Posts by Alan Brown 15085 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"1. Scrap the TV license. Make the Basically Boring Channel collect their own subscriptions."
This is on the way by stealth.
It's no longer a criminal matter to not have a TV license - which on the one hand makes it a civil matter with lower burden of proof, but on the other hand reduces the incentive to pay up in the first place.
The TV licensing company (a private wholly owned subsidiary of the Big Brother Corporation) hires Crapita to actually go knock on doors and _their_ people run like fuck when confronted by cameras (they especially hate having their ID and car license plates recorded for some reason.....)
Researchers simply aren't valued. I'd say that 95% of our PhD graduates end up working outside the field (One left to be a patent clerk, in a reversal of past trends)
Engineers turn research into reality, so business can see their point, but coming up with the ideas in the first place isn't seen as a priority.
" Where I used to work we had one that did hundreds of thousands of copies and just kept going."
The official lifespan of a 4700 is 1 million prints. We got 2 million out of it, but it was a bit tired by then and the reason it had to do it was due delays caused by bickering about my refusal to buy any more HPs on economic grounds.
"It's entirely up to him when he'd like to stop spending $20/month on toner, and splash out on the $25 video card needed to connect the second monitor already on hand. It's been in the works for several years."
As has that computer, obviously.
Just about everything made in the last 5 years can drive 2 monitors without add-in cards and most intel-chipset systems up to 10 years have the capability.
"HP has had the Universal PS/PCL drivers for over a decade or so, supporting laser printers dating back to 90s."
HP's PS interpreter has the interesting feature of only allowing 1024 bytes of PS headers when the standard allows for 4096.
When the inevitable happens the printers will shit over a few hundred pages if not power cycled.
I flagged this to HP in 2003 when I discovered it in HP 4100s (which they wouldn't repair) and despite promises made back then to sort it out, that flaw is still there.
"HP has some nice printers these days with a great price per page,"
Only if you compare those prices with HP printers of the recent past. When we were looking to replace our troublesome CLJ4700s the like-for-like replacements had a 3 times higher operating cost.
Paying 5 times as much for someone else's hardware was a drop in the bucket compared to the six-figure savings made over the lifetime of the printer.
"But it's going to still be slow for full adoption."
When I queried Ofcom a few years ago about misleading claims on "full internet access" when IPv6 isn't available they said that at some point when adoption had picked up they'd make it a requirement.
The question is at what point they'll make that determination and how much warning they intend to give ISPs that they have to offer IPv6 or not call themselves ISPs.
After the fiasco at the start of the 00's with walled gardens and then web-only access being sold by mobile companies as "Internet" I don't hold out much hope for anything soon.
"carrier grade NAT there too, never had an issue"
CGNAT works ok(ish) if all you're doing is accessing webpages.
If you're running anything with a listener on it, then all bets are off. Even with the webpage part the periodic change of IP address can be problematic.
Marketing and management think that "Internet == http"
"Avoiding NAT as far as possible was an explicit design goal of IPv6, which hasn't been arrived at arbitrarily, but from bitter experience with that kludge."
Having been involved with NAT from the early days, I can't upvote this enough.
Yes NAT works - mostly.
No, it doesn't work well.
Running NAT behind NAT is a spectacularly bad idea but a lot of SE asian ISPs do it anyway.
Whoever came up with CGNAT should be staked out over an anthill and smeared with honey.
"TOIL is a swiz as you never seem to be able to schedule the time off in lieu."
A relative ran into this one working for local govt.
. She ended up taking legal advice and got 3 months accumulated TOIL off (she would have preferred the monry up front but $employer wouldn't do that. Shortly after returning, she and the entire city secretariat(*) resigned en masse and subsequently won a very large settlement for constructive dismissal.
(*) City secretaries are "keeper of secrets" type employees, not the typing pool. When 25+ of them all leave at once due to to the actions of the city manager you can rest assured the organisation has major problems. By all accounts there have been mass resignations in other departments since then.
"do you have a choice of inhaling the toxic fumes of petrol cars or the carcinogenic particles of the diesel cars ? errr no"
Which is why the exhaust output of petrol and diesel engines has been subject to increasingly tight restrictions over the last 50 years.
I can tell there's a smoker in the car in front of me by the smell. Why isn't what comes off the end of a cigarette regulated?
SMOKERS switching to vaping are already addicted.
The bright colourful advertising and various flavours aren't aimed at them.
There's a reason flavoured cigarettes were banned 40+ years ago (marketing aimed at bringing in new smokers and children) and it's the same reason it needs to be banned now.
I have no problem with smokers switching to vaping but I have plenty of problems when finding that there is a substantial vaping population who've never smoked - they were pulled in because of the "cool" factor.
"Are you aware what Prison is about?"
Very. And I'm also aware that keep prisoners in touch with their families keeps them grounded, less likely to play up whilst inside and less likely to reoffend when released.
Unlike the USA system (revenge, retribution and profiting from slave labor), most other prison systems are supposed to be about repair and reformation.
"Either you want phones because you want to hear what they are saying or you don't want phones in prisons."
By all accounts the vast majority of smuggled phones are used to keep in touch with family due to the official ones being expensive and/or extremely limited availability.
If they solved THAT problem, I'm willing to bet the smuggling problem would become minor and easier to keep on top of.
In any case once the IMEI of phones inside a prison's walls are known RIPA can be used to force the mobile providers to provide a tap no matter where the phone is actually located.
And of course once you know where that phone is calling you can correlate with calls made by _those_ numbers, which starts weaving a large web of contacts. I assume the more tech-savvy are simply using things like whatsapp or redphone to do encrypted conversations.
"A380 coming in over that spot is .... just ..... staggering, and apparently for more than a few folks outright terrifying."
Go sit at the end of the runway at Avarua.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSFJR9BkGEk
skip to 2:50 for the fun part. It was more impressive when ANZ used 747-400s there. (you can count the rivets as they go over)
"The fly in the ointment is Broughton where the runway is bounded by a main road at one end and a railway at the other. It's also quite narrow."
It's entirely possible to have a runway with a railway crossing. Broughton isn't exactly busy and trains don't run every 5 minutes on that line.
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/08/gisborne-airport-runway-with-railway.html
Yes, I've landed and taken off from there.
As for width: It's wide enough to do the job - and it can be widened.
"Over the years, quite a few Airbus have been in perfect mechanical condition in the millisecond before impact."
Not just Airbus. The same accusation can be levelled at Boeing and McD.
Pilot error (CFT) has been the prime contributory factor to almost all air crashes in the last 40 years. The few where it hasn't been have been all the more newsworthy because it wasn't pilot error.
(This is one of the reasons why airlines don't hire ex-military pilots anymore. They tend to keep trying to push on regardless when everyone else goes around or gives up and diverts.)
"ABS will not reduce braking distance on slippery surfaces"
It does over the typical scenario (wheels lock and driver doesn't lift foot from brake) but quite a bit.
It can pull a car up slightly better than an expert driver in an non-ABS car, but it's far more important that it can pull the car up far better than most drivers can achieve AND won't result in the car spinning if the surface under left/right sides of the vehicle are different in their levels of grip (eg, side of the road or one set of wheels on paint) - this is one that even expert drivers have trouble avoiding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKiTAcXK6M4 - 3:41
It's probably more saved more lives under these kinds of circumstances than anything else.
The steering part is a bonus but no matter how you try and play that it does extend the stopping distance.
" That is why factories are required to install things safety gates, two handed controls, sensors etc."
And why employees bypass the things, then find they have no recourse when the machine amputates body parts (except that these days they do, because the factory is generally found to be negligent in allowing someone to bypass the safety mechanisms.)
"site publishers themselves would be vetting and uploading the content before you see it"
This is particularly the case with media companies.
They wouldn't dream of NOT doing it in their print media so why the FUCK are they passing off vetting to 3rd parties who've clearly demonstrated on multiple occasions that they're incapable of doing the bloody job?
" a banner across the top or side of a page is really not a problem to anyone."
The problem with banner ads can be surmised as follows:
Site allows advertising banners and has a written agreement with the ad network to NOT allow such adverts.
They show up anyway. Users complain _loudly_ and some go elsewhere.
Site finds it has no legal recourse over breach of contract and despite assurances form the ad network, it keeps happening. Half the time the ad network doesn't actually pay up anyway.
This isn't theory. I've seen it occur on a number of sites. The reality is that advertising networks have been shitting on users and site operators alike for years and for the most part it's not actually worthwhile to allow adverts on your website.
"go to any of the Johnston Press local newspaper sites and you'll instantly see display ads for obvious scams "
It strikes me that a call to your local trading standards office would disabuse newspapers of the notion that they can allow these in the online version any more than they do in the print versions.
"Essentially demanding money with menaces."
Pay us money to maintain a list of acceptable adverts or people who CHOOSE to use us and CHOOSE to allow acceptable adverts from a list they trust us to maintain won't see you.
The alternative being "not to be seen at all"
Advertisers seem to assume they have a _right_ to shove stuff in our faces without the _responsibilty_ of not pissing us off in the process and like many others I've stopped using sites in the past due to intrusive adverts.
Right now a baby's nappy holds more responsibility than the vast majority of advertising agencies.
They should be thankful we're taking the tack of shunning them. The alternative (distributed clicking networks) would bankrupt them in short order.
In this context means - non-irritating/dangerous ones.
IE:
NO animations/noises/interaction
NO popups
NO scripts
NO pageunders
NO massive advertising frames.
NO tracking
ie:
small, static adverts that don't annoy.
That said, I moved to ublock years ago and experience with any whitelisting service is that sooner or later some outfit will come along that will ignore the rules, then sue when their accreditation is withdrawn.
"Bad copper is just bad copper."
Yes, but if you have a decent ISP they'll ride Openreach until they fix it.
In my experience of supporting cow-orkers who need connectivity to telecommute, If you are with the Big6, you've got 2 chances of them doing that (Fat chance and no chance)
Very happy with my phone.coop connection - precisely BECAUSE they don't take any shit from Openreach.
"From my experience and that of others I know who are Virgin customers, if you're in a Virgin area you pretty much get the advertised speed."
For a long time around here, people were getting the advertised sync rate but throughputs during peak evening period would have made a 33k6 modem look spritely.
I found this was entirely due to their extension wiring being _illegally_ spliced in before the master socket.
There, FTFY - and in such cases Openreach are fully justified in charging full whack in remediating the problem caused by interfering with the line on their side of the demarcation point (There are a still a couple of offences on the books which cover this kind of thing)
"crossings are very often hump back, and there's millions of them like that"
There are standards requiring approaches to be fixed or the crossings closed - and US railroad companies have been steadily forcing that to be done for decades.
Humped crossings are also supposed to have warning signposts so that truckers can avoid them (but US truckers are notorious for ignoring safety signage - like the idiot who drove her 40-ton vehicle onto a historic bridge only rated for 10 and clearly signposted as such - with utterly predictable results - because she thought 40 was less than 10. Hopefully she gets the complete bill for replacing the bridge.)
> There were rumours that this driver was completely inattentive (watching videos on his tablet, as I recall).
That claim was made by the truck driver, who claimed to have heard the video over the noise of his own engine (yeah right)
There's also the issue of the missing dashcam. The driver was known to use one at all times. It hasn't been recovered.
The simple facts are:
1: Truck driver drove across a busy road when the way was not clear (75 vs 65 mph is not going to make much difference here)
2: Driver failed to observe the (illegal) obstruction in time to stop.
The truck driver has a major interest in playing things to look as bad for the car driver as possible, because otherwise he faces jail time for careless driving. It'll probably never be known how much warning the Tesla driver actually had unless the missing dashcam is recovered and my money's on it having been "disposed of" quickly.
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