Posts by Will Godfrey 5930 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Sep 2007
Whether false alarms or real sabotage attempts, this will develop into the biggest game of wack-a-mole the world has ever seen.
All it needs is for the baddies to set up a drone on a fixed flight path, then bugger off.
Oh, and forget about registering and tracking devices. The designs are are so simple that anyone with a 3d printing kit and a tame electronics geek can build their own - at least good enough for a single flight.
In the late 1960s Grayshott Hall was basically a slimming farm for those with more money than sense but the need to maintain appearances, and I worked for the firm that got the lucrative contract to install and maintain brand-new colour TVs in all the rooms. Well the catch was that it was a polished shoes, shirt and tie job - even the vans had to be glistening. However our manager (the guy who snagged the contract) was one in a million, and obliged the hall to pay our cleaning costs and where necessary replacements - these TVs with the old shadow mask tubes were seriously heavy, and had lots of sharp edges. They then had to be converged once in place, which in itself was not a nice clean job.
I don't know quite how it happened, but we were also given clearance to take our breaks in the kitchens, where some rather exotic dishes were prepared. Indeed there was no 'ordinary' food at all - we all coped as best we could. These breaks could be quite long, as we needed supervisors to let us in the rooms, having checked they were empty and paying guests not likely to turn up unexpectedly. As we still had to run the regular business, we were sent there on a strict rotation to give everyone a fair chance.
I've never had such a good time since {sigh}
One thing I never do these days is to directly go from site to site. If I'm looking for something I get a list from the search engine (usually startpage), then close the browser. My browser is configured to delete all cookies on exit. When I go to one of the sites on the list in a new session they get very little info about me - and if I see that 'Like' button it's immediate shut down.
The only time I ever use google is when looking up software and programming info (it does tend to be quite good for that), so they must have a very slanted profile for me!
That might seem tedious and overkill, but it's surprising how quickly it becomes a habit and it doesn't actually slow me down - just a few seconds against many minutes actually on a site.
They are strange. Very strange.
I once went to the retirement party of a woman who has spent her entire working life doing secretarial work. The result was we were a mix of people from all walks of life, making for an extremely interesting party. There was one small group though that coalesced in one corner of the room and didn't interact with any of the rest of us - they were all primary school teachers!
What you need to keep in mind is that all of this is the result of nearly a century of very careful selection and placement of the 'right' people in the right places. Sadly I see no likelihood of this changing in the foreseeable future.
Incidentally, does anyone know of any of our so-called regulators that is not a mistress of the group it is supposed to be regulation.
I rather like the relatively simple architecture. Hopefully this results in fewer hardware 'oopsies' - unlike some other types we know so well. It should also be much easier to code. I remember in the days of coding ARM2, it was amazing just how much functionality you could get out of a very small, highly orthogonal instruction set
Especially when the information you are given about the installed system is wrong.
On a factory automation upgrade our people insisted on getting timings for every part, right down to solenoid actuation. We built a sophisticated test rig with all those times built in, then added extra to allow for slow or sticking ones, and as many failsafes as we could think of.
When we installed it the system wouldn't even start. One of those failsafes kicked in. We had been assured the vacuum system took 1 minute to get to a usable level - even though we had doubts and allowed for 2 minutes. It actually took at least 10, not helped by the fact there was a leaky pipe that was known about, but not by us.
... but not a problem I'll ever have. My email client simply doesn't have a 'reply all' feature, and was chosen with that very much in mind.
OK, so I'm not a business with thousands of clients, but even so, by now there should be a separate system in commercial products specifically for sending bulk messages where and when wanted.
P·S. I was going to say 'needed' but that's debatable anyway - needed by whom?
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