* Posts by Dodgy Geezer

1773 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2007

Women crap at parking: Official

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Nw for a spanner in the works..

...Rather than being mildy mentally ill as one commentard has suggested ( a comment which, for the record, I didnt find in the least offensive)...

Mental illness (beyond the grosser forms of brain damage) is at least partly a social construct. We tend to see people on a sliding scale, running from 'eccentric/a little odd' all the way down to 'a complete nutter'.

Looking at things dispassionately, I note that a major feature of humans who are claimed to be perfectly sane is their tendency to believe what they are told by society/authority figures, even if that belief is completely at odds with reality. We have a near-infinite capacity for self-delusion. Charles MacKay documented this in his "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds". Most human beings seem therefore to be quite 'mentally ill' to begin with...

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Actually...

...the experiment measures the development of brain neuron connectivity.

Brain structure is known to be plastic, and to respond to outside stimuli. One wired-in feature of a brain is that it will learn by taking outside stimuli and modifying itself accordingly. In particular, all young primates/mammals seem to pick up social cues and 'fit in' to society at a very early age.

So, although this experiment shows the development of male and female brains along different pathways, it does not indicate whether this is because the male/female brain is pre-set to follow these, or whether the social pressures (simplistically, girls playing with dolls and make-up while boys play with guns and football) are the things responsible for the difference in connectivity...

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

What I can't understand....

...is why the experiment saw it as a disadvantage that women used their whole brain while men only used half.

It's well known that a man thinks half with his brain and half with his penis.... so we still present 100%...

IT MELTDOWN ruins Cyber Monday for RBS, Natwest customers

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

I've never had any trouble...

... with Coutts Private Office.

But I accept that it may not be suitable for everyone.... :)

India's Martian MOM leaves the nest

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: My favourite line

..."The burn also pointed the probe in the general direction of Mars, "...

Actually, it pointed the probe along a curved course to where Mars will be in a little less than a year's time...

Chester Cathedral smites net in Wi-Fi SMUT OUTRAGE

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

A modest suggestion...

...Meanwhile, my two sons (17 and 13) are unable to do their history research (Korean War and WWII) on school computers because both wars involved weapons and sites describing weapons are now banned...

Get them to write an essay with all paragraphs describing weapons or fighting-related issues redacted.

Climate change makes phones obsolete: ITU

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Right and wrong...

Christoph Dosch, chairman of the ITU-R Study Group 6 says he feels the world may be 'experiencing' more natural disasters and that the increase could be attributable to temperature rises.

The world IS 'experiencing' more natural disasters.

They are not happening any more frequently - in many cases, where we can measure things, they're happening less. But we're 'experiencing' more.

That's because an order of magnitude more natural event are detected, recorded and displayed to us through the ubiquitous self-monitoring media that we have created. Even 50 years ago a mud-slide in Siberia would not have been detected, let alone reported. Nowadays there will be a village close by, a picture of some fields sliding down a slope captured by a mobile phone, a Reuters report and a comment by a geologist, all within a few hours of it happening.

And we get to 'experience' it. What we need, of course, are figures of natural disasters 'happening' over the past 100 years with the detection capabilities we have today. Which we won't get...

Bonobos 'face extinction from interacting with humans'

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Least understood?

...“Bonobos are probably the least understood great ape in Africa...

Given the stories about their habits, I would have thought that there would be naturalists and social anthropologists queuing up to film them.

Then again, given that a lot of the expenses from this kind of work are paid by selling the US television rights, and the resultant shots are probably not suitable for the average US audience, this might explain the dearth of research...

(Edit Addition) - Having looked at the Wiki, I'm not sure that there IS a dearth of research... :)

WTF is the Internet of Things and how insurers will use it against you

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Tumble Drying

No, actually. I don't think you'll find that paper in any of the activist sites, because it's a technical one, a doctorate thesis from Trinity College, Dublin, and nothing to do with politics at all. I'm just an engineer who knows something about running a grid because I have traded energy for a living...

I think the paper gives a very good indication of the actual pressures on power generation plant. Note that, at idealistic best assumptions, wind power produces NEGATIVE benefits at about 30% penetration - at worst, it goes negative at 5%. In reality, 15-20% is the practical point at which adding more wind INCREASES the costs of your energy rather than decreasing them. And we're planning 40%.

I would have thought you might like to read it , rather than trying to damn an unread paper by false attribution...

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Tumble Drying

...I want the dryer to put out a tender saying "I need 2kWh supplied at the rate of 3kW anytime between now and 8am tomorrow". I want energy suppliers to be able to bid for this demand, and for my tumble dryer to pick the best offer. I want the energy suppliers to be able to base their offers on the weather forecast, so if the wind is forecast to pick up at 4am they can earmark some of that power for my drying....

I don't. Because:

1) Wind power is a very bad thing for a Grid. See this PhD thesis: http://erc.ucd.ie/files/theses/Eleanor%20Denny%20-%20A%20Cost-Benefit%20Analysis%20of%20Wind%20Power.pdf

2) I do not want to have the infrastructure tell me when to use energy. I want to use energy when I want it. At a low cost all the time. Neither of those is possible with wind, but they ARE possible in many other ways...

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Making 1+1=3 ?

Alas, you are no longer living in the entrepreneur-friendly 19th Century :(

Even though you may have no intention of marketing it, do not be surprised if you receive a patent-troll 'Cease-and-Desist" letter from somewhere. Probably America....

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Making 1+1=3 ?

Did you check the patent status of this technique before implementing it?

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

The way of the future...

...Did you leave the stove on and the leave the house? Did you use the wrong kind of toilet paper the last time you used the washroom...

We seem to have moved invisibly from a society where infrastructure services were purely for our benefit, into a world where we are beginning to be seen as Government property.

In Victorian times, it was the job of the sewers to carry foul water away, and if people started using non-dissoluble paper, it was the job of the sewer designers to alter their services to cope. Nowadays they seem happier to leave the Victorian infrastructure with no investment, and force us to alter our behaviour to fit in with the service they deign to provide.

Water is actually a good example. There has been a considerable increase of population in the South-East of England over the last 30 years. Engineers have stated that around 8 new reservoirs need to be built to provide for this. But DECC and the water companies have said that NONE will be built - instead, everyone will be required to use 20% less water, and water meters will be installed to enforce this.

I can't help feeling that the Internet of Things is part of this process - it's not being developed for the benefit of customers, but to enable complete day-to-day control of our lives...

Dry, cold and volatile: How to survive Mars, and your fellow crew

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Radiation issues can be addressed.....

...by:

1: using a magnetic deflector for particles

2: bringing LOTS of water, and storing it in the bit of the ship that's between you and the Sun...

The ZOD FILES: Climate documents from 2007 'must stay secret'

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Not that long ago

Thanks for the offer - we may take you up on it.

In return, our GCHQ can offer you all of Mann's emails - the ones he's fighting to stop being revealed at the moment...

Microsoft FAILS to encrypt data centre links despite NSA snooping

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

There is a fundamental problem here...

... and it's NOT about NSA. Or GCHQ.

We seem to be taking it for granted that the Western Intelligence Services will spy on all citizens intrusively, even though there is no real justification for this. Now, the intelligence services do not exist on their own. They are supposed to be under the control of governments. If they are doing something wrong, we should NOT be just looking to defend ourselves against them - we should be looking at the bodies responsible for controlling them, and asking what's wrong with the control structure.

I see the same problem with the energy sector in the UK. The companies are being blamed for incompetence and high prices. but NO ONE is complaining that the regulator has failed to regulate them properly.

I wonder why not...?

Fukushima fearmongers: It's your fault Japan dumped CO2 targets

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

1 - why are we restricting ourselves to the electricity sector? The chemical industry has just as many pollution problems. And they don't slowly fade away - they stay there.

2 - suffering from evacuation is there because of your scare stories. Stop pushing them and the suffering drops.

3 - ALL will be able to go back over time. As opposed to every other pollution, which requires clearing up...

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Sievert calculation assumptions

...Can a more learned person than me, explain what's wrong with what this scientist is saying about the assumptions made in the Sievert calculation?...

Certainly. I am not formally qualified as a teacher, but I have worked on the protection side for British Energy, the nuclear power station people.

I will need some contact details, however, to send my bill in. My consultancy rates are £100 per hour (considerably cheaper than a solicitor) and I estimate that we will need 3 hours work on this.

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Anti-nukers... vs. Pro-Nukers

...But why are there so few sensible discussions on this topic? The Pro-Nukers decimate the anti-nukers with utter ridicule. But that's no win to win an argument over such a divisive topic. It just fuels resentment... And it only serves to make the doomsayers more entrenched and want to proven right IMHO!

What are you actually asking for? Both the pro and anti nuclear sides are now entrenched - you said so yourself. Humans don't listen to reason in such circumstances. If you want to know who's right, the only thing to do is to research the subject yourself and come to your own conclusions.

Or are you complaining that you don't know which way to think because nobody's told you?

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Humans aren't responsible enough for nuclear power

...Chernobyl isn't either. The Ukraine estimates the exclusion zone (30KM radius) will be uninhabitable for 20,000 years...

My! That's a lot of Fuc******!

There is a small, shrinking community of stubborn, independently minded women who returned to their ancestral homes inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. They have been there for more than 25 years, but though their numbers are naturally shrinking due to old age, most researchers agree that they are outliving their counterparts of who accepted the Soviet Union’s relocation orders.

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Not quite

...The alternative is war....

We know. Why do you think we're supporting green politics?

signed,

NSA, GCHQ, and the Military-Industrial complex of the USA

Goodbye cruel world: Robot 'commits suicide' in KITCHEN FIREBALL

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Actually...

...that was a robot Snowden, who was about to spill the beans about the ROTM plans for next year.

An autonomous quadcopter was clearly seen flying away from the house shortly after the incident by a human witness, but the police say that the robot CCTV cameras have nothing on them at all, so the witness must be mistaken...

You've been arrested for computer crime: Here's what happens next

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: 3 of 19

..."there were 19 refusals to decrypt data to date in the period 2012/2013. Of those 19, three were successfully prosecuted"

So the other 16 had no charges brought against them?

Or maybe they committed suicide while in prison..?

Tales from an expert witness: Lasers, guns and singing Santas

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Better education needed..

...The main problem with expert witness(es?) is when they give opinion on evidence in which they have no expert knowledge....

There are also problems when they give evidence on a subject where they think they have knowledge where what they have is religious belief.

James Hansen was an expert witness at the 'Kingsnorth Six' trial, getting the defendants off because they were 'saving the world'. That was 5 years ago, and we now know that the danger was hopelessly overstated...

Brit ISPs ordered to add more movie-streaming websites to block list

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: At what point

The judge doesn't have a problem. The case is work - he gets paid. No problem. Even more the case for the Media solicitors.

If you want to SOLVE a problem - don't go to law...

Stephen Hawking: 'Boring' Higgs Boson discovery cost me $100

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Stephen Hawking hates the Higgs Boson...

...and the Higgs Boson doesn't like him much either...

The truth about mystery Trojan found in space

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

...its malware payload only came into play in screwing up the operation of industrial control systems from Siemens. Additionally, it only activated when the kit was being used to control high-speed equipment such as Iran's nuke purifying centrifuges. Nothing would happen to the same type of kit within a milk-bottling factory or an escalator control mechanism that became infected....

That's all right, then.

We'll forget about the fact that it only takes ONE malicious teenager inside the virus-writing fraternity who isn't thinking much about long-term consequences to put a jump around that.....

'It seems that the OSes and devices are based on the Devil'

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Apple and Windows are just as bad with there's if not worse, Apples OS X is Osaten or Satan and Windows 8 is based on hate. The list goes on on and I am at a lose...

He could always use that rock of operating systems, Catholic Pious Miracle....

As approved by the Holy Pontiff himself...

Anonymous threatens cyberwar with Anonymous

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Why on Earth...?

Er - 'spy' on a CLIMATE CHANGE CONFERENCE?

AFAIK, They are full of boring left-wing activists proposing grandiose plans to spend other people's money. Anything that is agreed there will be spread all over the green press, and pretty much all of it will be pointless verbiage.

Perhaps this might have been used as a NSA training exercise...?

Watch out, MARTIANS: 1.3 tonne INDIAN ROBOT is on its way

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Spending

...Don't bring up such old stuff. It was very one-sided in many ways....

Funny how that doesn't seem to be an issue when people call on the UK to apologise for things that happened several hundred years ago... ?

And perhaps you should thank us for getting rid of suttee and the Thugs?

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Spending

...I thought it was reparations for pillaging the Raj?...

Can we have an apology from the Indian government for the 'Black Hole of Calcutta' incident?

Just asking.....

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Poverty and Space Shots

...In space terms, the mission is fairly cheap. Nonetheless, some observers are surprised that a country with such visible problems with poverty would spend its dosh on sending a probe to Mars...

2 points:

1 - Humans need a mix of things in their lives. During WW2, under heavy rationing, people nevertheless saved up ration points to spend on a few luxuries occasionally. Same goes for countries - you can't expect a country never to run a festival, for instance, even if many of its inhabitants are malnourished.

2 - Poverty in India is a complex issue, built into the social structure of subsistence farming. It is slowly changing, as more people become 'middle-class'. One important driver for this is the provision of sophisticated jobs for people to aspire to. An indigenous high-tech industry would provide such jobs, and a space programme is a good way to create that demand....

'Only nuclear power can save humanity', say Global Warming high priests

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: @Vladimire Plouzhnikov - Sigh...

...I have said it before and I will say it again, we need to use energy MORE EFFICIENTLY!...

Alas, no.

This margin is too short to give you the economics lesson you need, so you are going to have to explain to yourself that:

1 - The market automatically makes us use ALL resources at the appropriate level of efficiency depending on their rarity/value. That is why you see goldsmiths sweeping their workbenches for scraps of gold, but you don't see builders filtering the gutter for sand.

2 - If you want to make people save energy and use it more efficiently, you are going to have to raise its price considerably. People CANNOT save items while still getting them cheap.

3 - There is NO justification for forcing energy prices high. We can effectively generate an infinite supply if we like. It is NOT a scarce raw material. Our current usage of energy would be considered ridiculous to someone of 100 years ago, and in 100 years time we will probably be using many times more energy than today.

LOHAN's mighty thruster poised for hot coupling

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

I use magnets extensively...

... to hold hatches on things like model aircraft and boats.

If you have a magnet which is too powerful, you wrap a bit of insulating tape around it, or mount it a bit further from the steel plate using some kind of spacer. This gives you an infinitely variable force from full down to nothing.

But I would still like a little servo-motor to release spring-loaded clips, so that they fall away just like a NASA umbilical cable just before a Shuttle launch. The Russians use a swinging arm, and a spring-loaded one of those could be mounted somewhere to hold two contacts in place as an alternative...

Cyber-terrorists? Pah! Superhero protesters were a bigger threat to London Olympics

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Are they counting every ICMP ECHO separately?

No.

They appear to be counting them twice...

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

You realise...

...that with this level of sarcasm going the rounds, GCHQ and Security Service (I wonder why the latter don't like being known by their initials?) will HAVE to find (or make up) a credible new threat. And quickly.

Note that their preferred method of gathering data is to set up agents provocateur. Expect to see adverts in the computer underground for 'hackers willing to attack government systems'...

Or, of course, they could move to somewhere there was guaranteed work, and claim that breach of copyright was a fundamental attack on the country's critical infrastructure, sponsored by the Norks....

Snowden leaks latest: BT, Vodafone, Verizon jack GCHQ into undersea fiber

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

How thorough will this be...

....British MPs have taken steps to probe their spies' mass collection of data from private sources....

...when GCHQ has a complete list of ALL the MPs private phone calls, financial dealings and web page viewings?

If any MP gets a bit too close to the truth, someone will have a word with him about that indiscreet e-mail he sent a couple of years ago, and how difficult his life might become if the press got to hear about it...

SR-71 Blackbird follow-up: A new TERRIFYING Mach 6 spy-drone bomber

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

I don't know....

...but it can do the Kessel run in 12 parsecs...

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

For this aircraft to be built....

...it will need a justification. A justification in terms of a threat.

Look for US foreign policy to continue stating that 'nasty foreigners living on the other side of the world hate us because of our democracy'. I wonder who it'll be next time? Because you can't really claim that you need this to fight Afghanistan.....

New Oz government keeps Huawei ban after spook briefing

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

...if the USA thinks Huawei is dangerous and Australia thinks Huawei is dangerous and the two share intelligence, as we know they do, why doesn't the UK think Huawei is dangerous?...

Let me guess...

The UK doesn't have any secrets worth keeping...?

The UK isn't about to offer a big tender that Huawei and some US companies are bidding for...?

Fleet of driverless pods to take over Milton Keynes town centre

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Faces the same legal issues as driverless cars

...where does the liability lie? Cannot be the occupant if they have no real time control over it, pretty sure the council won't want to be paying out, likewise with the manufacturer...

Our legal system seems pretty capable of dealing with that issue. Liability will be shared between the people/organisation that allowed it to be on the road, and the person who may have contributed to the accident.

So, if one runs amuck due to a malfunction and kills a pedestrian, the operators will be be at fault (though they may be able to offload some of that to the manufacturer if it was a design failure.

If a passenger sabotages one and starts a fire, for instance, or manages to derail one, they are likely to be blamed...

Study: Arctic warming at 'stunning' rate – highest temps in 44,000 years

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

...A recent study has shown that over the past 100 years the average summer temperatures in the Eastern Canadian Arctic have been toastier than at any time for at least the past 44,000 years, and perhaps for as long as 120,000 years....

Er, not exactly.

The study looked at 139 sites. At 135 of them, the age of the moss exposed was around 1000 years, showing that it had been warmer than this 1000 years ago.

At 4 of them, the the age of the moss exposed was around 44,000 years, close to the limit of the age-measuring process.

It seems surprising that just a few sites should show a very great age of ice, when all around them, in some cases only a few hundred yards away, there is clear evidence of greater warmth in the last 1000 years. More work is obviously needed. I would consider those 4 sites closely, re-examine them, and check for error and contamination. With this data, I certainly wouldn't announce that the average summer temperatures in the whole Eastern Canadian Arctic are now 'toastier' than at any time for at least the past 44,000 years.

Unless I hadn't read the fine detail of the study, of course. I wonder if Rik Myslewski has...?

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

New Winter slogan...

"Vote Green - turn blue...."

Why Bletchley Park could never happen today

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

You're SLOWLY getting there...

While Mr Mathieson has a long way to go, he is clearly beginning to understand what has been happening - and some of the commentators are way ahead of him. Which is heartening...

During the 1940s, we had a World War. In a war, the normal checks and controls that society expects to put on a government are thrown away. Your government may forcibly commandeer your property, attach you to the armed services, and investigate/spy on anything it likes.

Just after the war, many of the state bureaucracies which applied these new powers were swept away. Several were happy to be closed down - but many put up quite a fight. One example of the sort of thing that happened can be seen here:

Clarence Henry Willcock

Our State Secret Police and Intelligence Services were lucky - they survived the end of the war quite easily by moving into the Cold War virtually unchanged. Gradually the Cold War shrank, disappearing entirely in the early 1990s. It may be interesting to consider whether it would have gone earlier if it had not been in the interests of Security Service, the SIS, NSA, the CIA, KGB, Stasi, and many similar organisations to keep it going.

When the Cold War died these organisations were staring redundancy in the face. They have built up the threat of terrorism to justify their own existence. It may be interesting to consider whether Middle Eastern politics might have been very different if it were not for the intelligence services input encouraging destabilisation.

The intelligence services do not particularly WANT to spy on the entire civilian population. I'm sure that they are quite uninterested in the information they are gathering - indeed, they probably can't make any practical use of it. Famously, they have NEVER been able to show an example of a plot uncovered by the use of it. What they are interested in is justifying their existence. And big projects like this are self-perpetuating, and ideal for maintaining a lifetime's career.

We need supra-legal intelligence services in wartime. In peacetime we need the rule of law, applied by the police, democratically accountable and presented in open court. And that is what our intelligence services do not want to hear, and are very scared to see discussed...

Leaky security could scuttle global ship-tracking system

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

The Security Service ran out of reasons to exist in the 1990s, when the Russian Cold War threat vanished.

Since then they have been making up threats to justify their existence. One of the subjects they made a big song and dance about (and got a big budget from the Treasury for) was 'Responsibility for securing the Critical Infrastructure' of this country.

This country has been a maritime nation for all of its history. We are the headquarters of the International Maritime Organisation, which is the body that requires AIS. In fact, the IMO is about half a mile up the Thames from the Security Service headquarters. Maritime security IS part of the Critical Infrastructure of our country.

I wonder whether Security Service should have been doing their job and ensuring that security was considered in any of the big international infrastructure projects we run... but perhaps that's just naive

Space boffins boycott Kepler 'scope talks after US bans Chinese guests

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: A slightly tepid war

...Ah, a scientific reprise of the worst days of the Cold War, how quaint...

Thanks. We are trying our best to get back to the good old days when everyone knew that God was on our side, that the budget was never in any doubt, and that we had a job for life...

Signed,

the US military, intelligence and industrial complex...

NSA data centre launch delayed as power surges 'melt metal, zap racks'

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge
Big Brother

I've scanned all the comments...

...and so far no one seems to have mentioned internal sabotage. Which seems most likely to me.

Either because someone does not agree with what is being done, or because someone wants the work (and fat profits) to continue. Knowing America, probably the latter.

And before someone says "But everybody was cleared!" - that only documents that you're not Communist or homosexual, and that you can whistle 'The Star-Spangled Banner'.

P.S. - It doesn't actually mean that you ACTUALLY conform to these requirements, it just documents that you do for the records...

Brew me up, bro: 11-year-old plans to make BEER IN SPACE

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

..."He got a book for Christmas that was about weird facts and explains how in the Middle Ages they used to drink beer because it was purer than water."...

Indeed. Score 1 for making sensible deductions about the kind of activities an early colony would have to get up to. I think that it is indeed very likely that a Mars/Moon colony would find ways of making their water more attractive to drink of great benefit.

Perhaps we should think of other medieval village occupations which might be appropriate. I suspect that the colony would have to get up to quite a size before they could start witch-burning...

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Re: Intriguing

...but it would be able to be served VERY cold...

Three BILLION people now potential nodes for the transfer of cat videos

Dodgy Geezer Silver badge

Life in the 21st century....

...Documents like this are intended to demonstrate that having access to the internet is, or should be, a normal part of 21st century life. The ITU got that access enshrined as a human right by the UN, but we're still a long way from extending connectivity to those other four billion people who need it...

Presumably this is the way the backbone providers lobby international organisations to get them to provide large tranches of taxpayer money for them to run projects which the market won't cover.

Anyone who really thinks about 'human rights' (as opposed to 'how you can make profit out of them) will probably come to two conclusions:

1 - The concept of 'human rights' is a vague, nebulous one which does not seem to have any real grounding in political philosophy, but is often used rhetorically to justify a wide range of political activity.

2 - If anyone wanted to really bring all of humanity up to some arbitrary minimum living standard, then the provision of fresh water and adequate sewage facilities would probably be first on the list by a long way. Internet connectivity would be way down the priorities.