Posts by Peter2 2945 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
There is no such thing as a free market pretty much anywhere, because utterly free markets are terrible ideas.
With a totally free, totally unregulated market then you eventually get a single monopoly taking over the sector, and using it's market dominance to buy or bankrupt/marginalise anybody else trying to compete fairly. See Microsoft or Intel.
Free Markets however work beautifully when their worst excesses are prevented and there is lots of competition.
That's what I was told when I was in my teens by the adult staff who'd found it hilarious and I didn't question it then. The floor inside the minibus was a plastic layer though to make cleaning easy and presumably would have had the vehicle frame under it, with the armour plate underneath that, which would prevent easy welding inside.
Perhaps it was story that grew with the retelling, thinking about it with technical knowledge gained since I can see any number of problems that could cause a vehicle.
Not really IT related, but many years ago when I was in the Air Cadets the unit I was part of picked up an (ex forces) minibus from the armed forces scheme for tossing decent ex military equipment to the cadet forces cheaply.
The minibus was a brilliant buy for practically nothing, in excellent condition. The only problem was that it didn't have seatbelts. (This was the late 90's, so not legally required for busses at the time) However, it was thought that it should have them retrofitted given that the minbus would have teenagers in. A local garage who dealt with that make of vehicle was approached, who decided that it'd be an incredibly simple job, just drill holes through the bottom of the vehicle and then bolt the seatbelts on stalks reaching the seats through those holes, which was a standard optional extra kit from the manufacturer.
It was such a simple and easy job that the garage decided that they'd do it free of charge to get some free publicity by getting in the local newspaper by doing a handover to us after they'd done the work.
So, the minibus went in to this garage, a mechanic produced a drill and applied it to the right section of the floor and applied a bit of pressure. The drill sank straight through the floor... and into 2" worth of sucessive layers of the most hardened steel money could buy (harder than the drill bits) followed by layers of Ceramic (Chobham armour?) and Kevlar that the Army had applied to the bottom of the vehicle in case it ran over an anti tank landmine or buried bomb in Northern Ireland. This was apparently not one of optional extra kits the manufacturer supplied for that type of vehicle.
The job was apparently the most difficult fitment of seatbelts ever recorded in the country, requiring 3 drill bits per hole, and about half an hour per seatbelt as they had to push the bolts up from underneath the vehicle and tighten them from the inside, as doing it the other way the bolt heads sank into the Kevlar making it impossible to get the spanner around them... It should also be noted that knocking on the side of the minibus also made the sort of sound you'd expect if hitting the side of a main battle tank rather than a flimsy bit of metal a fraction of a milimetre thick.
So it's not just IT; some jobs are easy looking on the surface, but rather more complicated if you look at them in detail or actually try and do the job.
In Britain, Lawyers are unqualified secretarial types and aren't allowed to appear in court. Solicitors are allowed to appear in court, but Solicitors or Barristers still don't get any say as to which Judge deals with their case unless there is a direct conflict of interest in the case such as the Judge being on the board/owning shares in the company in question, however that is rare, and the Judge would recuse themselves at the point the Judge was picked before it got to court in such a case.
It's rather rare for anybody to try and change the Judge, simply because it always fails unless there is a geniune reason, which leaves the people who tried pulling a fast one with an awkward situation where they still have the Judge they tried to replace dealing with the case, who is likely to have very little patience with any other underhanded tricks that somebody might try to pull.
** Halfway through Egan's evidence, one of the attorneys sitting with him, on the US end of the video link, declared that there had been a problem and asked the High Court, "Can we take a break please?"The court – including the judge – remained dead silent as people on screen began fiddling with the video link from Egan's end. The witness himself got up and wandered off. More techies appeared on screen, one announcing: "I'm sorry, this is being looked at right now." Someone then disconnected the US end of the link, blanking the screens in the courtroom.
"I found the witness most interesting," muttered Mr Justice Hildyard, pointedly studying his fingertips as his courtroom ground to a halt with the witness on the stand walking away without the judge's permission or even involvement. A few lawyers laughed nervously.
So, the American lawyers declared that there was a technical problem with what appears to have been a perfectly working bit of equipment to prematurely terminate questioning from a case in the High Court because the questioning was revealing that witnesses had been coached as to the correct answers to questions they had to give. If that one is pulled much then it's going to mean the end of attendance via video links in court, especially if the witness is coached on how he answers before he gets to give evidence again.
Isin't witness tampering a crime in America?
But is that deliberate or accidential? It's difficult to tell with Microsoft things just stopping working these days. The (lack of) quality of their software has always been a standing joke, but it used to be managable by waiting a couple of years for the service pack release that fixed most major issues, and you could then control their shoddy system breaking patches with the remote admin tools.
Now things just get forcibly broken with a patch released a month or so later when Microsoft feels like it it's well beyond a joke.
Typically, it is a sefety feature, but too many dials kill safety
Seriously?
This is a picture of the 737 Max cockpit.
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MqHQov0yl1I/maxresdefault.jpg
Compare this picture of a Grob 115e cockpit, a light training aircraft used by the RAF to do basic flight training for their pilots at a really, really early stage and for teaching the Air Cadets how to fly.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/06/Cockpit_of_Grob_Tutor_Two_Seat_Training_Aircraft_MOD_45152683.jpg
I might be wrong, but I think that the Tutor's instruments are actually displaying more information to the pilot than the 737 Max is, with less room. The tutor cockpit is also not to overcrowded, or at least I personally didn't have any trouble finding and using things at the tender age of ~14. One assumes that an extra couple of dials wouldn't have been too much for the (hopefully) better trained 737 pilots to deal with.
Whatever good he did in the past (when he released the video of the Reuters journalists being killed by a US helicopter gunship)
And if we are going to be absolutely fair, that journalist decided to embed with the opposition in the hope of getting some combat footage.
The footage in which it shows him being killed clearly shows the group that he was with being armed with AK47's & at least one RPG. The group then only gets strafed by the Apache about 30 seconds after one chap aims and looks to be firing around the corner of a building towards the US troops the Apache is flying top cover for.
So it's not as if the US Military deliberately went aiming at a journalist or did something utterly unjustifiable. He just happened to be 3 meters away from somebody shooting at US forces in a war zone when they shot back.
Because you are implying that the staff (all female) are less capable of doing this than the sole (male) person present despite having literally no idea whatsoever what you are doing. This is firstly grossly unprofessional, and secondly massively sexist given that the only reason for mentioning the sex of the people concerned is implying the inherit superiority of the men concerned over woman, and you then immediately proceed to demonstrate in your next paragraph that you have literally no idea what you are doing, apparently being unaware of both the sexism and irony.
A fairly large percentage of the people reading this site do this sort of thing for a living and find reading your post outright painful, hence the downvotes.
If you have a PXE environment (probably Windows Deployment Services, available free of charge for Server 2003 and upwards) installed and correctly configured then all you need to do is press F11 on each computer, it searches for the PXE environment, downloads a bootstrap program from the PXE server, boots from the network and then asks you which image setup on WDS that you want to install.
The job should be about as simple as doing the setup, walking around the room tapping F11 and then selecting the image required and then going to dinner or the pub and then coming back and renaming the newly imaged PC's to what you wanted rather than the defaults.
Which practically everybody here knows and has done, including quite a lot of woman working in IT.
Gavin Williamson keeps being seen as a threat to Mrs May & Hammond. You can tell when she's particularly scared because stories with highly debatable accuracy get leaked to the newspapers. Hammond has had it in for him since he told the RAF to not accept any more bookings for the Queens Flight from politicians unless they paid for them.
It's the same as when she's scared of Boris, stories like "we've sold the water cannons Boris bought during the London Riots that were legal for use in the UK until the (at the time) home secretary Mrs May decided to ban them after they were bought, making them unusable in the UK" appear in the papers.
Personally, I think that guessing who is doing the smearing of the opposition in the newspaper gives a better indication of how things are going in politics than the purportedly news items that are printed.
The Chinese will have control of Britain's Energy security at Sizewall C and now a good chunk of our national networks, thanks to May's atrocious decisions. She really must hate Britain.
Ok. The Chinese pony up the cash for building a new nuclear reactor to their own design in the UK, mostly because they want their design vetted and signed off in the country that produced the first commercial nuclear power station and that has the strictest nuclear regulation on the face of the planet. If the design gets signed off here then they can get them signed off anywhere, giving them a large potential market with good long term returns on the investment. If they manage the build process without getting ticked off by the regulators for screwing up then it's a major plus point for them building the same plants in other countries to replace coal plants. This is probably attractive if you are in the business building things, and have a planning cycle that is longer than that months reports.
Although they Chinese own it, all of the staff operating it will be British and probably wouldn't obey orders to turn the plant off in times of tensions with China to make a political point. Not that China would be likely to do that anyway, as it would be the kiss of death to any chance of building or operating any infrastructure anywhere else. And consider just for the sake of argument what would happen if they did. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot by preventing themselves from recouping the build costs, and the effect on the UK grid would be trivial.
We'd just get the coal tree burning "biomass" plants that are largely held in reserve fired up, or burn a bit more gas. This sort of thing happens frequently at the moment anyway due to the UK's ~21GW of installed wind turbines producing a very variable 1GW-7GW worth of power.
Letting Huawei run 5g devices on the edge of the network is not particularly risky, as they couldn't decide to do really dodgy stuff like send copies of your phone conversations back to China without sending it through the core network, which they are locked out of.
Whilst it would be lovely to go down the route of banning entire networks and providers that I don't like, my users are a bit insistent that when we get business emails from somebody that happens to have a Yahoo address that we receive them. Especially when it involves them handing us lots of cash.
Mark the sockets? Bah. If your going to that sort of effort go the whole hog and buy a different type of socket entirely.
This is a list of what's available:-
https://www.worldstandards.eu/electricity/plugs-and-sockets/
Pick something rated for your use and stick new sockets around the place spaced appropriately for the cleaners and stick a new plug on the vacuum cleaner.
It kills two problems stone dead. Nobody can plug anything into the cleaners sockets, so the cleaners never have a problem with that again. The cleaners also know that they can't just unplug something to plug their cleaner into, so won't try.
Judges in the UK are famously impartial. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence to back them up, and I am sure that we shall all look forwards to you posting some evidence that the Judge is bent.
Should you actually have any such evidence then this would of course lead to the Judge being prosecuted and jailed for corruption, and the case would be reopened. You don't have any evidence of course, because there is none.
You may be misunderstanding what a Court of Justice exists for, which is to allow for the redress of greviences when the laws of the country are broken. In this case, the law has not been broken in any identifiable manner, the company has suffered no loss and has no legitimate grevience under the laws of England & Wales, but is attempting to demand that the court outlaw the widely known and used term "FTTC" for no other reason than it would benefit their business marketing.
That sort of thing might work in the USA along with other dubious practices that receive much abuse on this pages, but this is not the USA. Given the overwealmingly negative comments about the US courts posted in here, I don't think anybody actually wants to adopt the US court system either.
Frankly I think that the company got off lightly just getting the case kicked out. Judges have previously administered severely expensive judicial kickings to companies without a case that are attempting to use the criminal justice system as a hammer to damage their competitors.
Ok, so the AI won using an interface not available to the humans making information (such as being able to see the entire map) available and artifically restricting the options available to the humans.
I'm not particually impressed. If the AI is being allowed to see the entire map, the humans should be able to as well. Otherwise it's like playing poker with being able to see the opponents cards while they can't see yours; that sort of advantage does make winning somewhat easier!
What is this "international law" they are talking about? More specifics would be helpful; otherwise it sounds like a generic, unsupportable claim.
There's a good reason for that...
The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees contains this:-
Article 32 expulsion 1. The Contracting States shall not expel a refugee lawfully in their territory save on grounds of national security or public order.2. The expulsion of such a refugee shall be only in pursuance of a decision reached in accordance with due process of law. Except where compelling reasons of national security otherwise require, the refugee shall be allowed to submit evidence to clear himself, and to appeal to and be represented for the purpose before competent authority or a person or persons specially designated by the competent authority.
3. The Contracting States shall allow such a refugee a reasonable period within which to seek legal admission into another country. The Contracting States reserve the right to apply during that period such internal measures as they may deem necessary.
Article 33 prohibition of expulsion or return (“refoulement”)
1. No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.
2. The benefit of the present provision may not, however, be claimed by a refugee whom there are reasonable grounds for regarding as a danger to the security of the country in which he is, or who, having been convicted by a final judgment of a particularly serious crime, constitutes a danger to the community of that country.
With refugee defined as "a refugee is a person who is outside that person's own country's territory owing to fear of persecution on protected grounds, including race, caste, nationality, religion, political opinions and participation in any particular social group or social activities. "
Eucador can probably reasonably legitimately claim that Assange is causing them national security problems by upsetting the highest levels of the Spanish government in contravention of agreements he has made:-
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/16/julian-assange-ecuador-spain-catalan-independence-meeting-separatists
Hence, no case to answer. Probably. I suppose you could argue any of those points endlessly, although it would achieve precisely nothing at this point.
The major reason behind buying up every domain extension going was to prevent squatting and lost business through those squatters, which makes perfect sense when you consider that for most businesses the cost of registering the lot is minute; as El Reg notes about $10 per domain per year.
Even if your defensively registering a dozen domains a year, the cost is still pretty trivial compared to the cost of somebody squatting and actually picking up business from you.
I doubt that many people are going to register a domain at $2500 a year. Frankly, the cost of the domains is going to put squatters off of it's own accord without needing to register them defensively.
I see the desire to launch from British soil
I have always thought that Ascension island would be a better launch spot. It's a British Overseas Territory so our soil, it's only a few hundred miles south of the equator which is rather useful as you gain an extra ~1kps from the earths rotation getting to orbit and finally it's something like two thousand miles to both South America and Africa, so a failed launch (ie, rocket exploding in the early flight stage) is unlikely to inconvenience anybody too much.
it won't hang around very long after spinning rust reaches price-parity.
And the HDD won't hang around very long after the SSD reaches price parity. I just suggest that Tape has now survived 40 years beyond it's mass life purpose, and the HDD will probably be with us (albeit it increasingly a niche) for the same sort of time frame.
I'm surprised that any HDD manufacturer is spending any cash on R&D.
Why?
It's obvious that the HDD is going to lose it's market for mid scale (~100GB to ~500GB) as the prices drop for a long time. However, that just means that HDD's get pushed back into a more niche market of larger storage, where they could survive for the foreseeable future due to the financial cost of a large SSD being massively higher than an HDD.
Nobody working at one of these companies wants to lose their jobs, hence they are going to do what they can to keep their jobs. Failure of one of the companies to survive means their market share transfers to their late competition, and cutting R&D first practically ensures that your the first one to die off. The point that R&D stops and you just thrash the remaining equipment is the very last bit of the endgame, which we are nowhere near reaching, i'd say that it's quite possibly several decades away yet.
If your not sure what I mean by that, have a look at the still going tape market. It started in the 1960's, was made pretty much thoroughly obsolete for most purposes by FDD's & HDD's by the 1980's but yet is still going strong for niche applications (ie, backups) in 2019, 40 odd years after pretty much everybody would have considered it "dead".
I don't play it either, but if the purchasable items were purely aesthetic then most people wouldn't bother. A quick look shows "Exclusive Legendary Heroes" and "Exclusive Legendary Weapons" for sale and I have great doubts that those are purely cosmetic.
Well, games have always designed to a reasonable extent to be fun and relatively easy to get into to maximise their market and get recommendations via word of mouth. That part is not a problem, and I don't think anybody serious (beyond a handful of cranks) has ever seriously argued that it was more dangerous than say, sitting in front of a TV/Radio/Gramophone.
Older games were a case of pay once, and that's it. Then when MMO's came along that needed central infrastructure they switched to a monthly/yearly subscription. Still fair enough.
The problem comes with a new business model; give the game away, but introduce "power ups", that give you a substantial advantage over somebody that doesn't have them (aka pay to win), which practically requires everybody to buy these power ups to get a level playing field. Introduce these in lock boxes (ie gambling) paid for in real money via micro-transactions and you get (some) people spending hundreds a month on these things, many times what has been paid for gaming before. In order to get people to spend this sort of money, the game is deliberately designed to be as addictive as possible to maximise the income received from micro transactions.
Facebook is (imo) just as bad as these games as it's designed to be deliberately addictive to maximise facebooks income from adverts, and to hook other people into the things along with you. Both tend to result in a situation where people are neglecting their real lives in order to stare at a screen, which is not healthy or particularly socially desirable.
This can reasonably be considered to be a problem that does need addressing.
all their assets returned to "the people" (from whom they were taken in the first place).
I, uh. Really?
Your a bit late, I take it that you hadn't heard that this process was completed in 1760 under George III? The Monarch's assets were separated off and paid to the Treasury, and in return the government ran a Civil List returning a set figure. Under the existing arrangement the Monarch currently is paid 15% of the profit of the Crown Estate, with the remaining 85% vanishing into the bottomless maw of parliamentary spending.
Personally, I would support putting a major constitutional change as dissolving one of our major constitutional pillars to the people in a referendum with a simple question.
Would you like to dissolve the following institution:-
A) The Monarchy
B) Parliament
And make it clear that the management of the dissolution of either is dealt with by the other institution, not the one being dissolved.
I think we both know which institution faces immediate eradication due to a near total lack of public support.
The other weapon Wreford-Brown had available was the wire-guided Mark 24 Tigerfish. It is unclear whether he picked the Mark VIII** for its bigger warhead for attacking a WW2-era armoured target, or for general distrust of the Marconi-developed Mark 24, which at that time had a reputation for not working properly on account of being unfinished.
On the way back from the Falklands the RN fired five Tigerfish torpedoes at a static target hulk. 2 failed to function, 3 missed. One sees why the Mark VIII** was the favourite for shooting at a surface ship.
Incidentally, the American Mk48 torpedo in it's original incarnation was also incapable of hitting a surface target. Both torpedoes were designed to hit submarines to be fair, so they might have been a bit more useful at doing that, but making submarines as targets is a bit expensive.
The limitation was well known, which is why the RN was carrying the MkVIII** in the first place, which was later replaced with the sub launched Harpoon missile, and still later replaced with the Spearfish torpedo.
Um, two points.
First, when wargaming commanders attacked with tactical nuclear weapons used their tactical nuclear weapons in response, and after a few cycles of response and counter response using tactical nuclear weapons against unlaunched nuclear weapons created a use or lose situation on both sides and use of tactical nuclear weapons became prolific and ended with a full nuclear exchange on both sides, which was basically one reason why (e)limitation of tactical nuclear weapons was started in the first place.
Second, Russia does not have and has never had a huge advantage in numbers. The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe set both sides with parity on numbers, and the NATO side had a comically absurd qualitative advantage. With the breakup of the USSR, a good proportion of the Soviet equipment is now arrayed against Russia as the former Soviet states want to remain independent so the Russian quantities are lower, and the western quantitative advantage has risen at a generally considerably higher rate than Russia's has as the combined R&D spend is bigger than Russia's total military budget.
The reds aren't coming over the hill for us because they cannot possibly win. We aren't going to invade Russia either, because if the Russian leaders offered the country to us on a plate we wouldn't want to spend the money rebuilding the place, which rules out wanting to actually invade it, what with the resultant war which would result in tens of thousands of deaths with a purely conventional war, if not hundreds of millions should nuclear weapons be resorted to.
Your whole premise is based on the fact that you can't disprove a negative. As a wise man once pointed out "Throughout history, every mystery ever solved has turned out to be NOT MAGIC." As another one pointed out, religion is being dwindled to the point of being known as "the god of the gaps".
Nope. My premise is about rationality. Simply, just because somebody has a different rationale for doing something to you doesn't make them irrational. If they have an internally logical reason for doing something then it's still rational, according to the dictionary definition of the term.
In order to be rational, you simply need to be capable of reason. You don't need to come to the same end result.
Imagine the following situation. Somebody comes across an opportunity that would be extremely advantageous for the individual, at the cost of breaking a rule, but with zero possibility of getting caught.
A non religious person might rationally consider they stand no chance of getting caught and is more likely to take the opportunity, knowing that they won't get caught.
A religious person who actually believes in an omnipotent all knowing, all seeing God might decide that while they wouldn't get caught by any mortal on this plane of existence that their God would know and might/would punish them on this plane of existence, or worse on the next plane of existence by refusing them entry to heaven and letting them burn in hell for all of eternity. Upon that basis, the purely rational basis of "is it worth it" skews the possibility of getting caught from "not a chance in hell" to "it's a certainty that I will end up in hell". Hence, that skews the result of a logical calculation of risk and the outcome might look like:-
1) Non religious person takes the opportunity.
2) Religious person does not take the opportunity.
And both people would be making rational decisions, in that they have logically considered the situation and made a decision on the basis of that.
Although you can consider and evaluate an idea without agreeing with it, you're ability to consider and evaluate it fairly drop away dramatically.
Eh?
Personally, I evaluate an idea first and then decide if I agree with it or not based on that evaluation. Only an utterly irrational bigoted fanatic could possibly decide if they agree or disagree with an idea before actually considering it?
Rationally AI and religion don't have much relevance, but the trouble is religious people aren't rational.
You know, once upon a time it was said that a sign of a first-rate intelligence was the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time.
In this case, you personally don't find people holding a belief in a religion to be rational by your standards of rationality, because you do not believe their god exists and insist on then processing their likely behavior from your own perspective, rather than considering their perspective from their perspective.
If hypothetically speaking their god did exist then it would mean that heaven and hell also existed, and what would be rational to somebody believing that if they do (or fail to do) X then their soul will be dammed to hell and therefore exist burning in hell in agony for all of eternity might, maybe be somewhat different to somebody who did not believe that and believes that there is no consequence to their actions beyond what happens on our mortal plane of existence.
It's not that they aren't rational, in fact people believing in a religion can be very rational. As a point of fact, the entire foundation of our science and governments in the enlightenment was created by people who believed quite deeply in religion, so to believe that people believing in religion are irrational is in itself irrational from an objective viewpoint.
You can consider and evaluate an idea without agreeing with it, you know. Personally, I don't believe in the existence of a god, but an absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. My belief in the lack of a god is about as rationally valid as their belief in the existence of a god so rationally one shouldn't climb up on a high horse and consider themselves better than somebody who has differing beliefs. Believing in one or the other certainly doesn't make you more rational.
I suppose it's much easier to bash a strawman than engage in debate?
Staffing any committee with half of it's members from the same activist group is always going to be an act of futility because they'll all parrot the same things. This is my point; you need a diverse group of people with different life experiences.
. . . I take it that this is a parody?
"We should have a dialog, but only if it excludes everybody we disagree with." Which is actually bigotry, according to the very definition of the term. (bigotry: extreme intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own)
If you have a dozen people on an ethics council, then one of them having a different opinion formed through different life experiences is not harmful. In fact, it's rather helpful. Having a group of people with the same experiences would tend to make it an exercise in groupthink, which would make it pointless.
The real question is, how well would modern systems deal with ~10 million concurrent visitors?
Our company setup is not doing web trading beyond handing out quotes and is just hosted with 1&1, but I suspect that it wouldn't deal with more than a few thousand concurrent users before dying very horribly. Do we have any admins here for really large scale systems? And if so, how much load can you take on your systems?
Very handy to open up my girlfriend's Raspberry Pi TV I made her to the world, complete security nightmare for anyone expecting to secure their network.
Only if your running a consumer grade modem firewall combination? Every business firewall i've ever seen had upnp as an option to enable/disable, with disabled being the default.
Its all about short term gain in the 2008 post-growth capitalism model.
Nope, it was happening a lot longer ago than that. In 1997 or there or thereabouts when the great offshoring to China was getting going I distinctly remember having a discussion about the likely impact. ie, companies did very well off in the short term, and the country as a whole would do very badly in the long term.
This was quite obvious to the people at the bottom, and so must have been as obvious to the people at the top collecting huge bonuses for doing it.
We know by now that the planes CAN fly without the sensor and its attempted automatic corrections -- and probably fly safer without it -- so why not disable it and get them back in the air?
We now know about this fault, which has crashed two aircraft killing three hundred and forty six people. This design flaw should have been picked up by the regulator; my understanding is that the aircraft has two sensors fitted but the software design was to use one of the sensors, and then ignore the input from the second. The result is that if that single component provides bad input (with doesn't require a malfunction; a bunch of insects crawling in could provide bad readings) then the aircraft is deliberately flown into the ground by it's software complete with screaming pilots yanking at controls that don't work.
While the revised software design is using both sensors, doing a sanity check on the incoming data and disabling the system if the inputs are radically different, the quality of the initial design is well beyond appalling. If i'm writing code then I make better design decisions doing a website, which does not conceivably have lives depending on it.
The regulator did not pick up on this problem, as Boeing provided them with factually incorrect information pertaining to the design. Yes, this particular fix has almost certainly resolved this particular problem. However, what other problems are lurking within the rest of the aircraft that nobody knows about?
Having been caught lying to their regulators to gain certification Boeing has in effect nullified their certification since what they have said now cannot be trusted, and dead bodies exist to prove it. I suspect that while the US regulator might get pushed into letting it back into the air quickly on the basis that "if we don't, Boeing loses sales to Airbus!" this would be obvious to everybody concerned and the European regulators are unlikely to let it fly in European airspace. What Africa & China would then do is an open question, but one thing is for sure, this is not a good look for Boeing or the FAA and it may well impact American aircraft sales in the future.
Some of Lynch's less temperate emails were quoted by HPE in its written submissions to the court, with Lynch having told Hussain in a row over vacation allowances:
If I was the CEO and people were asking me to make decisions on vacation allowances then my response would also be a bit intemperate, although instead of telling people to "do whatever the fuck they want" i'd be asking the head of HR or CFO to kindly do their job or resign, should their responsibilities be too much for them.
You missed a zero of this: With each lawyer's fees running to hundreds of pounds per hour, the costs of the case.Each silk in a case like this will be at least £1000 per hour in addition the court teams will be support by a range (probably 4-5) solicitors with rates of £400 - £800 per hour.
Back of a fag packet calculation are £5000 per hour per team. They will probably all be working 12 hour days 6 days a week while in court. So lets call is £120k per day or £720k per week for the in court weeks.
Total bollocks.
This is what your allowed to charge:-
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/solicitors-guideline-hourly-rates
If you charge more than the guideline, then somebody is going to fill this form in (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/form-n260-statement-of-costs-summary-assessment) and give it to the Judge at the end of the case and you'll end up with your bill trimmed back to the guideline costs unless you can present an exceedingly good reason why costs should be higher. (which in actual practice rarely happens)
So if you can figure out how to get away with charging 2.5x the rate for an experienced partner for a junior Solicitor and achieve a weekly income that represents ~10% of the average yearly income of a large law firm hovering just under the top hundred legal firms by income then I think I could promise you many interested readers in the legal profession, and a very well paid job in law firm practice management.
@Peter2It is very refreshing to hear those comments on comment boards seemingly increasing in guardian commenters.
Most people only believe what they have been taught because they've been taught to believe it. Most people also learn basic reasoning at some point, so if you point out the obvious logical fallacies in what they have been taught then most people will at least consider that they might have been taught nonsense.
It tends to work better than just screaming at somebody that they are wrong without pointing out why.
If Margaret had been in charge, there would have been no referendum and Mogg et all would nursing bruises from the repeated handbaggings...
Well, she would still be dead now regardless...
But if a Thatcheresque attitude towards sticking up for UK Plc had been maintained by her successors then personally I think that the EU would look different today and we wouldn't have voted to leave.
Labour promised a referendum on the EU Constitutional treaty. This treaty was rejected by the voters of several different EU countries. It was then rebranded as the Lisbon treaty and signed into law without democratic consent despite being something like 99% identical to the EU Constitutional treaty.
Picking a single point; I rather doubt that Thatcher would have agreed to that being signed into law with the consent of the voters. She'd have fulfilled her promise and given us a vote. We'd have voted it down, and she'd have told them to go back to the drawing board and come up with something that could obtain the democratic consent of the people.
Had that have happened, then the widespread discontent reaching boiling point in almost every EU member state would have remained a small fringe movement instead of having reached boiling point and being about to take an absolute majority in the EU Parliament.
UKIP simply wouldn't have any significantly meaningful reason to exist and we wouldn't have had a vote to exit the EU because we wouldn't have needed one.
Thatcher inherited a economy where shipbuilding, aircraft manufacture, the railways, the post office (the GPO was also BT), coal mining, every utility, etc, etc etc had all been bought by the government and was in public ownership. Pretty much all of these industries were also loss making, and the country was literally bankrupt and had to go with the begging bowl to the International Monetary Fund in 1976.
A combination of the unions striking, only having electricity for 3 days a week and the winter of discontent in 1979 led to Labour losing the election in 1979 rather badly and the British public putting Thatcher in with a mandate to sort out the mess. Her solution was devastatingly simple, privatise everything and let it all sink or swim.
It's quite fashionable among the kids today to pretend that the country was a Socialist paradise which was working perfectly, only to be single handedly destroyed by Thatcher. It is rather rare for anybody to suggest any alternative course of action that Thatcher could have taken that would have been viable other than "privatise it all and let the public choose who they want to use".
Personally, I think it's a travesty that civil servants are giving work to companies who they know are going to subcontract it ten times and end up with a crap job done. It appears obvious that the job should be given directly to a contractor who will be responsible for the job, and frankly I think pretty much everybody would support this sort of reform.
I would also quite happily support a state sponsored company competing in an open market on fair terms. If that company is inherently superior, then it'd end up picking up most of the market. The only justification for a public owned monopoly though is a tacit admission that the state has been, is, and will always be crap at running a company precisely because knowing that you will lose your job if you do a sufficiently shit job compared to the competition tends to focus minds.
Knowing that you have a job for life no matter how crap a job you do has proven to be a dead end in this country when tried previously and I personally have no great desire to try it again unless somebody can explain (and preferably demonstrate in the marketplace) what they are going to do differently to the utter failures delivered previously at extreme cost to the taxpayer.
It can also be caused by physical damage to the battery such as bending it by putting it in a jean pocket.
And that is a fault of the designer of the end equipment; the battery compartment should be designed to provide adequate protection to the battery according to the Material Safety Data Sheets that I read for Lithium batteries many years ago.
One can argue that liability is shared due to the fact that the user (possibly) damaged it, but the designer/manufacturer has a good share of the responsibility.
It is only luddite territory if farmers don't use the extra income to purchase the necessary equipment. Remember this equipment doesn't come cheap and its cost has to be found out of income, or are you suggesting that you want cheap food but are happy to pay big subsidies via your tax - ie. pretty much the current situation.
And yet, farmers aren't purchasing this equipment and as noted hardly anybody has heard about it, because newspapers no longer concern themselves with reporting and simple reasoning like "well, what does the rest of the world do?" followed by a google search.
Instead the newspapers are just saying that we need to import fruit pickers because British workers who have done their GCSE's, then their A levels before the first possible opportunity to leave the education system are overqualified to pick fruit in a field, and get paid more via the benefit system for sitting at home watching TV. Hence a need to import unskilled and uneducated labour who will work for the minimum wage. (often minus "accommodation" costs for a berth in a caravan, which is a quasi legal way of paying less than the minimum wage).
The other option of course is importing automation equipment, and then creating semi-skilled & skilled jobs in the operation of that equipment, and the maintenance and servicing of it which British workers do want to do.
The latter might need a few things to help it get started (government loans or grants to buy the equipment?) but why is this not being discussed in the media? It's like there is a conspiracy of silence over this issue but it seems pretty simple.
Picking fruit without damaging it is way more difficult. I think the technology required to do that is about 10 years away.
You think the technology is ten years away? It was thirty years ago. Ten years ago this was winning awards:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iXJFDoKEvI
You can look at a wide range of mechanisation equipment on their website:-
http://www.oxbocorp.com/
How is that ten years away?
The reason Europe has to put large tariffs on to protect our farmers is that the rest of the world is using this stuff, and the EU tarrifs exist to protect the people picking by hand. This is Luddite territory, and absurdly indefensible in the 21st century. While I don't want to see British farmers go out of business and am reasonably happy to pay to maintain British farming I do expect that farming to be done on a modern commercial basis and not as a quasi heritage industry.
Dude, speaking as an Irish worker, we might take your job, we might take your bosses job but we're not going to take the Romanian potato pickers jobs anymore,
The fact that in the 21st century that we are actually importing workers to pick things by hand is indicitive of a really, really serious problem as regards informed discussion of issues.
Nobody would even consider importing an army of foreign workers to harvest corn with a sickle- even heritiage museaums in the UK use steam engines for ploughing, threshing etc, the first combine harvester was introduced in 1835 and nobody alive has seen this done by hand. The idea would be completely laughable, and anybody advocating doing this would be openly mocked as a luddite for wanting to turn back the clock 200 years.
Yet people reading the newspapers think and really beleive that it's a remotely sensible idea to import tens of thousands of very low skilled people to pick potatos by hand instead of just using a potato harvester to do the job.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vdF-HvletU
Picking potatos/fruit by hand is equally as absurd as cutting corn by hand, yet this is not seriously challanged anywhere. How good a job is your newspaper of choice doing on educating you on the issues involved?
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