Posts by Alan Brown

Re: I don't care what the experts say....

What you mean is there is no "private, internal" address NAT range like RFC1918 defines for IPv4

that was deliberate

You can certainly NAT IPv6 addresses if you're dermined enough to do so

Why is it discouraged? Because NAT breaks a bunch of stuff in subtle and sometimes unpredictable ways.

It may be relatively invisible across most of the western world but as soon as you're stashed behind 2 or more layesr of NAT - as frequently happens in many parts of the developing world - "helper protocols" start breaking down.

In some cases you can find a million of more people behind double NAT layers and the fustercluckage becomes pretty bad. Trying to work arouns that breakage is the root cause of many of the "phone home" tunnels built into IOT appliances such as CCTV DVRcs that have destroyed network security on so many occasions.

Re: A reprise

"it's a cook book"

Re: Nevermind Fibre, could I have copper please

"what is wrong with Aluminium for POTS?"

It fractures if you look at it sideways

Re: Quite frankly ...

99% of the complexity of an automitive engine is related to the need to produce a near infinite combination of speeds and power outputs whilst also maintaining emissions

They're very simple to control and emissions-regulate if running at constant load/speed and you can dump almost all of the complexity if you do so, (Congratulations, the series hybrid has been reinvented aka diesel electric locomotive) - this will give a substantial improvement in MPG all by itself

On the other side of this equation, Automotive engines seldom if ever operate at maximum power. To underscore this point, the motor in my "49kW" EV is actually rated at 23kW continuous but can be tweaked up to 65kW (10 second rating)

If you size the engine to the average load and fit a battery buffer to your series hybrid then you can not just improve your MPG by "a bit" but more than double it

Re: Thank god for small favors

You know you've been able to buy heated toilet seats since the 1980s don't you?

Re: Thank god for small favors

My batteries get fairly warm in use (20-30C over ambient) and cold climate packs add insulation to minimise heat loss, so as long as they're kept warm whilst plugged in, the hit may not be much

Re: Thank god for small favors

Blanket effect - and acid rain effects (carbonic acid) if atmospheric CO2 exceeds 800ppm

It was the latter which was the runaway trigger point for the Permian Extinction event ~250 million years ago, resulting in atmospheric oxygen levels dropping to 12% for 10,000 years and the extinction played out in less than a decade, possibly as little as 18 months

Most mammals and birds can't survive in an atmospheric oxygen content of less than 17% and drowning in your own lungs (altitude sickjness) is a nasty way to die

Re: Thank god for small favors

"An EV heater should be a heat pump"

Most of them are now. Older models were resistive but the range hit put paid to that very quickly

Re: Thank god for small favors

The max heat + max cold thing is actually logical. It dries the air, dehumidifies the interior and defogs the glass _VERY_ rapidly - but only after the engine warms up a little

Re: liking the new normal

I don't know about Toyota, but I drove a European VW Passat a few weeks ago which had many features disabled and only availalable if you paid extra for them via the car's infotainment system

Re: All parties

the part I don't understand about Q is why he moved from antagonising Picard to trolling Americans

Re: re: countries that haven't ventured an opinion on the invasion and shelling of civilians

" Russia doesn't need territory, it needs people."

Annexing Ukraine would result in having 1/4 of the newly enlarged total population being actively hostile to the country and attempting to sabotage it

"Biting off more than you can chew" is one way of putting it - and this kind of failure is likely to embolden the Siberian independence movement in addition to encouraging China to seek the return of ceded territory from the 1850s.

Russia is a huge country with a very low GDP, spread very thinly. The claim to Ukraine is rather tenuous at best (and if valid, then Sweden has a valid claim to St Petersberg, etc)

Re: Yay!

That and the Siberian independence movement which never really went away after it was "crushed" in the 1917 civil war

I could see Japan wanting the Kuril islands back as well as taking a strong interest in acquiring Sakhalin if China regains its old territory.

Such a Chinese acquisition is potentially extremely dangerous - North Korea is mostly supported by Russia (not China) via a 50km border strip and railway up to Vladivostok which would be closed off (China's been "tolerating" the Kims for decades, not supporting them as much as avoiding having millions of North Korean refugees dumped on them. They cut off oil/electricity exports to NK for an extended period in the 2000s but resumed them when it became clear the kleptocracy was taking everything it wanted and lettig the population starve/freeze)

The Kims would lose the primary export route for most of their "questionable substances" (meaning: counterfeit currency and methamphetamine production) as well as the primary energy import route and there's always a risk of a nuclear tantrum or other event resulting in 5-7 million starving North Koreans fleeing northwards in search of food and shelter.

China will need a LOT of support to prevent a humanitarian disaster unfolding in such a scenario and the western powers need to drop the politics & step up to assist if/when it happens. I suspect if they can get a guarantee of support they'd be more willing to take a firm stance about it, as ending the Korean Standoff would negate the reason for the USA to be in South Korea

Re: Yay!

Chinese approaches towards "rebel provinces" has historically been to wait a couple of centuries and solve the problem by intermarriage between leaderships.

Whenever there's been a war it's usually been instigated by the rebel province in question and at that point they usually lose (China either surrenders and absorbs them in two generations or simply retreats until the attacker supply lines are exhausted, then pounces)

Solaris is arguable either way. The original needs a lot of editing and endless footage of japanese motorways doesn't mean much to a non-soviet audience

Re: Every company!

The trick there is to tell the higher up that you're not being funded for the extra workload and need some training allocations

"it was better at sniffing out network issues"

There were a number of such network activities which acted as pretty good canaries. IRC was one of them

Re: Paper tape at first.

Correct.

Paper tape was used to record/reply communications on that new-fangled telegraph (and later, the Baudot teletype)

Re: First time I heard of her -- thanks!

This isn't intended to denigrate Margaret Hamilton in any way, shape or form - but one of the reasons you know about her and not many of the other brilliant female engineers/programmers at NASA - such as Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan or Mary Jackson (all crucial programmers in various arenas) is because she's white

NASA's facilities - Johnson in particular - were in the heart of segregationist country in the 60s and it showed. Several NASA administrators fought tooth and nail to keep women out and even harder to keep black women out

This atittude was stll showing at the end of the 1960s despite presidential equality orders and the appointment of James Webb with a mandate to desegregate the agency (This is WHY the telescope is named after him) - the work and effort of black employees was played down or flat out "disappeared" right into the 1970s

Re: First time I heard of her -- thanks!

This happened at NASA because "computers" were human beings for the first half of the 20th century and the electronic variety was about to put many of them out of work.

The skullduggery, assumptions, biases and sneakery of management was more than matched by a bunch of highly intelligent and undervalued women determined not to become unemployed

It turned out they were able to solve problems with the newly installed systems (out of hours, without authorisation and without knowledge of the management) that even IBM's installation techs couldn't figure out (a good chunk of which was down to miswiring)

Re: actually

IPv4 was originally going to use 128bit addressing. Vint Cerf was talked out of it and into 32 bit - because IPv4 was a temporary solution

Re: actually

The original concept WAS routed based on the octet. IPv6 DOES route this way

IPv4 was intended to last 5 years as an interim measure

Re: Give sanction controls to end users via AdBlock / AdGuard / etc

Why I am reminded of the Dish of the Day in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?

Re: It's over

All the whataboutism you've brought up is happening within the borders of the countries in question and international policy has tended towards "not messing with internal affairs"

This is pretty much the first invasion of another country in modern (internet) times where civilians are being explicitly targeted by the invader

Those of us with longer memories will remember the amount of Internet fuckery that was launched out of Greek networks when a former Yugoslavian area attempted to register a "Macedonia" top level country domain. It pretty much only stopped when those Greek networks were threatened with being cut off the net if it continued...

Similarly, Ukraine was a major home for kiddie porn spammers in the early 2000s. Most of that found itself looking for new homes when the backbones made it clear the hosting networks had a choice between connectivity or hosting such activities

Re: It's over

People who use "woke" as an insult only started doing do because "liberal" doesn't have much impact outside the USA

"Liberal" only became an insult when it was turned into one by Adolph Hitler

Re: its over

China and Russia have been striving to achieve their own separate systems for years

There's an old trope that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routs around it" - which is pretty much true. It really does take concensus action to remove bad actors (and as we constantly see, bad actors seldom stay off for long)

Re: The real problems are the ethical and legal ones

> "Robot [anything] can be much safer" often because humans are barred from the space around robots

This is done for the simple reason that most robots have no way of sensing humans (or anything else) in their workspace. Times are changing and sensors are becoming normal. Bans on being in the way of robots in factories these days is increasingly because it interferes with production speeds (the robot will pause), not because it's likely to get you killed

Re: The real problems are the ethical and legal ones

"AI is not intelligent, it has no internal/conscious model of the world and understanding of how to move a car and avoiding things"

All AI needs to do is understand it's out of its depth, STOP and call for help(*). It doesn't need to be entirely self-contained in todays always-on always-connected world

(*)Which is something far too many humans refuse to do, then end up fucking up spectacularly. What's particularly amazing is the number of European drivers who seem incapable of observing a low speed hazardous situation (such as an oncoming HGV on a narrow road they must give way to) or reversing (to get out of the way of said HGV) - you have to wonder how they obtained their license in the first place...