Posts by Alan Brown

Re: It's an interesting idea, but more tricky than you think

"I'm not arguing against splitting it off, but just warning that we may end up with a whole set of new problems in the future if the regulatory regime is not really really well thought out."

The advantage this time is that the Kiwis looked at how the UK has messed it up(*) and that means their regulatory framework is a pretty good starting point.

(*) NZ used to be the poster child for how NOT to privatise your telco and after 25 years of monopoly abuse they knew they had to get it right when rewriting the rules or there would be blood on the streets.

Re: "...defence against laser..."

"First marketing approach was sheets of film installed in the aircraft windows just like window tinting is installed in cars."

The local oiks lase cars, cyclists and residential windows in addition to aircraft (their usual method of getting away is to duck into a pub when the helicopter shows up)

When they hit my lounge window about 30 degrees off axis the entire pane (1.2m square) went bright green and illuminated the room whilst preventing anything being seen outside. Apparently this is down to microcracking in the glass. Having experienced it I can see why it'd be hellishly distracting to a pilot even if he doesn't cop it directly in the eyeball. (I've caught that too, It hurt like hell and at least one other driver crashed into parked cars when he got struck).

I've been sorely tempted to liberate a cutting laser and use it to return the favour.

Re: Dangerous, stupid and highly illegal"

"some people get far more aircraft passing overhead than they used to."

It's bloody hard to lase an aircraft passing overhead. You need to be a long way away and able to shine it on the windows at the pointy end, which is why so many get painted when they're on finals (low and moving slowly)

This is more a stupid prat thing than a Victor Meldrew type response.

Re: "and previously told investors it had "completed" a security audit."

All a formal audit means is that they followed procedures and got ticked off as following procedures.

Nothing at all is done to check whether the procedures are appropriate, nor is it the auditor's place to say anything if they're not.

Re: Rural Britain Wake Up!

>> There was no technical reason why the FTTC cabinets couldn't be full concentrators/DSLAMs

>Could you expand on that please? An FTTC cabinet is a concentrator and DSLAM. Or are you suggesting that they should also support older versions of DSL?

VOICE concentrator. DSL/VDSL DSLAM - ie, all fibre back to base, no copper, no stupidly long copper tails hanging off the arse end of the VDSL circuits.

Re: DVLA has scammers too

"Any time it's a company I'm not familiar with, out come the credit card instead of the debit."

Read the fine print. Most of the time protection is only given for amounts over £100

Re: Colour blind risk

"it's for precisely this reason that the "green" traffic light colour actually has masses of blue in it"

Coming from a town in a region with a historic 28% rate of male red/green colourblindness and significant rates of others considered odd (yellow/blue and a few monochromats), the blue is extremely noticeable there - as is the word "STOP" masked onto every single red light.

The fact that the town's population has been shrinking and over the last 50 years has gone from 40 sets of traffic lights to 10 is another matter.

"The business might be a bit more enthusiastic if they would offer something more precise than a 6 hour window for when they want to take our office down."

Push back. Offer them an exact appointment time and a window to execute with penalties for no-show or overrun and make them wait 6 months for a new appointment if they show up late.

Re: What *customer* wants this?

"Renewables are not an alternative to building fossil fuel power stations"

Nuclear stations are though - and they're cheaper than "renewables" could ever be even at today's vastly inflated figures for the new ones, plus use a lot less space.

Molten salt nuclear plants can load-follow too. The ability is an inherent part of the design.

What renewables _really_ are, is a way of transferring a lot of money from the hands of consumers into the pockets of certain landowners. Forget "doubling" your power bill under Hinkley Point, if the UK was 100% powered by renewables the figure would be more like 6-10 times higher.

Re: What *customer* wants this?

"a surprisingly small percentage of our countryside and coast are "blighted" with wind turbines."

Given the small factor of blades being known to go more than a mile when one breaks, it will remain a small percentage or a lot of people are going to have to be forcibly evicted from housing located in the safety exclusion zones..

Re: What *customer* wants this?

"The good news is we can still buy energy (expensive) from the French who at least have a reliable supply."

No, we can't - and not for the reason another poster has already put forth (the french are ramping down their nukes a little), but a more practical reason that anyone who's looked at gridwatch should have been able to figure out

The french could have a massive energy surplus and it still wouldn't help the UK much: the _total_ electricity load able to be supplied between mainland europe and the UK is 3GW.

Underwater power interconnectors are not cheap, nor are they of massively high capacity. The 2GW french one is about as large as they go. Perhaps feeding the lines down the chunnel is a better idea than running trains in it.

Re: Huh?

"Or are they not worried about the science at all, but about about the climate? "

In my experience, the latter - although some are starting to concede that sea level and temperature may not matter that much as a global oceanic anoxic event is looking increasingly likely to take out a large chunk of the planet's megafauna before too many cities are drowned.

(The parallel to this is Apollo13. Their oxygen tanks might have exploded and everyone might have been concentrating on making sure they didn't suffocate or die of CO2 poisoning, but the overlooked thing that came closest to killing them was plain old hypothermia - and long before the oxygen ran out.)

Re: Huh?

FWIW anyone who does understand statistics will avoid horses and take ecstasy. One is _much_ safer than the other.

As for bacon: just about everything that's fried is bad for you at some level, so choose the best fried things and don't eat the rest. I'll keep my bacon.

Re: Bah!

"A first fix chippie wacking up a set of roof trusses for a standard build house on site..."

... is an oh so typically english waste of fucking time and money.

If it's a standard build then it can take a standard truss, made by the hundred in a factory, at ground level and under cover, then trucked out to the site and lifted on in an hour or so, meaning the entire roof can be finished in a day or less.

The UK is full of the kinds of attitudes and practices which helped the shipyards compete so well against japanese builders and gave us the likes of British Leyland - whose management seem to have spontaneously migrated into the real estate industry (substandard builds of substandard designs, only this time there are no floods of better designs coming in to show them up for being as bad as they are, the odd Huff House notwithstanding)

"But it's traditional" doesn't fly. So was dying young from a preventable bacterial infection.

Re: ICANN is using internet community money to lobby against the internet community !

"You mean, what's to stop them from doing what the US are doing right now, under your nose, with your money?"

ICANN might well be operating under the auspices of a US govt contract but the US govt has made it clear that they are not happy with the way things are being done.

The antics of ICANN are the kind of thing that only a lawyer could devise and uncoincidentally the previous chair was one - he also engaged in the same kind of tactics when the chair of the Internet Society of New Zealand. ICANN was dodgy before then but under his watch it went into full-blown maliciousness. In the opinion of many, the _ONLY_ thing that ICANN staff and most of the board care about is the lining of their own pockets and the furtherance of their own control of power.

> Even the NSA has admitted that the number of 'stopped attacks' is less than 100, not 'many hundreds'

In other news, both the NSA and GCHQ have predicted 50 of the last 3 terrorist attacks.

The fact that 47 didn't happen (and 46 of those probably only existed in someone's mind) is what they're taking credit for.

No, the NSA _say_ they have.

On the other hand if the USA didn't go around dropping bombs on foreign civilians, there wouldn't be a steady supply of pissed-off revenge-seekers queuing up to try and get it.

Ditto for the Federal govt's stomping all over individual and state constitutional rights since 1941, in an effort to stay on a war footing and therefore keep power federated instead of devolving back to the individual states as was supposed to happen at the end of ww2 (until the cold war fired up). US domestic terrorists do tend to have several loose screws upstairs but what's come out over the years has made even their deluded fantasies look tame at times.

What's been happening since 1990 is a combination of batshit crazy economic policy pushed by a sociopathic cocaine smuggler with a power fetish (search for "The ten reprehensible crimes of Ronald Reagan" sometime) and the US military-industrial complex thrashing around more and more frantically to keep itself in power, most recently by embedding itself into the economy so firmly that like a cancerous growth, removing them is going to damage the surrounding parts - but leaving them there will eventually kill the host.

There are several recent history lessons in what happens if you allow your military budget to become a tail wagging the dog and the most obvious one is the Soviet Union. Those F35s might yet turn out to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Last time an aircraft turned out to be so overpriced and utterly useless at any task they dumped the F111B and came up with the F14/15/16 instead but the lesson learned from that was how to ensure your programs can't be cancelled, rather than "don't build flying pigs"

Re: Government Denying Wrongdoing

"Ironic just how much things stay the same despite changing so frequently."

The purpose of a president is not to wield power, but to deflect attention from the people who do.

Re: Not all sciences are created equal

"Not much use inventing and building widgets if your factory gets burned down in a riot because you neglected society."

At the moment your widget factory is going out of business because society was screwed over to the point where noone could afford them. After it closes and unemployment booms, it'll be squatted in and set fire to.

Re: When...

"But I actually get less now than I did 8 years ago because of bigger changes to the pension scheme contributions."

Less still when you factor in how much the cost of just about everything has risen in that 8 years.

At some point you need to say "much as I love the job, I just can't afford to work here anymore"

"Any kid with a botnet vained from a virus-making kit."

It reminds me of a replay of the IRC wars back in the late 1990s.

Once the script kiddies established they could make the IRC server owners do what they want, they proceeded to DDoS those who had the temerity to stand up to them. Several companies went under as a result.

Of course back then, the "law" didn't want to know about it until some of the kiddies went too far and took it into real life. One of them ended up with a very long stay indoors after attempting to murder the FBI agent investigating his antics.

Relevance? Many of those script kiddies then are the hardened cyber criminals now.

"AMD do need to significantly improve their IPC"

And their thermals.