* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

UK's Virgin Media celebrates the end of 2019 with a good, old fashioned TITSUP*

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Across, not down

"CAT make fine Cable Avoidance Tools. Available in a range of bucket sizes with teeth to yoink up a cable so you know to avoid it in future."

What surprised me was that the teams using CAT/genny tools on our site didn't know how to use 45 degree triangulation to work out the _EXACT_ depth of the cable (rather than reading the rather inexact measurements the meter gives), or how to back off the squelch to locate the exact horizontal position of the cable vs "it's somewhere in this 3 foot wide swathe"

I suspect my 5 minute tutorial in doing this saved us a lot of trouble.

Just because someone has the tools, doesn't mean they actually know how to use them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Are you me?

"The genius left the whole street without service.."

The whole street should be claiming compensation for loss of service then.

That kind of thing tends to wake accountants up.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"it took over 3 MONTHS to get back online"

and they didn't pay the OFCOM-mandated compensation for loss of service?

Small claims beckons... (and it doesn't matter whose fault it is, as long as the cut is outside your premises)

Alan Brown Silver badge

"No idea if Virgin maintains the price differential and standards but surely the principle of "pay more get better" is a universal expectation."

Our experience of Virgin (1GB/s leased line connection) was, shall we say..... less than stellar. Delays of 2 working days from fault report to someone showing up were the norm.

This weighed heavily on our decision to stop using them.

European Space Agency launches planet-hunting Cheops while Rocket Lab starts on a third launchpad

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: 120 launches a year and it takes 2 weeks to recycle the pad?

1: They can't build that many at once.

2: Mahia Peninsula isn't very large and the bit where the launchpad is, is even smaller

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Morere+Hot+Springs/@-39.2613086,177.8657306,393m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0xc38635e7512b3977!8m2!3d-38.9865779!4d177.7910302

Then zoom out.

Waveout to the whaanau at Nuhaka, who should be getting a ringside view of the launches.

I wonder how many post-launch soaks are had at Morere hot springs? Nice to see it's open again.

There is a Santa! BT prises remnants of InLink from jaws of administration

Alan Brown Silver badge

Not just street advertising

These things are snarfing every MAC address that goes past them....

(Bluetooth and WIfi)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: A technological Solution

"That's not very likely beyond monitoring every call for some sort of key word,"

No need. the metadata would give it away.

ie: Lots of short calls to one particular set of numbers.... Geolocate those numbers and the associated web of calls and you have your connections.

As many others have said, the drug "problem" isn't a policing problem anyway. It's a health problem and best fixed by addressing the issues that cause people to start using (most "addicts" use drugs to get a respite from a shitty life and stop using if life improves - something that the Rat Park experiments support (there's a real addiction rate of less than 2% and that's lower than alcoholism - treatable too))

The gang problems are best solved by taking the part away that the gangs are really about - MONEY, and again that's a public health issue - as Switzerland and Portugal have both proven. When we stop "blaming" and punishing the poor for being poor (a particularly anglo-saxon/Calvinist/fundamentalist prediliction) then things change for the better.

I'm not advocating drug use, but by taking away the gangs customers and insane profit margins (a medical knockout dose of cocaine or heroin is worth well under 50p, with a street value upwards of 50 quid - meaning there's always someone willing to take on the risk of selling for the reward), you won't get highly profitable materials being pushed towards "new customers" (ie selling crack to schoolkids). You don't take the customers away by punishing them - that just makes things worse. This is showing in Portugal where the narcogangs have almost given up.

Boeing, Boeing, gone! CEO Muilenburg quits 'effective immediately'

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Real life is hard

"Its an expensive lesson that US automakers had to learn, a lesson that lost them a lot of domestic market share"

It cost them virtually ALL of their foreign marketshare, but they didn't seem to care as they had a protected local market.

After the Chicken Wars US cars and pickups started disappearing from world markets pretty quickly. Having a protected domestic market made them lazy as hell and it showed (not that they were alone in this, the British car industry imploded when exposed to competently built competition, dropping from 30-40% of the Australian/NZ markets to less than 3% in 18 months when Japanese cars were given equal tariffs in 1973. US cars had already gone from 40% of the market in 1960 to effectively zero by 1970 having proven too expensive to run and utterly unreliable)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Orders shifting to Airbus

"Spirit Airlines are the most recent - 100 off A320neos with options on another fifty."

With 8500 aircraft already on backlog, that's only..... 5 years delay or so.

People tend to forget you can't order up these items and pick them up tomorrow.

There's another factor inasmuch as the penalties in Boeing contracts for _cancelling_ a confirmed order make it almost as expensive as taking the aircraft and parking it somewhere to rot. At least if you take it you can sell it to some other sucker or part it out.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"I get the same where I work - something won't work, we tell the big cheeses it won't work then they have trouble believing it didn't."

BTDT. Kept the correspondence. Produced it when they tried to drop the resulting clusterfuck in my lap.

It's amazing how fast "We can't possibly spend XYZ to make your impossible demands happen!" change to "How much do you need to make this work?" (to which the answer is invariably "three to five times as much as it would have cost if you'd given me the correct budget in the first place and it will take weeks to fix, not tomorrow, longer if you don't fuck off from breathing over my shoulder 24*7")

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fault tree

"If there is a risk to a company in the defence industry like Boeing then they just talk about the national interest and pressure is applied to the regulators to wave them through"

Except when the customer - the defense industry - finds the products are in such a dangerous condition even after the regulators have waved them through, that they return the entire batch to be fixed - and refuses to pay for those repairs as they are delivery faults.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Very very Simple

"They traced the shift in culture to the move of their HQ from Seattle to Chicago some 20 years ago. The change also coincided with the McDonnell Douglas acquisition which because a de-facto takeover of Boeing, an engineer driven company, by McDonnell, a company driven by the financials."

The change in HQ simply exacerbated an existing shift. The problems were already there - look at the history of industrial relations. Unions only get uppity (and build quality goes bad) when management is mistreating employees.

Boeing had stopped being engineering-driven at least 10 years before the McD takeover and accountants had been increasingly in control since the launch of the 747.

If it was an engineering-driven company it would have pushed through with production of the 7J7 as replacement for the larger 737/smaller 727 models in 1989 instead of shelving it and making the 737NG instead. THAT was a direct "accounting trumps safety" decision.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"corporations are not people so when they do something that kills actual people no one is held accountable "

That _really_ depends on the jurisdiction.

New Zealand has laws which specifically hold individuals inside corporations accountable for unlawful decisions and has applied them (mostly in the area of unlawful anticompetitive activities) - usually with personal penalties of around 10% of the financial penalty the company is hit with, plus jailtime when things are serious - those penalties are applied to _BOTH_ the individuals making the decisions and their superiors - making CEO/CFOs far more cautious about potential illegal behaviour (especially corporate manslaughter)

It's important to note that "Limited liability" merely limits the overall financial liability of SHAREHOLDERS if the company goes bust. It in no way shape or form shields anyone from criminal charges - and the directors/board are front and centre if criminal/civil prosecutions are pushed forward as they are presumed to have signed off on policies.

The way companies seem to shrug off such stuff is more an indication of their legal abilities and the way that they've been able to shape decisions over the years than their actual liabilities.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cascade failure

"Boeing shares are up 3.57% after the news."

Only until it sinks in that changing the CEO won't make an iota of difference to foreign aviation regulators.

Without export sales, Boeing is sunk.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Cascade failure

"It's not as if they can lay the blame on the outgoing CEO for the MCAS palava that has cost hundreds of lives!"

The MAX deaths are the culmination of 25-30 years of regulatory capture and an increasingly brazen management dominated by accountants rather than engineers (which has been going on for a lot longer than just 25 years)

Look at the history of industrial disputes and reports of production line problems at the company, the 2010 Al Jazeera investigation into the firing of whistleblowers who shopped Boeing regarding NGs being assembled with crucial fuselage ribs being handmade (well out of tolerance), falsely certified as CNC parts (per the FAA approval for the airframe), beaten into shape to fit on the assembly line (including further damage of other parts during thie process) and the damage covered up by assembly line workers (mostly with goo and paint) plus further falsification of paperwork before sending the airframes along for final assembly - this was in the 1997-2003 period.

Then there's the whole saga of the military tankers, where Boeing used political interference to GET the contracts (TWICE!) despite the USAF not wanting them from Boeing, and then doing the job so badly that airframes have had to be returned to remove various foreign objects from inside sealed areas. It makes you wonder what the new presidential flight 747s will be like (with friends like Boeing...)

And THEN there's the cockups in the space front and the political interference where Boeing has been front and centre in obstructing selection of SpaceX for USAF contracts as well as NASA ones.

Regulatory capture isn't just written loud and clear all over Boeing's actions and activities for the last 30 years. It goes much further than that.

The only "good" thing that's come out of the MAX crashes is that regulatory bodies around the world have been able to actually SAY "the Emperor has no clothes" without being killed on the spot by the crowds and the Palace Guard. Up to now if anyone had called this shit out they'd have been the subject of an immediate trade war and heavy sanctions from the USA. Now, the world's regulatory bodies are able to work in concert to say they don't trust American regulators and anyone who changes that tune individually looks highly suspicious.

This means that the 777X program can't skip over a bunch of tests that Boeing expected to merely grandfather, the ENTIRE 787 certification process is in question and under review (remember all the fires - not all in the battery compartment?) and those 737MAXes won't fly in non-USA airspace until _other_ regulators are independently satisfied that the aircraft are safe - most likely requiring pilots carry (at least) supplemental type certification to be allowed in the pointy end. Then there are the deeper investigations into the allegations about the 737NG irregularities....

In other words: Boeing has well and truely shat in its nest. Even the USAF has been pushed past breaking point and is holding the company's feet to the fire regarding the absolutely shocking build quality of the 767 KC conversions, despite attempts at political interference aimed at forcing them to accept the aircraft as-is.

I wouldn't be surprised to see most of the board removed and some serious criminal investigations into how deep the rabbithole goes - because without that happening, the entire rotten state of the US regulatory structure is called into question. It's not just the FAA, as anyone observing the telco or automotive arenas knows and the the USA is no longer THE dominant world economy able to throw its weight around anymore, despite (like the UK) dreams of past grandeur (see US automotive manufacturers crying "foul" because rest-of-world won't accept LHD(USA) standard cars and demands they be LHD/RHD(UN) spec, whilst USA only accepts LHD(USA) spec for the local market - there are more forms of protectionism than just tariffs and they can make your local makers just as uncompetitive as tariffs do)

Starliner: Boeing, Boeing... it's back! Borked capsule makes a successful return to Earth

Alan Brown Silver badge

Exactly this.

There is NO WAY WHATSOEVER that NASA would have put a payload on a similar SpaceX test launch - or let it anywhere near ISS on the first flight.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Chilton also called out how pristine the capsule looked

"I get the sense they prefer Boeing to SpaceX"

NASA (and US military) administrators form cushy relationships with contractors and traditionally retire to well-paid jobs in those contractors. This has led to some extremely.... "unhealthy" relationship webs and familial connections (meaning that NASA admins giving jobs to SpaceX are facing the prospect of taking jobs away from members of their own extended family - quite literally)

SpaceX's vertical integration doesn't allow for such things. It's healthy in terms of competition, but the USA has had problems with empire building and corruption for a very long time - meaning there are a lot of glass ceilings and walls to crash through.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Commission was split 50-50 with myself and Bernard the latter complaining this wasn't fair."

I know some bosses who would make that 80:20 in your favour on Bernard's first complaint and 100% to you on the second, as you were the one who went above and beyond to rescue the order.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: well.....

"The nice thing about the russian modules is that they can be manually controlled if something does go wrong."

It was the manual control which WAS what went wrong and nearly killed everyone on MIR when it was tried.

Inertia is unforgiving and judging speed/distance in space is very very hard

Say GDP-aaaR: UK's Information Commissioner pours £275k fine into London pharmacy's teaspoon

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Maybe they thought that just because it isn't on a computer it's not data"

Lots do. I've even had councils make that claim.

Email blackmail brouhaha tears UKIP apart as High Court refuses computer seizure attempt

Alan Brown Silver badge

"no Boris isn't far right, he's right but he's no extremist"

What Boris _is_, is a self-centred Chaos Monkey who's spent the laet 30-odd years spreading lies and fabrications deliberately aimed at stirring up trouble so he can sit back with a bag of popcorn to watch the results. He's openly boasted about doing so on a number of occasions.

He's also a vindictive fucker if anyone gets close to making him accountable for his actions.

Alan Brown Silver badge

He changed his name by deed poll.

It was originally Richard Cranium.

Post Office faces potential criminal probe over Fujitsu IT system's accounting failures

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Good for them & the judge

"A malicious prosecution is simplistically when you take out a lot of spurious cases just to force the target to expend resources defending them."

Post Office steamrollered the SPMs by employing expensive QCs to use the attack mode in court of "We're a large company our computers can't possibly be wrong" to hoodwink judges. They also used threat of prosecution as the FIRST line of attack, to force settlements which cost many victim SPMs pretty much everything they had.

When a judge puts "malicious prosecutions" in writing, he's not adding it as some flippant comment.

This was a deliberate and pernicious policy by Post Office aimed at maximising damage and minimising the chances of SPMs being able to fight back by utterly destroying their reputations and building their own - being able to point to their trail of legal victories being one way of convincing judges in each NEW case that they're bringing solid charges to the table, when they're actually building a house of cards even higher each time.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Worse.

"The Post Office will try and weasel out of this hiding behind Crown Immunity."

That won't go down at all well with the courts.

Post Office might be OWNED by the crown in a convoluted route, but as a private company it doesn't have that immunity and nor do the directors.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Worse.

Several SPMs lost their houses or life savings "making good" on losses that never occurred

Several SPMs ended up being convicted and jailed for fraud on losses that never occurred

Several SPMs comitted suicide due to the stresses of accusations about losses that never occurred

Post Office thought it was going to get away with "just the Settlements" - which were far less than the total cost of litigation and losses for the individuals involved IN THE CASE ALONE - ie, it was effectively going to get out of it and still make an overall profit.

This judgement means that it - and more importantly the management who kept pushing things even when it was clear the computers were wrong - is now facing criminal and substantially higher financial liabilities.

What's likely to come out now is who gave the orders inside the Ministry of Fun (who own Post Office) and that person is likely to find hirself facing an extremely irate set of judges that won't be looking to take prisoners.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Court admin

"although the pay is so bad you'd think that was the case"

And this is the problem right across the entire public service spectrum, resulting in skilled people walking out for the sake of their sanity.

If anyone's seen "Brazil", it's worse than that in many areas.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ooooh first post....

" It's almost as if a Conservative government only cares about Brexit."

They don't even care about that.

Queen Bloris has been telling all and sundry that he has a deal all ready to go after elected - and as predicted promptly dumped "No Deal" back on the table.

1980s Albania here we come.

IT consultant who deleted every account on UK company Jet2's domain cops 5 months in jail

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: He was stupid

"Essentially, some people can't take their booze."

Reading between the lines, pretty much this - the hotel incident appears to have happened when he was tanked up and so did the hacking ones.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ... with a history like that

"The very idea, and a a well proven one, is that people that are able to contribute to society and get self fulfillment"

Only if he stays sober.

Cool 'joke', bro, you could have killed someone: Epilepsy Foundation sics cops on sick flashing-light Twitter trolls

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Client Problem

"If deliberately triggering epileptic fits in others for your own amusement isn't an indication of psychopathy, I don't know what is. "

It's out there with writing fantasy stories about straight bananas, unelected bureaucrats and various xenophopic rants deliberately aimed at pushing emotional hot buttons, passing it off as journalism, getting it published in major newspapers, then sitting back and watching people believe it.

I'm sure the same kind of people use to tweak rat tails in the science labs in order to provoke the animals into fighting each other to the death, simply for shits and giggles.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Client Problem

"Or stick'em in an anechoic chamber, apply strobes and alternate loud bursts of white & pink noise.."

I'd prefer to go for simpler methods. Red hot poker suppositories are highly effective recidivism prophilactic devices amongst repeat offending advertisers. For those who really can't be dissuaded, the ultimate treatment is the gravitationally administered thermite enema.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Or put developers of 90s games into prison."

After the events of a certain 1990s Pokemon episode, where a couple of Japanese TV producers almost DID go to prison, games developers and cartoon producers were _extremely_ careful to stay away from certain flash rates and colour combinations.

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/18/world/tv-cartoon-s-flashes-send-700-japanese-into-seizures.html

This was kind-of known before 1997 (7Hz strobes were known to trigger some people back in the 80s when I was playing with lighting and many pieces of hit had lockouts or warnings to avoid particular ranges of flash frequencies) but became a major study after that event because it was found that a lot of people were set of who previously showed no sensitivity to flashing would get triggered by flashing colours.

And yes, if you setup flashing lights which injure people - even unintentionally, you CAN go to jail in many countries.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: mailing a rabid bat or rattlesnake

Only because nobody ever suggested naming a country "Macedonia"

And now for this evening's space weather report. We've got a hotspot of satellite-wrecking 'killer electrons' in the outer Van Allen belt...

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Born Free - Space Radicals ;-)

"our network was being crashed by solar radiation"

Time to break out the water shielding (aka wet blankets)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Explore at your peril

"That's the works of Lord Asriel and his experimental theology, I'd dare say"

Lord Asriel and his Prime Starfish

Buzz kill: Crook, 73, conned investors into shoveling millions into geek-friendly caffeine-loaded chocs that didn't exist. Now he's in jail

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: I don't get it...

"It would make more sense for Monster or another larger company to buy an established player"

The "trick" is for the startup to run an advertising blitz so it becomes well-known for long enough that Monster buys it for the brand recognition just as the bills come due.

It's been done on several occasions.

Deadly 737 Max jets no longer a Boeing concern – for now: Production suspended after biz runs out of parking space

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Is it a good idea ...?

"redesigning a taller undercarriage to accommodate the new, bigger engines in their proper place would be awfully expensive as well as adding weight, which reduces payload capacity."

Not at all. Such an aircraft already existed. It was called the Boeing 757 and works extremely well, as well as having greater payload capacity because it has engines with much BIGGER fans than can possibly fit under a B737's wings and are much more efficient.

The problem was, it isn't a Boeing 737 and pilots need 757 cockpit certification, ground handling crew need 757 certification, service crew need 757 certification, gates need resetting to different heights etc.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"It must be airliner design 101 to have multiple redundancy in all control systems -- but MCAS has no redundancy at all."

It's worse than that.

MCAS uses angle of attack sensors - 2 of them.

Except that it was setup to use a different ONE on each flight - and whilst the flight software could tell that the AOA sensors were giving different readings (even if MCAS was only using one for input), it was an $80,000 option to have this information actually display a warning message (not a dedicated light, just an information message) on the instrumentation LCD - which most airlines didn't bother with as an "option" it's not exactly something that seems essential to a beancounter.

On top of that, if you use 2 sensors on an aircraft, if they disagree all you know is that they disagree, not which one is correct. Critical sensors normally use 3 or another odd number (as with computer clusters, to avoid splitbrains)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "... anti-stall – sorry, plane pedants hate it when we call it that..."

"Indeed, many fighter planes are also unstable."

This is very much the difference. Civil transport aircraft aren't supposed to BE dynamically unstable under any reasonable circumstances(*), let alone need software/hardware to correct it, or special recovery procedures.

The largest 737NG was _ALREADY_ dynamically unstable (ever increasing stall characteristics) and as such should have been the absolute end of the line.

(*) Deep stalling of a T-tail is an extreme condition well beyond any kind of normal flying - on civil transports usually only ever encountered in extreme handling tests.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Rebranding exercise

if you fly Ryanair, you can never be sure, air to be sure.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Rebranding exercise

"Ryanair's undelivered aircraft have been photographed carrying the model name 737-8200 "

Which is the aircraft's technical designation anyway. MAX8 is/was the marketing name.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Rebranding exercise

"I'm sure a responsible regulator like the FAA would be amenable to calling it something completely different to 737, but grandfathering in 737 type approval."

Wouldn't matter. What happened merely allowed the other agencies around the world to say out loud what everyone already knew.

EASA, CAA and CASA are not going to let the FAA mark their own homework anymore (although the Japanese might).

Boeing's scored itself a fine tooth comb inspection of the 737MAX testing procedure and microscopic oversight of the 777X tests which have caused _its_ costs to start ballooning virtually uncontrollably - and that's well before the reinspection of everything related to the 787 gets underway.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"when they got caught with their pants down by the Airbus A320neo?"

Not that they needed to: The Boeing 7J7 was developed and then shelved in 1989 for one very simple reason: It wasn't a 737

Boeing already had it and the 757 able to step into where the 737MAX operates. It was AIRLINES who demanded this aircraft. MCAS was an attempt to ensure it flew like older 737s - avoiding needing a supplemental type certificate. However Boeing utterly screwed the pooch on the software and implementation of the system hardware.

MAXes will fly again - quite possibly with MCAS disabled by regulation in EU airspace - and it's quite likely that pilots will have to have supplementary type certification to fly it - which wipes out every single piece of commercial advantage that Boeing (and airlines) expected to gain from rat rodding the airframe one last time.

NGs already have undesireable handling characteristics near stall meaning pilots have to put the stick forward and and _wait_ until the nose is actually down before throttling up (this goes against every bit of stall training given in other aircraft up to this point). MAXes had it in spades plus excessive throttle-related pitch changes in normal flight - and MCAS was supposed to prevent the latter.

(This is quite apart from the other scandals involving Boeing parts suppliers falsifying documentation for substandard (handmade, well out of spec, not CNC milled) NG parts and Boeing assembly lines beating the shit out of them and the skins to make the things fit, then falsifying _their_ paperwork and painting over the damage before sending them down the line for final assembly. This happened in the late1990s-early00's and the FAA helped Boeing cover it up, including shitting all over the whistleblowers - 3rd generation Boeing employees)

iFixit surgeons dissect Apple's pricey Mac Pro: Industry standard sockets? Repair diagrams? Who are you and what have you done to Apple?

Alan Brown Silver badge

"who the hell needs 700GB of RAM?"

Anyone editing large 4k video files for starters - which is one of the target markets for these machines

Wham, bam, thank you scram button: Now we have to go all MacGyver on the server room

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Pardon?

"I started mentally composing a strong warning against inserting paperclip wire in your ear..."

If you insert it too far, you WILL reset youself to factory presets

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: And this is why...

"For the average Eurolock"

Except the ones which have specfic protection against this - and cost a whole pound extra.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: And this is why...

"Those rack locks are trivial to pick"

Almost all of them only use 3 key patterns. Why use a pick?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not his fault really

"Each one of those datacenters was the source of one of those stories"

EVERY SINGLE DATACENTRE I have had to deal with has been installed with unprotected BRBs

and it usually takes stand up screaming arguments with the beancounters to get that sorted.

(locking them in the server room and pushing the gas discharge button is a last resort but oh so tempting)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Not his fault really

"You are supposed look around and be careful with your protruding body parts while wheeling a trolley"

Lesson one: If it can be whacked by a passing body part or trolley part, it WILL be whacked by a passing body part or trolley part. Plan accordingly.

Lesson two: If whacking said item will cause a claimable injury, then you will get a claim and your insurers will gripe at you. Again - plan accordingly.

Lesson three: Someone will ALWAYS go "what does this button do?" whilst pressing it, unless it is under a protective cover of some sort that can't be broken by simply walking into it (see #1) very clearly labelled what it does, how much pressing it will cost and that there's a camera monitoring it.