Posts by Peter2

Re: 3.

The "under instruction from the government" part is an interesting issue.

"The Government" meaning a dozen ministers are therefore responsible for all of the civil servants. Figuring out how many there are is an interesting exercise. This site says Public sector employment totalled 5,442 thousand in September 2016. Which appears to be an appropriately Yes Ministery way of saying 5.4 million.

How much control do you suppose a cabinet of a dozen people has over 5.4 million people?

My personal take on it is "probably not enough".

Yeah, but what's happening with Grenfell is rather obvious.

The fire service relied (and rely) on buildings being built to the fire code for their advice and procedures to be valid. Ergo, the problem is in approximate order:-

1) The people who clad the building in flammable plastic.

2) The people who demanded that be done instead of a safer alternative.

3) The system that allowed it to be done.

The system is allowed it to be done is devised and run by the civil service, and the people who demanded that it be done work for the civil service. The civil service are largely running the inquiry and always appear to protect their own. Therefore, neither 2 or 3 are likely to get blame attributed to them, which leaves the available option as being 1. If taken to court and the entire blame is put on 1, they will reasonably point out the role of 2 & 3 and they would be drawn in. Ergo, 1 has to be protected to protect 2 & 3 and so nothing happens.

Yes, my political education comes from "Yes Minister". Assuming things work something along the lines of how the civil service is depicted there though tends to be more accurate than assuming that they work as they are actually supposed to though!

While i'm completely onboard with criminal prosecutions for people who knowing persecuted people who were innocent, presumably there needs to be some investigation into who knew what before criminal charges can be brought because at the moment nobody really knows who should be prosecuted?

And yeah, the F-35 is an amazing aircraft in terms of what it can do, but to shoehorn it into every bloody role on the planet, is just hurting its' own cause.

The problem is that if you pick any one of those roles that the F35 can perform then existing specialised aircraft already performs them better. The F22 is better at long range stuff, as is the Eurofighter with a solid state radar upgrade and the new Meteor missile has twice the range. It gets destroyed in dogfighting by literally everything.

ground attack? eurofighter is better from a europeon pov (carries a heck of a lot more) and the A10 is better from a US perspective.

It's a rerun of the situation in the 1970's. If you read Colonel Burton's memiors from the Pentagon Wars (the book is better than the film, although the film is funny given it's a comedy) then there was a fighter program that was supposed to replace everything which ended up so expensive and loaded with hardware for every role that it was crap at all of them, and ended up being replaced by the existing set of aircraft.

The F35 is just a more modern example. The main difference of which is that it's actually made it to the production stage. The crap performance and insane price is about right though.

Re: Missiles are drones

Nope. War isn't a tom cruise movie.

When air support no longer exists, if your driving along the ground in a tank/APC then your a more than a little vulnerable.

A single Eurofighter pops up over the horizon, and tosses eighteen Brimstone missiles in their fire and forget mode in a single ripple volley and then legs it. Ten seconds later a tank battalion, it's anti aircraft guns and half a dozen APC's lie burning from a single aircraft, even if your S400 shoots it down when it's on the way back home.

More or less the same thing can be done with attack helicopters, which are designed to barely show themselves over a hill. However, if you have a big airborne radar looking down on the battlefield (even from a distance) then this is a quick form of suicide for the helicopters crews because the helicopter meets a missile from a fighter jet before getting close to it's target.

Simply there is a hierarchy.

Infantry control the ground.

Tanks/artillery wipe out infantry at long ranges. (but are vulnerable to infantry in prepared positions or ambushes)

Helicopters wipe out tanks.

Fighter aircraft wipe out helicopters.

Miss one of these and all the others eat you alive.

Re: Missiles are drones

And if you are just talking about being able to assemble a wave of them and steer them towards the incoming enemy, I can't actually see why nobody has done this yet?

This thinking makes a number of assumptions, which is that everybodies military is roughly equal.

It's not. Basically, western nations control the sky already with fighter aircraft, whereas Russia/China tend to be more interested in mind boggling numbers of tanks etc to steamroller the (land) opposition in an offensive, but have relatively limited air to air capability and make up the difference with prodigious numbers of anti aircraft guns and long range SAM's.

Therefore, our existing forces are already sufficient that the existing arguments even by our adversaries is over if we can have total air supremacy or if we can just have air superiority. Hence, we aren't that bothered about doing it, Russia would probably do it if they could afford to do it, and while China could afford to do it they are mostly interested in keeping us at a distance greater than the combat radius of our aircraft.

Re: Still fighting WW2

In a real full scale war (WW3) then "kill anything flying" is acceptable with long range missiles without visual verification that it's a hostile aircraft.

Otherwise, it tends to cause problems. For instance MH370 which Russia shot down and has caused them severe diplomatic and public relations problems.

Other near misses go back to the Falklands, where the Argentinian navy had been flying recon missions against the british fleet in Boeing 707's. The Royal Navy had gotten fed up with this, and told the Argentinian's that next time they'd be shot on sight.

Shortly afterwards, an airliner then flew directly over the formation and came close to being shot down, only for the admiral commanding to ask a staffer to get a map and draw it's course and guess the origin and destination. At which point they decided it might be an airliner, and sent up a couple of harriers to have a look and decided that actually, they didn't really want to shoot it down.

Hence, visual confirmation tends to be required before shooting something to bits is authorised, which involves getting close to something that perhaps doesn't want to be shot down, which can result in dogfighting. At least until somebody makes something like a B52 an air superiority fighter with a ton of long range missiles and a couple of tomahawk sized drones for checking out if it's ok to kill something at long range before tossing a Meteor/AMRAAM at it.

Re: He isn't all bad.

Never complain about downvotes. Unless your pointing out something constructive that people are wrong about it's just waving a red rag at a bull.

Re: If Only...

Not using NAT doesn't constitute a change to whether or not people can connect.

Gamers and people using VOIP aren't connecting to internal servers at the moment, and they are playing and phoning from behind IPv4 NAT's now, which sort of undermines that point?

Re: If Only...

Raw IPv4 has no such provision, but if the laggards are happy to paddle in lagoons behind a NAT (and to judge from this forum, they actually see that as a feature)

Do we see it being very difficult being able to access internal servers on the internet a feature? Hell yes.

Who wants their internal servers accessible to the internet? Hackers. And possibly GCHQ/NSA.

Otherwise, many of us go to a great deal of trouble and expense ensuring that our internal networks are as close to being impossible to connect to from the internet as is humanly possible. Changing this is not something many of us find particularly desirable.

So based on learning it from "random web pages" you'd be willing to tick the IPv6 box?

If there is a security compromise as a result, your company probably goes out of business due to GDPR fines. You personally lose your job, and almost certainly never work in IT again. Are you that sure? Few people are.

The risks are huge, the rewards are zero. Hence, nobody ticks that box.

... Why not?

There are 254 usable addresses per octet, so my math is running at 254*254*254*254 gives you the ip v4 address space (0 & 255 being unusable, obviously) which gives you 4.2 billion addresses, minus the ~600k reserved addresses.

254*254*254*254*254*254 = two hundred sixty-eight trillion five hundred thirty-five billion addresses.

Think about that for a moment. 268.535 trillion addresses. That .535 trillion? That's five hundred and thirty five billion addresses. IPv4 has 4 billion. The existing IP space would sink into this scheme without leaving a ripple.

A new top level block would be 1,057,227,821,024 addresses under this scheme. That's one trillion, fifty seven billion each. You could literally reserve a top level block to contain IPv4 (which would waste one trillion, 53 billion addresses), allocate the 192 countries in the world a block each and still have 61 blocks that size left spare.

Even China which has a population of a billion and a half would still have seventy addresses per person in it's address block. How is this not enough? How many do you think are needed?

Re: What has it got in its pocketses?

I'm clairvoyant, and can see exactly the discussion that took place.

Engineer: hey boss, here's the list of things required to do IPv6

Boss: Hang on a moment, you want to replace EVERY SINGLE BIT of our hardware, and then send practically every single member of our staff who has anything to do with networking off on long and complex training courses?

Engineer: That's what would be required to roll out IPv6.

Boss: Do you have any idea how much that's going to cost for zero actual benefit to us?

Engineer: Quite a lot.

Boss: Quite a lot hardly begins to cover it. Do you think this is a good idea yourself?

Engineer: Personally i'm happier with IPv4 because I understand it. I'm told that i'll become a rabid fanatic after going on the training course though, and we really all ought to go on new security courses as well as everything becomes directly addressable on the internet with IPv6 which has major security concerns.

Boss: **** this, we're sticking with IPv4.

Engineer: Fine with me.

Actually, i'm not clairvoyant. I just know that's exactly the sort of discussion that's happened hundreds of thousands of times across the country because -nobody- wants IPv6 for any reason beyond address exhaustion so it's not getting rolled out.

Re: The bigger issue is rising Chinese power

Corbyn lost seats held not only held since WW2 but since the formation of the Labour party.

What happened is that Labour has two different support bases. One is the upper middle class city types, and the other is the labour, as in working class types. The metropolitan upper middle class minority pushed a candidate that pushed middle upper class policies which weren't attractive to the working classes and which went against working class cultural values, and the working classes for the first time since the labour party was formed said "these people aren't representing me" and walked. There are no longer any safe Labour working class seats.

Since the conservatives decided to adopt more working class friendly policies to attract their new voters, how safe their middle class seats are is now in some doubt.

I don't think there are any safe seats.

Re: Fun fact

The fact Trump is regularly contradicted by civil servants (albeit quietly) and his own intelligence services gives me hope that once he's out of office, things will improve.

My personal concern is that it's fashionable to hold a view that once Trump is gone all of the problems that caused him to be elected are going to magically vanish.

There is no reason to assume that this is the case, and I would suggest that if the causes of Trump being elected aren't dealt with then it will lead to somebody being elected who makes him look like an idealistic boy scout.

Re: The bigger issue is rising Chinese power

999 year lease on Hong Kong IIRC. However, the "New Territories" had so much critical infrastructure on that keeping one without the other would have been unfeasible.

Re: Never understood this

Which makes perfect sense.

If the sensor goes faulty then you can then replace the sensor, instead of the entire fridge.

Also with 1, remember that the monarch owns certain businesses. The income of those (the crown estate) is paid into the treasury. Out of that, 20% is then paid to the Royal family, which is an 80% rate of taxation and by far the highest rate paid in the UK.

So the monarchy doesn't cost the taxpayer anything. The taxpayer in fact gets paid by the monarchy.

2. Meh, creating something better than the current half millennia old mess can't be difficult and creating a range of options and then putting them to a referendum would be perfectly feasible.

Re: We dont need .eu !!! :)

This is where it gets interesting.

In negotiations between the EU and the USA they both have huge ranges of interests involved. For instance, the Germans want BMW/Volvo/ETC excluded from competition from cars imported from America, France wants food standards set to exclude pretty much anything coming in, but want to be able to send champagne out. Multiply this by the number of countries involved and you start to see the issues.

Our last car manufacturing concern on any notable scale was Rover, which went out of business fifteen years ago. Hence, no really great reason to protect our car industry. We don't need to do a deal for exporting champagne because we don't make any.

The number of areas we do care about is so small that while we don't have the leverage of scale, we also don't have as many vested interests to placate so in some respects we have an easier job.

It is.

He also said in the house of commons that "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

The full title is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland.

If (Northern) Ireland leaves the union then we go back to being Great Britain, which in practical terms means that we lose the red X in the flag and use the flag of Great Britain again. If Scotland left the union of Great Britain afterwards then we'd just be England.

And if the English people then decide to get rid of Queenie thanks to her resolute failure to do anything to protect her subjects from her ministers, then it's even less appropriate.

Sure. Let's have a vote on it with a simple question.

Do you wish to:-

1) Abolish the Monarchy.

2) Abolish Parliament.

The dissolution of whichever has totally lost the public confidence to be carried out by the other, along with devising a suitable replacement. I'd be perfectly happy with this. The only people who wouldn't be happy with this are those people who talk a lot about what the public want, but don't want to ask them because they know full well that one of the above would get eliminated by a landslide, and it's not the one they'd want.

I know that your doing a bad attempt at trolling, but as the .uk domains aren't restricted to people living in the UK so that wouldn't be an issue if a member state of the UK left the union.

The British government also doesn't have the authority to tell Nominet to cancel the registrations of all scottish domains, and if they were told to do it unlawfully I can see Nominet politely declining.

I'd suggest that it's considerably more daft, actually.

It's now an established thing that you should account for in planning which domain name to use. So if you live in a country that might conceivably leave the EU in the next twenty years then your going to want to ensure that your using a national domain name that you know dammed well is going to keep working.

That would suggest that you shouldn't use a .eu domain in any country that has any serious movement with any public support to leave the EU. And um, that's not just Britain.

Re: Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

In which case at 16 persons per pod Hyperloop expects to do 52.5 journeys per hour, requiring a turnaround time of ~50 seconds per pod. Opinions as to the feasibility of that may differ.

Re: Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

As far as I know Hyperloop was not considered. Even though construction has already begun, one would think that this option should be on the table.

Oh, i'm sure it was considered. For about five minutes.

On a trainline, you have a limited number of trains on track split into segments. A single train carriage has capacity for 76, and a train typically tows 16 of them. Therefore, a single train fully loaded with people seated (and nobody standing) would shift 1216 people. Assuming that you can unload people in 20 minutes and then send it back the other way then that's 3 per hour, so 1216 * 3 = 3648 per hour. You can leverage far greater numbers along the infrastructure by having lots of different platforms so the throughput can be a lot higher with multiple trains unloading.

Hyperloop is currently vapourware, but the sketch that does exist is a single pod per track with 16 people in it. Assuming that you can get everybody out of one and then send it back in 5 minutes (probably optimistic, but thought exercise) then that's 12 hyperloops per hour. 16 * 12 = 192 people shifted per hour and the design at the moment doesn't allow for different platforms or stops en-route.

Think of it like Concorde. Technically cool, but commercially destroyed by slower transport that carries large number of people slowly.

Re: Open-source nuclear warplanes

As somebody doing reenactment, 3D printing in the manufacturing technology of now.

It's just that you don't 3D print metal.

Here and now, you 3D print wax. Then you take it to a nice man who buries the wax in sand and leaves a couple of holes, then melts out the wax. Then you pour in molten metal, and after it's cooled and the extra bits are cut off then you have an identical replica of the original in the metal of your choice.

Re: I wonder

Mmm.

A drone won't carry a nuke halfway across a planet. An ICBM might, but then it'd run the risk of being shot down by Anti Ballistic Missile defenses. This is not a theoretical point, The USA has deployed their own ABM system, other nations have bought or developed their own (ie Israel), South Korea, China and Russia have deployed systems.

Hence there is a risk that ICBM's may not work, and therefore there is a rise in interest in cruise missiles and bombers to maintain the balance of terror.

Not really.

Imagine that back in the times that the prevailing weapon combination was the sword and shield that somebody had suggested that because their military was only a defense force they'd only equip them with shields and armour, but weren't equipping them with swords or javelins because those were offensive weapons. Yes, it would have been obviously stupid, but let's consider why.

The meaning behind the saying "the best form of defense is attack" that the mere possibility of attack forces the opponent to dedicate significant attention to fortifications (in ancient times castles and strongholds, in more modern times radar installations etc) and then troops to garrison these facilities against attack, even if they are attacking you. Having to guard against an attack means that only a fraction of the total possible force can in actual practice actually be deployed to an attack.

If your potential opponents know that your troops couldn't hurt theirs then it'd mean that they would reduce the amount spent on fortifications (why bother?) it'd also reduce the amount spent on good armour (well, if they don't have swords then leather armour is going to be just as effective as metal armour, if you bother armoring your troops at all) and you'd make more swords, maces, spears and then hire more people for your military with the savings. And you can just buy ladders to swarm up the walls of the opponents fortifications, since your not going to have to worry about javelins getting thrown at your attackers and therefore you won't need siege artillery with longer ranges than their personal infantry weapons.

On a more political level of choosing to go to war, you know that your not going to get counter attacked, and that nobody is going to go around burning your farms, warehouses and industry so the risks to the politicians getting kicked out of power (either by being voted out, or strung up by an outraged mob) are relatively lower than an opponent that might hit back. The chances of going to war therefore rise.

In modern terms, flapping about stealth bombers means that your opponent spends more on fixed defences such as radar installations, bomb proofing things in case the bomber gets through and then building spare installations in case one gets blown up.

Re: I get that the cameras may not have picked out the truck...

No, but we do have two visual receivers and very, very good software with neural learning that gives good depth perception on the fly and then automatically gives approximate distances from objects.

People with damaged equipment that doesn't support depth perception are simply banned from driving in most countries.

Re: It is autopilot but not autonomous

3. Standing on the brakes turns off cruise control in most cars. Since the human braked, did that turn autopilot off? If so then technically if one were so inclined then this could be omitted from the list of autopilot accidents since the accident occurred while the human was in control. Technically.

Of course, that'd be absurd, but that's why the saying is "lies, damn lies and statistics" and frankly, I wouldn't trust a marketing department not to do it.

When the car is driving, after a while your going to start trusting it and get complacent and pay less attention to the road. In previous incidents this has included watching DVD's, or climbing into the passenger seat while the car is driving.

The problem comes when the car does something so absurdly stupid that a human is frozen thinking "what the hell" before getting to the "I need to take control, I need to stop, slam foot down on brakes". That takes time, and when the car is moving at 70mph you don't have it. 70MPH is ~30 metres per second. If you spot the problem 200 metres away, you have ~6.6 seconds before impact. Since it takes 75 meters to decelerate to a stop from 70mph you have a hair over three seconds to realise that the car is going to kill you, and go for the brakes.

It takes one second for an average driver paying attention to notice a problem and hit the brakes. If your expecting the car to react because it's driving, by the time it hasn't reacted as you expected and you realise you need to take control, in most cases it's already going to be too late.

This is well demonstrated in the video, at six seconds you can notice that the Tesla is alongside a car under human control. Note the differences. The car in the lane next to him under human control notices the problem, checks his surroundings and then moves over a lane and considerately slows down to allow the Tesla driver to pull in front of him.

He finishes doing this at point the Tesla driver realises he needs to take control, a second later smoke comes from the Tesla brakes as the driver picks the simplest route and slams on the brakes as he doesn't have time to evaluate all possible courses of action (which even at this point include switching lanes, but he doesn't have enough time to consider this, check his surroundings and discover that the surrounding traffic has left him room to escape) Hence, brakes applied. Too little, too late. He hits.

The human driver drives past the "AI" created crash 4 seconds later having slowed down rather more considerably than the Tesla simply to allow it maneuver room to escape.

One can point to accident rates, however these will rise as more self driving cars end up on the road and run into conditions like this. It also ignores that the majority of accidents at the moment are had by inexperienced and arrogant drivers, mostly within their first few years of driving when racing on the public roads and then discovering a tree or ditch. I would suggest though that even if self driving cars did away with boy racers, it would simply distribute the fatalities more widely through accidents like this that a 16 year old learner wouldn't have committed. :/

I'm quite happy with adopting some of the useful technology like automatic braking (which has the possibility of all but eliminating the most common UK accident, the rear end shunt in traffic) but personally, I'd be happier driving myself.

Re: So, the country that created the Marketplace for Ideas

The UK Libel laws exist for a reason. The reason is that the only way of dealing with the period equivalent of a twitter hate mob spreading nasty rumors was to publicly challenge the person responsible to a duel. If the person refused, they would be forever branded a coward in polite society and would cease to be welcome pretty much anywhere.

If they came along to a duel then the protocol was not shooting both at the same time, but the aggrieved party would shoot first, the offender would accept this and then take his shot if he was still alive. The idea is not to shoot somebody with a ~.75 caliber pistol ball at 12 paces, but to persuade the person that actually apologising and desisting from upsetting the other person would be a jolly good idea. If they did apologise, that was the end of the duel.

Dueling was thoroughly illegal even at the time; it was just effectively the only option going to protect your reputation. Hence, the libel laws penalties were upped to the point that you could legally destroy somebody to provide an alternative to a pistol ball. However, equally the aim remained not to destroy somebody but to persuade the person that apologising, admitting that their claims were without actual foundation and they'd made their claims and stopping was their best option. And if they came to that conclusion before even upsetting the person, so much the better.

Hence, you'll note that if you publicly apologise and admit that your claims were baseless in the UK that's a bar against legal action being taken against you. You only end up in trouble if you double down on your baseless claims.