Posts by phuzz

Re: default filter lists

Can an adblocker "work as advertised"?

Surely if it's working then adverts are blocked, so it can't be advertised, which means it's not working as advertised....

Re: 737max

At least in this case it took fifteen minutes to crash, flying "an erratic series of climbs and dives". In a 737max as soon as it loses input from the AoA sensor it just noses down into the ground.

Re: Very cool, but..

"The reason for using test pilots back in those days was that they were considered to be expendable monkeys"

Expendable possibly, but certainly not monkeys. The selection process for the Mercury 7 was looking for candidates with a bachelor's degree or better. When they landed on the moon, Neil Armstrong had a Master's degree, and Buzz Aldrin had a doctorate (he wrote his thesis on "Line-of-Sight Guidance Techniques for Manned Orbital Rendezvous", which obviously came in handy).

Test pilots in those days were expected to be engineers as well as pilots, especially in the more cutting edge programs like the X-15, which several astronauts were selected from.

Re: Iinformation "likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism"

Someone might be able to argue that perhaps they had a non-terrorism related reason for looking at a map. Maybe.

On the other hand, what about these interactive maps showing oil and gas, pipelines and storage, in the UK? Surely of interest to terrorists right?

And all of this published by those notorious enablers of terrorism, erm, the Oil and Gas Authority, a UK government agency...

Re: Whaaat?

Bravo all, I'd like to join in but I'd only sink below your standards.

Re: Expecting a takedown notice

For my friend's birthday I used several manufactured devices that produced a broad spectrum of EM waves in all directions, deriving their energy from an uncontained exothermic reaction, just to liven the place up a bit.

Fortunately they were able to blow the candles out with out any problems.

Re: How can the government get away with this?

Didn't Eisenhower mention it was happening fifty something years ago? I've no idea how old you are but this has been the case in the US for most of your life, how come you've only noticed now?

Things like due process get in the way of making money, and the US is all about making money, so, "out with due process".

Re: ReactOS (as the new XP)

I always saw it as harking back to the 2D era of Windows 3.1 or early Macintosh OS (System 1-6ish). Interfaces were flat, long before they were skeuomorphic.

Re: Multi factor authentication

To be fair, what MS call "Modern Auth" is just a standards compliant implementation of OAuth2, which was first published in 2012, and is used by loads of providers (including GMail).

If they'd stuck with some out of date protocol they'd have been slated for being insecure. If they mandated OAuth2 then people would complain about backwards compatibility with old software. Instead they allowed the email admins the choice, and get criticised for being both insecure and incompatible.

Re: Three year olds can't read

That's a pretty literary 'your mum' joke.

Re: May we introduce ourselves?

Eagles mate. Thousands Tens of 'em.

With lasers on their head if you can afford it, but maybe just sharpened metal claws...

Re: Strictly PC takes on a Holy Different See in the Worlds where Mankind is a SMARTR AIMachine.

I notice that elReg's resident AI, amanfrommars1, made their first post (or at least the earliest I can find) in June 2009.

Are you doing anything special for your decadal anniversary amfm? Perhaps we could club together and buy you some more RAM?

Re: Hmm

Nice to see a British company trying to enter the small launcher market, but I do wonder what they've got that none of the their tens of competitors do. Especially as several of their competitors (eg RocketLab) are already launching payloads for paying clients, which in the rocketry business is quite unusual.

I've heard of hundreds of companies that have billed themselves as the next big thing in rocketry. Maybe 5% of those manage to build some kind of actual hardware. Ten percent of those actually launch something (this is where Skyrora have reached, a whopping 6km of altitude). Practically no rocket company makes the final step which is to actually (successfully) launch something for a paying customer.

As far as I know, no company has managed all of the above and also made a profit from purely commercial customers (if you can convince a government to give you money then you just might make it, eg ULA, SpaceX).

Re: They knew who sent the e-mail - Were they sacked?

"we have to have public healthcare via the NHS, policing via, well, the police, and passports from the passport office etc etc It's a monopoly provision"

Well privatisation is all the rage these days, so if you're really lucky some of these services in your local area will be taken over by Capita.

I bet you can't wait.

"Animal House ... Some Animals are more equal than others."

Erm, are you sure you don't mean Animal Farm, the 1945 book about the perils of revolutions being co-opted into a dictatorship by George Orwell, instead of Animal House, the 1978 National Lampoon film?

"Does Boeing provide training or do the individual airlines?"

The FAA agreed with Boeing that the changes between a 737 MAX 8 and the original 737-800 (first flown in 1997), were so small that no extra pilot training was required. Boeing performed many of the tests for the type certification themselves and the FAA accepted the results. (That link is worth a read for a more in depth look at how the certification process worked in this case)

So, Boeing would provide the training if requested, but they told the airlines that their pilots would not need training on the 737-MAX if they were already qualified on the 737-800, and this was backed up by the FAA.

So to answer your question, it's Boeing's fault for saying that pilots wouldn't need additional training covering MCAS, and the FAA's for believing them.

Well, like you say, the police are cash strapped. Austerity dontcherknow.

What's that, MPs just got a 2.7% pay rise? I'm sure that's totally justified. Totally.

Re: Testing in the real world

Either wrap it around a big chunk of ballistics gel, or failing that, just use a dead pig or something.

Oh, and probably best not to mix alcohol and firearms, but hey, just think of it as evolution in action.

Of course, once you've shot it, it's now useless, so you're going to have to buy a new one.