* Posts by I ain't Spartacus

10123 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jun 2009

Gearheads get their spudgers into an iPhone 11 Pro Max: Bi-lateral charging, anyone?

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All those plastic bits popping off seemed to dissipate the energy. Plus of course they were made out of sensibly deformable plastic, not rigid metal, and worse, glass.

My old Microsoft Lumia 735 has survived a few drops that would have killed most smartphones - because it's got that weird plastic interchangeable back thing which is basically a case - and that can deform and then fall off. It's not as pretty, but I think a more practical design. Especially as not being directly connected to the glass means that unless the thing falls glass down - the plastic will absorb the shock and not the glass.

Exploding super-prang asteroid to pepper Earth, trigger deadly ice age – no, wait, it happened 466 million years ago

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Happy

Re: I'm getting a bit tired of this silliness

Rich 11,

From my downvote score above, it looks like you're the only one who couldn't agree more. Other El Registrans clearly like their time exactly thankyouverymuch!

My brother actually bought a "cool" watch in the 1980s that was highly fashionable by being black and shiny - with glowing hands. But the only time marked on it was 12 o'clock (in watch-speak should they be called indexes?), so you could see which way up it was. For any other time, you were literally in the dark.

He got rid of it because he complained that he couldn't tell what time it was. To which my response was, why buy a watch with no numbers in the first place? Now I campaign for imprecise time, I'm all in favour of it...

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Re: I'm getting a bit tired of this silliness

I'm also a member of the Campaign for Imprecise Time. If I ask you the time, don't tell me that it's 7:53. The quarter hours will do nicely.

Obviously a bit different if you're trying to catch a train, or boil an egg. But under normal circumstances it'll be fine.

On the other hand, "Tuesday", probably doesn't quite cut it. But points for trying.

BOFH: What's the Gnasher? Why, it's our heavy-duty macerator sewage pump

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Re: It's all fun and games...

Naked Gun style.

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Re: It's all fun and games...

The problem with those long gloves is that they've never quite long enough to also cover your nose...

Imagine if Facebook could read your mind: Er, I have some bad news for you...

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Proposed card:

We're sending our best wishes,

On this very special day.

The stork has brought your baby boy,

But soon will take him back away.

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

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Happy

I believe the phrase is...

Tee fucking hee!

With a side order of yippee!

The Central Telegraph Office was serving spam 67 years before vikings sang about it on telly

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Re: Telegrams. In 1987 ?

The shipping industry (as in ships, not just transport) were using telexes into this century. Doubt they still do now though.

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Re: BT Archives worth visiting when they next have an open day

It's an annual thing. Which I forgot to look up this year.

Here's the site for the rest of England - which started last week and goes on to this weekend.

link to map

I'm sure there's a Scottish and Welsh equivalent, I just don't know that they're called.

Obviously a lot of places that are open to the public anyway put themselves on it. But you also get interesting stuff from the railways, London Underground, and I see the John Radcliffe (Oxford) vascular imaging clinic are offering a tour for some reason. So if you're into ultrasound and radioactive tracers - go and knock yourself out.

I missed the trip down Brunel's Thames tunnel a few years ago but I think that's on most years. And Thames Water have given people some interesting chances to get into water treatment works and down sewers.

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Well the Zimmerman telegram went via the US embassy in Berlin. And apparently Wilson offered this route to communications as an aid to peace talks - the deal being all messages had to be un-coded. They persuaded the US ambassador to allow them to send that one in code, as it would have a tad embarrassing otherwise...

Which means most of their stuff was still going to have to go via radio. Or sent on the commercial networks using subterfuge.

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Perkins Braillers are still the thing. Most blind kids will get laptops and all the special software. But Braille embossers are still enormous and bloody noisy - my Mum had one and it was a bugger to get software. If you just want to do a few little labels, nothing beats a Braille embosser.

The year after she retired from teaching, she took one of her ex-pupils to the Roald Dahl museum in Great Missenden - and complained to them about the lack of Braille labelling on everything. Though I think they opened some cabinets and let the kid touch some of the exhibits.

So Mum did all their labels for them, on her Perkins Brailler onto plastic sticky labels - and in return they gave her a golden ticket that got her unlimited entries. Which got used on a few other ex-pupils and the grandchildren.

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Claverhouse,

Oh I fully understand why the Germans would want Mexico to invade. And the pre-WWI US army was absolutely tiny. But the Mexican army wasn't that much bigger, and despite years of intermittent civil war doesn't seem to have been particularly effective or done much with all that potential combat experience. Plus I think the Mexicans got a lot of their weapons from the USA - and the Germans were in no position to ship them any.

As I understand it the Mexican government came to that conclusion pretty quickly, and also wasn't particularly optimistic about holding on to Texas even if by some miracle they were able to take it and hold it long enough to get it in the peace talks (should the Central Powers win).

Hence it's such a transparently bad offer that there seems no possible reason to take it. Or in fact to do anything else than try and win brownie points from Washington by telling them all about it.

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Cuddles,

Well lots of bad stuff happens now. But people like the military are a lot more aware about it. And normally even politicians nod to security - although people like Trump insisting on using their own mobile probably isn't that unusual. Didn't Obama demand they make him a secure Blackberry, because he didn't like the available choice of secure phones?

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Pirate

Re: BT Archives worth visiting when they next have an open day

I haven't looked if they're doing it, but Open House London is this weekend.

So if there's any BT open days going to happen, that's a really likely time for it to be. That's when London Underground let you go interesting and unusual places too - but those tend to book up ahead of time, as they're so hard to get on. But the BT archives are less likely to be over-subscribed.

The London one is always a week before or after the national one, and there are alwasy loads of interesting places open that normally aren't.

Sorry - just my little bit of advertising. As I remembered that it's around this time every year.

Along with International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Which is today! I'd forgotten until now. Yaaarrrr!

Sing a-long a Youtube

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I immediately thought of the Zimmerman telegram, when the article stated the Telegraph Office had had a relatively quiet WWI. Which led to a quick bit of Googling to refresh old memories.

It's interesting how things was different back then.

Britain cut German cables so as to force them to broadcast by radio, so we could crack their codes. And also to be annoying.

Comms discipline was pretty poor back then. Codes weren't all that good, or rigorously designed. And lots of stuff got sent in the clear. One reason the Germans trounced the Russians so badly in Poland and East Prussia in 1914 was that the Russian HQs kept issuing orders by radio with no encoding whatsoever. Also the German High Seas Fleet did their internal communications by radio when in port! Rather than by runner or ship-to-ship cable, which couldn't be intercepted.

The US offered the Germans some telegraph help. Take uncoded messages to their embassy in Berlin, and the US would re-transmit them over their "secure" lines. Said lines went via Cornwall for amplification, and so were sneakily copied by the British. *Ahem!*

The Germans managed to persuade the US ambassador to send the Zimmerman telegram in code - well they couldn't exactly get the Americans to transmit their plans to pay Mexico to invade them could they? Awkward!

So the British government spent a few months looking for plausibly deniable ways to get this to the US, without admitting spying on their diplomatic traffic or that they'd broken the German codes.

Which made it harder to say it wasn't an evil British forgery. But then Zimmerman went and publicly admitted it was genuine anyway! Despite German diplomats in the US and Mexico trying to say that it was a Britihs fake. D'oh!

Also, what a stupid idea! Mexico was only just (mostly) stopping its own civil war. How the hell did the Germans expect them to be able to conquer Texas and New Mexico? Even if they were a united country there was no way they were going to be able to beat the US army, and it was obvious that they would know that too. So why make the offer, and risk Mexico telling the US about it and bringing them into the war quicker? Unrestricted submarine warfare was likely to bring them into it eventually anyway. It's a strange old story...

Woman sues Lyft, says driver gang-raped her at gunpoint – and calls for app safety measures we can't believe aren't already in place

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Re: prove innocence

If a serious allegation is made about a teacher say (a job where you have to have background checks) then they would have to be suspended on full pay until the case was settled - or at least it turned out that they could be sacked for some reason, given the lower standard of proof required for a sacking compared to a conviction.

Robot Rin Tin Tin can rescue you from that collapsed mine shaft

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Facepalm

Re: PLUTO?

Aargh! I missed out the B of CERBERUS. How could I let myself down like this!

Canine Enhanced Rescue Bot Emergency Response Underground System

If only I'd asked for help, this would never have happened. After all, two heads are better than one...

Now where did I put that barrel of brandy?

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Happy

Re: PLUTO?

I prefer Canine Enhanced Robotic Emergency Rescue Underground System.

My version would have 2 heads (extra sensor platforms) and rending teeth 2 necks allows it to carry 2 barrels of brandy, in case the people it rescues get thirsty.

You can trust us to run a digital currency – we're Facebook: Exec begs Europe not to ban Libra

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Re: Poor comment

Nick Kew,

You don't understand fractional reserve banking at all.

FRB is about cash. A bank must hold a certain reserve of cash-y money (and electronic) so that it can settle all calls on cash for a certain period. This stops them running out of cash and having panics and so a bank run. This is because your theoretical notional bank has lots of loans (its assets) which it can't call in immediately and lots of saving accounts (its liabilities) where the customers can all theoretically demand their money back all at once.

Because that's what banking is. Liquidity Transformation. Taking short-term deposits and turning them into long-term loans - which allows for long term investment in the economy.

When it all goes titsup then you require a Central Bank to be able to loan them unlimited cash at punitive interest rates - as happened in 2008, all of which loans were paid back by 2010 at a nice profit to the government.

That covers cash. Liquidity. A problem for banks that perform liquidity transformation. Hence the requirement for Central Banks to save the day by loaning emergency liquidity.

But banks also have to be solvent (if they're not they don't get loans from central banks they get taken over). To be solvent means their assets must at least equal their liabilities. And again, they lend at risk and long term - so their assets may fall in value. While their liabilities don't change.

Thus banks must hold reserves of assets. This isn't cash required to remain liquid - these are the assets owned by the bank itself (it's shareholders). And they're designed to cover the losses if say the housing market crashes, and all those mortgages get paid back at 80% of book value. The last Bank of England stress test I saw talked about the big banks holding something around 13-14% of their total balance sheet in their own assets (the minimum requirement was around 11%) - which theoretically allowed them to weather a 2 year recession with a 20% drop in house prices and inflation of -1% (i.e. deflation) and still have sufficient assets to meet their minimum liquidity requirements. Which Basel III sets at around 7% (from memory too lazy to check).

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Re: Backed by real money 1:1

In some ways they're just a longer term brokerage - holding client funds in escrow. in others it's similar to a unit trust / tracker fund. They hold a portfolio of investments - for example they might hold shares in all the FTSE 100 index companies in the same proportions as they make up that index - and then you put money into the fund and get paid whatever return they make on that (minus their cut). The total invested amount fluctuates as people put money in and take it out, but the overall portfolio doesn't have to change that much - they just buy more shares in the right proportions as their investment funds increase.

Then each year they do a quick change of what shares they hold as companies leave or join the FTSE 100 - and the proportions that make up the index are changed.

Except in this case there's no profit to be made. If people are using it as a normal means of payment, then what they lose on exchange fluctuations going into one currency, they should gain on transactions going the other way. Then they just need to have a fund that's slightly larger than they need - and as people use more of the stuff they can slowly increase their pot of currency. If it's being used regularly - the overall amount of libra currency shouldn't change all that much - just move around.

Just buying AAA rated government bonds they should be able to turn a slight profit on the float - which if they've got any sense they'll retain in the float to cover those days when currrencies move a lot.

In theory you might be able to move money around between different currencies and do some arbitrage on Facebook - but I guess they'll limit transaction size to stop that. And then they could have a published daily conversion rate to each currency.

They could easily be licensed to stop them from losing too much of the clients' money. Say by forcing them to hold reserves and giving them a banking license so they've got access to Central Banks emergency loans. PayPal had to have a banking license in the EU - I don't know how they're regulated in the US.

I don't think the financial implications are all that serious. Having typed all that, I've just remembered that the banks who issue Scottish pound notes have to hold an equal amount of sterling in order to be allowed to do so. So there's already a UK precedent - and they'd want to weight their currency basket to the markets they operate in to avoid risk themselves anyway.

The serious problem is privacy - and their ability to identify people online from advert to purchase. And the fact that they'll be able to tie all that back to the bank account or credit card used to put money into Libra - which means they'll be able to link all that into credit records and also search history. Oh and their not-at-all creepy global facial recognition database - that somehow FB have been allowed to build without the massive outcry if a government had tried to do it.

Financially I'm unworried. On privacy grounds, I rate this: Fuck Off and Die!

First they came for 'face' and I did not speak out because I... have no face? Then they came for 'book'

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Re: I've trademarked whitespace

I use Tippex to get whitespace on my screen. So suck on that!

Two years ago, 123-Reg and NamesCo decided to register millions of .uk domains for customers without asking them. They just got the renewal reminders...

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Re: Spot the Difference

veti,

Charities have much tougher oversight/auditing requirements - as well as restrictions on what they can do and charge for.

Whereas Nominet was set up as what I guess would now be called a social enterprise - a normal company whose charter required it to raise cash for good causes and not to be a profit making machine. While still making enough to be able to get by, and have cash to spare if required.

Clearly not enough safeguards were built into the voting structure to stop the board from dumping all of that and then ridiing on to profit and glory.

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Re: Spot the Difference

Sadly that was a different Nominet back then. Not run by money-grabbing scumbags. The current lot only seem to be interested in enriching themselves - despite the fact that they weren't exactly badly paid before all this.

Bit like ICANN - used to be a boring place to sort out boring but important bits of the internet. Now a place to farm first class travel expenses and big bonuses - while making everything slightly worse.

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Happy

Don't forget to subscribe them to The Watchtower...

Maybe put their phone number up in a few select call boxes in Soho - if such a thing still happens.

France says 'non merci' to Facebook-backed Libra cryptocurrency

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Re: Monetary Sovereignty?

It's monetary policy that matters really, much more than exchange rates. In the early 2000s interest rates were set low to help Germany, France and Italy all in a bit of a slow growth period (in Germany partly I'm sure due to reunification). And those low interest rates were catastrophic for Ireland and Spain, which had good growth, and effectively interest rates lower than inflation. Which caused huge property booms - which bust horribly in 2008.

Then there was a bit of combat over how to deal with this. At first the hawks won, and the ECB even put up interest rates (disastrously) in about 2010. Way too late they finally persuaded the Germans and the other hawks to do QE, and saved the Eurozone. At the cost of several extra years of economic stagnation and a massive spike in unemployment - and a near collapse in confidence in the Euro as an idea.

If the EU were properly democratically accountable, this would have resulted in heads rolling and a change in policy. But it's not, it's a supra-national organisation with some democracy bolted on and can't work like that. So voters have punished national governments - who mostly don't have the power to change monetary policy, and even where governments have been elected explicitly to try to solve the Eurozone's structural problems (like Macron) they can't get any agreement on what to do.

So with national governments powerless to change things, and voters powerless to effect policy at a European level - no wonder so many of the mainstream parties are getting slaughtered - and people are turning to voices from outside the political mainstream to try and get something changed.

Something's going to have to give eventually. Either the politicians will get their shit together and actually fix the Euro (rather than relying on the ECB permanently printing money) - or there'll be another crisis and it will collapse faster than they can dance to patch it up. Or worse, someone will get elected (maybe in Italy) to pull out of the Euro - and it'll all turn to shit - and incredibly acrimoniously too. Making Brexit look like a picnic.

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Re: "we can not authorize the development of Libra on European soil."

Monsieur Anon,

Actually the people of France did ask him. You see they elected a government with the purpose of sticking its nose into these sort of decisions. And while governments are far from perfect, and we don't really like paying our taxes, when it comes to sorting out large corporations we often need them.

Hence, for example, British banks have now paid out over £35 billion in PPI compensation - because they indulged in practises that went from dodgy to outright fraud.

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Re: Monetary Sovereignty?

And yet, 8 years ago the French desperately wanted the ECB to QE, but Germany wouldn't let them. And now they apparently voted against re-starting it this week - and lost.

So how is that monetary sovereignty?

Not to mention the day when the ECB (broke its founding treaty) and turned off the Greek banking system, and did it in a vote the Greek member wasn't allowed to vote in - as only full members of some committees get a vote every time and the rest are rotating.

Not that I disagree with his main point that Libra is an awful idea. But France doesn't have monetary sovereignty. And has joined a hideously badly designed system of common sovereignty.

You can criticise Brexiteers for many things, and many misconceptions. But the Euro is the worst economic decision that's been taken since Communism. And if the EU wasn't inextricably linked to that massive fuckup, they'd never have got a majority and the EU would have a lot more credibility. And incidentally countries like Italy wouldn't be in an impossible situation where leaving the Euro is impossible, but staying in it is slowly strangling their economy, and with no tools to fix that, normal parties are getting slowly destroyed and replaced by extremists. A similar process that is also starting to happen to varying degrees in France, Germany, Greece, Spain and Finland.

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That is partly our own fault, for designing a flag that's not obvious which way round it goes. Couldn't we have put a "this-way-up" sign on it somewhere?

Captain's coffee calamity causes transatlantic flight diversion

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Thumb Down

Re: Cup-holding it wrong

Too many! Now I need the rest of the hundred downvotes to make up the numbers...

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Happy

Re: coffee cups

Why not waterproof trousers as well? Oh and can they do waterproof wipe clean plastic stewardesses uniforms while they're at it. To match the PVC nurses uniforms you can already get.

Asking for a friend...

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Happy

Re: The good news is that the coffee spill occurred before the cockpit crew could be served dinner.

What about the Admiral's Pie?

He's not a fussy eater then, the admiral?

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Happy

Re: Cup-holding it wrong

Ooo, the temptation to downvote you is so strong... Are you near to any significant downvote milestones that I can help with?

Disclosure: I'm miles from anything significant in upvotes. But a mere 8 more downvotes will get me to 2,900. Or 108 for the full 3k.

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Re: Elf-in-Safety

Lids work perfectly. Those double handled sippy cups for toddlers - the modern ones have some sort of internal membrane that acts as a check valve so that the little darlings can't spill their ribena all over the white shagpile carpet.

So just give the clumsy pilot those.

The gig (economy) is up: New California law upgrades Lyft, Uber, other app serfs to staff

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Re: About time

What if they said it was a goose with a duck call?

Then roast it and see if it tastes like a duck.

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Re: Knee Jerk

Roland6,

What's the social cost? Heaven knows!

My first lesson in economics was about "utils", which is the notional economic unit of happiness / satisfaction. So you can do things like say, this icecream gives me 2 utils. And I think that the exchange rate should be £1 to 1 util. Therefore I'll pay anything up to £2 for it, but not a penny more. Except if it's baking hot, when I might go up to £3. But if I've already had one icecream I probably only value the second one at 1 util, so will only pay 50p for it.

I lost quite a lot of faith in economists during that lesson...

But it is a good example of how it's really hard to put a monetary value on stuff that's still really important.

You can sort of make approximations. So you look at countries that don't have a social insurance system and see how much people save for their old age and unemployment or health problems. Then try to extrapolate what that means as to how much they value a bit of security over not having it.

Or you can look at the US, where people will sell food stamps for below their market value in order to get cash, which they can spend how they want. Which shows that people prefer control over their spending over total amounts of stuff they can get - although of course that could be just because of addiction issues. I don't know enough about the US benefits system.

How do you measure happiness?

Also how do you measure the present risk and uncertainty of job losses against the future lower risk of that due to extra economic growth. Assuming that cutting job security will lead to enough economic growth to be worth it. And here again we're back to my lack of faith in economic measurement. We can't even measure GDP all that accurately.

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

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Re: I'm off

Chips are vegan. Unless you do them in beef dripping of course, but nobody does nowadays.

Service call centres to become wasteland and tumbleweed by 2024

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Re: Does an AI lie detector already exist?

You don't need a lie detector. If customer is complaining about a broken computer, and speaking, they're lying.

You need a truth detector, for the vanishingly small number of times when, "no I haven't changed anything, yes I have rebooted, yes it was working ten minutes ago", are all actually true.

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Re: Sounds like the solution is to shorten the life of the capital equipment

All service engineers to be replicants within 5 years.

Call centres to be staffed by replicants within 5 years.

Only growth industry to be Blade Runners - who will have be recruited in massive numbers.

So simply train replicants as Blade Runners. Problem solved.

What could possibly go wrong?

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

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Re: The arcane arte of using a mouse

I think it took my Mum about a year to grasp the double click. I may even have gone into her Windows settings and slowed down the click interval required for the pooter to recognise it as a double click. She's fine with it now.

Drag and drop on the other hand...

But then I struggle to do that on one of those horrible track pads on laptops, so I suppose I can't really blame her.

Eco-activists arrested by Brit cops after threatening to close Heathrow with drones

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like cutting the fence at a nuclear base. Is it illegal? Yes. Will it threaten nuclear Armageddon? No.

And once you've done one illegal thing, how do we know you're not going to do some more?

If you want to make a symbolic protest by a nuclear base, then you simply organise a demonstration by a nuclear base and wave your placards and chant to your hearts' content. Your democratic rights have been duly excercised - job done. Off home for tea and medals.

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Oh yes - the 'why don't we think of the children' argument.

Nope. Try again.

There's an exclusion zone for a reason. That exclusion zone is over-large, because air passenger safety is a generally conservative passtime, and they like to have a margin of error. Fuck around in their exclusion zone, go to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect £200.

Plus, as well as the issue of malfunctions, we have the issue of trust.

I don't trust fuckwits like this to safely operate drones in close proximity to air traffic. They're fucking banned from doing it for good reasons, but want to do it anyway - which instantly makes them untrustworthy idiots to be shunned.

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Re: To our knowledge Heathrow has done nothing to warn passengers or airlines yet

It's not an unnecessary extra runway. They're running the current two at something like 98% capacity. So a bit of fog, which requires more separation in landings means that flights have to be cancelled. So even if not making any extra flights they should really have a third runway. Which would also reduce the pollution from the massive stacks of planes circling the place waiting for a landing slot because they've got their a few minutes early.

Not tha tthey won't then use it to have more flights and fill the capacity of 3 runways, so we're in exactly the same position in ten years time, but there are good reasons why a third runway should have been built 20 years ago.

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Re: To our knowledge Heathrow has done nothing to warn passengers or airlines yet

Remember the story in El Reg a few months ago about the woman and her daughter who went to the police to get compensation for a hit-man who'd taken their money and not killed the ex-boyfriend?

So wrong, on so many levels.

I mean it's not the police who deal with consumer complaints - it's trading standards / consumer rights!

Oh and also don't be surprised when the police arrest you for conspiracy to murder. D'oh!

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Devil

Re: I've built a "B Ark" from recycled paper and hemp string

No! You can't kill the vegans!

They're organic, free range, and will make perfect long-bacon and long-pork.

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Trollface

Re: RE: Re. Drones

I had sort of the same thought. Except my version was that we take all the environmentalists, strap them to deckchairs, and tie lots of helium balloons onto them. Then float them above the Heathrow runway on the busiest day of holiday flights.

That way they get to make their point with lots of publicity, and everyone gets to take a chance on what the best policy is. Sort of like medievel trial by combat.

If the planes all crash and the evil environment-raping holidaymakers die - then we change our policy to ban flying. The campaigners win, and can have that inscribed on their tombstones, we've reduced the population a bit and got rid of some of the more annoying members.

If the planes swat them out of the sky and continue on to land safely, then God has decided that flying is fine.

If nothing happens then we allow drone flights around airports and make the sky a free-for-all, then equip all commerical aircraft with gun turrets for self-protection.

Bonus you can get a cheap ticket for your holiday if you agree to be the rear gunner.

Everyone's a winner.

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Re: These are not the drones you're looking for.

Well if they're part of that conspiracy, then why hand themselves into the police? But if they are, then they will get to disrupt Heathrow, but the instead of the light sentences they'll probably now get - if not just cautions - they'll probably get the book properly thrown at them and jail time.

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Stop

Yeah because drones never go wrong, and pilots never fuck up. So it would be perfectly safe to have them flying around the restricted airspace of a runway and nothing could possibly go wrong.

Great fucking idea!

I congratulate them on their perspicacity!

If only the rest of us were so brilliant and safety conscious no accidents would ever happen.

Are you who you say you are, sir? You are? That's all fine then

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Happy

Re: Gaming the IVR

I find a series of clicks and whistles, will get to a person

Tried that. They put me through to their call centre staffed by dolphins.

Still couldn't make my bank transfer go through, but I did receive 4kg of tuna from DHL the next day.

Astroboffins baffled as black hole at center of Milky Way suddenly a lot hungrier than before

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Re: My limited understanding...

But after the ship has disappeared, any surviving local ship would hear "the cosmic burp" made by the black hole due to the laws of comedy, which are more powerful than the laws of physics.

Thus, in space no-one can hear you scream. But the sound of a fart will rip across the lunar surface. And the odour ignores Einsteinian physics and moves at the speed of smell, which can either be slower than walking pace or faster than light.

When we get an electronic nose into space I think we'll discover that Hawking Radiation is actually black holes farting.

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Re: "hungrier than it's ever been"

Hmmm. Lightbulb moment!

The Hawking Radiation diet!

Buy my new unobtainium bracelet that connects with your aura and converts your natural chakra radiation into Hawking radiation thus allowing you to eat whatever you like and still lose weight - in whatever periods of the day when you're not eating.

For just £599.99, in 4 easy payments, you can have worry free weight loss!