Posts by Nigel 11

Re: It could always be worse.

It's one of the recommended ways of getting out of a deeply nested structure in any well-structured programming language. Was the problem with a lousy language that did not allow an all-but-infinite number of distinct user-defined exceptions which can be handled while allowing other exceptions to propagate unchanged? If not, raising exceptions is a perfectly sane thing to do. Often the best.

Cut and paste?

@joeW My thought the same. Cut-and-paste coding where the coder got interrupted halfway through, before the crucial replacement of one of the #img

Lesson to be learned? Maybe "Let the phone ring. If it's important they will call back later".

Re: Hmm the ransom...

That's because Ibuprofen is prescription-only in the USA. Pop down to your USA pharmacy for OTC Naproxen instead. Naproxen is prescription-only in the UK. Care to guess where Ibuprofen and Naproxen were invented?

Re: Hmmm...

Stupid machines indeed. Last generation things. Scrap.

Google Maps seems to be smart enough and well-informed enough to use the current average speed of the traffic rather than any unrealistic estimate. (Turn on "Traffic" display to see in glorious techicolor what it knows). It is also more accurate with its estimated journey times than it has any right to be! Better than some train services I have known.

BTW I drive to work on various back roads where I can do 55-60mph on a fine day. The average is quite a lot lower because you have to slow down to 30 through the villages and 15 at some bends. One section is a main road with a 50mph limit. I don't know why. 95% of drivers on that road do 60-65mph anyway. If you insist on 50 cars will overtake you and you'll soon have an HGV driving two feet behind you. Wonder if Google maps routes using average traffic speeds or legal maximum traffic speeds?

Google Maps

with a downside: they funnel everybody onto the same congested route.

Not if you are navigating using Google maps on your Android.

I recently got taken on a tour of Coventry suburbia by my phone. I did wonder what it was up to until I re-emerged onto the main road about fifty yards past a major accident.

On the minus side it introduces other people to various unclassified Northamptonshire roads which I'd far rather remained known only to myself and the locals. So please ignore your phone. Has it warned you about the potholes? They eat tyres out here, you know.

Re: looks much cheaper

This is the Audi-VW-SEAT-Skoda model

More like the Maserati model. Looks great, goes great on a track, but does it survive much contact with the real world of speed humps and tyre-sized potholes and multi-storey car park spiral ramps?

Re: History repeats itself

Resonance is pretty well understood these days and yet people getting into lockstep could shake a modern bridge.

Except that the form of the resonance was different and new. It was well-known that people marching in lock-step might excite vertical resonances in a bridge. The millennium bridge was proof against that. What was not known was that a horizontal mode of vibration could cause people's gait to synchronize into a side-to-side pattern that further excited that particular mode of vibration. Which is what happened. Incidentally, subsequent modelling showed that the bridge could not realistically be excited to destruction. It was just bloody disconcerting for the pedestrians using it (and since that was not at the time understood, they played safe and completely closed the bridge).

It was not an inexcusable cock-up. It was a new discovery for bridge engineers. Any new design always has the potential to bite back. Pre-construction simulations are only as good as their inputs, and in this case the input model of human beings was wrong.

Re: It's gonna be difficult...

Laws do not protect you from law breakers

Depends on what sort of laws.

Laws that criminalize (say) ignoring safety and financial regulations will work, if the penalty is stiff enough. Nobody in VW would have authorized the cheat devices if the penalty once discovered was certain to be jail time. Bankers would probably not have created the recent financial crisis, if the penalty would have involved sequestration of all personal wealth howsoever acquired on top of certain jail time. They saw it as "heads I win, tails you lose" and in many cases they were not actually breaking the then-existing law, just working in dark grey zones of arguable legality but total amorality.

And of course, laws and regulations that impose safety or financial regulations are in general followed by the law-abiding majority, at least if people can see that there is a modicum of sense behind them. So company accounts are audited, electrical products and cars are rarely unsafe, food no longer contains untested and undisclosed additives.

In case you are bristling about unwarranted regulations, there needs to be a mechanism for striking down regulations that have outlived their usefulness (and a lot of EU nonsense that had no useful purpose in the first place. In what way will reducing the maximum power of a kettle save energy? The amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of a litre of water from A to B is a physical constant. Worse, if it takes longer to boil, more energy will leak out of the kettle. Idiots! )

Re: "The problem is in the design..."

Have you any idea how dangerous ebola is?

And before that, SARS. The world has had two narrow escapes from global pandemic. Both diseases were insufficiently infectious to continue spreading once people were sufficiently informed and convinced to change their behaviour. In Africa, abandoning funeral and other rituals that might have been designed to spread Ebola. In Asia (SARS) avoiding body contact where unnecessary and wearing facemasks.

When the next killer flu arrives, we won't be so lucky. Hundreds of millions will die, if medical science hasn't come up with an effective anti-viral or a fast way to make a vaccine by then.

we are due for another Carrington event and if it seriously screwed up 1860ish technology it will screw us over like no rogue nation can.

Wrong.

The threat is that a Carrington event induces what is effectively a high-power DC signal in transmission lines. It's worst for long ones, over 100km, with low impedance.

Back then data-transmission used copper wire and DC coupling to make a telegraph. The wires glowed erd-hot and shocked the operators and in places burned out. Today, long-distance datacomms is optical fibre. Telephone wires are rarely if ever long enough to get affected and I don't think a telephone offers a low-impedance path these days. Things have moved on since the days of bakelite boxes with electromechanical ringers.

The greater threat is to the power grid which is intended to carry 50 or 60 Hz AC. The power transformers through which it is coupled cannot cope with high power DC inputs and might burst into flames. Back in the 1950s we were terribly vulnerable(*) because the threat was not well known and there would have neen absolutely no advance warning.

Today, we have satellites watching the sun and so electricity utilities have an early-warning system. (about 15 minutes, but a lot better than nothing). Also the threat is understood and I hope that there are last-resort protection systems in place on the transformers connecting the long grid cables to monitor DC currents and internal temperature, that will disconnect from the grid if necessary to save the transformer.

So the result ought to be somewhere between a controlled shutdown of the national grids, and a cascading power failure caused by automatic protection systems triggering in an unplanned manner. A blackout is no fun, but it has happened several times (for other reasons such as carbonized squirrels) on the USA Eastern seaboard. Civilisation didn't collapse. A few hours to a day later when the event is over, they'll reconnect the grid to the power stations.

Move on a couple more decades, and the long-distance AC electricity grid will start to go the same way as the telegraph. It's more efficient to transmit power as high-voltage DC, and the technology of AC-DC-AC conversion is rapidly falling in cost. What was once impossible, then too expensive to use except on submarine grid links, will soon become the norm for any long-distance grid link. With a DC link, a Carrington event would just either add or subtract a small amount of energy compared to what is being transmitted. There would then no longer be a need to create a short-term blackout to save civilisation.

(*) I'd speculate, not actually on the edge of losing 20th century civilisation. The big transformers would have different times to catastrophic failure. As soon as the first one or two exploded all hell would have broken loose with the AC power they were transmitting, and ordinary AC overload protection systems would have cut in creating a cascade failure blackout but saving enough of the grid for life to go on fairly normally th next day. I'm glad it was never put to the test, though!

Re: Not all security is like that, I'm not

It certainly cannot be to aid security.

I'm not sure. Asking a photographer a few civil questions may mildly annoy him and waste a minute or two of his time, but what they are (or ought to be) looking for is

The photographer who runs away when he spots security coming over, or who hides his camera.

The photographer who tells them obvious lies.

The photographer who makes them think "he's a wrong 'un", which category you may place yourself in, if you get up on some high horse about authority having no right to ask. Which should not carry any adverse consequences, other than that you are making yourself into an extra grain of noise that slightly increases the chance of the bad guys getting lucky.

They have every right to ask. You have every right to refuse to answer. They are not the police and you are not under caution. But in most cases you have no good reason to refuse, so why not give them a totally banal true answer?

Personally, if any security people ask me civil questions about what I am doing I'd answer. If I have a camera that can provide instant replay, I wouldn't rule out showing them the recent photographs, provided they were being civil rather than insulting, and provided they were not claiming that I was breaking any laws or breaking any themselves.

Re: Not all security is like that, I'm not

Is there any actual evidence that bombers/terrorists are stood around taking pictures of buildings they are going to target.

ISTR that the ones who were recently jailed for planning to blow up the Westfield shopping centre did precisely that. I don't know if that interior is accessible via Google, but it's private property so there's no right to take such photographs. Anyway, they didn't get stopped from taking snaps with a mobile phone like millions of other innocent tourists do, and they didn't get identified as suspicious at the time.

Re: Apparently Security Guards have no rights and could be guilty of assault.

and as a result they can’t obstruct you from taking pictures if you’re standing on public land,

Actually if they do it by standing in front of you about a yard away, they probably can. That's not obstruction in the legal sense. That's just them exercising their right to walk on public land -- the same right you are exercising. You've got a right to take photographs but no exclusive right to the view.

Re: The best way to get their backs up?

You're displaying the fact that you have more to spend on your hobby than they earn in a month (or possibly in a year) so they hate you for it. And because they've got a uniform, and possibly because nobody has ever told them anything about the relevant laws they are supposed to be upholding, they decide to throw their weight about.

Such is life.

Or maybe, they are just trying to do their job to the best of their sadly limited intelligence and imperfect training.

There's no law against anyone asking you a question, even if it's of the general form of "have you stopped beating your wife yet"?

What happened next?

Re: Both sides didnt help

You can't have privacy in a public place, or on private property that can be seen from a public place without artificial aids. As the old ditty goes, "Don't make love by the garden gate. Love is blind, but the neighbours ain't". Which is actually good legal advice.

As was observed above, the answer for the inside of a private dwelling is ... draw the curtains. Outside ... well, assume someone might be watching, and don't do anything illegal or anything that would embarass you.

Re: guard

There really should be an offence of "gross stupidity in public office",

And the penalty should be a day in the village stocks. (Im the case of MPs there's a convenient green space just outside the houses of parliament).

Re: In Italy, you should not take photos of railroads and stations...

why aren't those regulations null and void?

It might be fun to take that all the way to the EU courts (if you have nothing better to do with your time).

What's the penalty? A 1000 lire fine? Or summary execution?

Little Hitlers

I think that's the more appropriate term.

DPA them?

It may also be worth a tenner to fire off a Data Protection Act request to the Port of Tyne, requesting all data concerning yourself acquired since the date of the event (explicitly referencing CCTV imagery) They'll probably deny that there is any, and hopefully they'll later prove themselves to be lying. Or you can go back and photograph their cameras and ask why they were not working, because faulty security cameras really do help terrorists!

Re: In Italy, you should not take photos of railroads and stations...

That said, in such cases is always better to make your intentions explicit in advance.

Alternatively take a friend with a camera with a telephoto lens and tell him to film you filming them. At least in this country you don't have to worry about being shot dead for having the wrong colour skin or haircut in a public place, so you can take the idiots down a few notches if you want to.

Add libel. They must have made an untrue statement to Twitter, alleging that the tweets were illegal, resulting in his account being suspended.

Re: Been there, done that.

Now PCs are generally so quiet that the slightest change in noise level and the user is on the phone complaining about the "loud whirring noise".

Have some genuine no-moving-parts PCs with a fanless J1900 motherboard and an SSD. Offer the user one of these to try, unless you know that his workload precludes anything less than a high-end i5 (video editing, high-end CAD, number crunching ...)

If that's his dream PC, you'll be his hero (and it's almost certainly also a cheaper PC than the one you swapped out, and a helluva lot more reliable). If it's too slow, at least you tried, and can explain that what he wants is beyond today's technology.

Re: Cheating ...

I've often wondered if one could create a single big fat cable (bundle) to carry, say 2 x USB3, 4 x USB2, 2 x 1Gb/s Ethernet, 2 x HDMI and just run it down from, say, the attic in a single piece of trunking. Is it even physically possible?

Maybe. Ethernet and HDMI no problem. USB maximum cable length is 3m(*). So it depends on the height of your ceiling. All is not lost if you need 6m. You just need to invest in USB{2,3} hubs and accept a cable bundle that looks like a satiated egg-eating snake.

(*) Unofficially, 5m may work, but its not tested or supported that long and reputable suppliers won't sell a single cable that long. I have also heard of 3m "extension cables" that have a one-to-one hub/signal booster moulded into the socket end.