Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
This is because if you tell people stuff, they will start knowing stuff.
And they might not like you as a result.
But then, maybe it's because you do things they don't like?
Given how much stuff the UKG does that quite a lot of people would not like it's not really surprising they don't like being honest about this.
That does not mean they shouldn't be honest about it.
I knooow.
It's an almighty PITA to do a full restore, endless trouble, planning, review, blah blah.
So much easier to hope it's all right and hope you never need it.
But, y'know, fail to plan or plan to fail.
Because when the s**t hits the fan PHB's love to point fingers and end careers. It makes them feel better. It's not fair, but it is what they do.
So you never have to code to detect and process such things.
Who knew?
I've never used slack but I'd say the coding some kind of "watchdog timer" into the process that tells someone/process "bot has been running X mins/hours/secs which is Y mins/hours/secs longer than it normally takes. Continue waiting (Y) or run recovery plan (N)"
Obviously setting (and changing it when the bot functions change) the timer number, and deciding what the recovery plan is are the big PITA's of this, but at least you know something is wrong to begin with.
Actually a big part of the original plan for Pegasus was to avoid range costs.
You have to book a launch range in advance. It's not cheap and the costs don't scale on size. So Rocket Labs would pay about the same to launch 250Kg on their Electron LV as SX would pay to launch 22800 Kg on F9, which is why RL run their own launch range in NZ. Something others might follow.
Likewise running the "Flight Termination System" as special software on a separate computer on the LV (rather than have a "Range Safety Officer" follow the launch and press a BRB if it fails also saves about 100 staff (and their associated costs).
But Pegasus is still the most expensive LV in terms of $/lb to orbit on the planet.
That was the striking thing about the web.
Start a site for peanuts.
Could run for years on peanuts (if five people are interested in what you supply)
But could blow up 1000x by the end of the week.
This phenomena has been observed at least since the late 90's.
Correct.
As old Vladimir Illych like to observe "Push in the bayonet. If it meets fat, push harder."
And note the implied "F**k you, Committee, who do you think you are? You're just the people's elected representatives, we're the Home Office and the Department of Health" in those letters.
So, once again the Home Office can't do it's job and expects someone else to wipe its mess up.
True.
And they don't like the answers when someone does and disagrees with them.
The UK has a very well developed infrastructure for distributing liquid fuels. They are easy and quick to load.
Seems like a pretty f**king big hint to me that something along those lines (that's easy to make, or better yet, extract) would be the way to go.
Apparently not judging by the down votes I've had.
That's what, 4 UK General Elections away? Does anyone think May will actually get elected to a second term?
What's your real end goal here?
De-couple car use from the pollution generation of the power station?
Go carbon neutral for climate change?
Build more nuclear reactors?
Going electric means building a shed load of power generation and distribution infrastructure that simply does not exist, along with the standards to support them.
IMHO any replacement has to be as easy to refuel and as energy dense as gasoline. My instinct says this is a liquid fuel driving a fuel cell using the existing supply chain. It's grown from something, so the processing is as as simple as possible IE it has minimal additional energy inputs. My candidate is sugar beet. It grows in the UK, conversion is well understood and it can be grown organically, so no additional inputs. Unfortunately sugar based fuel cell development is behind other kinds despite the fact that sugar solutions are room temperature storable and non inflammable.
Since when have these guys ever needed an order to do anything?
They didn't when they decided to hoover up every Americans electronic data since (at least) 9/11/01
Of course they could start by hardening the security on those ridiculously easy to hack "election machines" the US insists on using..
They will be quite inclined to pull the plug at the drop of a hat.
Historically UK banks used to call in a firm of accountants to decide if a firm was viable.
Normally the firm that got that job got the administratorship if they found the company was not viable.
Guess what? A lot of the time they weren't viable and the practice jumped right in, making sure to secure its fees first of course.
However one UK bank then put the administration work out to tender if the accountants reports was unfavourable.
Curiously they had a lot lower rate of insolvency.
Sadly that was RBS.
for his benefactors.
I'd say it's pretty clear who got their bid in early for "sweetness."
The US system allows people with no vetting to assume high levels of administrative authority. In theory this allows the proverbial "good man" to side step climbing the "greasy pole" and go in straight at the top.
But after 300 of this stupid plan being hijacked by various self interested weasels who line their own pockets perhaps "The Greatest Country in the World" (TM, along with other self flattering BS) should perhaps consider a refactoring of the hiring processes into such senior (but un-elected) posts.
"Johnny foreigner" should be doing, whilst admitting they voted for Brexit...
Indeed.
A British recruitment consultant of my acquaintance sent a mixed group of 8 people (some old, some young, some British, some foreign) to a 12 night shift at a bread factory.
At the 6 hr mark 1/2 of them (mostly the younger, fitter, lazier ones) had f**ked off home as it was "too hard."
The way he described them I suspected several of these idiots had voted to leave.
A nice demonstration of the Dunning Kruger effect in action, as they clearly believed they were far too good to do the job, despite no experience or qualifications to actually do anything better.
Shock news.
The UK is not part of the Shengen Agreement.
It always could put anyone going down the Green isle through the ringer if it chose to.
But y'know the UK Home Office didn't think that was cricket, and it would have needed more staff.
Name them, Mr (or Ms) AC.
Because we can plenty of them that have taken place in the US.
The "He's a lone loon" argument is a cop out. Let me suggest it has more to do with the racial and economic profile of who gets shot and whose a member of the NRA than anything.
As demonstrated in one a case of some "copyright is theft" law firm that got run out of business.
A lesson to all who would practice anything that the government de jour dislikes in the "Land of the Free (TM)"
Back from the days whent eh list was Windows/AppleOS/OS2/*nix
And with pretty much the same strengths and weaknesses.
As usual I'll be there are options to slim down the footprint, possibly by sharing core functions across multiple apps, so the first is 350MB+, but the rest are radically smaller, as they piggy back the first load.
And people know it is as well.
I'm guessing the usual user justification is roughly
a) It's no big deal, IT can handle any breaches.
b) I don't handle any important data so why would anyone bother.
c) I don't have many privileges so why would anyone bother.
Note how H&S is handled. H&S is everyone's responsibility, and Managers are additionally responsible for the H&S of the staff they supervise. I'd suggests infosec should be viewed in the same way, starting with the CEO.
Your implicit assumption is I wanted a Referendum in the first place.
I considered it a complete f**king waste of time and effort solely to keep the Conservative Party together and stop defections to UKIP.
On that basis (destroying UKIP as a viable force in UK politics) Brexit has been a resounding success.
The massive level of chaos in the UK economy is a price the Conservative Party considers well worth paying to ensure its own survival.
The old term for a country outside of any major power block is "Non aligned." You might like to see what sort of other countries are "Non aligned."
Which is why SolChem (which was designed to use low cost readily available materials, because it was expected to deploy on a huge scale) used Sodium Chloride.
That's the stuff you sprinkle on your food.
It's true molten salt system must be kept water free, which means a "bake out" in commissioning, then running sealed (in fact in SolChem they planned to sub divide the mass into welded shut re-purposed aerosol cans)
The key difference between solar thermal and solar electric systems is that solar electric (PV) systems operate at or just above the band gap energy. Below that energy photons just heat the PV cell material. Above it just seems to result in higher kinetic electrons.
OTOH solar thermal can use all of the solar spectrum to drive the process, and the reaction products can either be stored or moved on and used elsewhere.
It also is a very convoluted bacryonym.
As well as being very nasty.
The US data fetishists who wrote this (I mean really wrote it, not whose name is on the sponsors list) really do see no limits to their authority in any way shape or form.
The astonishing part is US tech companies see no problem with it.
Despite the fact it might as well be called the "Don't Send Your Data Anywhere Near A US Parented Company If You Want It To Stay Out Of The Hands Of Any Federal Law Officer"
Not at all.
"Compatibility" is basically why people put up with Microsoft's s**t.
I've lost count of the number of times Microsoft has claimed "Our new tablet/phone/watch is compatible with your desktop windows" (going pack to the "poquet PC" days) and turned out to be complete BS. That spreadsheet you wrote. Sorry, not going to run. That Word doc you wrote. Nothing you can't cut n paste from, eh?
If they didn't call it "Windows" WTF would you buy it?
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