Posts by Alan Brown 15090 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"If the fine is a personal one if would be wrong for the council to pay it."
Except that indemnification is a standard part of most employment contracts
"If the fine is a personal one if would be wrong for the council to pay it. If it did then the councillors responsible could be surcharged."
In a lot of cases the councillors responsible for such policies are dead and buried. In any case councils don't care because this invariably comes out of their public liability cover.
AS SUCH:
A better path is to find who underwrites the council's public liability insurance (Zurich?) and let them know that a: this is happening and b: It's extremely UNlikely to be isolated to one council
One of the reasons liability cover is so cheap is because there are requirements to take full care to comply with legal requirements, etc and failing to do so blows the cover
One of my cats had a knack for finding hardware reset buttons in the days of AT PC cases with thumb sized ones
This was back in the days of Dos based OSes which needed hardware resets with a monotonous regularity. The fact that the boxes in question were invariably running Linux or BSD was...... annoying
Servers have IPMIs.
IPMIs have remote command (and watchdog hardware timers)
If you need to bodge something to monitor lights and/or press a reset switch then you're WAY out of your depth.
20+ years ago it was a different story of course, but these days if it doesnt have this level of functionality, it's not a server, it's someone's cheaped out solution waiting circa service call
And for watchdogs on old PCs, whatever happened to the PC speaker ticking on network packets duverted to driving the input of a 555 to hold off a relay connected to the reset switch?
A 'temporary' radio hut I worked in was finally replaced with a more permanent building after an earthquake dropped chunks of concrete from the edwardian water tower it was parked under - through the roof. It had only been there 44 years...
It wasn't so much demolished as simply disintegrated when the racking support ironwork inside was dismantled
"Despite the US Government's best (and continued) attempts, US law does not apply internationally,"
"long arm statutes" have been ruled as applying anywhere.
IE: if you "do business with" an entity (corporate or individual) in a US state, then you fall under the laws of that state and the USA for the purposes of that business.
It's the same in most parts of the world.
"Long time ago in Sydney, an expensive minicomputer was being unloaded by specialist computer/fragile equipment specialists from truck loading lane,"
Electrronics Australia recounted the story many years ago of a regional newspaper in NSW which got a colour printing press and new computer (secondhand). The delivery company transporting it from Sydney put it all on an _open_ delivery truck which was also carrying fertilizer to save costs and didn't liberally encase the fragile bits in plastic wrap.
1500km later, AU$2million of computer and about the same of printing press ended up being a complete write off, as was the transport firm when it got the bill and its insurers refused to pay up.
" They're strong enough to make the monitor wobble on its stand, CD cases rattle in the storage rack and dust to fall from the 5mm crack that has opened up between the wall and the coving since the bus route opened about 5 years ago."
FYI: UK councils are _required_ to ingestivate complainst about this kind of thing and deal with it. Whilst traffic noise issues are exempted from environmental protection legislation, traffic _vibration_ shaking buildings is not - and the liabilities if they ignore complaints can be stupendous - as Croydon council found out after traffic vibrations caused the frontage of a building to fall off a few years back.
"Not just a case of of curing the fault, not the symptoms, but also a case of not every problem needs a high tech solution."
There's still a problem there (three problems actually(*)). They just punted the problem down the road
(*)
1: servers being knocked out by voltage drops
2: The VERY REAL RISK OF FIRE if voltages are dropping that far due to current draw without blowing breakers - meaning there's bad wiring somewhere
3: very poor maintenance of the equipment
"Perhaps it was the small motor that opens the doors?"
It's invariably a combination of the motor operating the doors, switch arcs and long unshielded runs from the car to the relay logic in the controllers in the hoist room
Dry risers and building comms risers invariably run beside or inside the elevator shafts so you learn very quickly that anything with high impedance ends sees a lot of capacitive/inductive coupling and that no matter how many times a building might have steel covers specified for the trays to achieve electromagnetic isolation, they're either never installed (cost savings!) or never replaced (lazy arsed electricians who don't see the point of them - which brings up a point of one sparky firm who'd been contracted from day one on a building and were forced to pay for replacing every single missing one they'd "lost"....)
My days were mid 80s onwards. Yes you'd use RS422 or current loop in olden times.
I actually did build and maintain a few 20mA current loop setups when playing with RTTY as a spotty youth - mainly to tame the prodigious EMF kickbacks you get out of old style Creed model 7 teletype.
I did a bit more with loops and optoisolators in later years interfacing various ancient technology in university laboratories to "modern" computers
"Years ago, I was checking a cabling infra in Paris, only to hear a perfect radio signal in the controller."
One of the more annoying problems around landmobile repeater stations is that the wire fences of the surrounding farm boundaries fences act as antennas.
Which wouldn't be so bad, but fence wires tend to be nailed into fence battens using galvanised staples and when things rust (as all things left in the weather eventually do), some of these turn into perfect diodes.
If you have 100-plus transmitters all turning on and off, combining in antennas and being rectifiied in diodes, then you end up with all sorts of nasty intermodulation products and sooner or later some of those intermodulation products show up at the same frequencies of the receivers. At that point you can end up with a cascade effect.
At some point someone has to wander around, hitting said fence battens with a hammer to dislodge the rust, and encourage farmers not to use galvanised wire fencing.
"Nobody put two and two together prior to this because the lift rarely went into the basement"
The number of "lifts and IT equipment" stories i've heard over the years always made me check for shielded cable and correct use of RS485 instead of RS232 for long runs in such installations as a matter of course when problems were reported.
I've got a set of my own EMF interference stories but they tend to involve radio transmitters rather than electric motors
"Back in the 1930s legalization of alcohol dealt a body blow to organized crime financing that the traffickers survived by moving into the illegal drug trade"
Except there virttually wasn't an illegal drug trade back then.
A lot of it had to do with the fact that the newly created FBI had a shitload of newly minted G-Men who were about to be unemployed if there wasn't a new public enemy to deal with and it mostly started with a substance smoked primarily by mexican immigrants.
Cocaine and heroin were a rich peoples' party drugs at the time and nobody blinked an eye, Opium smoking was frowned on in the USA but not usually illegal. Remember the british empire went to war with China for the right to sell the stuff when China wanted nothing to do with it.
a medical knockout dose of cocaine or heroin is less than £1.
The street value is considerably higher than this (as in closer to £100), so there's quite an incentive to flog it even if the risks are high
Interestingly the "Turkish opium" problem was solved by getting the growers to contract to the medical supply industry. Morphine and heroin are _extremely_ useful drugs which the artificial replacements don't come close to replicating. The growers were happy as they get paid more than the narcogangs were paying...
"Decriminalizing drugs would be a better option, the war on drugs will never be won"
Of course not. Drugs are a symptom, not a cause. The motivation is PROFIT, not narcotics - and keeping them illegal benefits both the sellers (higher profits) and the enforcers (various)
Like terrorism (another symptom), it's your FOREVER WAR and the authorities can shout down anyone who disagrees as a traitor and supporter of the enemy.
The real homeland security threats are the "domestic terrorists" - Unabomber, McVeigh and their ilk. The ones who actually believe that Obama was coming for their money, nasally implanted mind control chips and that a certain Pizza place in Washington DC has a basement (hint, the water table is just below street level. Washington DC is built on a swamp.)
"Everyone is calling this a war, and of course in a war the first casualty is the truth."
The reason the media and government are calling this a war is to soften everyone up for the inevitable high casualty rate amongst medics, carers and first responders - primarily thanks to a culture of denial, deflection and gaslighting amongst those who are responsible for public health and safety.
Pandemic planning has been repeatedly called out as vastly inadequate in the USA and the UK, but ignored by chancers in office who kept brushing the scathing reports aside. Now that chickens are coming home to roost they're trying to deflect attention from the avoidable deaths they've caused and the liabilties they should be facing.
The fridges will need to be awfully big for them to all hide in. Ice rink size, perhaps.
"It's much harder to find the unbelievably low recovery rates for the U.K."
Because it's impossible to do so
You can't show recovery rates if you don't have accurate reporting rates and we know the reporting rates are wildly inaccurate due to the sampling method (essentially: only people who are very sick are being tested. The number of asymptomatic people being tested is a number approximating zero by comparison)
The only thing that's accurate at the moment is death stats because people dying of any cause is recorded as "he dead". Spikes above the long term averages can be inferred as being attributable to the pandemic even if not reported/diagnosed as such, and whilst it's only an inference for statustical purpose it's good enough for most purposes (you'll see the influenza/pneumonia rate has dipped slightly. you'd continue that at the normal level to get your covid rate)
"What you conveniently forgot to mention is that those figures put the UK bang on dead average for death rate increase during this outbreak when compared to countries globally."
Early days yet - and the numbers the ONS has are a couple of weeks old at best
This is the "honeymoon period". Historically, pandemics have had at least 2 wave and the second one is the deadlier one.
We won't know the REAL image until looking back a year from now. All this is preliminary - but bear in mind that just like everything else, our systems are geared around people dying at a predictable rate and having 10-20k extras clogs things up, let alone the possibility of having 10-20k extra PER MONTH for 12 months.
"Deaths that occur due to organ failure that may be related to Covid-19? No, don't mention them. Deaths outside of hospital, care homes etc - can't be sure leave them off the stats."
Overall population deaths are harder to hide and you can compare those to the 5-20 year averages.
This is a link to a google search for death stats for the year 1918 (overall and per 100k are showing)
https://www.google.com/search?q=1918+death+stat+chart&sxsrf=ALeKk00Sij5Gi35Pbp0zx6O7zbHwDtGDAA:1587644949403&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=wT-FkiYtWQk6iM%253A%252CG8PXEPLzi_y03M%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kS3H-G8YFUc9mMMDAJHe0VFiKagJw&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjN8fOpxv7oAhWGN8AKHeuJDvcQ9QEwAHoECAoQBQ#imgrc=wT-FkiYtWQk6iM:
It's MUCH harder to hide this kind of peak - and the ONS numbers trace a curve in the UK that shows that the "above normal" death figure was in excess of 40,000 people when the government was claiming 10,000 Covid fatalities (that was the most recent release, these things are necessarily a few days delayed)
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending10april2020
"Not new at all"
Even without the antiprotest legislation there are a bunch of laws on the books in NZ and AU left over from the 1918 epidemic that have never been removed in case they needed to be reactivated.
There is provision for a 14 year sentence on either side of the Tasman for spitting on someone with intent to pass on an infection or to cause fear of having passed on an infection. So far in NZ the only sentence handed out for doing it in this pandemic has been 14 days, but it's there if needed. Under normal circumstances it'd be a simple common assault charge.
Quarantine laws are also on the books with virtually unlimited enforcement powers and open-ended provisions to actually enforce them if needed for the same reason
The reason is simple: Death rates in the Pacific and in rural/native communities in both countries were the highest in the world and hit 30% of the population in Samoa(40+% of the male population!), 20% in other areas. 1918 is still part of the history books.
"rather than a binary liquid explosive, which requires careful handling and pretty precise mixing to cause an explosion."
Actual attempts to mix simulated binary explosives in an aircraft lavatory have NEVER suceeded
And that's on the ground, stationary, with the lav module sitting on a solid concrete floor, not shaking around as flying aircraft tend to do (let alone the slight wavering they tend to do in the wind when sitting on landing gear)
Which underscores the "Hollywood" aspect of binary explosives in real life. They don't work with kitchen/bathroom or bucket chemistry equipment. Get it wrong and you tend to just have a hot toxic mess on your hands. (Bringing up the aspect that terrorists who only manage to blow themselves up get laughed at, not feared)
"Previous actions have been about individuals or very small groups at the most. "
Amoy Gardens being an abberation?
Or the global lockdowns in 1958 or 1968?
or the wildly different spanish flu experiences in Western Samoa (no quarantine - 30% of the population died, So the British administrator pulled a Boris and skipped out, refusing to acknowledge responsibility until the day he died in Dorset in 1927)) and American Samoa (rigid quarantine, no deaths)
"COVID-19 is no more deadly than the typical nasty virus with a 1.8% death rate"
Most viruses with that kind of death rate are shockingly hard to pass on.
Coronavirus SARS-Cov19 passes on at least as easily as the common cold (being closely related to it), but the common cold has a death rate well below 0.01% and influenza is 0.1%
51,000 people died in the UK last year of influenza/pneumonia with that 0.1% death rate
That means 1.8% could be 1.2 million dead people. In a year
- and that's assuming 1.8% when it looks like it's actually significantly higher than that if you look at actual numbers of deaths in this period vs the 5 year average.
There are a lot of cases NOT being reported and a lot of "excess deaths" NOT being officially attributed to Covid19, but in the absence of secret undetectable assassination squads wandering around in the night it's a pretty good bet that it's the culprit.
You can't bury, store or cremate that many people at once. The systems aren't setup to cope with it, which is why ice rinks across the UK have been requisitioned to do duty as morques and bulldozers are digging mass graves (which are ALREADY being used)
Is it still a big joke?
"Anyone whose access to email is conditional on continuing to be a customer of the ISP is asking for trouble."
Anyone whose access to email is conditional on continuing to be a customer of the ISP is locking themselves into the vendor
Which is why ISPs continue to provide email (back in the old days it was the only reason to sign up, but in these days of ISPs being pipe providers, there's NO point in being reliant on anything else they offer
setting up your own independent namesevers behind your firewall isn't hard either. That way you're not beholden to google or others playing games - however some ISPs used to intercept/redirect port 53 queries to their local nameservers anyway. They may still do so.
"OK, so GOogle News is shuttered."
Except it's not. What it does is brings you news about your region FROM OTHER REGIONS - all perfectly legally.
If advertisers do deals with a foreign newspaper to ensure their ads are seen by local eyeballs, how are you going to stop them doing so? (or Google USA instead of Google Australia)
And the local rags can't do a thing about it, because apart from genuinely local content, they're buying their content from the same place as everyone else - Reuters and friends (who pay a fixed rate for articles which are syndicated)
Protectionism simply doesn't work and protectionist tactics are invariably for the benefit of a monied few, not the general population.
As for Netflix, they'll simply move out of the country. It will be a VERY BRAVE GOVERNMENT which attempts to censor flows of data based on who hasn't been paying up and I'll guarantee that the real result will be a return to the days of widespread VPN streaming that used to exist before these outfits setup local shops.
Then again, this is Australia: A country where a CSIRO scientist tore apart a number of radar prosecutions because of the appallingly sloppy way Australian police were setting their speed traps up - so the Australian government passed laws declaring radar infallible in court AND further laws prohibiting government scientists appearing for the defence in cases brought by the government against its citizens.
The most expensive way possible is simply not use that content for their "news", nor to direct to the source papers - which is exactly what the Goo has done, simply bringing "news" in from other countries.
The Germans cried 'Onkel' in about 6 weeks and now media there PAY Google et al to bring eyeballs to pages.
Spain noted this and wrote the laws to prevent individual publishers making agreements with Google. They're now crying "tío", but they have to collectively negotiate through the government - and haven't yet done so. Meantime local media is going down EVEN FASTER than before.
France didn't learn from Spain's experiences and are trying the same thing. I give it 6-8 weeks before french media are crying 'oncle'
Now the Aussies are falling for the same thing - and I'll guarantee they're crying "uncle" even faster.
Of course the beneficiaries of these policies are the big media outlets. It's the smaller outfits who have been disproportionately wiped out by Google adopting a hands-off approach (one might even say dying like flies when the Pea Beu comes out) - and given that we KNOW this will happen, one might be forgiven if one wonders about whether this is the intention (IE: wipe out all competition and Blame Google)
"they genuinely want to do a good job (sometimes mixed results, I admit)"
Mixed results is an understatement.
I learned 30 years ago that most "local reporters" are not interested in anything unless it's delivered to them prewritten and wrapped in a ribbon with a bow on top.
The idea of actually checking behind the press releases was anathema to most - to the point that you could point to previous stories on the same issues IN THE SAME NEWSPAPER that they hadn't even bothered to look at.
"if all satelites had been equipped with an ISO standard gas connector"
Have you ever seen the way that satellites are fuelled up? And the amount of protective kit people have to wear when they do it? This stuff is hydrazine and other nice hypergolics. https://sci.esa.int/web/herschel/-/44658-preparations-for-hydrazine-fuelling-in-s5b
The issue isn't the connectors, it's the amount of protective stuff that has to be put over them afterwards to ensure there are NO leaks during subsequent handling/launching of the bird
Proposals have been made to have this stuff be removable on-station but nobody has adequately addressed how to be able to reseal the things after refilling. You DO NOT want your satellites floating around in a cloud of hydrazine and other sticky, corrosive "stuff" coating every conceivable surface
"LTO-4 drives will be around for a few years, but more recent generations (LTO-7 and above) won't be able to read the tapes."
It's worse than that.
Owing to a media formulation change during LTO6, LTO7 won't read or write earlier versions as the abrasiveness of the older media can destroy heads in short order
That breaks the entire "read/write -1 generation, read -2" that everyone's used to and is going to make migration a royal pain in the arse.
"That did get fixed properly, and at twice the cost of what doing it right originally was..."
Yup. it's always worth bringing that kind of thing up and asking that your objections on that basis be minuted so that when it happens you can bring it up and point fingers at the responsible parties - and if they refuise to minute it then you'll just note by email that they've ferused to do so - and by the way being told about this possiblity may affect liability insurance, which means that whoever makes the decision might find insurers coming after him _personally_ to recover costs at a later date.
You'll get LOTS of dirty looks but it usually makes the person who makes the decision think twice.
Mains cable colour coding is a classic example of CVD changing things worldwide.
Black/white/Green is as dangerous as red/black/green when some people can't see red (it shows somewhere between brown and black) some can't tell the difference between red and green (they both show as brownish) and CVD testing was never part of electrical training.
Brown / blue / green-yellow stripe can be distinguished by virtually ALL people regardless of CVD
I don't have any CVD, but my father does and the area that I'm from has somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 the male population suffering from red/green colourblindness. This stuff got drilled into us because it kills people.
"There's a reason the green on traffic lights has a lot of blue in it..."
Normally the red has blue added as a number of forms of CVD means the sufferer can't see red _AT ALL_, whilst not seeing green is rarer than rocking horse shit (apart from anything else the night vision cones in our eyes are centred on green spectra, so even someone without colour vision at all is normally seeing green light)
Which makes you wonder why brake/tail lights continue to be be red and increasingly use monochromatic red leds
"I find Brother TZ labels tend to start letting go after 5-6 years"
Not if you use the "strong" TZE-S (will take the heat in the back of a rack) or "flexible" TZE-FX (labels roll around the cable, not stick out like flags) adhesive types, or go the whole nine yards and use the HS (heatshrinkable) labels.
HINT: Every character in a Brother TZ name means something (width, fg/bg colour, substrate, etc)
https://www.brother.co.uk/supplies/p-touch/tapes/tze
Of course if you use cheap "compatible" labels then all bets are off (and you can get interesting deals on specific genuine types, down to around 1/4 the normal retail price, if you look around, so there's no need to bother with the compatibles)
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