Posts by Alan Brown

Re: but when I registered my first .li domain

time to register johnson.li

Re: Weights?

very few cars have a weight sensor for the driver seat, on the "sensible" basis that a driver is always present.

This may change with the rise in this kind of stunt and avanced driver assist features proliferating

Re: Back in the 80s...

> The employer was questioned about which bit of 10% they didn't understand. The response was "Yes, but we didn't think you'd make any sales. We're certainly not going to pay you £1m!"

I'm minded of Edison and Tesla

And always getting such offers in writing, then checking that they're ironclad before proceeding

Re: Island launch

the occupants of said island aren't happy about that offer

Re: What's the problem?

"If 30,000 satellites that are essentially disposable are needed to provide the service that is a massive overhead with absolutely no guarantee it can be maintained even assuming permission is granted."

The real money isn't in providing this service. It's actually a side-show when all is said and done

trans oceanic laser-linking outside the atmosphere at LEO is about 30% lower latency than the shortest submarine fibre cables. Financial houses will pay billions for that kind of advantage - quite literally that kind of money has been spent for 2-3ms advantage on entire submarine cable systems, let alone getting 10-12ms advanbtage

Re: That’s one big battery

the "people in question" have gps jammers in their vehicles.... you know who they are (and yes, they're stealing them for the scrap metal value)

Yes and the problem is that a nuclear armed country losing the #1 position might have a nuclear tantrum

Re: It could be worse

as far as family know. I'm a piano player in a brothel

Re: I find myself saying...

"Logically, with the UK now as a 3rd country, it should be no different."

It's vastly different, because the UK is not a simple "3rd country"

Items _manufactured in the UK_ are allowd to be imported to the EU Tariff Free

This means you must prove they were manufactured in the UK, or tariffs apply. Problems immediately start accruing when items are made from multiple components sourced from within and outside the UK as percentage of work in the UK then becomes the deciding factor (local content rules)

if the tariff-free agreement was not in place then the paperwork would be significantly easier because tarffs would apply on the finished goods at the prevailing rate

And no, the US exporter DOESN'T care about the rules. Stuff does turn up with such bills. Everything tends to be "FOB" (meaning you have to pay local customs agent handling fees and these can be STEEP)

Re: You think it's bad in tech...

" there are hundreds of people willing to put up with everything just to see their name on a list "

Having been exposed to the periphery of this shit, this is one of the reasons I have as little to do with the "entertainment" industry as possible. Many of those involved spin it out into everyone around them (even in amateur dramatics)

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

or railway mania

What would Jesus do?"

flipping tables and whipping merchants was definitely part of the bible stories (in the temple)

Re: Nuke the Planet for Equality

" The worry is that it does work, its very effective and its constantly improving. "

last time I checked, the false negative rate was high and the false positive rate was high. The only thing it CAN do is improve

it's nowhere near close to being useable by anyone and yet Big Brother is trying to do so

Re: They doing this with a cron job?

"Robin Hood and Friar Tuck" date back how far? (Certainly to mainframe days)

Re: Not so easy in the UK

"robo-calling problem isn't as bad here - at least not for my TPS 'Protected' number."

"They" don't care if your number is TPS protected and "They" don't care whose CLID they're forging (the "BT scammers" have been using valid ones belonging to active customers for a while now)

As the terminating telco gets a cut of the revenue (call termination charges), my argument is that they're jointly and severally liable for the scam. If/when that starts being upheld in court is when telcos will sit up and take the issue seriously. Until then they'll continue to pay lip service to it and only pay attention when they don't get their termination revenue

Re: Technical Report

Having been an El Reg reader since its inception and spent at least as many years chasing various miscreants across networks who never got anywhere near court, I'd say fewer than 0.1% ever get anywhere near police, let alone a court.

For the most part the Plod simply don't want to know, even when it's dropped giftwrapped into their lap, unless "someone influential" puts a flea in their ear

What's really surprised me over the years is how few cases have resulted in victims taking matters into their own hands. Many of the most destructive/malicious skiddies haven't exactly been low profile

Re: Open options

it's rather ironic that Libreoffice is the go to rescue package for broken ms office files.... :)

Something similar can be said for both Boeing and AT&T's breakups too

There's definitely a place for antitrust laws and the USA isn't using them nearly enough but the legislative abuse is so deeply entrenched that I don't think one nutjob senator railing about them (ironically, from the side of the plutocracy) will make any difference

It's important to realise that what we're seeing now in the USA is the culmination of an effort to destroy the New Deal which began in 1940 (and recruited evangelists to the cause). That group gained the upper hand in 1980 with the election of Reagan and have been running rampant ever since, but history has a tendency to repeat and the New Deal short-circuited a depression which "should" have lasted 30 years if normal economic cycles had been left to play out. When the crash comes, the USA is going to hurt and unlike the last few times it's no longer the only 900 pound gorilla in the room - meaning that "if America sneezes the world catches flu" no longer applies

there were a lot of things wrong with the british shipbuilding industry at the time but that was merely a symptom of what was going wrong

When 3 shifts of welders could be outperformed by a single japanese worker operating semiautotomated rigs on the other side of the world, changes had to be made. Choices were between shedding staff and modernisig practices or shutting down entirely and it ended up being the latter

This scenario has repeatedly played out in industrial areas around the world where manglement have tried to maximise profits when they saw that heavy reinvestments in plant + automation was needed and chose to run the business into the ground instead. It's never ended well for the poor buggers at the blunt end of things

Re: Yes, poor Iran needs nuclear power.

"They don't have any other fuel source to produce electrical power."

Sooner or later the oil will run out. Long before that the world will be paying middle eastern countries NOT to pump oil.

Contrary to what many americans believe, climate change is a very scary reality and what's happening in the Leptav Sea risks turning into extinction level event material if the methane clathrate beds that are threatening to blow out turn into a chain reaction (it was end-game of the Permian era and played out in less than a decade - one blowout is bad. 2 is a disaster. 3+ is likely to be "game over, planetary reset button hit, global oxygen levels reduced to 11% for around 100k years" - That's what happened last time)

Re: Looking forward to full reusability & refueling

SpaceX's constellations are at _very low_ altitudes which have a maximum endurance of 5 years without constant reboosting from their onboard ion thrusters (ditto any debris from collisions - note that they have onboard collision avoidance software so this is fairly unlikely anyway)

They launch them into initial orbits which come down even faster than that (18 months or less)

The irritating thing about bringing down a lot of the smaller shit is that "we" already have the technology to do so (laser brooms) but actually deploying it risks causing a war because being able to bring your stuff down also means you can use it to bring down the other guy's stuff and nobody will agree to a closely supervised cooperative effort

(it's not even particularly difficult to bring things down - just sufficiently destabilise the orbit to make it mildly elliptical and the atmosphere will do the rest for you)

Re: Design software ?

If China wanted a biological war all they actually needed to do at any time in the last 3-4 years would be to lob a few infected pigs(*) into Wisconson or other pork farming centres. Plausible deniability and all that...

(*) China's been battling an outbreak of haemmoragic african swine fever ("Pig ebola" zoonotic) that's been raging across Asia for the last 5-6 years, culling hundreds of millions of pigs and putting millions of farmers out of business in the process. That's WHY soybean purchases plummeted in the first place - you don't buy animal feed for animals which no longer exist. Meantime pork smuggling across internal chinese biological protection borders is rampant and continuing to spread the disease (which might give a hint about how much control the government REALLY has over the people when the people don't want to cooperate)

"The weird part is always how it doesn't hurt anywhere near as much just after you do it as it does the next day and thereafter."

I found that out after falling off a motorcycle(*) and bouncing down the road. The day after was agonising

(*) You might think it was carelessness but it was a choice between road and the back of a car which pulled out in front of me. The road was softer