Posts by Dodgy Geezer 1773 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2007
...The doorman of Abbey Road Studios, Gerry O'Driscoll, is heard speaking at 1:37, answering the question: "What is 'the dark side of the moon'?" with: "There is no dark side of the moon, really. Matter of fact, it's all dark. The only thing that makes it look light is the sun."...
Wiki entry for 'Dark Side of The Moon' - Pink Floyd album
...And do people who voted for Trump, or for Farage, ever wonder how someone like Hitler could ever have gotten into power? Off-topic, I know, but I think we should be told....
Odd, that. You see, the people who vote for Trump or Farage are WELL aware of how someone like that gets into power. They do it by telling the people that the 'other side' presents a huge threat and that the whole country would be in peril if they elected the Weimar coalition, or left the EU...
Then they present themselves to the Establishment as the only group standing in the way of chaos, while undertaking smear campaigns designed to present their opponents as 'working with the enemy' - much like Clinton did, and the Democrats are still doing....
Finally, they put a set of laws in place which are designed to stifle any opposition to their policies - indeed, make it illegal to oppose them. Much like the current anti-sexism, racism and Hate laws that we have today. Which means that they can harrass and imprison oponents perfectly legally, until they end up with a one-party state. Much like the EU is doing with Hungary and Poland.
There. You have been told. The people who voted for Trump and Farage already knew. Perhaps you should start to wonder?
..this is either seen as an implicit acknowledgement from Zuck and Co that British MPs will ask the really tough questions, or as evidence that the UK is not as important on the global stage as it thinks it is....
Simply make Facebook illegal in the UK. Designate it as a terrorist organisation, or something. If Zuk complains, it's the first. If not....
...as most of the infrastructure services are, there's a simple answer.
Raise prices.
Even if it's a private company, fines benefit no victim, and they just help the Government, who are the ones who get paid. And they don't harm the companies.. Fines for Civil Servant Departments are particularly pointless, but even a fine for a competitive private company removes some element of competition from the market place. The only loser is the consumer...
If it were up to me, I would stop fining public bodies, who just pay in taxpayers own money, and start fining the managers personally. Or, better still, jail them....
You were give a monoploy on the use of your work in return for donating it to society at some point in the future. That is what the copyright bargain is. Why do you think you should keep the first part of the agreement, but not the secoond part?
...Originally copyright was seen as something that would extend to the end of someone's life and this a certain amount of time after their death. It was, after all, their work and so once they were gone, it didn't serve any purpose to have its rights controlled....
Originally, copyright was for a period of 14 years, plus another 14 if you renewed. See Statute of Anne
The concept was a 'bargain' between a creative person and society. Society would grant a creator a monopoly for a limited period to benefit from their ideas, if, in return, society could make free use of them after that time. There was, orignally, no concept of a creator holding rights to the idea until they died, let alone allowing the idea to be purchased by a corporation and kept from society forever.
Interestingly, during the copyright negotiations which led up to the 'Mickey Mouse' laws in the US, a senator had this point explained to him when he proposed a 'forever' date. He drafted a reply calling for copyright to last "forever minus one day"....
..and video games are already being blamed. Rather than, oh, say, gun control, or the lack thereof....
...I think the comment about video games deserves a little more consideration rather than simply laughing at it...
That's not to say that violent video games cause mass shootings. They don't. You might as well think that Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment causes axe murdering. But they are an indicator into the attitude of the culture that generates them.
Mere possession of guns doesn't cause mass murdering either - though it is true that if you make guns impossibly hard to get hold of you will probably limit occurrances, or change them to machete attacks. Look at the Swiss - lots of guns and few massacres.
The problem for the Americans is that they have a culture of using guns to settle arguments. They look back to their pioneering Western days, and have this image of good and bad - white hats and black hats. The hero has to shoot the villain. While Europeans have a nuanced view of living together and are prepared to accomodate others - or look for ways in which opposing groups can live together (an attitude brought on by their history of interminable internecine warfare), the Americans are not inclined to 'live and let live'. In America 'a man's got to do what a man's got to do', and defend his rights.
It is this attitude which results in people with real or imagined slights taking a gun to a school or a mall and shooting people. You will see the same attitude in American action films and videos. They don't cause violence, but they are a reflection of a society which sees violence as a suitable way to settle a quarrel. Gun control is simply addressing a symptom. Ideally, you should go for the cause...
...Why the massive emergency services response?
“It seems that when we had reported the battery we used words like ‘chemical’ and ‘bomb’,” Len confessed...
If you had made the same report today you would have had a trigger-happy anti-terrorist team beating down your door, and a good chance of getting shot if you were holding a power screwdriver at the time...
...Lest you think that the rover must have been shoddily built to last this long...
Normally, we think that something must have been shoddily built if it falls apart in a SHORT time. That drill lasted 5 years in a heavy sand climate, which is a lot better than the lifetime of the tools I usually buy. Things that last a LONG time are normally praised for solid, reliable craftsmanship*...
* Under new Activist guidelines, the word 'craftspersonship' should be substtuted here...
...Sir Barnes Wallis, who came up with the idea to ensure that the barrel-shaped weapon would skip along the water's surface and then roll itself down the wall of the dam before exploding at the right depth. Conventional bombs were unable to reliably stay in contact with the wall before exploding.
Wallis devised the bouncing principle by watching children skim stones off the surface of a pond. It was ingenious but miles from being high-tech....
I see that macjules has already pipped me to the post by pointing out that conventional bombing couldn't actually deliver bombs to a precision of inches, and that torpedo nets were the reason for the skipping - and that it was sufficiently high-tech to mean that we don't have the capability to do this today, and would have to re-invent it...
But the real high-tech was displayed in B-W's famous paper "A Note on a Method of Attacking The Axis Powers". In this he points out all the problems associated with bombing from a first principles position - in that you are trying to transfer energy from a chemical reaction to a target through air, which is a poor medium for transmitting energy.
His answer was to transmit energy through the ground, which is a good carrier of pressure waves. You do this by making a large, fast bomb which can bury itself many feet into the ground and then detonate, passing the shockwave into the foundations of the object you are targeting. For viaducts and bunkers it's important NOT to hit the object, which will almost certainly resist a direct strike - the trick is to get underneath and shake the whole object to pieces rather than break one part of it. Or create a huge hole that the object then falls into....
That's a lesson the Americans failed to learn while bombing Iraq, and I don't think we have any 'earthquake' weaponry even today...
...when a government body is fined? Say £1m?
They either ask for another £1m in their budget (making the fine completely pointless)...
...or they make a £1m saving in their budget, Now, they can't sack any staff, so all they can do is withdraw service. In which case the taxpayer gets punished twice - once with maladministration and the second time by having to suffer worse potholes in the roads, or whatever that department provided......
...they're actually repeating scientifically verified facts...
I tried once to verify it. All I could get were lots of official documents telling me it was bad, and lots of papers telling me that there was a correlation - many of them using very poor methodologies and seemingly cherry-picking their evidence.
So I suspect that these 'facts' are a lot less clear if you approach the subject with an open mind. The one thing that I did find out was that smoking is strongly correlated with surviving heart attacks, and researchers are embarrassed by this....
...While D’Elia's death is a first, injuries from electronic cigarettes are surprisingly common....
While D’Elia's death is a first, injuries from electronic cigarettes are sought after and reported in a slavering fashion by journalists everywhere in an effort to start a witchhunt.
There. Fixed that for you...
It used to be the case that you only committed a crime if you DID something dodgy.
That era has now long past. Nowadays you can be guilty if you think about doing something dodgy. or something that used to be quite legal last year but has suddenly become illegal without anyone telling you.
In the UK, they could probably get him on "Writing code while having a suspicion that it might be used for criminal purposes" or some such.
Not a chance.
'Non-fossil' Renewable power sources are very poor. They deliver low amounts of power, which is easily disrupted. No engineer in their senses would use them - unless it was to obtain subsidies from a government bemused by Greens.
I suspect that you have been seduced by the never-ending stream of propaganda suggesting that full grid power from Renewables is 'just round the corner' into thinking that these systems are useful...
There were 90 bolts in total. The wrong bolts had been used in some aircraft for years. He used 84 that were too thin (but still held a bit) and 6 that were too short.
I think I have that the wrong way around in my explanation above, but I can't be arsed to craft an erratum...
Well, that WAS a lot of comments - some of which were vaguely informed!
The incident in question was BAC 1-11 flight 5390 - Birminghan-Malaga June 1990.
The accident report is here: Accident report
It turned out that the maintenance crew were proessionals of the old school, and prefered to rely on their skills rather than formal checks and drawing approved bolts from the proper box in stores. The local engineering management were content with this practice.
In this particular case a windscreen needed changeing when they were short of resources - the shift manager did the task, and used bolts that were too short. He matched them to the ones that came off, but they were also mistaken, and had presumably been wearing the small area of contact while they were on for the prior 4 years. He needed a few more bolts to make up the full 90 which were used, and used some which were too thin for this.
It was an easy mistake to make if you relied on your expertise - the proper bolts only had minor differences, and three aircraft in the fleet had ended up with the wrong bolts. The essential AIB finding was that engineering maintenance teams should have more structured work practices, and draw authorised bolts from a storekeeper rather than use their eyesight.
Of course, we don't yet know if the Chinese accident was casued in this manner or not...
...High to low pressure would suggest blown, but I'm not sure...
At Last! An intelligent and serious comment on The Register, dealing with important issues. This really demands a whole series of threads and sub-threads - perhaps a paper or two, and certainly books could be written about this.
ALL pressure-influenced movement involves a higher pressure behind an object and a lower one in front. So invariably, the object is moved by the difference in forces, and one would naturally think that the most important force is the one governing the direction of the object - in other words, items are always 'blown' - not 'sucked'.
However, I am inclined to consider the initial state of the object being acted on as the baseline, at the point where motion is initiated.. Thus, if a liquid is in a container at Standard Temperature and Pressure, and a person sucks it up by a straw, the action of sucking changes the liquid's motion, and so it is specified as neing 'sucked'.
In this case, the physical action that initiated the movement of the object/pilot was the windcreen blowing out, exposing him to low pressure. So he was sucked. An explosion in the cockpit resulting in his projection through the windscreen would mean that he was 'blown'...
...Technologies such as virtual private networks and virtual currencies will support fast, "secure" and anonymous operating environments, facilitating all levels of criminality," the report said....
All parts of the body facilitate alll levels of criminality,
Hands allow someone to go shoplifting,
Legs mean that criminals can run away,
A brain means that people can think up crimes,
Eyes mean that a person can read Official Secrets,
A tongue means that people can slander important Estabishment figures...
Perhaps we should do something about these far more common threats to our way of life?
I always thought that String theory was the key - that, and Sellotape and Brown Paper. This paper (Milligan, Seccombe, Sellars et al, 1958) should make things clearer:
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