Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Could never move the tax to fuel ...

"If you remove the requirement for a car to be taxed, then the roads will fill up overnight with old bangers being kept for "spares"."

You still need MOT and emissions checks.

Regarding the latter: California has had roadside emissions cameras for a couple of decades. Drive past one with an engine out of whack and you'll get a letter telling you to show up at a testing station by XYZ date "or else".

The same technology can be used to spot boilers that need replacement (see previous posts, this is the source of around half the NOX in London)

Re: In reality...

"The NOx problem is caused by running the engines very hot (improves fuel economy)"

There's a lot more to it than that. It's to do with the distribution of the fuel charge in the cylinder and the localised heating of the compressed air. Lots of R&D goes into trying to get this as sorted as possible. (Stratified charge being one of the big areas of contention). Computational fluid dynamics is getting better and better every year, which helps design better geometries but it also requires higher injector pressures and faster metering valve (and eventually, fast acting pneumatic/electromagnetic poppet valves)

"a 16 litre truck engine which can go from idle to max RPM and from cold to hot, each time it changes through its 24 gears in climbing from 0 to 56MPH and back between roundabouts and traffic lights"

This is Drayage work and should be replaced with a diesel-electric or diesel-hydraulic Hybrid (limited RPM range makes engine management much easier) or full EV. The engine you describe is designed and intended for long-haul transportation and shouldn't be on the roads you envisage for more than a tiny proportion of its operational life.

NOX is _only_ an issue in urban areas and even then only in the inner urban ones.

Taking London as one example, Nox is only effectively measureable within the North/South circulars and only of concern within the Inner London Ring road (and some arterial routes to the N/S circs), with small (in most cases less than 1 block long) hotspots on some suburban high streets. Even then, as of 2007 about HALF of inner London NOX was generated by static heating systems (mostly 1970s-80s era domestic gas boilers) with most of the remainder coming from large diesel engines and only about 10% from small diesels.

The same applies in most european cities.

Which means that

1: greater emissions controls on cars rapidly runs into the laws of diminishing returns

2: Paradoxically, greater emissions controls on petrol engines starts increasing their fine particulate output, so you start needing DPFs on petrol engines too.

3: Emissions controls to keep dense urban levels of pollutants down are useless and drive up costs in non-urban areas for no good reason.

NOX standards for new boilers (oil and gas) have been in place since 2001. Sooner or later there's going to be a change of rules to ban older boilers in urban areas (these are almost all unsealed systems with high CO emissions that can vent back inside the house anyway - one of these nearly killed friends of mine some time back after making them sick for years)

At some point the realisation is going to be that areas like London Zone 1 will have to effectively ban IC engines entirely and concentrate on vastly improved public transport 24*7.

Re: In reality...

> You've just put 10,000 people out of work in a failing economy!

Those 10,000 people (at the DVLA) are parasites who were just making the failing economy worse. You're better off paying them the dole as its much cheaper than keeping them employed.

Re: This should be one of the easiest taxes to collect ...

" I had a pretty Chinese teenager decide she was going to walk out onto a light controlled crossing when it was my right of way"

Unlike the USA, pedestrians ALWAYS have right of way on UK roads except where expressly prohibited (motorways, etc)

The lights are advisory, not regulatory.

Re: This should be one of the easiest taxes to collect ...

The highest reduction _WOULD_ be from tachygraphs - because we've already had a huge reduction in DUIs (the only people who do it now either do so unintentionally or are the hardcore who've been doing it for years and believe they'll never be caught - the latter being almost entirely a rural phenomenon in most countries.)

In any case, what you're arguing for is the removal of human driver entirely (robots don't get tired, don't get distracted by the cute ass on the girl walking by or the kids in the back fighting, don't get tunnel vision and don't miss one hazard whilst concentrating on another.)

Re: In reality...

"In an ideal world, I'd scrap car insurance as well and have a blanket scheme paid for by a fuel levy as well, because it would mean you couldn't be uninsured as long as you paid for fuel..."

This is getting dangerously close to state-run personal injury insurance (http://www.acc.co.nz/) and that's not allowed as it must be communism. (FWIW, with injury cover already in place, vehicle insurance gets surprisingly cheap - but not even New Zealand is brave enough to scrap the compulsary insurance as part of annual registration and switch to fuel-based fees.

Re: In reality...

"We were fed the Diesel nirvana, now we are told the NOX emissions are is too high and we need to go back to Petrol."

The real issue was the balance of what was coming out of refineries. Whilst it can be tuned one way or the other there's an optimum ratio of petrol to diesel production which needs to be matched by consumption.

Diesel was cheap, simply because the supply outstripped demand.

Re: In reality...

"The economically rational answer is to increase the tax on fuel to match what was taken in by road tax."

And that answer (surprisingly) is about 2p/litre.

All that talk of "ringfencing car tax" for roads was claptrap - the UK collects a few hundred million from that whilst picking up £45 BILLION or so in fuel taxes - which were pointedly NOT mentioned.

Re: This should be one of the easiest taxes to collect ...

"ANPR camera at every petrol station."

They already exist (to detect driveoffs) and most of them live-feed into the Police national system.

Drive off barriers. At a site with flammables and a driver who may be inclined to criminal damage if restrained (or GBH). That's a seriously unthought-through option that would be disabled the first time

a car gets torched beside a pump (to remove DNA) and the offender legs it.

Re: This should be one of the easiest taxes to collect ...

"Even better launch a game"

You'd need to check the VIN for extra credit (see cloning comment)

Re: This should be one of the easiest taxes to collect ...

"Untaxed vehicle drives past ANPR camera. "

Car fitted with cloned plates belonging to an identical model somewhere in the region.

No alarm.

Car fitted with plates which never existed - no alarm either (Police ANPR setups don't look for unissued numbers, as I discovered when one ran a stop sign a few years ago and I T-boned him. The car even had a counterfeit tax disc which looked genuine. The cops only realised it was a ghost car when they called the plates in. The ANPR aspect is that it was right beside one of London's "ring of steel" cameras, which I pointed at as I asked how such vehicles can exist.)

Cloning and completely bogus plates have been a major issue for years, so have counterfeit tax disks and fudged VINs.

Re: The Athlon days were good.

"Intel thought as long as they could market with the highest clock speeds of CPU and RAM then the performance didn't matter."

They're right, up to a point. People buy based on clock speed, not on actual benchmarks.

When I point out how small the differences are between E5 2.4GHz and 3.5GHz cores for most _real world_ operations people look at me as if I've sprouted a second head.

Re: Stock HSFs

"The Intel HSFs aren't *that* bad."

And surprisingly, Intel stock coolers are pretty efficient.

Foil/air bearing fans aren't terribly expensive compared to any given CPU. These tend not to fail ever (unless dropped). I'm guessing the mentality is that a system is only expected to last 3-5 years at most so why spec the fan beyond that? (Because some proportion of them die early!)

Of course most home systems end up with clogged up heatsinks long before the fans die. There has to be a better way of getting heat out of the box which doesn't cost the earth.

"Which AMD chips were the hot ones?"

All of them have been hotter than comparable Intels. Some hotter than others.

None as hot as the Intel 286 I left a baked-on fingerprint on though. The blister took weeks to heal.

"Perhaps if our white goods had the capability to communicate with the grid and run when there is the most capacity available it would also make sense."

This is one of the sensible uses of the Internet of Things - and it doesn't require smart meters.

"the investment via BT Openreach doesn't appear to have produced great results compared to other countries efforts over similar time frames."

That's because thanks to the miracles of creative accounting, BT have mostly taken the broadband funding allocated for rollouts and spent it elsewhere.

This is why when New Zealand regulators looked at what was being done here, they refused to play along and made it a condition of getting any more broadband funding that the telco and the linesco be completely split up into 2 companies with separate (unshared) boards, C-level staff and shares.

The "spectacularly unprofitable" linesco turned out to be doing quite well after all, once the dead hand and vampire squid of the telco head office was removed from it. It's also extremely responsive (Openreach is _deliberately_ setup to be hard to deal with - as an independent company it has to be easy to work with or go bust)

"That'd certainly focus their efforts on ditching those customers on slow connections."

Yup, in the same way that certain NHS trusts have eliminated waiting lists by simply refusing to do certain classes of operation.

Re: Without a license

> To the point where a defense attorney bringing it up can get a case dismissed so they don't have to reveal details during discovery

Which makes one wonder why this isn't being done routinely by defence lawyers for _everything_

Re: Public institution procurement

> As long as there's someone at the table who says "I think we could get it for less money" you just have to check all the options, and that takes time and money, to be seen to have carried out the job with "due diligence".

Been there, done that:

Got outvoted by the BoD on internal development of software because the one I wanted to buy was too expensive.

5 years later, the internally developed software was a festering pile of dogshit which not even the Inland Revenue could untangle (they tried and walked away).

Fed up with it, I managed to pull all the raw data into a personally purchased copy of the software I wanted to use - and discovered that our internally developed "cheaper package" was such a pile of crap that it had cost the company more than 20 times the price of the "expensive package" simply because it was producing wildly inaccurate financials.

The scary part? That internally developed software was forked from a package used by a Regional Health Authority which had been written and developed inhouse at that RHA (one of the board was a software developer at the RHA) - it was entirely based around Excel.

Re: Odd

"I did wonder what odd requirements they added (and why) so that evidence management needs could not be met by some of the (as mentioned in article) off the shelf evidence management systems."

I'm seeing this with our ticketing/network management systems. There's an ideal package for the job (GLPI) but various people are looking at the _untuned_ version and going "look at all these extra fields we don't need. I can write a stripped-down version much more easily" rather than just switching off the extra bits that aren't needed. This has caused implementation and replacement of the old system to drag out for at least 2 years longer than it's needed to.

(Of course, writing it locally pretty much guarantees your employment as noone else will understand it, I'm pretty sure this is the mindset behind a lot of this kind of shit)

basic security procedure

"And don't forget that the 'moral' attitudes of today are vastly different to what they were back in the 60s and 70s."

Indeed, but that doesn't excuse sexual/mental/physical abuse of children.

What happens between consenting adults is up to them.

The reality is that this kind of abuse has been happening as long as there have been societies to have them in (probably before then too), but has been less and less tolerated.

The biggest problem for detecting it is that 2/3-3/4 of all of this kind of abuse is perpetrated by direct family members or close family friends, and it's about 50:50 male/female perpetrators (the same figures and ratios show up in things like child murders and just about all other kinds of abuse).

The reason that men figure predominantly in this investigation is a matter of the balance of power at the time coupled with reluctance to admit women are just as capable of this kind of thing (kind of like Queen Victoria's refusal to believe that lesbians exist was one of the reasons that being a gay male was illegal but a gay female wasn't)

Ironically, despite the paranoia about abuse and "stranger danger" in particular (See above. Such paranoia can leave kids more vulnerable due to ignoring the elephant in the room), it's highly likely that actual levels are at an all-time low. Greater awareness means greater levels of reporting - and this is a good thing - but it's important to realise that attempts to report such things 40+ years ago usually resulted in the messenger being vilified, so people simply didn't.

Getting back to the topic: UK civil servants (and a bunch of other countries too) suffer badly from "Not Invented Here" syndrome and cronyism. Why use something that already exists if you can be pay a shedload to your friends so they can (badly) reinvent that wheel?

Almost

That was the concensus amongst New Zealand pundits when Lowall Goddard was appointed.

http://www.laudafinem.com/2015/09/01/australia-v-new-zealand-and-united-kingdom-the-royal-commission-v-the-art-of-cover-up/

Her history is majorly dodgy. Anyone who'd looked into it would have known she wasn't suitable.

Being excoriated by the privy council on multiple occasions should be a big alarm bell, as is being rated dead last of all NZ high court judges by the NZ legal profession, with specifc comments about a lack of understanding of human rights.

She's also known for presiding the NZ IPCC which tended to exonerate NZ police on every complaint despite activities likely to make Gene Hunt blush.

LF is now saying "I told you so"

E2nz weighed in and made an interesting observation at https://e2nz.org/2016/08/15/kiwi-judge-dumps-uk-victims-of-child-abuse/, quoting from a guardian article:

“She has been accused of sidelining survivors in the investigation. Their testimonies will have no direct legal consequences and will only be used as “ballast” to the final report, says Phil Frampton chair of the Care Leavers’ Association. “[It’s] a form of window dressing that may leave many survivors not only bound to secrecy about their testimony but also deeply distressed.”

Bound to secrecy? On a public enquiry?

Re: No love for servers?

> Why aren't we focusing on ARM for the data center?

Because whilst ARM is good at low power, when you crank up the computation rate it can't compete with x86 in the power stakes.

Which is surprising as x86 used to be spectacularly inefficient compared to Alpha. Sparc, MIPS, etc

Re: Warp Factor Stupid!

" an undocumented community string of ‘wheel’ (read/write) also exists,"

That's a blast from the past. Wheel was the superuser group on *nix systems up to the 90s.

It still is in some implementations.

Re: Fuel

"They used to get around this by venting the hydrogen at a proportional rate so the flight remained level."

Later airships captured and condensed the water in engine exhaust in order to maintain trim.

"However due to the expense of helium, this isn't really considered an option these day"

If you have a compressor onboard you can pump helium (or hydrogen) into (relatively low pressure) storage tanks, taking it out of the gasbags. This has the same effect as chucking it overboard without actually chucking it overboard and means you don't need to faff about with complex condensing kit in a hot gas stream.

Re: 1957: Russia is planning to launch an artificial satellite

"I'm stupid, but why can't we mix helium and hydrogen?"

You can, but why would you bother? If you're going to use hydrogen then you'd use 100% as the embrittlement and flammability issues are already there and hydrogen is cheap.

FWIW modern airship technology includes pressurisation tech to inflate/deflate the gasbags rather than simply dumping the gas overboard and/or using water ballast. Venting and ballast still exist for emergency use but for more gentle ascent/descent you can keep all your gas. Walrus technology proves you can "stick" your airship to the ground if needed too.

It's also worth noting that unlike the 1940s (The US military used airships up to the loss of the Akron) we have lidar and radar tech which enables spotting clear air turbulence and weather cells at long enough range to go around them. Todays rigid airships are a far cry from the Hindenberg and blimps are used routinely for stuff like skycrane work in a fixed environment (such as forestry where tractors dragging logs would do a lot of ground damage or aren't practical on steep slopes)

The best way to position Airships is "slow, cheap, high capacity haulage". The hard part is their poor weather performance but that's not much different to helicoptors and things like a Mil 11 are much more expensive to run. If you can live with them being a fair-weather only device then they're useful.

Re: 1957: Russia is planning to launch an artificial satellite

"because the Americans had refused to supply Nazi Germany"

Or in other words "Because helium wasn't available"

Just because it exists doesn't mean it's available.

FWIW most of the world's supply of helium currently comes from natural gas wells, but only about 0.01% of them worldwide are setup to capture the stuff (the rest just vent it).

There wouldn't be much of a shortage if more wells added helium capture tech (cost is the barrier - mainly that of trying to retain the stuff, it permeates through most containment) or if molten salt nuclear tech becomes commercially viable (the nuclear process produces quite a bit of helium but with current tech it mostly stays stuck in fuel rods and what doesn't is hard to capture from a high temperature high pressure sealed environment. Molten salt systems are unpressurised and need a sparge space behind the circulation pumps so it's mostly in one place and easy to capture)

Re: The shape of things to come ...

"Well in this case, the highly trained operators knew they knew best - or rather, they knew of limitations and some 'known issues' with the automated system."

And yet:

1: Knowing that bad weather was on its way in during a training mission, They didn't abort the training mission to get back to base before that inclement weather started closing in on the airfield.

2: When they finally did return the drone to airfield - and knowing that inclement weather _was_ closing in and that the ground conditions were already at or beyond the limit for the drone, they decided to try and land it anyway instead of diverting to another base and/or retreating to a safe distance whilst the front passed over.(*)

3: Having disabled the automatics they didn't warn the airfield that they were attempting a risky landing procedure, nor did they station anyone to watch it, so confident they were in their flying abilities.

This is classic CFIT(**) material and everyone involved should have the cost of the lesson deducted from their salaries.

(*) This kind of gung-ho attitude to flying is why civil operators don't like military flyboys. It's worth noting that whilst civil aviation has an exemplary safety record, general aviation is about as safe as riding a motorbike and non-combat military aviation is several factors worse than that (it's not just fighter pilots. The crash rate of military transports and of ex-transport military pilots in civil roles is significantly higher than civil-trained pilots and the single biggest contribution to improvements in civil air safety was to stop hiring them when they finished their military career.)

(**) Controlled Flight Into Terrain - the most common kind of aircrash in civil aviation until "human factors" became a large part of the training. ALWAYS concentrate on flying the bloody aircraft, then deal with any other problem, _before_ trying to land it.