Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: Companies don't pay tax

good point - if the company does make a profit

Have you ever tried to make that point to the HMRC as an independent contractor?

Yeah, I know, all animals are equal, but some are _MORE_ equal than the others.

Re: VW's billions...

Perhaps city buses with heavy diesel engines.

Err... Most of these already run adblue so they are fairly NOx clean compared to cars.

It is possible to make them even cleaner on other parameters (soot, etc) too. The tech has been well tested and is used extensively around Europe. It is called diesel fumigation - adding a small amount of LPG to the injection flow (AKA diesel blanco, etc). It is used on boats, buses, etc worldwide.

It improves fuel efficiency, reduces particular output roughly by an order of magnitude (before any filters take effect), but as with anything which improves diesel efficiency it also raises the NOx. If you are already adding "piss" to the exhaust that does not matter, you just adjust the amount of piss to add. It is also retrofittable.

The problem is that some governments like UK are so oil revenue addicted that they will do no anything to disallow a massive step-decrease in fuel consumption so you cannot get a fumigated diesel past a MOT in the UK and similarly, the LPG conversion guys are not allowed to do fumigations except on boats.

So the article is incorrect. You _CAN_ get a diesel to emit less off everything compared to gasoline on any metric, you just have to make it even more complex. You will be looking at 3 tanks - diesel fuel, LPG and Piss (adBlue). Similarly, if you are looking at pollution efficient vehicle that burns stuff, LPG _WITH_ adBlue is way ahead of gasoline too (switching to LPG raises NOx quite a bit). Gasoline trails all of them and once you take into account everything that is available for pollution reduction it is not any better.

Re: Software Code Reviews?

My exact thought. If this is a reflection of their software management process all of their cars MUST BE TAKEN OFF THE ROADS IMMEDIATELY.

After all, VW is the most "software driven" mass production car on the market. Even the fecking lights are driven of individuial CANBus controller. So if their software management process allows "a couple of engineers" to introduce bespoke engine management code that alters the engine spec, then who the hell knows what lurks in the steering, airbag or breaks controllers.

So if their QA process _CAN_ allow that, then all of their certifications ever since they moved to total CANBus-ing must be immediately withdrawn until a _PROPER_ review is complete.

Re: Not really sure it takes Sherlock Holmes.

but but Turkey is the big country who

Turkey, due to its various Eu related aspirations imports (and assembles) Eu spec vehicles.

The Toyotas on the ISIS videos are not the Eu spec. The Eu spec has the extra diesel turbo intercooler input on top of the bonnet.

What you see has not gone through the normal import channels in Turkey. It has gone through somewhere else. The same goes for the "truck" version of the Landcruiser. You cannot buy that normally in Eu (and Turkey) at all. Even if you manage to get your mitts on one it will be diesel with the intercooler input, not with a smooth bonnet.

It is the middle-Eastern spec so it was bought for them by Saudi, Qatar or some other usual suspect. All we need is one captured and to read the VIN. Then it will become clear who supplies them (with evidence).

Re: Blue sky at night-

Err... more likely a fashionable choice of black or black.

You may see some blue around that lovely yellow dot which is the Sun from that distance. The rest will be black. Pitch black. The cost of moving out to the suburbs of the Solar system I guess.

Re: Kicking Uncle Sam in the nuts

Non-trivial I am afraid.

Any Eu country "falling in line" will get dragged in front of the ECJ for public whipping.

Re: Lot of nonsense

We have T&C's that state any interaction with the company is subject to US laws and litigation must be commenced in Orange County, California.

That is illegal in half of jurisdictions over the world and in most of the Eu this makes any contract or commercial agreement with your company unenforceable under fair contract act(s) and their equivalents. I suggest you take some legal advice from someone with some residual clue and knowledge of the contract and data protection law in the jurisdictions you operate. You may need it.

I am doing it now after I watched what happened to them

I took a set of on old SCSI LVD drives which lingered in my loft for 8+ years to the county dump last year. I left them with the other electronics. By the time I went to the car to pick up the next load and dump it they were gone. They were immediately collected for "reuse" by one of the guys at the dump who clearly knew what they were and what he was doing..

Thankfully, they were properly wiped using a 7 pass. Something you could do once upon a time. Realistically, you can no longer do it in the age of flash. You really have no idea what exactly what done by the storage controller and what can be recovered from the drive after that.

Re: I know of 3 separate instances

Standard CCTV footage is inadmissible in court in 99% of the cases. It is all digital nowdays so there is no legally acceptable guarantee that it has not been tampered with.

Re: Maybe not just SW...

It is slightly different, but that whole movie is a cut-n-paste from Magnificent Seven (down to the point of using some of the same actors in the same role - f.e. Steve Vaughn), The Seven Samurai and run through a Star Wars theme generator.

As far as Sci Fi goes that is the cream of the cr***, probably with very few to match it.

Re: Double standards?

Miss England 2009

Compared to most gun advocates she probably knows how to use a gun, not just talk about how brave it makes you.

Re: Am I the only one ...

Nope you are not the only one.

If you look at the stock prices for FB, Google, Amazon, etc - the stock market is indeed having a perception that this immaterial and nothing has happened. The ruling is in the newsfeed for the relevant stocks, but there is no stock market reaction to it.

My exact thought

The article missed the fact that the treaty is rumored to establish "corporation can sue a state for lost profits due to changes in tax and environmental legislation" procedure.

So the concept is not entirely new - there are some cases of international corp vs state arbitration. The treaty supposedly streamlines it and makes it nice, easy and one way street for the corporations.

The opposite - states clawing back compensation for tax evasion, environmental disasters, etc from corporations in other countries signatories to the treaty is surprise, surprise - not supported. Same as the similar deal with the Eu.

Re: The problem is, usually Linus is right

He is right in this case too.

With all due respect, "her responsibility" which is USB 3.0 continues to be fickle and quirky in Linux till today. She has allowed crap code to go in multiple times as a maintainer and is complaining that she gets flak. So while Linus is sometimes overdoing it, she is being disingenuous at best.

Re: 2 markets, big difference

That depends. You get other kit as standard.

In Europe you get heated seats (something all of us who have a bad back would quite appreciate) only on top of the line models. Looking at the pics, I think I see the buttons (they are on the sides of the console), but not sure. The low spec i30 and i20 definitely do not have them here.

Compared to that USA AFAIK gets it across the range. Even crappy rentals have it.

There are other parts of the spec which USA gets as standard while we don't/

Re: Head unit obsolesence.

COULD.

Now try doing that on a new Crysler/Fiat where the cretins have hooked up the head unit to the ECU and have connected the whole shebang to the Internet so someone can shove you off the road. I would like to see you successfully replacing something with that level of integration.

It was possible on older (and cheaper) vehicles - all of my (rather old in the tooth) cars have the head units replaced. The last one was done this summer after the Pioneer POS that came with it set itself on fire destroying the central console in the process.

There is another issue with older cars and modern head units. On older cars you cannot use touchscreen safely. Touchscreen pretty much requires you seeing where your fingers are. This means that you need the display within the field of view of the driver. There are very few old cars which have the car stereo within the field of view of the driver (old VW Polo comes to mind). Usually it is too low and too far to the side to be safe as a touchscreen because it is positioned center and under the heating grilles.

I have a touchscreen unit retro-fitted on a 2007 D-Max so I can have an integrated reverse camera in the dash. I actually often end up telling the "co-pilot" (junior) to chose the music. I can just about safely scroll on the touchscreen on a clear motorway crawling at ~50mph. Trying to do anything at speeds above that is a "forget it". It is simply in the wrong place for that.

Re: I will be boring again

Well, if it runs something else but Windows it may make the Xmas stocking for one of the kids. A 200 quid for an ultra light laptop running Linux is not bad value for the money and it is likely to be much better than torturing yet another Chromebook into running Debian.

If not, I will pass.

Re: It's a shame

Worth remembering that even "x86" architectures these days aren't, really. Since the Pentium Pro

Nope. The first one was UMC U5 and it was quite openly declared to be using RISC underneath and a translator It was creaming its counterpart - 486SX so badly that it was not even funny. I had one - it was running on par with DX2 and DX4 chips. To add insult to injury it was cold while, Intel chips by that point already required heatsinks and fans. Intel killed them using patents. I have never ever seen Intel move so fast as in that case. Not surprising as UMC apparently had a DX part and a Pentium killer lined up too.

This was several years before Pentium Pro. In fact, I think AMD started using this tech in K5 and K6 before Intel. I would not be surprised if IBM Blue Lightning used some of that too. Intel as usually, innovated through marketing and "interesting" practices before giving up and following. Same as with x86_64, AES insructions, RNG and many other things.

Re: Let he that is without sin...

Actually the worst scores on the "pollution on the road" test announced yesterday are Nissan/Renault. Up to 10 times more than the Eu test spec.

While Volvo is not great it is likely that its entry in the test was defective (yeah, I know, queue jokes about PSV engines).

Re: Four mile high pyramid

Neah, It is more of a case of characters with yellow eye flashes prone to violence due to their parasite gone nuts from sarcophagus abuse.

No need to even invoke the "right to be forgotten"

Basic Eu data protection legilsation obliges _ANY_ organization subject to Eu laws holding data on you to disclose you all the data (it is allowed to charge a reasonable processing fee) and is obliged to correct any incorrect or erroneous data free of charge.

A service like this cannot even get anywhere near Eu any time soon (and thanks god for that).

Re: Not being able to ship electonic devices conitaining batteries is a joke in 2015.

It is not the violent reaction of Li with O2 which is the issue. It is the violent reaction inside the battery (which accelerates as heat is emitted during that) is the problem. While the most common scenario is a short, it can go nuts even when not shorted if it has been subjected to rapid pressure and temperature changes (which is what happens in a cargo hold).

The only thing inert gas will help with is to prevent the fire from spreading. In that function it is as effective as the fire suppression system in the hold which most modern aircraft have anyway.

Re: I was going to post a snarky comment about backronyms...

Snarky comments aside, that is not a worthy mission. Now float in the Venus athosphere (and thus survive for more than an hour) is a different ball game

The idea is different

The idea of signing is different. Forging a signature is a specific legal offense which in most legislations lands you directly into the high-penalty fraud bucket. It is not a check - it is to deep-six you after the fact if you fake the sig.

What lawsuits

This is illegal in more than half of the world on basic data protection grounds, defamation law, libel law and god knows what else. It would take less than a day or two to get an injunction and a week to make it permanent to shut down a service like this in Europe on basic data protection grounds. The same goes for at least some USA states which have a basic resemblance of data protection legislation.

It will be interesting which jurisdiction will this operate in. I do not see it working in California and New England states. They all have legislation this runs afoul of.

Re: Doesn't pass the smell test

Rumour says

Rumor is somewhat correct. US limit for diesel is set to make petrol preferred and the reason for that is not pollution. While the actual lobbying is done by "green facade" shops, the money to do it comes from a surprising source - the same one that bring you intelligent design in the classroom and global warming denial. When you give it a thought it is not so surprising - diesel is 1.5+ times more economical than petrol and cheaper too. If you are making billions selling petrol you will be interested in it not getting anywhere.

The best proof is in the dates - nearly all adoptions of the Californian "clean air" standard which puts this requirement on diesel were done during under surprise, surprise - the republican administration which you will never call "environmentally friendly" (note - adoption dates, not effective enforcement dates - they are 2004-2007).

Not quite

For the time being the Uber "Interface" does not include:

1. Extra 5 miles detour around Terminal 5 and Terminal 4 if you take a cab from Heathrow and look like a foreigner. Or any other route for that matter

2. Obstruction of public highways when something is not going the Uber way

3. Spending half a day at a taxi rank at an airport chatting with 50 other lazy sods to skin a single mark 10 times the actual fare

And so on.

As long as cabs continue to charge based on time + distance traveled instead of a fixed cost from A-Z based on GPS the issue will stand. Milking Uber will not change a thing as it has a different charge basis which anyone who has been given the 30 mins extra run-around via the scenic route will definitely prefer going forward.

It is time for the Taxi licensing regs to be shredded and updated to the technical realities of today and the journeys to be charged purely on the basis of GPS distance.

Re: So....

Not so hasty. We still do not know if the NOx, the CO2 for UK VED and the bhp for VED in Portugal, Bulgaria, etc were admin-ed separately or at the same time. The real fun will begin if these need to be re-run and vehicles re-banded.

Re: The best and worst features

Tell this one to "we live in the browser" HTML5 crowd.

Do not understand me wrong - I agree with you. A large portion of the rest of the world does not - including Apple itself.

Re: "the attacks seemed unprofessional" ?

In russia? Yes. You can hire a professional for anything. Just pay the right price.

Companies making money of blades

All razor companies are making money of blade consumables in a HP/Lexmark Inkjet style.

As a result there is absolutely no interest in making a blade last longer. In fact the average "lifetime" of a blade has been slowly creeping downwards instead.

So your ceramic suggestion is an anathema.

Re: More Tax for More Follies and Greasy Palms?

There shouldn't be as far as I can see.

Not necessarily.

There are two tests that apply in the UK. One is Euro compliance which has NOx component and the other one is CO2. I do not know for sure if they are administered _SEPARATELY_ or at the same time.

I suspect they are separate, because the Euro compliance test is admin-ed at VW (and occasionally checked by a couple of labs) and the UK VED test is admin-ed and done in the UK as it is UK specific.

VW software when running in normal mode based on published US data may actually fail Euro5 in some cases. That means that if the UK test does not also check NOx (and other Euro5 compliance) at the same time as CO2, VW may need VED re-banding.

Which I suppose leads to funny-shaped window

I suspect primary view is a front-facing camera, same as in Virgin galactic and its Scaled Composites predecessor. The windows are more for belt-n-braces, just in case the camera fails and for side view.

Re: Tasty Morsel

"When a hardy Earth bacterium gets to that wet soil

I cannot think of anything on Earth that is hardy enough to survive in perchlorate at -70.

In fact, any(micro)organism capable of living in this will have to have a metabolism different to anything we know of.

Someone pointed to Dechlorosoma as an example of something that can eat this kind of substrate. Sure it can. Not at -70 and not in the concentrations capable of changing the water boiling and melting point.