* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Tesla, Atlassian told to go through front door in effort to save Australian industrial civilisation

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Farmers think different

"Solar won't cut it unless there are several hectares of panels which removes that amount of ground from crop production."

You're overthinking it in one direction and underthinking in another.

Greenhouses have a major problem with excess heat (which can be used by a water pump) and can be used to grow high value crops with far lower levels of pesticides/herbicides used thanks to being enclosed, if the heat is removed. There are a number of schemes doing this around the world.

100m^2 of shed roof will drive a 10kW water pump quite happily anyway.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Farmers think different

"Solar doesn't work at night when most irrigation takes place"

I've been faffing around with various bits of solar tech enough to know that solar stirlings work pretty bloody well to fill header tanks during the day - and the "hot as balls" part is good when you have a steady supply of cooling water to keep the cold side colder and raise thermal efficiency.

Not all energy schemes need high technology and complex electronic devices.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bring It On!

Elon could simply buy land near one of the major interconnectors, do it and announce it's ready to connect.

The political fallout would be most amusing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Did they repeat California's failed energy deregulation?

"the profit motive of the companies is opposed to the "we don't want blackouts" motive of the customers."

Which is why you balance the profit motive with "VERY $$$$LARGE FINES" for avoidable blackouts.

Thank heavens the wrangling over BT's Openreach separation has ended

Alan Brown Silver badge

" that chocolate teapot OFCOM compromising again with BT"

Concentrate on having the competition and markets authority weighing in.

They're the elephant in the room. BT can perform regulatory capture on Ofcom but they can't do it to the competition regulator.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: THis IS all about.....

"the political complication of the BT pension hole"

If that was a REAL pension hole BT would be falling over themselves trying to hand if off to some poor sucker who didn't know better.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Nail on the head

"Ofcom insist that BT/OR maintain copper to every house"

No. Ofcom insist that BT/OR provide a phone socket with dialtone that works during power cuts - as do most regulators worldwide.

BT _interpret_ this as "must provide a copper circuit back to the exchange" because it suits them to do so, but the reality is that a battery-backed NTU will work just as well and appropriate sizing will give several days' operation during no-power conditions.

With a concentrator/MSAN at the cabinet the copper line only need be a few hundred metres long and the batteries can be centralised. Again, this is easy to do (in most cases virtually the same cost as the DSLAM in the cabinets) but BT are playing the game to prevent opponents getting access to high speed anything into the end-user premises without having them collecting differing rents based on the services offered.

And then there's the issue of BT refusing to allow Openreach to install BB services into areas with large numbers of commercial premises because that would cannibalise their leased line business.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Assets

"but why is transferring ownership of the assets any harder than (say) dividing up the CDs during a breakup"

It isn't. See the 2011 breakup of Telecom New Zealand into Chorus and Spark.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Assets

" Whilst the separation is some (small) progress, the ownership of the assets is a biggie. "

Yup, Separation MUST be of ownership of assets and operations.

This is done via a reverse share split (1 BT share becomes 1 BT-NEO share and one Openreach share), where openreach assumes onwership of the outside plant.

What BT have done has actually cemented their monopoly and made things WORSE.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"The secondary reason is that if you provide DSL service without dialtone, as BE used to do, you are very likely to find your circuit snarfed by an Openreach engineer looking for an unused pair."

The fact that this even occurs us testament to how fucked up BT's recordkeeping actually is - and the reality is that they'll do it to a pair with dialtone on it when they're trying to switch a fucked line onto the "least bad pair" and get out of town to the next job. Even if there's no tone, the pairs aren't usually dry, as that would result in corrosion problems in the longer-term, so a quiet line will still have 50V on it and be detectable.

Such events should come with an automatic £5000 per incident charge. They tend to stop rapidly when there's actually a cost involved.

The _real_ problem is that Ofcom's collective gonads are sitting in a jar on a desk in BT's head office,

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "where Openreach’s profits go,.. back to the BT Group. The group's budget..controlled by BT."

> the 2008 decision should have been a much simpler network upgrade from "legacy low speed fibre" to "new fast fibre".

At the very least, there should be cabinet MSANs deployed. This clusterfuckage of DSLAMs and copper voice runs back to the switches is an example of BT queering the pitch, because it can - in a deliberate way that disadvantages rivals on the supposedly "equal access" lines.

It's not as if Combo DSLAM/MSAN cabinet equipment haven't been around since the very first days of VDSL. MSANs themselves have been around for 30+ years after all.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "where Openreach’s profits go,.. back to the BT Group. The group's budget..controlled by BT."

"Remember back in 2008 we were talking about: 100mbps up and down at £100 pa, to 100% of homes in the UK "

Back in 1984(!) The japanese were taking about 140Mb/s symetric (E4) to the home to 100% of the population as their target. At the time I was involved in the deployment of state-of-the-art 140Mb/s (per channel) 7+1 microwave bearer systems and whilst we wondered what people would do with it there was no doubt the japanese govt would achieve it before the end of the decade.

Back in 2001 the Koreans were _achieving 1Gb/s.

I keep banging on about what's happened in New Zealand because it's germane to the discussion: In an effort to stave off government intervention after 20 years of an increasingly rapacious telco, the incumbent aped the BT/Openreach model and tried to sell it to the government there as "enough to ensure a fair market" - the NZ government _documented_ the ways that BT are able to continue manipulating the british market (including damaging the UK GDP) and act in blatently anticompetitive manners (eg, the way it's been able to shut down rural broadband initiatives) - and having no desire to see that kind of thing happen in New Zealand as a continuation of 20 years of rape&pillage, ordered that Chorus (the NZ version of Openreach) be completely cleaved from the incumbent - by the simple expedient of withholding any further broadband funding until it happened.

Yes, the NZ regulators were braver than Ofcom - but just like Ofcom they were completely subject to regulatory capture and had spent a decade claiming that all was well in the face of increasingly loud complaints from across the spectrum before grudgingly admitting maybe things weren't so rosy, but just like Ofcom not actually doing anything about it. The actual shove came from the NZ ministry of Commerce (Equiv Competition and Markets Authority) to stepped in and forced the issue.

People really should look at what's happened - the exact same arguments against breaking up BT were all raised there too. They've all turned out to be fabrications.

Whilst a vertically integrated monopoly makes some sense as a regulated government entity in a completely regulated market (ie, the old days), it is damaging to the entire UK economy to allow a privately owned vertically integrated monopoly to exist and continue to leverage that monopoly to engage in rent-seeking behaviour. BT must be broken up and steps taken to ensure that Openreach cannot be captured by any entity or cartel.

IBM could have made almost all the voluntary redundancies it needed

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The good people

Yup.

Not IBM, but one place I worked at had sucessive rounds of cutbacks, initially (and sucessfully) aimed at getting rid of multiple (redundant) layers of management whose primary function was to obstruct things being done, but then taken up on a "monkey see, monkey do" basis by people(+) who didn't understand that getting rid of your talented technical staff was a bad thing even if getting rid of people who were only pushing paper that was better shuffled by computer was a good thing, and so decided to make cutbacks at all levels.(*)

After it was clear to me that the deadwood(**) weren't going anywhere and most of the talented people had bailed out en masse at the last moment in the previous round I decided I didn't want to be stuck with a bunch of box-tickers and put my hand up. The company was getting wise to this and tried to block people it didn't want going but had a fight on its hands because the deadwood were also the bush lawyers and had no intention of going anywhere and the union took the voluntary part of "voluntary redundancies" seriously(***).

(*) The effects of the first couple of rounds of redundancies were to achieve massive speedups in getting things done. It wasn't unusual for customers to find that many orders were processed the same day instead of taking 3-4 months. After cutbacks in tech staff started happening, this started slipping back to several weeks or longer simply because of a lack of staff to do the job(****)

(**) ie: people who kept me employed going around fixing what they'd broken in addition to what they'd failed to fix in the first place.

(***) Yes, it did result in them having to hire some people back as consultants for 3-5 times what they'd previously been paid.

(****)vs the previous situation where delays were caused by the order being filled out in triplicate, sent to one end of the country for processing, sent to the other for filing, lost, found, lost again, left in a peat bog for three months and finally fed to a Ravenous Bugblatter beast of Traal before arriving on the desk of someone technical - who did the work the day they received the job and usually in less than 20 minutes.

(+) I use that term loosely, but calling them barely trained primates with MBAs and low comprehension or deductive skills would be unkind to lemurs. Seriously, I'm sure that many management consultants are there because they have big tits and/or are good at giving blowjobs and not for their ability to actually plan for the long-term benefit of the organisation they work for. I'm sure a flock of flying monkeys would fling less poo too.

NASA finds India's missing lunar orbiter with Earth-bound radar

Alan Brown Silver badge

"KNowing where to look"

"As a proof-of-concept, the mission scientists had previously used the radar technique to spot NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a much easier task since that craft's navigators knew precisely where to look."

They still knew more or less where to look, just needing to open up the observation window time for longer.

Looking for unknown unknowns (asteroids) is somewhat harder, which is why we tend to only see them after they've been past and are brightly illuminated by the sun on the way out. (The ones brightly illuminated by the sun on the way in are - of course - relatively easy to see)

Bear in mind that you don't need to have something actually lithobrake to have a really bad day. A series of large bolide airbursts (eg, a disintegrating comet) is arguably worse and has been postulated as having effectively sterilised a large swathe of North America and kickstarted the Younger Dryas period.

Japan fires shot warning off risky bidders for Toshiba's memory biz – report

Alan Brown Silver badge

"A: unemployment "

Although they have a lot of it even with the old "cradle to grave" employment system well & truly gone and mostly replaced with a gig economy from hell.

"B: foreign people running their things."

Only the appearance of that. The only carmaker not under foreign control now is Toyota.

Japan is worth watching from a number of points of view, not least of which is that their population demographics now are where ours will be in another 15-20 years if certain elements have their way and the UK housing situation is likely to follow the same lost (two) decade pattern too.

User lubed PC with butter, because pressing a button didn't work

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Sounds all too familiar

"and to get someone to tell him before he left. "

You're kind.

Some people would have told the police to be waiting instead.

Alan Brown Silver badge

If pour butter into a computer, you Are Not Qualified to work with them

And the fact that the user is both still employed at the company AND slagging off the IT department is grounds for naming and shaming both.

Ofcom to force a legal separation of Openreach

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I know plenty of people who live in towns and can't get fast broadband."

Quite common in areas where fast broadband sales would cannabilise leased line sales.

This is the kind of market abuse BT regularly engages in - and which an independent openreach can't, because they get the same income from a leased line as a voice line as a broadband line.

BAE Systems' autonomous research aircraft flies itself to Scotland

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Probably easier to do than autonomous car driving

"Except the ones that don't, such as balloons"

Balloons frequently do. They're also slow moving and hard to miss.

Other aircraft (particularly if flying more-or-less directly at you) are small against a large sky and _very_ difficult to see (personal experience).

That said - fully automated aviation is much easier than fully automated cars, which is why it's already been around for a long time in large transport. Pilots won't admit it, but they've been mostly superfluous for decades and having monkeys at the controls has caused more crashes than it's prevented.

This is where UK's Navy will park its 65,000-tonne aircraft carriers

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: sea power

"It's a massive sitting duck for surface skimming missiles, submarines and air attack"

Even with all the defences it's a sitting duck - especially when the opposition can field precision-guided anti-shipping ballistic missiles or swarming tactics.

Seagate plays disk cricket with a 12TB Enterprise Capacity drive spinner

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I can't wait to see...

"Put it this way, RAID 5 is probably not a good idea...;."

Nor is RAID50 - just ask KCL

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I can't wait to see...

"..the look on my customers faces when I have to tell them what the expected rebuild time on an array of these will be. "

RAIDZ3, preemptive replacements.

But customers won't do that, so occasionally you do have to pull from tape.

Volkswagen pleads guilty to three Dieselgate criminal charges

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Justice for the UK?

" It will be a good idea if the muppets from the Met start checking and enforcing it."

It doesn't need the Met to do it. The DVLA enforcement arm can just as easily start checking for missing cats/DPF and impounding vehicles - it's a MOT failure and MOT is the _minimum_ standard for maintenance a vehicle must be kept at in order to be allowed on the road.

The interesting thing is that it's possible to pick up NOX emissions via a suitable roadside camera and then flag down offending vehicles 100-200 metres down the road. If the claim about PHVs is accurate then "drive over this ramp" will catch them pretty easily.

Pennsylvania sues IBM for fraud over $170m IT upgrade shambles

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: IT project failure is now structural

"And of course, it's never their fault when you fail to make good on their unrealistic promises, now is it?"

The best thing to do when you discover such promises have been made is to start writing your resignation.

You can do it now with a reference or do it later when they're blaming you, but if you do it now you can parachute in later for a large sum, perform a heroic rescue and be handsomely paid.

Telemarketers hit with £70,000 fine for cold-calling pensioners

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What We Need Is Direct Compensation

"I think that legislation should be made that forces these companies to compensate each individual person (whomever is named on the phone bill) for say £50-100 each."

Nope. That's too small to be worth filing. Look at the USA's "Telephone Consumer Protection Act" for guidance.

- Caller AND the company that hired them jointly and severally liable for $500 _statutory_ damages each - per call.

- Triple damages for wilful violation (which means phoning anyone on TPS list)

- Withholding or faked caller-ID is criminal matter as well as wilful violation.

- FCC (regulator) able to apply $11,500 statutory damages _per call_, tripled for wilful violations.

- Company principals (which means directors for a LLC) are individually liable. Liquidating the company to avoid the bills means they end up being personally liable.

- All fileable via small claims court (you can also get the judge to order that the advertiser divulges who they hired)

There've been a lot of cases in the USA where small claims judges have tossed the cases as they'd "hurt the business" - and in every case where it's been appealed the judge has been spanked hard and told that's the general idea. Whilst junk fax and telemarketing calls are still a problem there, they're a trickle compared to what they were like before the law was passed.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Baseball bats, while effective, lack the entertainment value provided by cattleprods"

That depends on how you use them.

I recommend sharpened and lubricated.

What went up, Musk come down again: SpaceX to blast sat into orbit with used rocket

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Don't call it "re-used"

"launch proven"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Collection of low cost cube-sats instead

"Maybe each launch could also take a large Hoover, bring some junk back when it lands"

[Not high enough, not fast enough] to be worth a damn - the first stage is in a ballistic trajectory (and not even an intercontinental one). Anything that's at the levels it reaches will be out of orbit in a matter of days anyway.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"But how much does it really cost to rebuild an exact copy of a satellite you have already built once ?"

It doesn't. You already have one, It's called the flight spare and you already paid for it.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I would have thought they'd try a test launch without a payload just to prove the engineering"

NOBODY does a test launch to orbit without a payload. You might give a free relaunch if it fails but the costs are too high to wear otherwise,

Besides. You need the mass up top to prove the system.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Don't call it "re-used"

No, suborbital doesn't count - not that any of the mentioned units are suborbital. They're sounding rockets.

Sounding rockets go straight up and straight down again, without being subjected to the kinds of stresses that going sideways at high speed result in (most notably: Atmospheric friction and being able to either return to base or to a downrange landing spot - neither of which are issues for sounding rockets)

"The shuttle itself cost a fortune to refurbish between launches, which was one of the things that made the shuttle uneconomical."

You're understating the costs by a long shot.

Shuttle cost so much to refurbish that it would have been wildly cheaper to build new launchers each time, but it was only intended to be used for missions bringing heavy shit back down and was only designed to be economic for those missions.

The SRBs would have been much cheaper to fabricate as right-sized expensables somewhere along the Gulf coast and barged to the cape, rather than being size-limited by railway tunnels from Utah, but that was a pork job and only one of many on the project.

After the early cancellation of the US space station, it was a platform flailing about in search of a mission (the mission being ISS) and the airframe life was used up in flagwaving exercises keeping a manned mission alive, to the point where it ended up being wrecked before its useful mission was accomplished.

As a result "we" no longer have any easy way of bringing big bits back down from LEO, which poses a serious problem when things like Hubble are large enough to come down substantially intact and uncontrollable. Skylab was bad enough. The ideal compromise solution would be applying a linear shaped charge to blow the tube open when it starts entering the atmosphere but I can't see that being acceptable either.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Don't call it "re-used"

"Sadly it doesn't look like they will be able to manage to bring back the 2nd stage as well."

Never say never, but the 2nd stage is going a _lot_ faster (and there's the small matter of having to catch it on the once-around or better)

BT agrees to legal separation of Openreach

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: He who pays the piper

"It's got to be owned by shareholders who aren't part of the industry Openreach is providing services to otherwise nothing will change."

Actually there's a lot of mileage in allowing all comers (including telcos) to own shares up to 5% maximum for any entity, but prohibiting any preferential voting stock and making submarining (ownership of more than the limit by stealth) a criminal matter(*) with any shares discovered to be held this way immediately forfeitable to the crown.

(*) In the case of mergers, any shares which would take the combined entity over the limit must be disposed of on the day the merger is announced - even if that means taking a bath on the value.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Great staff: crap organisation

"It's the infrastructure within which they have to work which is a complete pile of pants."

Yes, and that infrastructure is _deliberately_ setup by BT head office to be as difficult to penetrate and as expensive to operate as possible.

The first thing a separated entity will do is ensure it's efficient.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ofcom continures to be utterly useless.

"All Openreach has to worry about is a bit of competition from Virgin"

You are blurring BT wholesale/retail and Openreach (lines and ducts), either deliberately or naively.

Virgin is an ideal Openreach CUSTOMER, not competitor - as are all telcos with in-ground infrastructure.

The day Openreach is fully independent is the day you'll see Openreach salespeople actively approaching outfits like Virgin offering to lease out duct space so Virgin doesn't have to spend 50k/mile to dig up roads - which is the primary barrier to rolling out CATV to every cul-de-sac in the country and can simply run them down openreach trenches instead.

They'd also be offering to maintain Virgin (or other telco) outside plant for XYZ facilities management fees and leasing space in that 3rd party ducting.

They'd ALSO be providing leased lines WITHOUT demanding that BT wholesale NTUs be attached to each end of the pair (this is one of the classic incumbent telco rent-seeking behaviours that dramatically drives up costs for 3rd parties) and actively seeking dark fibre customers.

Why do I say this? Because this is exactly what's happened in New Zealand, where Chorus was entirely split off from Telecom New Zealand (now Spark) - and it turned out that the pensions liabilities were a fiction, along with the high costs that TCNZ (and BT) claimed are incurred for operating the outside plant network (When the company is part of the group, you can use creative accounting to siphon out money)

An entirely independent Openreach (independent headquarters, board, shares and management) with regulated line charges to all and restrictions on shareholding to prevent any kind of predatory aquisition (as a Strategic National Interest, this is justifiable and legal) has the potential to have the same galvanising effect on the market on the UK's comfortable triopoly as it had in New Zealand's comfortable duopoly.

Interestingly, 6 years on from the split, the old NZ dialtone company is in trouble, having had its credit rating slashed not long after the split, whilst the lines company had its one upgraded (the exact opposite of the FUD scenario it and BT put out). As with New Zealand, in the event of a fully independent Openreach, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see BT crying "poor us" a couple of years down the track, demanding special concession rates because the Openreach charges are "far too high", despite all the other companies being happy with them.

I'm not saying the NZ model is perfect - Chorus' regulated copper rates have been set too low recently and the company is stinging a bit as a result - what isn't helping is that the low rates are discouraging the stated objective of getting all clients migrated off copper and onto fibre.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ofcom continures to be utterly useless.

"The shit and expensive service from openreach was never anything to do with who owns/manages them."

Actually, it has everything to do with that.

An Openreach which is dependent on its customers vs having the dead hand of head office holding things back will be quite the different beast to the Openreach of today.

As long as BT headoffice can pull the strings, Openreach will continue to be anticompetitive.

Alan Brown Silver badge

You'll know Openreach is fully separated

When they're leasing duct space access to Virgin and other BT "competitors"

This is what happened in New Zealand when the incumbent there tried to sell the BT/Openreach to the regulators there in order to stave off government intervention.

What also happened in New Zealand is that the equivalent to BT had its credit ratings downgraded, whilst the equivalent to Openreach had them upgraded - and those "pension liablities" as well as "staggering losses" turned out to be accounting fictions cooked up to try and scare off regulators.

Incidentally the easiest way to force the split is simply to say "No more money for broadband rollouts unless you split". It short circuits any court cases because you can't force someone to hand over cash on contracts that haven't been signed yet.

Lessons from the Mini: Before revamping or rebooting anything, please read this

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Impressive..

"Issigonis was trying to design something cheap, small on the outside and big on the inside all while using as much from the BMC parts pin as possible. "

The whole "small on the outside" and highly stressed small engine thing were for tax reasons (larger cars were taxed out the wazoo) and whilst sir Alec succeeded, the prevailing design ethos put people in harm's way (the rear seats were the crush zone when shunted, as a f'instance).

Ralph Nader's "unsafe at any speed" may have been about american cars, but most european ones were much worse, compounded by government rules which encouraged such designs without regard to the human costs. We owe a massive debt to (E)NCAP

WikiLeaks promises to supply CIA's hacking tool code to vendors

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Assange seems to have done a deal with the new administration

"The UK has no statute of limitations - he will have to do the time sometime."

The standard penalty for bail breaches (and not just a first offence either) is a smack on the wrist and warning not to do it again.

Given that's done with serious violent offenders, if Asshat's given more severe treatment then his lawyers would be all over it like a badly fitting shirt.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Thank you to Assange?

If there really was a FISA order, then the extinction event may not be the DNC's.

Such things need to be signed off by a judge, and reasonable proof provided - specifically because of the activities of a certain republican president named Richard Milhous Nixon (incidentally the only other president in recent US history to have an "enemies" list)

Also thanks to that president's actions, it's illegal for a US president to even ASK for such a tap, and a constitutional law professor (Obama) would know that.

So by all means, let's see that FISA order and the associated evidence. It would make for very entertaining reading if one exists.

'Mafia' of ageing scientists, academics and politicos suck at picking tech 'winners'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The more reactors become "small"

"Cheap efficient reactors need low operating pressure"

Molten salt

"high operating temperatures"

Molten salt

"and (ideally) natural Uranium to side step all the proliferation issues"

Thorium (but you can feed it natural uranium if you wish)

The vast majority of the cost associated with PWR plants is tied in with handling high temperature/high pressure radioactive water. Nixon did the world a great disservice by killing the Oak Ridge research program.

The bare fact is that nuclear is expensive, but we can't afford to keep using carbon and "renewables" don't produce enough energy to cover requirements when you eliminate carbon.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Self defeating conclusion?

"picking groups which include some winners can"

Like UK government was so good at picking the future of the space or automotive industries?

(Hint, one suceeded in spite of the govt and the other crashed and burned with the full support of it)

Microsoft to close its social network on a week's notice – and SIX people complain

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Microsoft has a problem with word of mouth

"If stupidity were a crime they would be amongst the first in line for summary execution."

Although their "Share and enjoy" corporate theme tune has some...... unique..... features.

NASA spunks $127m on SSL-powered robot to refuel satellites in space

Alan Brown Silver badge

"it'll likely burn more fuel getting on target than it'll actually deliver"

That doesn't matter. Fuel is cheap. You can manoeuvre and get there using electric thrusters

The vast majority of a launched satellite's mass is.... satellite. They generally only have a few kg of fuel (up to a few tens of kg of fuel)

If you can get 8 tons to GEO then you can refuel a couple of dozen birds and effectively double their lifespans AND bring the refueller back down or park it in graveyard orbit

It'd be even more interesting if you could plug in extender tanks. It may even be possible to clip on retrofit electric thrusters to older birds.

More important than all that is the possibility of getting out there and removing dead GEO birds to graveyard orbit because THEY are the reason that all the live ones are expending so much high thrust manoeuvring fuel each year to avoid the stuff precessing through the Clarke belt (stationkeeping can mostly be done on ion drives). This would be an extremely useful final mission for a refueller.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This is a good idea

You're confusing booster rockets with simple low impulse thrusters.

Once you escape atmospheric drag and the extremely high impulse needed to overcome it, the vast majority of motors use simple hypergolics (and some used simple pressurised cold gas)

As others have said, almost all satellites have accessible fuelling ports, because they had to be filled up before launch. The hard part is connecting to them in a "weightless" environment without the things simply bouncing off, which means not only to you have to fly up to the bird, you actually have to hold onto it whilst you plug in - and with the antenna/solar panels deployed that can be a pretty delicate manouvure if you want to do it without breaking parts off given the delicacy of parts and inertias involved.

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2012/09/Galileo_FM3_Fuelling3

If you're ever in London, there's an Intelsat with half its antenna deployed on display in the science museum (the other is furled). Think of a butterfly and the fragility of its wings and you won't be too far off.

NASA extends trial of steerable robo-stunt kite parachute

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Trees

"One assumes this is an evasion tactic."

Yes. It evades hard contact with the ground if the 'chute isn't working.

Smut-scamming copyright chaser 'fesses up, will do hard time

Alan Brown Silver badge

This is a good start

Unfortunately there are several other outfits who've emulated this activity and there are strong indications that this scam was driven out of Germany anyway.

IE: The patsies have gone down but not the mothership.

Iconic Land Rover Defender may make a comeback by 2019

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Why did people like the defender?

" the general mechanicals will go for ever with a bit of maintenance "

Front half shafts were a common casualty on all our Series 2s. That was really the final straw for them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Which market segment will they go for?

Space can be anywhere. Out of date machinery is a liability.

When GM moved one of its factories from Detroit to Mexico, it laid off 11,000 people in Detroit and hired 1500 in mexico. If forced to move it back, it is likely to only hire 500 or so and most of them will be pushing paper, not maintaining the robots doing the actual work.

if you were a factory assembly line worker and you got laid off, you need to accept that those kinds of jobs aren't coming back - ever.

And once you have robots doing the actual work the driving factor for location is supply lines, energy cost and distribution logistics. That tends to put the best location near the customers.

Don't forget that the UK factory towns weren't built where they were because that's where people were - Manchester was a miserable wet fishing village with a perfect location for steam-engine powered cotton mills because that damp weather made dust explosions unlikely and it had good proximity to incoming raw materials as well as transport for finished product.

People moved there for the work, not the other way around, and as the UK government has found out several times to its cost, directing that factories be located in XYZ areas to soak up unemployment simply results in high numbers of inexperienced people working on lines, turning out buggy product - and without years of expensive training, the problems won't get resolved.

It may sound harsh but expecting the government to provide work or force employers to operate in areas of high unemployment simply because people have grown up and lived all their lives in that area is a non-starter. It's been tried and failed too many times under governments of all stripes - the money is better spent on educating and training to ensure that laid off factory workers (etc) can be employable in other fields, or paid to move where work is available.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Needling me?

"I think in the case of Oz, as soon as they weren't forced to buy commonwealth they were very happy to buy something cheaper and more reliable."

Exactly this and not just Australia.

The New Zealand Post Office got stuck with a load of quite nasty unreliable british telephone exchanges and microwave systems in the 1970s under government orders, instead of the nice (and well tested) american and french ones they wanted. That was the final time they went along with such orders and the next round of kit was almost entirely japanese (Neax 61 switches and Fujitsu or NEC bearer systems)