* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

India roasts as mercury hits 51°C

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Hong Kong recorded its coldest temperature this year."

Records are being broken in both directions as cold air gets dragged further south than usual whilst northern places are simultaneously hotter than normal.

It was predicted 30 years ago that global warming would result in more extreme weather in mid to high latitudes (NB: weather is NOT climate) as well as the tropics getting too hot to handle and the polar regions getting out of whack.

Bear in mind that ice is a terrific moderator due to the latent heat of crystallisation. The amount of energy required to transform ice at 0C to water at 0C is about the same as the amount of energy required to heat that same mass of water from 0C up to 80C

If you want to really worry about shit, look at what's happening in the Leptov Sea and look up historic anoxic oceanic events.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Isn't it obvious?

"So surely what India needs is a blanket of smog over the country for a few months to block out the sun and let the country cool down"

It does. Otherwise things would be worse. The smog and dust layer is almost a mile deep over India and worse as you go further east.

Airbus to build plane that's even uglier than the A380

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A380 ugly?

"the 777's operating costs are lower and its ETOPS rating means there are almost no routes it can't match."

There's not much money to be made in PAX transport, which is why so many non-state airlines have gone titsup in the last couple of decades and had to be bailed out.

By the time you load all the passengers into a 777 there's not a lot of load capacity (mass, not space) left for revenue cargo when you're running long haul flights. It's essentially a passenger-optimised aircraft - big but can't carry much mass.

On the other hand an A380 has slightly less space available under the floor but it can carry more revenue cargo mass than a 777 on shorthaul duty over a greater distance than a longhaul 777 can - and air transport cargo is charged per kilo, not per container so this trick is profitable. The Higher ops costs are offset by more PAX income _and_ more cargo revenue.

(Apparently BA have tweaked their A380s to carry even more cargo mass. Probably something to do with those nasty lightweight seats)

The A380 has a couple of other tricks up its design sleeve - the wing seems oversized for the body because it is. Fuselage plugs can be dropped in whenever there's a demand for a -900 model, or the loading capacity can be used for a freighter if there's ever demand for such an item in future (with cheap fuel and lots of end-of-passenger-life aircraft being sold off at knockdown prices there's not much demand but it wouldn't take much of an uptick in oil pricing to change that equation, given the fuel consumption of the older planes).

Conversion to NEO was pretty much thought about from the outset and it's one of the few aircraft which have standardised interfaces on the wing pylon, meaning you can hang certfied engines form any maker without substantially rewiring the system (not that you would run RR + EA engines on the same wing or aircraft, but it's supposedly possible)

The end result _should_ be (best laid plans of mice&men and all that) that if there's enough demand to justify making a -900, or a freighter or NEO engines then it can happen fairly quickly.

I can't see Airbus shutting down the line even if production dipped to a half dozen airframes per year. It makes enough from the smaller ones to keep its halo project going. (State subsidy disputes are all about marketing. Boeing and Airbus are both about equally in the trough so any "victory" tends to be phyrric)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Turn one into a passenger aircraft

"Having the whole front section of the aircraft just lift up "

Would be a bit of a problem if that section happened to be pressurised - and somewhat of a problem in flight if it wasn't although the passengers would be quiet at any rate. (Clue: It isn't)

The AN225 is the only aircraft with a huge _pressurised_ cargo bay and if you could perfect a rapid pod (un)loader for it, it might fit the bill :)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Would you trust TSA (and other counterparts) while you're asleep?

"Just like hand luggage, check in baggage is X rayed and only opened and checked manually if the X ray check suggest further investigation is required"

Anecdotes from people within airports suggest that xrays showing "interesting" (and expensive) electronics are most likely to be targetted for "inspection".

More worryingly, TSA agents are routinely being busted for stealing from luggage AND SMUGGLING THE STOLEN GOODS OUT. Here's a big hint: If security allows that to happen then it's probably just as easy to smuggle things in.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: XB-70

"Blimey! How do you "drop" bombs at Mach 3+ ?"

You can't. They hit the slipstream and get forced back into the bomb bay.

SR71s were originally designed as bombers and redesignated to observation planes when this phenomenon was discovered. By that point ICBMs had made supersonic strike bombers unnecessary so no R&D was put into solving the problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_SR-71_Blackbird#SR-71

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The A380 is not ugly!

"Presumably in much the same way that bricks don't ?"

The A380 is quieter than a non-floating brick. It's spooky to watch them.

Compared to everything else coming out of Heathrow they're like a hole in the wall of sound.

The ‘Vaping Crackdown’ starts today. This is what you need to know

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Capitalism's true colours

"Here is an unregulated market with a multitude of suppliers, for a product that is demonstrably safer t

than its main competitor."

The key point is this one:

If someone was to invent alcohol or tobacoo on Monday, they'd be banned by Friday. "safer" is relative when both substances make appearances in the "most dangerous drugs" lists put together by health groups.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"One of the leading lights in their little movement doesn't even seem to realise that nicotine isn't a carcinogen."

No, but it's an extremely potent neurotoxin with the potential to kill someone in a few minutes if misused. Cancers usually take longer to do that.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The maximum tank size is a measly 2ml, less than half of the typical tank size today of 5ml.

"You can only buy packs of 20 now, packs of 10 can no longer be produced."

Yup and about time too. It's about 4 decades overdue.

The direct intent of this move is to price packs out of the affordability range of schoolkids, which is the same reason that selling individual cigarettes will get a large amount of hurt falling on any shopkeeper who does it from a very great height.

If vaping usage continues to increase in under 25s faster than cig smoking declines you can expect heavier targetting to reduce attractiveness to young people.

FWIW: Thai Red Bull contains a small amount of nicotine (it can be ingested via the gut as well as the lungs). I wonder how much outcry there would be if it was sold here.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Attracting children in needs to be stopped

Fruit-flavoured/scented tobaccos were banned decades ago because they generally targetted kids.

Fruit-flavoured e-cigs are popular with younger vapers - many of whom have never smoked a cigarette in their life.

Making vapes available in "attractive" flavours was an act of self-inflicted well-poisoning. Once that happened and young people started vaping, governments couldn't NOT pay attention to an uptick in nicotine consumption when the trend has been steadily downwards for a long time.

Several shop managers I've spoken to are deeply uncomfortable with fruit-flavoured vaping materials but have been ordered to stock and sell them by their Head Office. In many cases they're brightly advertised at the front of the counter, beside the impulse-buy candies.

Now even EUROPE is slapping down ICANN in internet power struggle

Alan Brown Silver badge

rich uncles

ICANN controls the root servers and hence the global DNS system.

There have been alternate roots, but ICANN leveraged its dominance to shut them down.

Walking away from ICANN requires setting up a new set of DNS roots AND convincing the rest of the world to use them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ICANN in a death spiral then?

"The tech world's FIFA"

As with FIFA, the ones going down now are the patsies. The real masterminds bailed out some time back.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Walking away from this and trying to find clean lawyers at this point is a crap shoot."

Ironic that you should use the analogy, given that the ICANN chair who came up with the models and strategies still in use happens to be a particularly bent lawyer.

CIA says it 'accidentally' nuked torture report hard drive

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Yes, we accidentally wiped it 35 times

"The truth is out there but torture is no way to get it."

That's not why they use torture.

Torture is used because they're psychopaths who enjoy doing it and they think that using torture will scare others into toeing the party line.

Now Suzuki admits cheating

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Another car manufacturer cheated

"According to the BBC it is Japan and not emissions - fuel consumption data"

Comparing claimed vs actual european fuel consumption, it's pretty clear that fuel economy cheating is a competitive sport in the EU.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Not much to be gained from cracking down on the cheats

Even with "cheats" in place, NOX tailpipe emissions are now so low that they don't matter in most locations and in the areas where NOX _IS_ still a problem(*), at least half the NOX in the air is coming from non-vehicular sources (primarily gas and oil fired heating systems).

(*) NOX levels worldwide are only problematic in the cores of the densest cities. As an example, for London they're only of concern inside the inner london ring road and completely inconsequential outside the north/south circular roads. Between the Inner ring road and the n/s circulars they're only an issue on the arterial roads and only for part of the day. In all cases, boilers account for 60+% of NOX emissions detected away from main roads and 40% on those roads.

PM10s are another matter but even if ZEVs were mandated there would still be issues with them. Again, the main sources away from roads are non-vehicular and vehicular sources only matter within 20 metres of those roads - which means that workarounds like the nightly glue spray and possibly running water misters in peak periods are effective tools that are much cheaper than trying to legislate cleaner cars.

That "clean boiler" initiative might be scam caller fodder, but the reality is that condensing boilers emit almost zero NOX or sub PM10s and most of the offending systems are in excess of 20 years old. There's one part of North London with very high NOX levels and this is directly attributable to ancient boiler installations (sniffers were used to home in on the sources) and a "cultural reluctance to upgrade" in the community concerned(**)

You can expect that the UK government _will_ mandate boiler replacements eventually and that boiler WOFs (warrant of fitness) certification will involve more than just CO levels. (Longer term, boilers will have to be legislated out of existence along with reticulated gas supplies if the UK is to meet its carbon emission requirements.)

(**) These same boiler installations produce massively high levels of CO and I know of one family who suffered chronic poisoning with acute spikes because the unsealed design blows fumes back into the house when the wind blows "in the wrong direction" - After giving them a CO detector to document how bad things were they replaced the thing and their continuous migraines "went away".

What's holding up Canada's internet?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"There should be blanket way to license any conduit anywhere in the country. There should be uniform construction standards across the country, rather than city by city."

The easiest and fairest way to achive this is to completely separate the last-mile and services components of the companies. it can be achieved relatively easily by making it a requirement for any future govt funding for broadband rollouts.

As with the Ofcom problem in the UK and the Telecom problem in New Zealand, this won't be driven from the CRTC - specifically because of the regulatory capture.

The path that worked in New Zealand was to treat the issue as a commerce one. Show that incumbent monopolies are damaging to your GDP and you have the incentive needed to get the Canadian ministries of commerce and economic development breathing fire&brimstone.

http://www.wordworx.co.nz/KiwitelcoTimeline.htm - “Telecom has become the defacto industry regulator; it owns or controls most of the critical inputs, it competes with all the firms to which it supplies those inputs and, by and large, it makes the rules under which competition is permitted to take place,” Commerce Commission report, 1992.

It took another 14 years to address that problem - http://www.wordworx.co.nz/Kiwitelcotimeline2.htm - 2006

Telecom continued to play gamekeeper and poacher, all but ignoring ministerial threats to play fair or face legislative changes. Telecom CEO Theresa Gattung called communications minister David Cunliffe’s bluff telling business analysts in Sydney in March 2006, she thought the government was far too smart to "do anything dumb".... A message delivered by rogue Parliamentary messenger Michael Ryan into the hands of a senior Telecom employee on 3 May 2006, proved the government was indeed serious.

and another 5 past that before anything concrete actually happened, but it did happen and Canadians should be looking to what happened in New Zealand when the lines were truely opened up as an example of how much the telcos are blocking economic development.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What?

"Increasing regulation is actively discouraging competition. "

Only if it's regulating what they sell, not if it regulates to prevent discriminatory sales or leveraging of monopolies.

A favourite telco tactic worldwide is margin squeeze - setting wholesale pricing to be the same as or only sightly less than retail rates. In one country I lived in, when the telco got into the retail ISP game, wholesale rates on nearly everything were set MORE EXPENSIVE than retail with the predictable effect that most small ISPs went to the wall.

last mile lines service (DSL or coax) is a "natural monopoly", the same as water/sewer and electric services. As such they ned to be carefully managed to ensure there is true competition in the marketplace and preferably WITHOUT having XYZ new company tearing up the roads every 6 months to install their own set of ducts.

FTC's Jerk ruling against ex-Napster boss upheld by court

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Extortion is difficult to prove when someone can find the information with a little from Facebook and Google. "

If someone's offering to make personal information go away for money, then it's extortion, _even if_ they can't actually do as they claim.

Hold the DRAM phone: IBM claims phase-change breakthrough

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I could see using a smaller amount of DRAM and paging from a phase change backing store, thereby saving power. "

That missed the point that DRAM is a bigger bottleneck to performance than anything further down the chain.

CPUs spend most of their time waiting for ram to catch up. The fact that storage past that point is a few hundred/thousand times slower only matters when loading in data or apps.

PCM and friends are good as a rival to keep spurring flash along (even if they never are commercially viable, they keep development of existing tech going), but what's sorely needed _right now_ is affordable off-cpu memory with random access latency of less than 10ns, preferably under 5ns

NASA preps silicon-photonic modem for space laser internet test

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Instant Laser Communication

" I recall trying to work out if some random text generator was spamming USENET when they first started posting "

It still made more sense than McNamara or Serdar Argic.

Smartmobes in spaaace: NASA deploys Android nanosats

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Radiation and SEU hardened?

"How does a smartphone survive space radiation and SEUs? "

ISS-altitudes are well within the Van-Allen belts and radiation levels are generally pretty low (only slightly higher than experienced in commercial air travel)

This is one reason why ISS experience is good for measuring microgravity endurance but no good for realistic evaluation of the radiation environment that would be experienced on a Mars trip.

Earth's magnetosphere provides a _lot_ of protection against the worst that's out there.

New solar cell breaks efficiency records, turns 34% of light into 'leccy

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Critical questions

"there are people on here that are determined a mix of renewable power MUST NOT work"

At best, wind and PV can replace the current UK electricity generation capacity. That would take carpetting the country in turbines and panels.

Right now the entire wind and PV base is about half the output of the existing nuclear fleet.

The problem is that to achieve CO2 targets:

1: All the coal/gas stations need to be shut down.

2: Gas/oil heating systems need to be shut down

3: Transportation systems need to move to being 2/3 to 3/4 electric

That means that not only do you need enough _working_ capacity to replace coal stations, you actually need about 5 times as much as exists today.

Hinkley point is a fustercluck, as are all water-moderated nuke plants - they should have gone away a long time ago, but the USA stopped Molten Salt reactor research in the early 70s. That's only just started getting rolling again and we're effectively 50 years behind schedule on them.

The problem with nuke designs isn't the nuclear part, It's the water. Thermal nuclear reactions run best around 600-900C and are self limiting about 1100C (the core of a conventional fuel rod is about this hot), but you can't allow water to get to these temperatures or "really bad things happen". Using it as the heat transfer fluid is a spectacularly bad idea only matched by using molten sodium for the task.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: In terms of watts per dollar...

"Hot water only represents only around a fifth of total domestic heat requirements"

That depends where you live. In hot climates, solar heat can drive Solarfrost coolers, which puts a big dent in power consumption figures, especially in countries where ACs are forming such a load that rolling blackouts are the order of the week.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Science is a filthy tease...

"Why set such a low limit for yourself? How about 1000 percent?"

I'd settle for ones which output usable power at night

Manchester cops to strap on 3K bodycams

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Police Body Cameras Seemingly Cause More Assaults on Officers

"Police were more careful about what they said"

Which means a lot of them shouldn't be loose on the streets without a muzzle.

The problem with policing is that it attracts the kind of people who abuse their powers and for some obscure reason "we" refuse to hold them accountable for that abuse, or refuse to punish them as much as when the action is performed by non-police. It doesn't help that "good cops" refuse to eject "bad cops" from their ranks.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if sentencing guidelines contained an automatic 100% addition for "acting under colour of authority"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: That's not too bad

"As other have said, the worry is when they turn it off"

It would be "interesting" to give cops cameras that they only _think_ they can turn off. Flagging when an attempt is made, etc.

I've had some very interesting experiences when using a covert and overt camera and someone's demanding the visible one be turned off.

Destroying ransomware business models is not your job, so just pay up

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: It's not three choices for most businesses, only those run by idiots.

"The malware artists won't have taken your documents away"

The bandwidth of a copy is trivial. How do you know they haven't?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Price of an education...

"A backup containing encrypted files is not particularly useful you know."

Nor is one where the backups are gibberish.

This is why backups MUST be tested periodically.

Nuisance caller fined a quarter of a million pounds by the ICO

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Auto report

> What's quite worrying is that 6million+ connected calls only generated 200+ complaints. Surely that says it's too difficult to report them?

Most of these outfits are using fraudulent caller-ID, so unless you're willing to do a fair amount of legwork it's fairly difficult to identify them.

Using forged caller-ID should be a _criminal_ matter. It's too easy to forge and most telcos have no filters in place to prevent them being issued from ISDN lines (BT being one of the few exceptions)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Lovely, lovely publically available information.

"Think of those BBC consumer programmes where Mr. X's company has gone insolvent owing a small fortune to customers, and the premises opened up immediately on the same site, with the same staff and the same dodgy used cars etc."

Interestingly, the insolvency laws have just been rejigged to try and prevent this happening. In particular they try to nail down reuse of the name, similar sounding names or giving any indication that they've taken over business from the previous company.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Lovely, lovely publically available information.

"So as an individual, Mr Iqbal is presumably not liable to pay this fine."

As a shareholder perhaps.

As a director, he should be fair and squarely in the firing line.

I spent the afternoon looking through the ICO blogs. They've been using DPA laws to go after these companies in addition to the call fines, but the penalties imposed in court are derisory at best.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Lovely, lovely publically available information.

"Just out of curiousity, I've done a bit of basic digging on this one. "

which is about ten times as much as the ICO or trading standards have bothered doing.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Add

" if the report demonstrates unfit conduct, the director can face serious sanctions:"

Spam calls aren't classified as fraud (yet), even if they use fraudulent callerID.

More to the point, going after the companies which HIRE the spammers will shut the problem down in no time flat.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Go after the owners / directors

Limited liability is a shield for the owners. But not for the directors.

Other comments about slow investigations are spot on. There need to be statutory per call damages, right of private action in small claims & holding both the callers and those who hire them jointly and severally liable.

Pie in the sky? Not at all. That's exactly the remedies in the usa's TCPA and whilst the USA still has trouble with illegal calls, they're insignificant compared to the levels of spam calls and faxes before the act was passed in 1994.

Sysadmin paid a month's salary for one day of nothing

Alan Brown Silver badge

> I then informed my manager that the date on the search page had rolled over to 1900 :)

There were quite a few reporting the date as 19100 too.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Wow

"Which is pretty much why the rest of the world saw the Y2K "problem" as scaremongering."

I saw 3 Y2K issues and none of them happened on December 31st.

1: Alarm systems tended to regard 9/9/99 as an impossible date or a test code. Unpatched ones around the world either didn't work at all on that day or went off and wouldn't shut down.

2: A lot of NTP implementations represented utime as a signed long. There were a LOT of embedded systems and routers which went into reboot loops on "halfway through the epoch" day.

3: A NEAX61 which got a new software load for y2k fixes turned out to have scribbled all over its memory and been writing garbage to backup tapes for at least 3 years. 60,000 lines got knocked out for 12 hours when it was rebooted and came up brain-dead. A very old backup was found to work and then all journalled changes had to be written back into the switch. It took more than 6 weeks to replay that journal.

The only one which did happen on Dec31 was on a very old SCO unix system which a law firm was using. They were sensible enough to back everything up and it booted up fine with no operational problems - but every time it rebooted the cmos clock would be set to Jan 1 1970. The workaround was simply to set the clock at every startup. It was replaced with a NT server system by March 2000.

ZFS comes to Debian, thanks to licensing workaround

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: That's Why...

"This is not going to be the last time Linux is unnecessarily hamstrung by licensing niceties"

If you actually read the CDDL you can see how it was explicitly written to conflict with GPL.

Sun could have released it under BSD or GPL and chose not to, for political reasons.

In any case the easy workaround is "compile from source" or "pull binaries down from a separate repo" - both approaches have been used for similar conflicts in the past.

Alan Brown Silver badge

" Free is Free as in BSD licensing, not as in GNU GPL"

The problem with BSD style licensing is that people can (and do) take your BSD code, roll it into their proprietary system and if they fork anything it doesn't get contributed back to the pool, plus "open source" code under BSD licenses frequently gets buried under the hood of expensive proprietary systems without the sources being acknowledged.

GPL is aimed at preventing that kind of thing from happening.

It's free, but if you distribute GPL-based stuff, you have to hand over the source code too. (If you don't, it's a simple copyright violation issue - this is the reason so few GPL cases have ever hit the court. almost all get settled(*) as soon as lawyers realise what they're up against.)

(*) Settled, as in the source code get released along with the product. When a lawyer tells the client that they have a choice of doing that or risking their product being banned from the marketplace it's a no-brainer.

Sick of storage vendors? Me too. Let's build the darn stuff ourselves

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Well, I agree in theory but...

"This sounds like something you could fix right quick, if you had the source code."

You can get this information out via appropriate systemtap calls, but it would be a better solution to move NFS serving back into userspace where it belongs.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Well, I agree in theory but...

"Possibly we'd be better served with a user space NFS server, but they all seem to have their own problems."

As one of the miscreants partially responsible for the nfs-kernel-server clusterfuck, I agree with the first and second parts of that statement - and it's not helped by the userspace server not having had any substantial work since 1996.

The original userspace nfs server was - to be blunt - a piece of utterly slow shit. That's why nfs ended up in the kernel.

The other part about it being in kenrel space that you missed is that IT WILL NOT PLAY NICE with _anything_ else accessing the same disk blocks. If you NFS export a filesystem, then the _only_ access to it had better be via that NFS export or you risk trashing the data.

Putting nfs into the kernel more than 20 years ago was a solution to a problem (painfully slow exports and PCNFS being almost unusably slow) at a time when the people implementing it hadn't even thought of the possibility of something accessing XYZ file via NFS at the same time as something else doing it via SAMBA or something doing it at local level. If we had, then perhaps we'd have been more careful.

Robo-taxis, what are they good for? Er, the environment and traffic

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Can you spare some change?

"The railroad companies have been making and breaking trains of rolling stock for ever."

1: they're on rails - no lateral movement.

2: They don't do it when the train is moving.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "shifting to electric, autonomous taxis in 2030 would cut vehicle emissions by 90 per cent"

"impose the doubling of nuclear power plants"

Nuclear currently produces around 5-8% of the UK's power. In order to reduce/mostly eliminate carbon emissions we not only have to replace coal/gas plants with nukes, but also produce enough extra electricity to replace gas/oil heating systems (roughly as much electricity capacity as currently exists) AND provide transportation energy (Double that again).

(It's that 4-6 times current generation capacity requirement which precludes wind/solar/tidal "renewables" as a viable source as they simply can't provide that much no matter how whizzy the technology in use and no, you can't go carpeting the Sahara in windmills then shipping the energy to europe because the distribution infrastructure isn't technically feasible and even if it was, there's more than enough demand south of the Sahara to take that entire output - which would mean that Africans might get pretty pissed off about 21st century colonialism)

Nukes might be safe and I'm fully in favour of them but if we're going to increase the size of the nuclear fleet by a factor of 100 then I'd strongly prefer they aren't the kind that have highly pressurised, superheated water in direct contact with the radioactive stuff. MSRs _need_ to be commercialised.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"So some might have an employee riding in them to provide that service for passengers who require it."

The bus concierge will load your cases for you.

They might even pretend to drive it, like DLR cabin attendants do.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: questionable thinking

"And even allowing for a robotaxi have lightning fast reflexes, is the slipstream useful while still maintaining a safe braking distance."

Volkswagon have been demonstrating "trains" with 3-4 metre spacing at 80mph for nearly 2 decades. A robodriver can react fast enough for this to be safe but it scares the bejesus out of meatsacks when it's demonstrated.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Petrol taxi?

"I haven't seen a petrol based taxi, ever."

I only started seeing diesel ones when I moved to europe. Mind you most of the petrol ones when I was a nipper in the 70s were CNG conversions - apart from the fuel being cheaper, engines tended to last a lot longer and go further between major servicing when running on the stuff, for various reasons.

Alan Brown Silver badge

not just taxis

The driver is the single most expensive part of any taxi.

That figure isn't 250k drivers. It's more like 40 million worldwide facing unemployment in the long term.

Some (hauliers) will likely still have some form of job as loadmasters but the change will be profound.

It's also worth bearing in mind that more convenient (and cheap to use) taxis are likely to reduce the number of cars in cities by about 2/3 if a Barcelona study is accurate.

Comms providers call on Ofcom to get tough on Openreach

Alan Brown Silver badge

Same old same old

BT get to lever their monopoly to achieve dominance in other sectors.

This is an issue for the competition commission. No company should own retail _and_ distribution networks. This wasn't allowed when the power networks were privatised and it's doing substantial economic damage.

Microsoft phone support contractors told to hang up after 15 minutes

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: This is not unusual

"The reason tier 1 has time limits is because those tech usually know just enough to be dangerous and very often do not follow the rules, so they will attempt to fix problems they should never touch or say really stupid things to the user. But the time limit needs to be longer than 15 minutes."

It's the "fix problems they should never touch" which is a really big problem. They won't kick things upstairs when they should. You can easily spend 30 minutes battling tier1 in order to get through to tier2-3 and get the problem solved in 5 minutes (particularly when it's a config problem not at your end)