Posts by Alan Brown 15087 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
When it comes to spacecraft and the like, the cost of 2 is about 0.5% more than the cost of one.
When you're making a few hundred prototypes (which they do) the final item (singular) hardware cost is pure accounting noise.
For that reason (amongst others), a complete spare set is ALWAYS made unless it's a production line-craft such as Boeing's geostationary comsats (and in that case 90% of the craft is available as off-the-shelf spares anyway)
The "cutting edge fubar" with the F35 isn't the technology, it's the lifting fan which necessitates a tubby body to hold it and stubby wings to keep the weight down, imposed on the non-VSTOL versions.
It's a classic example of a horse designed by committee.
It seems that lessons learned from the F111-B (which gave us the F14/15/16) were never learned (or that the lesson taken home by some was "make sure it's so embedded that they _can't_ cancel it")
Ledswinger is correct.
Airpower can suppress opposition but ground forces are needed to drive them out and political will is needed to keep them out. You can't indefinitely occupy a country whose inhabitants don't _want_ to be occupied and you don't win hearts and minds by dropping bombs on some bystander's family (on the other hand, doing so is one of the best recruiting tools for terrorists that exists)
"I wonder how a Vulcan-shape would work as a design starting point."
Badly.
It doesn't have the carrying capacity for high level bombing and it's not strong enough for the turbulence encountered in sustained low level operations (which is what eventually forced them to be retired)
Vulcans were obsolete within 3 years of their introduction. Ever since then the missions they were given were ways of justifying keeping them flying.
Every single case which has hit german courts has found in favour of the GPL. I don't see it being any different this time.
It's notable that VMware are trying a slightly different tactic than the thoroughly discredited "Open source == Public domain == non copyrightable" defences that various outfits have tried in the past, but the fact remains that if they didn't write the code in question, they get to use it in ways the author authorises, or not at all.
German judges are not stupid, even if VMWare seems to think they are.
"I think we are all overlooking the real point here?"
You're missing an even bigger one
"A 15 year old went to the TalkTalk website and performed a SQL Injection attack upon it, which was successful."
A 15yo went to the TT website and sucessfully performed a SQL injection attack on it _after they'd been breached twice already and should have well and truely nailed that particular barn door shut_
This isn't just an oversight, it's culpable negligence.
"I'm worried that if I no longer have a contract with them and the worst happens -will they actually do the right thing and compensate me. "
That's what small claims court is for - and given the fine plus admissions, they'd have a hard job fobbing it off.
(My experience with Talktalk is that you can spend months arguing with them over compensation or you can just file a Small Claim and they'll settle it almost immediately.)
Given that PLusnet and BT are the same company, the fact that they use deficient procedures is hardly surprising.
The fact of any outfit keeps the password in plaintext is a good reason to avoid them, even if you never use their supplied email setup (you many not use it, but someone else might well decide to use it to impersonate you.)
"my boss has okayed the request of C-bods for me to do important work by Tuesday while I was away, completely "forgetting" that my team of 2 part-timers and my lowliness have several "high priority" projects of about 2-4 man*month (each)"
I guess being signed off for 3 months medical stress leave wouldn't go down well then.
"Now unfortunately breaking the Sale of Goods Act doesn't get the (ir)responsible senior management locked up (after due process, obviously). That needs something else."
"Operating recklessly" should do the trick and fits the bill.
Imagine comrade Dido finding herself banned from being on any boards for the next decade.
"The Titanic actually carried an excess lifeboat capacity than required by the UK Board of Trade when she sailed in 1912"
The irony there is that as originally designed the Titanic/Olympic had enough lifeboats for everyone, but they were deleted because they "spoiled the lines of the ship" and because it was felt that many lifeboats would make the upper-deck passengers uneasy.
TalkTalk has never had enough security in place or planned. Even a cursory glance at the issues of outsourcing and the vulnerabilities it exposes the company to (lowly paid workers being paid off by gangs to leak data, etc) shows that they're not paying attention to anything except pennies coming in the door.
Security has _always_ been regarded as a cost centre until it's too late. "No return on investment" rules supreme and there's no such thing in business as "Cost Of Not Investing"
"Surely the data protection act must have something they can pin on them here"
There is. Losing personal data exposes them to _private_ legal action - and the court of appeal has upheld that claims can be for distress as well as actual monetary losses.
If 40,000 people all sue for £500 each, it'll make the ICO fine look like peanuts, just in the legal bills TT will run up, let alone the actual settlements.
Outdoor WiFi 5GHz usage up towers is proving problematic enough (interference with weather radar systems up to 50miles away) without having cellcos muscling in on the game and making things worse.
Their solution to Wifi interference will be to crank the mill a little harder to ensure it breaks. If they do the same for doppler radar the breakage could be messy.
"My own experience in British politics"
Is not the way USA politics work.
American law exempts robocalls for religious, political and charitable organisations.
The ongoing and spreading abuse of those exemptions means they're likely to be withdrawn for the same reasons that the same exemptions in loudspeaker truck laws were withdrawn.
"How do you deal with international robocallers who basically operate outside of the law?"
Follow the money: You go after the people who hired the robocallers, who are invariably _inside_ the country.
The TCPA makes them all jointly and fully liable for this reason. You can also order them to hand over details of who they paid, etc (also invariably inside the country) so that you can go after them too.
The best part is that this is all in local (to you) small claims court, with fixed fees (which are added to the judgement), mandatory tripling for wilful violations (robocalls and breaching DNC lists) and the charges are PER CALL, which means if they call you 5 times, that's 5 lots of $500 statutory damages, tripled if wilful.
There's a cottage industry around collecting TCPA damages and a lot of knowledge/assistance on the net about how to do it. If you're an american you'd be silly to pass up collecting $1500 (or $3000 if you can find both parties, or more if there's a liability chain) per call for 5 mins work filling in paperwork and a filing fee.
"The response is always the same ... sue 'em yourself."
You should, no matter what the FCC (or FTC, or state AG) do.
You have the right to - and the death of 1 million papercuts is a greater threat than anything the FCC or other law enfircement authority can bring to bear. This is why "reputable" outfits stopped that kind of telemarketing when the TCPA was passed 25 years ago.
Remember, the TCPA makes the caller _and_ the outfit hiring them jointly and severally liable and you have the right to file in local small claims even if Joe's widget company is across the country and hired Achmed's telemarketers in Bangalore. The fun part is that once you have the judgement against Joe (even by default) you can apply to get it enforced and this all adds to _his_ fees, not yours. If Joe has any sense he'll disclose who he paid, how much he paid and where he paid it to, so you can go after Achmed's US sockpuppets, else he can face contempt of court action.
Joe's defense of "I got cold called and offered this fantastic marketing service" is _not_ a defence, as there is specific wording preventing ignorance of the marketer's activities being used this way.
Robocalling (with a robot voice) or calling a number on a do-not-call list is an automatic wilful violation (ie. $1500 strike _each_ against Joe and Achmed) - and on top of that many states run their own prosecutions of do-not-call violators. (The FCC charges $11,000 per call when they weigh in, several states go for $50,000per violation(call) and they get aggressively pursued through state AGs and state courts, not as a civil agency seeking a settlement without admission of wrongdoing.)
The single biggest problem with TCPA actions is hostile small claims courts judges refusing the cases or finding for the defendant (usually on the basis that finding for the plaintiff would be "harmful for local business"). In _every single case_ where that got appealed and kicked up the food chain, the judges higher up the chain have ruled that this itself is illegal and had extremely harsh words for the "judges" in question, forcing them to take the case back and deal with it as the law requires.
The "seldom used" part is easy - leave the things switched on permanently and control them via the app.
If you must have physical switches, then just have wall-mounted control modules and permanently link out the switch in the wallbox. (X10 has been doing that for 30 years)
The dead loss in this instance is that LED bulbs are really only for replacing lamps in traditional fittings which can't be (economically) replaced. Bear in mind that the shape and connector are for a device which traditionally required replacment every 1000 operating hours, or 1500 switch-on cycles (The light bulb cartel really did exist, look it up)
At $75 apiece you may as well have a permanently fitted device with a much nicer form factor than that of a light bulb (and a lot more light output, plus more room for the whizzy bits). These are a solution looking for the wrong problem.
"Until penalties for keeping information secure are punitively higher than the costs of doing so this will keep happening."
The DPA has specific provision for personal legal action against companies which breach data security and a recent court of appeal ruling allowed for distress claims as well as actual monetary damages.
The night terror for Dido Harding isn't the hacking. It's that enough customers take TT to court that the legal fees alone put them out of business. The death of 1 million papercuts is a far greater threat to business than staving off the ICO.
Thankfully for TT, most customers are either unaware of their rights or too meek and mild to pursue them.
"Much like the 'rogue' VW engineers that are being liberally coated with executive blame right now in Germany."
With any luck those "rogue" engineers will have kept the meeting notes and emails from top brass telling them to do it, despite objections.
Or they could be handsomely paid off for _not_ revealing said items.
"At this point I will just be happy when capital starts having problems finding child and slave labor. "
You do know the origins of the word "robot" don't you? (It's Czech, from "rab"(slave), meaning forced labour)
Child labour is getting expensive. Robots work 24*7 with the lights off and they don't need feeding, housing, toilet breaks or shift changes.
"The Ghost Forest was created by the land slipping down into the sea - most likely caused by local tectonic activity."
This is normal for subduction faults. Look at what happened in 1964 in Alaska. Some areas slumped by several metres during the quake as the land slipped back to "normal" position after decades of being compressed and uplifted by the pacific plate pushing under it.
The San Andreas can't provide much more than 7 because it moves too freely - and as has been pointed out, californians are pretty much prepared.
Cascadia on the other hand could easily be bigger than 8.5 when it goes, with the accompanying tsunami taking out most of the coastline between California and Vancouver Island. Populations in the pacific northwest are woefully unprepared.
New Madrid's last triple shudder were 8.1-8.3 apiece - powerful enough for the rollers to set church bells ringing in Boston. It's a long way from the centre of North America to the coast. It's about due to pop again and has the potential to destroy the USA as an economic power.
"It is not at all clear that Japan would not have surrendered due to blockade efficiency and Russia being free to enter the war in the East"
It wasn't clear at the time (witness what happened at Okinawa) and the top military brass were so fanatical that they still opposed the surrender even after the Emperor told them to give in (fanatical to the point of planning a coup). The Allies fully expected to lose a million men trying to take the mainland in house-to-house fighting.
20/20 hindsight from 70 years on is an inexact science. Trying to see through the fog of war is a hell of a lot harder still.
In any case, if those bombs hadn't been dropped in WW2, someone, somewhere would have dropped one on a large city. Just be thankful that fewer people died in Nagasaki and Hiroshima than in the Tokyo firestorms and that none have been used in anger ever since.
(FWIW, 1980s Hiroshima and Nagasaki cancer rates were 0.25% above background normal. The abhorrence of how the bombs affected the population is justifiable, but it's clear that much of the long-term risks are statistically negligable and we really have to get past the knee-jerk "all nuclear stuff baaaaaad" mantra which is keeping us burning coal/oil when we should be using them as industrial raw materials or fertilizer.)
Microsoft claim that their EU office365 servers are resident in Ireland and insulated against US gov attempts to access (hence the current NY state case) however when pushed, they admitted that anyone stateside invoking the PATRIOT act would rip right through any protection supposedly offered.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
