Posts by Voland's right hand

Top tip: if you have a diesel check out the new MOT rules coming 20/4, I think a lot of cars are going to go off-road.

It is only an extra DPF presence/tamper test. Various forms of De-EGRisation as done by most commercial and hire car drivers in London are still not checked for. So the real problem with diesel in urban environments, namely NO₂, will continue as before...

By the way - it is 20th of May, not 20th of April.

Re: The Law of Unintended Consequences

I thought the traditional covering of the season is the cake which we are somehow having and eating at the same time.

"Flight diverted due to asshole on board"

End of the day, all that flatulence has to come out of somewhere...

No, they have not.

The reality is that nearly anything you can think of regarding mutual recognition of documents, insurance, rights, deeds, whatever which Britain was part pre-Eu with any country in the world has been superseded by Eu agreements. Most of these agreements also have VOIDED any prior agreement and Britain as a part of the Eu has agreed to that at the time.

As a result Britain either has to fall back to prehistoric treaties like the idiocy about the international driving license and the original car insurance "green cards" or in some of the worst cases has nothing to fall back onto as the original treaties have been obsoleted by the other side as no longer needed. This is especially the case as far as UK and Eu countries are concerned. All pre-Eu individual agreements UK had with let's say France and Germany are null and void now.

This is is in all areas and driving licenses are the least of them. It will take a DECADE to churn through all the admin on this and this is an optimistic estimate as UK will have to redo the work Eu has been doing for the last 50 years (so much for it being useless). While signing a deal with the Eu is a big deal for most countries (even USA), signing a deal with a single country is something that is not going to get any priority in the legislative queue.

Re: The EU would be shooting themselves in the foot

The limitations on travel should prevent it easily.

Just an idea... Visas... Extreme vetting... You know...

Re: Complex problem

EU countries accept driving licences from the US, Australia, etc. without problem.

Sure. There are mutual recognition agreements between them. This is the exact reason why UK license will NOT be recognized. There is NO mutual recognition agreement. It will be in the "yet to be signed" queue and (surprise, surprise) UK has not signed and ratified the relevant conventions to get an automatic recognition (at least Vienna convention of 1968, probably more).

By the way, the recognition of licenses is the LEAST of the worries for a driver post BrExit. Private drivers have the workaround of getting an international license so there is a way around it (albeit annoying and painful).

The big Bugbear is the insurance. There is a mutual recognition agreement for 3rd party liability insurance in Europe which is beyond Eu. Non-Eu and non-EEA countries like Serbia, Monte Negro, etc participate in it and agree to the same final arbiter. That arbiter is the same as for Open Sky agreement. It is called ECJ. According to stated policy by UK government this is red line. So based on current red lines, any car with a UK registration stops being street legal in the rest of Eu on BrExit date. No ifs, no buts, no coconuts.

In addition to that, at least several European countries mandate access to MOT databases and ability to check that a car has a valid MOT as an additional requirement. If UK fails to agree data equivalence with Eu _AND_ associated states/states in the process of a joining application after BrExit any British car is non-street legal and non-legal to cross a number of borders in Europe.

And so on and so fourth. As a driver who traverses all of Europe multiple times a year (mostly for fun - go and see places) I can summarize it. The executive summary is - ROYALLY SCREWED.

Re: Project Fear is still alive and well at camp remoan.

where we keep paying our money to subsidise life in Eastern Europe.

The biggest subsidy of life in Eastern Europe at the moment is Brexit.

1. The money which the immigrants were going to spend in the UK is now exported out there in order to establish plan Bs and fall-back potions.

2. The companies in the city which have failed to buy one of the few last train to Dublin tickets and have balked at the cost of tickets to Paris and Frankfurt are buying tickets to Sofia, Prague, Bratislava, Bucharest and Warsaw. I have some business down those parts so I was there this week. There was f*** congestion from business jets at the airport. Most of them were opaque (via holding companies). The two I managed to identify by their numbers were two large USA banks which have not moved their Eu HQ to Dublin and frankly, they no longer can - you cannot even get an appointment with a realtor there at the moment. Not that Eastern Europe is any better at the moment - all 3 bedroom+ properties are off the market - they are being scooped up by both "plan B" and city companies which are organizing evacuation.

Re: Wonderful timing!

You forgot to put inverted commas around the word 'election'.

I did not and I meant to. It is an election all right. With hist current public rating Putin does not even need to rig it.

Most western politicians will kill for a public approval rating half of what he has. We have not had anyone commanding this approval rating and winning elections by such margins since the days of Charles de Gaulle. We have forgotten what it looks like too.

This is something which the west fails to understand. Putin can be elected on "merit" and will be elected on "merit" - based on his total of 15+5 years of running the country. It does not matter how much noise our sponsored Navalni muppet makes, he will not be able to get even remotely within the numbers necessary to contest that election. With all the millions poured into him he is still polling within the margin of error of a poll.

Putin needs to make a major miss-step and his approval needs to drop under 50% for him to need to rig the election. As long as he continues to have the rating he has, he will win the elections the same way De Gaulle won his. By 80%+. Without rigging them - he has no need to.

By the way, we really do not want his approval rating to fall too. If it does, it will not be our sponsored clown to contest the seat. It will be Zhirinovski or even worse Zuganov (or whoever inherits their parties from them). Compared to them Putin is the lesser evil. If you do not believe me tune into RTR (not the foreign edition - the internal one) on Thursday night and listen to the politics talk show. Zhirik is a recurring feature there and he usually has a couple of opponents on fairly liberal positions, sometimes even from UK or USA so you can get a good idea of what we (and the liberals in Russia) should expect if Putin is to loose the election.

Re: Wonderful timing! -Everyone else is under 3%. This includes our preferred rival.

so that in a year's time rather a lot of Americans could be indicted for interfering with the Russian election.

The way Russian law is at present they can be indicted anyway. The governing law is foreign organization financing. While USA law completely disallows it, Russia law allows it provided you declare it above board. You have to openly declare yourself a "foreign agent" and provide full accounting for all of your funding on a quarterly basis. Navalni has failed to do so for obvious reasons.

By the way - I have participated in protests myself 25 years ago in Eastern Europe so I can see the all the signs. His operation is clearly funded. By us. It is not internal funding. You cannot do what he is doing with less than tens of thousands of dollars per day, ramping up to hundreds of thousands for specific "protest" events. That money has to come from somewhere and I am pretty sure that Mueller counterpart in FSB is patiently collecting all the transaction information as we speak. It is not just ex-FBI directors which know the "follow the money" principle.

It will be a nice indictment list with one major difference. USA always screws this one up. It did it in Eastern Europe 25 years ago, I bet they have screwed it again this time. They always have one or more embassy officials involved. Compared to that Russia always deals via disposable intermediaries. Lavrov's department keeps its hands clean and can always do a theatrical shrug after that.

I am preparing a BelAz full of popcorn for when the sh*t encounters the rotating appliance attached to the ceiling. I will be needed to observe and enjoy the show.

Re: Wonderful timing!

. Putin has already has his courts rule his chief rival isn't eligible.

He is not his chief rival. He is our preferred rival. His chiefness is an image we are carefully crafting for him at the cost of millions of dollars and pounds which go for staged photos like this one:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/26/russia-rejects-concerns-banning-alexei-navalny-elections#img-1

This chiefness has no basis in reality. He is chief of bollocks, not chief rival. Even with the millions we have poured into media support for him he barely polls within the margin of error.

Like it or not Putin has only one rival according to Russian polls - it is Жирик. Zhirinovski. He polls at 8 - 15% depending which poll you look at. And you know what, this is one replacement for Putin we would never want to see. It is equivalent to bequeathing the Earth to the cockroaches.

Everyone else is under 3%. This includes our preferred rival.

Re: controversial bro-grammer ?

I missed one more thing just to stick the final nails into the coffin of this once and for all.

There are women who did and lived to 82 years old after that..

For a comparison basis - my mother's step-father was subjected to a similar level of stress in WW2. He is one of the possibly less than a few hundred submariners in the allied fleet who has fought the whole war from day one to May 1945. He was literally attached to the bottle after that and barely made it into his 60-es. He was not the only one too. All of them ended up with what we would call today PTSD. Similarly the lady I referred to in the previous paragraph was not the only one to have a career after the war and live into her 80-es. PTSD? "Sure, I heard of it, it is for someone else".

So my only thought when someone says something about stress tolerance being lower in women is: "You are so full of shit mate, you need to be carted out on a farmer truck to the place where manure is left to ferment before it is put to good use".

Re: controversial bro-grammer ?

and the Science in his "manifesto" has been backed up by essentially the whole Sociobiology Community

If Sociobiology or whatever this bullshit is called at Harward is backing some of his conjectures like "women are less resistant to stress" it needs ejection out of Harward.

For being utterly unscientific.

If anything women are significantly more resistant to long term recurring stress. No man has managed flying > 900 combat bomber missions in WW2. No man in the allied forces has managed 16 combat bomber sorties in 24h. There are women who did. Similarly, in other countries (not USA) it is women who sit in front of the early warning radar screens. Not men. Day after day after day with their job being the harbinger of WW3. If that is not endurance to stress dunno what is.

There are plenty of other places where his document is complete and utter bullshit.

One comment on the article - while the man is clearly an arsehole and so are most of his supporters we should not drop to his troglodyte level.

Re: @ wolfetone

The eurofighter is a vital first line of defence against the East German airforce's Migs

Not only.

The Eurofighter had two roles and establishing air superiority over Germany and Eastern Europe was probably the secondary one. It is first and foremost an interceptor, whose job was to meet the USSR Backfires and Bears when they come out remove the North American NATO fleet group out of the equation.

While in theory a fleet group should stand on its own, elementary math shows that even the largest fleet NATO could assemble would be on the bottom of the ocean if USSR was to throw all of its maritime aviation against it (even without adding in the rocket cruisers). There were just too many of them. Similarly there are just too many of them today.

This is why it has the range and the speed. You really do not need a nearly 4k km range and 2.5km/h speed for a dogfight above the BlackForest. You do, if you are to use it to support the F18s and F14s (in those days) of the carrier group above the North Atlantic.

It is also a job which the F35 in any modification can never do. It is neither fast enough, nor has the range. So as long as there are 67 or so operational Tu-23Ms sitting on Russian airfields the Eurofighter still has a job.

Re: So it was Russia

Finally, it is a wake-up call : organizations have no reason to allow the use of USB ports or CD players. In more and more companies where I consult, I find that the USB ports have been disabled and the desktops/towers do not even have a CD tray any more.

No. The conclusion is the same as with NHS ransomware, etc.

Flat networks cannot be defended against the current threat model. Firewall them all, god will recognize its own. Branch office? Firewall it, it has no business talking to every other PC in the organization. Single channel for documents and data up, single channel down. Department? Firewall it. Lab? Firewall it. Industrial equipment? DEFINITELY FIREWALL IT.

It does not matter how much is invested into blocking ports and filtering external browsing. Infections will happen. The aim is not to prevent them. The aim is to contain them and minimize the damage.

The best analogy is a ship. Close the doors, even flood compartments on purpose if needed, but do not allow it capsize.

Proof?

More budget needed for toys. Proof unnecessary. Tantrum sufficient.

Re: Not what they say, what they do

Like most Republican leaders Trump is utterly convinced of the dangers of climate change, but doesn't want any evidence.

No, they are just being the best democracy money can buy.

Trump wants to privatize the space station, and sell it off to commercial concerns

He is welcome to. After the Russians and the Eu have detached the American modules and have left them float. AFAIK they have neither life support, nor propulsion of their own.

I am surprised the Russians have not done it already. With all the vehement russophobia promoted by the USA lately this is very long overdue.

Re: Is spreading

Surely it's absolutely not racist since the one thing it can't do is discriminate?

It is not the computer's fault to start off with. Basic photography 101. With the same exposure levels for a colour photograph you will get less contrast and less feature differentiation for darker skin colours.

If you want to make the computer job easy, change the spectrum band in which you take pictures. I suspect that you can get significantly lower error rate going into near IR. This is already being done for number plates by the way.

Re: Happy engineers?

A PetaFlop super even for a half an hour or so would have produced significantly more than a few microBitcoins.

We do not know how big is the super in question. These are Russians we are talking about. Doing half-measures is against nature even if the consequences are likely to be dire, so they most likely applied the well known principle of "Раз пошла такая пьянка, режь последний огурец" (*). Based on that, my educated guess is that they either hijacked most of the super or all of it for this for an overnight or weekend run. If they succeeded in getting away with it for as little as a weekend, it would have been a nice rounded number in the 10s of k if not 100k range (depending on the size of the super).

100k for a weekend side job is a strong stimulus. Even outside Russia

(*)_{This cannot be translated meaningfully, it can only be explained. Its usual meaning is: Well, if we have gotten to this point, we might as well go all the way}

Just call it "Enterprise Leisure Suit Edition".

And leave it at that.

Re: Another perfectly crummy alternative to C/Java: chicory

It was foisted on the US public

One of the many things where USA and Russia are much more alike than people would like to admit. Literally same story up to the 70-es. As a result anyone who wanted real coffee had to get green Cuban beans by various semi-illicit channels, roast them and grind them by themselves. The smell of freshly roasted coffee beans early in the morning... It smells like...

You can still have it hoisted on you today by the way. If you are unfortunate to go to the more obscure corners of Greece you need to carry a Bialetti and at least 1kg of ground to sustain yourself. The coffee in the cafanas as well as the stuff in nearly all small hotels is all spiked with shit and practically undrinkable.

So if you want to draw a connotation that it is something vile and vomit inducing chicory would be a good choice.

Re: "So someone decided use different battery size for Model 3 "

GM and Nissan got the battery range or PHEVs became mainstream and killed the BEV market.

+1

The PHEV is still mostly large SUV and family cars. The Mitsubishi PHEV is ~ 30k at present. Even for that amount of money it sells like hot bread and is outselling all other hybrids and electric vehicles combined in the UK. If Musk does not deliver by next year, it is pretty much game over at least for the European market, because from 2019 it will probably go downmarket into the small car segment as well.

So he is clearly pushing things to the limit and is doing this not because he can, but because he has to. Anything else aside, he has created some competition in a number of supposedly moribund sectors so this cannot be bad.

I look forward to it. I mean he said he was aiming for Mars but then ended up in the Astroid belt, it might mean the Model 4 gets put in to production before he finishes the 500,000 back orders of the Model 3?

Dunno about that, but that Roadster paid for itself by a factor of 100+. Just being able to go out in front of investors and use this line probably costs a few 100 millions (in terms of share value).

Re: Unwarranted Trumpanzee

Ridin a bike is a crime as afar as I'm concerned.

As someone who lives in a criminal city where there is less than 1% of households without a cyclist, has a criminal wife (which clocks 16 miles a day bike commute) and two thoroughly criminal children (who commute to school and nearly all of their activities on bikes clocking up to 10 miles on some days) I am going to be short and to the point: F*ck off.

Alternative suggestion: HiIde under your bridge and continue to work on your morbid obesity, it suits you.

By the way, every time I end up working for a Valley company (it is a recurring mistake), my first thought is how to organize a spare bike there. Those nice cycling lanes around San Jose need filling and paying Avis king's ransom every time is just not worth it.

If Musk is actually promoting bike usage, one more cudos from me. One more thing the man is doing right. Applause.

Re: Tax write-off

Then the taxman cometh and wants to take a peek at the odometer.

Should not be an issue for Elon. They can launch the taxman as a followup.