're flying the F35 to be a data truck, you're better off putting that capability on an AWACs aircraft or some kind of ELINT drone. It's a lot cheaper to fly and likely to be a lot more likely to actually be flyable when needed.

"I'm going to upvote you for the idea about using a smaller ssd for the pagefile"

I'm not. Smaller drives have lower endurance. If you have enough ram pagefile isn't touched anyway.

As for Raid0 - it's great if you like your system hand-grenading from time to time but otherwise only use it for caches.

"The bill for cleaning all the equipment and having it out of service whilst being cleaned was (of course) higher than the original bill."

I've had similar occurences and make a particular point of saying so when it occurs.

"Computers in reprographic shops are likely to get clogged up with toner dust."

Or cigarette smoke, in the old days.

Older macs didn't have doors on the floppy drives. Smokers at the keyboard plus fans inside == congealed smoke solidly clogging the floppy after a couple of years.

Re: Out of Warranty

"Most devices sold have a one year warranty and if your Atom doesn't die for 18-24 months or longer, what are you going to do?"

These buggers are soldered-on devices - and frequently sold in systems along with 3-5 year support.

System builders using stuff like Supermicro boards in their kit (or anyone else selling extended support options) are taking a bath on costs. This is the kind of event which puts smaller businesses out of action.

On the other hand, you could do what HPE have just done to us and retroactively define your warranty (their "limited lifetime warranty" on LTO media is now only "3 years", despite being sold as "30 year archival or 260 complete backups")

The Atoms in question only have the name in common with old school ones.

Whilst low power/speed compared to the high end products they have more cache and compute power than Xeons of 5-7 years ago (and would give a core i7-860 a run for its money whilst drawing 1/4 the power)

Anaemic cacheless wonders of the early-mid 2000s these are not.

Re: Still no changes

"Or just have a real-time data connection providing basic telemetry information throughout the whole flight."

Funnily enough, the 777 HAS this facility.

MAS disabled it "because it cost too much" - remember this was an airline with major financial problems, a dispirited staff due to cutbacks and which had had a series of safety incidents (including a cigarette-caused fire in a heavy maintenance area nonsmoking area that destroyed a large amount of paperwork that shouldn't have been stored where it was located).

As in most cases, conditions were constructively building towards a catastrophe. The only variable was how it played out.

If you want an idea of what is going to be found at the bottom of the ocean, bear in mind that in previous crashes of this nature, most things got shredded by the breakup or impact with the water and what didn't float is going to be scattered over 20-40km^2 of seafloor. The biggest metal signatures are likely to be the APU and turbofan cores. Even the main spar is likely to have been broken.

Re: I want it found ... just to stop all the conspiracy theories

"If you have satellites constantly scanning the Earth's surface down to sub-meter detail, you will have computers which retain imagery of all non-cloudy areas."

They only do that in areas of interest - large areas of sparsely inhabited and used ocean aren't them.

The "looking via a drinking straw" paradigm applies. Unless you knew where to look for Osama Bin Laden he could have been sunbathing naked on the roof of his house waving at passing satellites and they still wouldn't have seen it.

There are still vast areas of the planet where a plane (or ship) can disappear without a trace. Those who haven't experienced the Roaring Forties or the Furious Fifties have little idea of the mountainous seas you see on a CALM day (I was laughing my tits off the day someone proposed using ekranoplans as patrol craft - not realising that 50 foot seas are routine. RNZN and RAN Leander Class frigates got pounded into early retirement patrolling those waters.

The search area is slightly north of the Forties but the seas are still ROUGH. Don't underestimate the Southern Oceans.

Re: No Soft Ditching

"The change in attitude moved the fuel, so at least one of the engines restarted enough to generate power,"

Engines won't restart without manual intervention, but there's no need for that. Power would be restored when the RAT popped out after the engines flamed out and the APU started up - and because one would flame out slightly before the other that'd explain the dive initiation (asymetric thrust, uncorrected)

Re: It's not a level playing field...

"There needs to be a mandated directive - zero tax payer payments to further funding of any copper based investment in BT."

This is more-or-less what was done in New Zealand to force the splitting of the incumbent into a lines company and a dialtone/connections company.

The problem isn't BT as such, the problem is that the commas market is dominated by a vertical monopoly with control of both infrastructure and retail with a vested interest in preventing any competition in the retail level.

ALL the arguments against splitting BT were advanced against splitting Telecom NZ (which isn't strange - TCNZ tried to sell the BT/Openreach model to NZ regulators as the way forward, to the stage of aping the same setup) and ALL those arguments were proven fallaciious (especially the pensions liability claims).

The real problem is Ofcom - as a technical regulator they're passable but as a competition and markets authority they're both decidedly lacking in teeth and arguably massively duplicating an existing regulator.

This was also proven in New Zealand when the Commerce regulator stepped in, documented the level of damage that TCNZ's monopoly was doing to NZ's GDP AND what BT was doing to the UK GDP (percentagewise, about the same - 3-5% - it adds up to hundreds of billions each year) and put its foot down, refusing to let TCNZ use the BT/Openreach sham in New Zealand.