Posts by Dr Dan Holdsworth

AI's thirst for water is alarming, but may solve itself

Green options?

One possibly useful way around this would be to use the waste heat from computing to feed into district heating schemes. In the UK there are as yet very few of these, but I would expect this paucity to change fairly rapidly once the free market gets involved with green matters. Domestic properties are a major user of heat, and if industrial waste heat could be converted into steam and this steam used as a means of transporting heat around a suburb, then a fair amount of energy that otherwise would be wasted could be re-used.

The means to turn low-grade waste heat into higher temperatures already exists with grid-scale heat pumps; AI bit-barns would be an ideal supplier for such industrial heat pump systems.

Woman uses AirTags to nab alleged parcel-pinching scum

Re: "police declined to pursue the matter"

One of the old tricks in this respect is to take a tin of red oxide primer, one of grey and decant some of each into a receptacle, then paint the bike using the poorly-mixed red-grey mixture. The result looks utterly vile, especially if you take care to badly paint parts of the wheels and sprockets and saddle as well. As long as the bike isn't obviously valuable for components then this generally puts off the bike thieves, together with a couple of strong locks.

Before we put half a million broadband satellites in orbit, anyone want to consider environmental effects?

The human population in Australia is very, very strongly concentrated in the coastal cities with very few inland cities of any size. If the internet in these cities is crap, then this is just down to the suppliers also being crap, along with the city regulators similarly being twerps.

This does not surprise me in the least, unfortunately.

BOFH: The true gravity of the Boss and the 3-coffee problem

Re: caffeine intolerance is a real thing

Generally speaking, vertebrates hydrolyse toxins first then oxidise, and invertebrates do the thing the other way around. There's an insecticide, malathion, which exploits this effect. Malathion isn't particularly toxic but when oxidised to maloxon if becomes very toxic to most life forms. Thing is, vertebrates either excrete it or hydrolyse it, so never see maloxon. Invertebrates like insects, on the other hand, synthesise their own toxin-induced deaths in a trick known as lethal synthesis.

CrowdStrike meets Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will

Re: Canary Deployment

The problem with giving users the ability to refuse updates is that a minority will refuse ALL changes to a system on the not-completely-insane basis that if the machine is running OK now, why alter it?

Users generally need to be told that updates will happen, and not ever asked about giving their permission, or this sort of stupidity will occur.

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

I currently drive a Mazda which has an early version of this system installed. It has a GPS-enabled map with speed limits, but also a camera which if it sees a speed limit sign will override the GPS map version. This function cannot be easily turned off (although the translation of what the car thinks is the limit to what the limiter function is set to CAN be made manual).

Thus driving past Gisburn Livestock Auction, the car will generally indicate that the speed limit is 5 MPH, having seen the internal speed limit sing inside the auction mart's carpark. It towns generally, the system very often sees 20 MPH signs on side roads and sets the local limit to this instead of what the actual road limit is. If the EU system is this daft, it will be widely ignored.

This sort of thing could also be gamed very easily: deploy a GPS jammer and a large sign denoting the speed limit as 10 MPH. A percentage of new cars will then try to conform to this new limit, which on a busy motorway would be carnage indeed.

Glastonbury to turn festivalgoer pee into eco-friendly fertilizer

Re: Bring back the long drop

I am told that there's an old military practical joke which involves a long-drop toilet and a thunderflash...

Energy buffs give small modular reactors a gigantic reality check

Re: it's called b̶a̶t̶t̶e̶r̶i̶e̶s̶, f̶l̶y̶w̶h̶e̶e̶l̶s̶, pumped storage...

Pumped storage using water doesn't scale in the UK.

Pumped storage using something a lot denser than water, on the other hand...

Research finds electric cars are silent but violent for pedestrians

Re: Just a thought

If a noise-maker has to be fitted, then I would definitely expand on the range of special effects available.

BOFH after a long night on the curry and cheap lager, for instance; with an extra-special sound effect for accelerating away from the traffic lights; just the thing to light up the faces of small children everywhere.

I would also use the sound of a particularly knackered diesel engine (just for old times' sake), and a synthesised Ferrari engine.

Finally, for use in queuing traffic, simulated Scottish swearing and ranting with an "Och see you... Jimmy!" when I accelerate away from traffic lights.

You want us to think of the children? Couldn't agree more

To be honest this is a feature, not a bug.

We know that through a person's teenage years their brain is undergoing quite a lot of change including a lot of connection-pruning. Effectively human brains start by accumulating a massive number of connections, then later on they prune back the ones that are optimal to the environment the person is then in.

This process of changing from child to adult is not particularly pleasant and generally causes a fair amount of anxiety and pain. I would hypothesise that the anxiety and pain are actually necessary parts of the process its self and MUST be present if you are to get an adult human being at the end of the process; if you try to medicate and otherwise remove all of this pain you merely end up with a very big kid, and once they've moved on from this phase of brain development, they stay as a very big kid.

End-to-end encryption may be the bane of cops, but they can't close that Pandora's Box

Re: Sigh......Assumptions Again.......

The answer is UseNet.

When you want to talk simply send out an encrypted message to a UseNet group. This puts the message into the public domain without any specific destination; anyone can pick it up but only the recipient with the correct private key can decrypt it.

To reply, do the same. All you have to do is preshare public keys and then you're laughing.

Re: The bits I love

The terrorists in some attacks in Paris did just that: plaintext comms using SMS and code-words. Having the plaintext is absolutely no use whatsoever if you don't know what the codewords mean.

NASA solar sail to be Siriusly visible in orbit from Earth

I cannot help but feel that NEONSAT will herald the start of a new spectator sport: map North Korean military installations and air defences, publish an optimised attack plan against them, then see how many frenzied rants can be induced in the Nork's leadership from this.

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: Mesh

Even easier would be to use the networking-over-power solution to communicate with comms hubs placed in each local power transformer building. These are common throughout residential and commercial districts and would provide the perfect place to go from low-bandwidth net-over-power to a connection in to a faster network.

All you have to do then is provide some sort of infrastructure for variable power tariffs to be communicated over the net-over-power networks, together with some sort of Network Time Protocol to keep the meters time-synchronised. There would be no need for complicated enforcement of who gets power when; you just let price variation do the switching for you.

The last mile's at risk in our hostile environment. Let’s go the extra mile to fix it

Make life more difficult for criminals

A point worth making here is that we ought to be trying our best to make life more difficult for petty criminals. Stop, for instance, using copper wire wherever possible and run fibre to the individual household premises. Fibre is merely purified glass; expensive but the resale value of scrap fibre is as near nothing as makes no difference, whereas scrap copper once separated from the insulation and chopped up to make it unrecognisable does have a very real scrap value.

Similarly cabinets need to be better armoured and also need to stop running on 230V AC. So, for that matter, do streetlights. It may have escaped everyone's attention but we are currently trying to force every vehicle owner in the country to change to battery electric vehicles (BEVs). When we manage this, we will have perforce compelled the nation's petty criminals to use BEVs as well. At this point, working out how to steal electricity will become a knotty problem at the forefront of lots of admittedly not very good minds.

Easily-opened cabinets with recognisable UK plug sockets in them are an obvious and easy target, even if the power sockets do have fairly low-output fuses. Changing these sockets for a much less common sort, and even hiding the 230V circuits altogether and leaving merely a USB or 12V socket for the engineer to plug their kit into would go a long way towards heading off electricity theft from these cabinets before it ever becomes a known target.

Similarly running streetlights on much lower voltage at much lower, dimmer outputs would save power and remove street lights from the list of potential electricity theft targets. The same theme should be carried on elsewhere: remove the easy targets for theft of power and copper.

Attacks on UK fiber networks mount: Operators beg govt to step in

Re: Using phrases such as "Genetically predisposed to violence" ...

Actually, in very broad terms you *CAN* point to a genetic link to violence; possession of a Y chromosome is one very good marker.

Yes, I know it has a huge false positive rate.

New solvent might end winter charging blues for EV owners

Re: A new solvent.

You notice that they're not using its alternative name, fluoro-methyl-cyanide?

ChatGPT starts spouting nonsense in 'unexpected responses' shocker

Re: Just as far away as before

To be honest, quite a lot of what might be classed as intelligence in humans can be revealed as simply generalised ape behaviour, if you know a little about the behaviour of other great apes such as gorillas and chimps (it is a mistake to study chimps exclusively, because they too have diverged quite markedly from our common ancestor and don't quite behave like a general purpose ape might).

A lot of brain power goes on keeping the supporting systems going, and this is pretty much hard-coded and adapted to the particular body that the brain is a part of. This isn't intelligence, however; our breathing response and mammalian diving response might be compared in an AI to the power systems being able to switch from general line power to UPS, and once on UPS to be able to fire up the auxiliary generator.

Humans actually are fairly parsimonious with their general intelligence. You rarely see humans turning on full intellectual power simply because most of the time it isn't needed; most of the time we humans cruise along on various autopilot systems. So it is going to be with AI systems; most of the time you'll only see limited responses since full-on AI shouldn't really be needed.

European Court of Human Rights declares backdoored encryption is illegal

The goal of monitoring everyone is apparently so attractive to the American government that they have huge data warehouses that store harvested encrypted comms in the rather vain hope that at some point in the near-enough-to-be-useful future they will happen upon a magical encryption decryption tool that will enable them to break these communications and do something useful with the data.

In the mean time, it isn't their money that they are wasting, but merely that of the American citizenry so they continue to store petabytes of useless garbage.

All in all, this is basically really rather silly. Most criminal enterprises require the participants to actually do something, whether this be sell small packets of dubious powder or wave guns at bank clerks and so on. Modern interception can tell who is talking to whom for the most part (criminals have yet to be brave enough to encrypt their messaging and stick it on Usenet for all to see, but not see who it is intended for) and thus knowing that at least a few in a network are known wrong 'uns would lead one to the strong suspicion that the entire network is mostly criminal and all members ought to be briefly scrutinised.

Of course this does fall flat if a few bank robbers are also part of an internet knitting club and are covertly exchanging patterns, but then that's what policing is supposed to sort out.

Dell said to be preparing broad Return To Office order this Monday

Re: Throw me in that briar patch!

Yeah, we've had this one a fair number of times where I work, and HR have had it explained in painstaking detail as well.

Specifically, engineering jobs attract people who are good at engineering. Quite a few of these are either actually autistic or have a lot of autistic traits, chiefly those of not actually liking people very much and certainly not being very good at dealing with them. So, taking oldish, experienced engineers and trying to turn such individuals into managers is basically the psychological equivalent of square peg, round hole.

It doesn't work and when engineers are forced to try to become managers then you get really crap managers and also lose good engineers.

This sort of thing is why I opted in the end for an interview with a private psychiatrist to work out once and for all if I was autistic; I am and have NHS-accepted proof thereof.

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Re: It's everywhere

Actually there are several ways of looking for pollution, depending on what you're actually interested in.

If you want really clean chalk streams, then you want to reduce phosphate levels to a bare minimum along with nitrate and pretty much everything else, which is all very well but actually quite difficult to do since it doesn't take much extra phosphate to get plant growth going.

If on the other hand you're looking for grosser levels of pollution, then nitrate is one way to go but this too will mostly detect agricultural run-off. The indicator for sewage run-off is to look for faecal coliform bacteria, which are the really, really common bacteria that all mammals excrete from their guts. These are very common hence easier to find than the much rarer but more damaging actual pathogens.

Re: Root Cause

The stock market isn't a money-making machine for just a few people; it is also where our pension money is invested, to make it grow in time for our retirement. The stock market by way of investment bonds is also where most of my personal savings are kept and for precisely the same reason: I want that money to grow.

Now, if Baillie-Gifford could please get their mind and investments back in order...

UK Civil Aviation Authority ponders vertiports for flying taxis

light monorail?

To be honest, I'd say that light elevated monorail is a much better bet if you want fairly quick, fairly easily installed light transport between cities.

A monorail solves quite a few of the way leave problems because it is elevated above the ground, and if constructed of decent materials then the pylons and track can be made to be fairly unobtrusive. The carriages suspended from the monorail need not be particularly large, obtrusive or noisy either since they can use solid rubber-composite wheels instead of steel, which reduces rail wear and noise. Power isn't now an issue either; you simply run the vehicles from onboard batteries, with a pair of recharge rails set every so often along the length of the tracks.

Power and rails normally cause problems, but not if these are five metres off the ground as these would be.

The only thing that light monorail cannot do is shift heavy loads very well, or shift loads at extreme speeds. However in a city speeds would be limited to about 20 mph, and to 50 or so out of cities. Doesn't sound much, but that's better than a lot of motorways these days and the infrastructure is much, much less obtrusive.

COVID-19 infection surge detected in wastewater, signals potential new wave

Re: It is only Covid if you take a test

And so we come back to heat recovery ventilation once more.

Take one well-insulated building that is also well sealed. Put some humans in it. Watch as the exhaled moist air causes the humidity to rise rapidly and the fungal spores start to germinate.

Heat recovery ventilation is the answer. You use a little bit of power to push outside air into the building over a heat exchanger and to pull inside air out, again over a heat exchanger. The result is lots of lovely warm outside air in your building and no fungus problems to speak of.

Re: It is only Covid if you take a test

COVID-19 is not a common cold.

The major difference is that covid uses the angiotensin-2 enzyme/receptor to get into cells, and in doing so it can interfere with this sub-system. Angiotensin regulates blood pressure and wound healing; if lots of angiotensin-2 (ACE-2) receptors get clogged up with virus then your body interprets the sudden superabundance of angiotensin-2 hormone as news that something's very wrong.

Specifically, lots of angiotensin-2 hormone means that blood pressure is low and there is a wound somewhere. This makes your body alter blood chemistry to make the blood extra-sticky and much more likely to clot, and activates the smooth muscle in your arteries to try to seal off any holes. There's no feedback loop here either; as long as angiotensin-2 levels are high, your blood remains set to clot at the slightest provocation.

That system is what caused deaths from covid-19. Super-sticky blood clotted everywhere, bunged up lung function and even brain function. That's what the vaccines were aimed at: not entirely stopping the disease but merely stopping it going systemic and hospitalising the patient.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Think of the Grid! - running costs are a thing.

The basic problem really is that governments have grown used to fuel duty as a revenue source, and a way of demonstrating their fitness to rule. Admittedly this boils down to "We are great leaders because we won't crap on you more than we are doing already", but the effect is the same.

The problem is how you replace fuel duty when electric cars can be recharged from household or other electrical sources and where some of these sources can be solar, hydro or other non-grid electricity. Pretty much every solution that tries to put a levy on car charging comes up against "User has control of hardware and can/will circumvent control systems".

Road pricing is another control freak wet dream: it requires that you monitor where vehicles go in order to charge them at those times, and will also allow for automatic issuing of speeding tickets and so on. Once again, the problem is that the end user has control of the hardware and a huge incentive to circumvent the charging system. Various activist groups would also find such a system to be a gold mine for their uses, since spoofing the system into fining drivers unjustly rapidly creates a groundswell of discontent against the government; this is always the hardest part of any campaign of political action (even terrorism) but if you can get your intended target to behave unjustly towards your target audience, you've got it made in publicity terms.

That a government would give up most road pricing and simply use Zero Emission Vehicles as a public good will likely have occurred to nobody.

It's ba-ack... UK watchdog publishes age verification proposals

What everyone seems to forget is that porn these days doesn't actually make much money. There are lots of free sites out there so advertising revenue from users who are by the very nature of the product not going want to click on adverts is the only way to go. Porn sites get hosted wherever the hosting is cheapest and law enforcement is least onerous, therefore this means very few are UK-hosted.

So, if you have a country that's trying to make you jump through all manner of hoops when their citizens try to access your site, what do you do?

1) Do nothing and hope they don't notice you

2) If contacted stick an "Are you 18?" banner on your page.

3) If threatened again with credible legal action simply black hole all UK IP addresses with geo-IP and a firewall; if they want to look they can use a VPN.

You will note that trying to force credible age checking on the users doesn't occur on the list. That's because this costs money and porn simply doesn't pay enough for this to be worth doing.

Re: "facial age estimation"

Retro-phrenology, when practised upon politicians, does however stand a chance of working.

Re: Re:Photo ID - DVLA

No, on the plastic licence card there's a long set of codes of which 01 means that the driver needs glasses or some other eyesight correction, 02 is hearing aids and then there are many, many other codes for multiferous things.

How to teach people the wrong thing

So, a free product is now to be ring-fenced with all manner of restrictions but also the government has to leave VPNs completely untouched.

It therefore will take one or two tech-savvy teens about five minutes to work out that a free Chinese VPN that terminates in somewhere not-UK is a completely effective way around this block. Granted such a thing is a data-stealing nightmare that likely also tries to infect everything it touches with viruses, but the average teen male won't see or care about that at all.

What IS being taught to young, impressionable teens is a very simple message: The Government is really thick. Like, quite incredibly, knuckle-draggingly stupid and all that matters here is not being caught. So, if you combine this with drugs policy then the message is quite simple and straightforwards:

Do whatever you like as long as you don't get caught.

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

There's a deus ex machina joke in here somewhere.

Share your 2024 tech forecasts (wrong answers only) to win a terrible sweater

13 days after Etherium is adopted as the world currency, everyone will simultaneously understand how morphic resonance works.

Millions of smart meters will brick it when 2G and 3G turns off

Re: 2G is perfect for this

If you go and have a look at the latest spec of NB-IoT then what you will see looking back at you is the perfect system for smart meter usage. Narrowband because meter readings are not yet going to be particularly data-intensive, and pervasive provided you use Vodaphone.

All the government has to do is to stop trying to pick winners and simply use the most expedient system that exists now; yes this is handing a contract to a single supplier, but the other ones will quickly shape up and start undercutting that single supplier before long.

Re: No corruption here.

That sounds like the time British Gas tried calling me, wanting to install insulation in the cavity walls of my Victorian terraced house. Feigning great enthusiasm with the idea I agreed to all proposals, then innocently asked how they proposed to install the cavity in the solid stone walls.

This caused a very long pause during which the salesthing was obviously trying very hard not to swear, after which they wished me a nice day and rang off.

Making the problem go away is not the same thing as fixing it

Steam sets off smoke detectors just fine. How do I know this?

Many years ago I was living in what amounted to a hall of residence for Rothamsted Research Station; the old Rothamsted Manor house. This was an old and rambling house that was mainly wooden and was essentially one great big fire trap; if the alarm went off you got out fast.

Anyway, some muppet had decided that the best place for a smoke detector was next to a bathroom with two showers in it. Not just any shower design, but thermostatic showers that were always that little bit too hot, so you always ran them full on to try overload the hot water input and cool the shower a bit. Given how hard the water in that area is, pumped straight from chalk aquifers, thermostatic valves vary between being cleaned of limescale and being in need of cleaning; these were a silly idea.

Anyway, one day I was in these showers, bathroom window closed because it was brass monkeys outside, and the inevitable happened: steam set off fire alarm, alarm went off, I got out, dryish and dressed in record time and thereafter was straight into "Baldrick, deny everything!" mode, convincing nobody at all but proof was not really available.

The powers that be installed an extractor fan on a timed PIR thereafter.

The ultimate cause of the Chernobyl accident was similar to this. The reactor design was one which, if you put in fuel rods containing depleted uranium, could be used to make plutonium. Plutonium is military stuff that goes bang, therefore methods of making it are secret and everything around secret stuff has to be secret, or so goes military doctrine.

One of the things that was made secret was an annoying little misfeature of the reactor design. The core was graphite and graphite expands when hot. The control rods were engineering fit rods, and as such tended to stick a little when the reactor core was hot and had expanded a little, thus making the fit a little bit tighter. To solve this, the first eight inches or so of each control rod was graphite, which as well as a nuclear moderator is also a good lubricant.

The problem with all of this was simple: graphite is a moderator; stick graphite into what was an empty hole and the reactor initially starts to run even better than before, until the rest of the rod descends into place and the cadmium starts absorbing neutrons and shutting down the nuclear reaction.

Standard "Oh golly, shutdown" procedure with a nuclear reactor is to drop control rods into it as fast as possible, even all at once to shut down the chain reaction FAST. Do that with this sort of reactor and you suddenly make it run a lot lot better which makes the core hotter which jams the control rods at that point, and shortly afterwards the whole thing goes seriously bang.

Correct shutdown procedure here is firstly keep all coolant systems running full belt, and secondly insert rods quickly but sequentially. You don't shutdown the reaction quite as fast, but you do live to tell the tale.

All because that little foible was a military secret that the civilian plant operators weren't cleared to know.

Mars chilled for aeons, but stayed so stressed it gets crusty marsquakes

The crust likely had fully solidified whilst there were still major oceans on Mars; as the oceans evaporated into space the reduction in weight would have created stresses in the crust rocks which should account for at least some of these quakes.

New information physics theory is evidence 'we're living in a simulation,' says author

Re: power

The post-human civilisation that is running the sim is probably living in a utopia of some description, which whilst being optimal for living in is also really rather boring. Mind-numbingly tedious, in fact. So, to maintain interest in being alive, sims like the one we are in are run so that these utopians can once again live in a risky, exciting sort of world.

Of course, whilst we die they simply do the utopian equivalent of sticking another 50p into the arcade machine if or when they croak it, to have another go.

The sim is of course going to be heavily and fairly cheaply optimised, which explains a lot of paranormal phenomena quite nicely.

Past-life memories, for instance. This is the sim recycling the code needed to run a human mind and specifically the link to a utopian mind; this is probably quite difficult to do from scratch so the sim will recycle as much as possible and take as many shortcuts as it can, including not filtering information flows. This will lead to info from one simulated human life leaking back down the link to another human life from the utopian in his bedroom remembering one life after it has ended.

UFOs: glitching aircraft object code. Poltergeists: glitching object movement code and probably something that is going to be fixed properly in the next major release. Similarly ghosts of all manner of stuff; simply memory garbage collection not running as well as it should run.

So, try not to look for and poke the holes in reality, because it isn't at all well built and you might just cause the whole kaboodle to dump core and end.

Ubuntu's 'Mantic Minotaur' peeks out of the labyrinth

The short answer to this is simple: backups.

Your machine's hardware has failed? Easy, restore it from your backups. You don't have any backups? Oh dear.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: GridWatch

We need, in other words, a lot of small but long-lived nuclear generators that might as well use district heating as the cold side of the heat engine. If we can operate the hot side at a sufficiently high temperature then we can use the waste steam from the turbines as steam input into district heating systems to supply heat to domestic consumers. We could also use grid-scale heat pumps to concentrate industrial waste heat such that it can be redistributed into district heating systems.

This sort of approach is only going to work in towns. Countryside locations are likely going to be burning biomass to keep warm for a long time to come. Contrary to popular belief, cycling carbon around the carbon cycle is an essentially harmless activity; it is inputs of fossil carbon into the carbon cycle that are causing the problems.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

The problem with road pricing is that the "obvious solution" namely a location sensor in the car is a very bad idea indeed on several fronts. Firstly, GPS signals are easy to interfere with, secondly such a system could turn into an automatic speeding fine machine, and thirdly the GPS or similar signal is really easily interfered with to inflict malicious prosecutions on innocent motorists.

That then leaves motorway pricing, which cannot be too heinous or people will simply crowd onto minor roads to dodge the tax.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

I wonder how the costs add up if you make the PHEV's hydrocarbon engine capable of running on methane gas as well as petrol? That way all you need is a feed pipe from your household gas supply and then you use the gas supply to recharge the electric battery by way of the hydrocarbon engine.

UK admits 'spy clause' can't be used for scanning encrypted chat – it's not 'feasible'

Re: Not sure I understand this.

It is quite possible to mandate breakable encryption. All that happens is that people layer in non-breakable encryption and "encrypt" the already-crypted message with the broken Government rubbish. This doesn't even need to be electronic in nature; a random one-time pad hand-written using a top copy and a literal carbon paper copy underneath would allow two individuals to communicate entirely securely even with known-broken Government encryption.

Moreover, if you know the Government encryption is broken, you simply do not use it. Instead you post your crypt-text onto public forums like Usenet News; everyone can see it but only the recipient can decrypt it.

Re: Logical fallacy of cracking encryption

To which you then say "Right then, we shall be having our day in court then, you and I" closely followed by the police getting sued for defamation of character, false arrest and so on.

To be honest I think that this Bill should be preserved as it is forever more, not because it might be useful but more as a warning from the past as to just how bloody stupid politicians can actually be.

The American NSA have built a similar monument to stupidity, namely an enormous disk farm wherein encrypted communications that they want to decrypt and which might possibly be decrypted in the dim and distant future are stored against that forlorn and frankly laughable day.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

Re: Easy win but challenging keep.

To be honest, not many people actually want to be politicians, or want to be elected.

Fewer still of the ones who want to be elected can be relied upon not to do something stupid, or say something that can be construed to be some sort of *-ist.

Having whittled the field down to the last 10% or so, few of the remainder have any actual management talent. Actual managerial talent is rare, for it to be accompanied by brains is rarer still. The few people who meet these criteria can generally find themselves much more gainful employment in commerce rather than in politics, and thus most decent managerial brains are unavailable for politics.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers 'data privacy nightmares on wheels'

Re: It's total lunacy

BMW found that one out the hard way.

To save on production line costs, they started out with a similar philosophy to that of Lexus: fit all luxury items like heated seats etc where the actual luxury isn't very expensive but which it would be difficult to retrofit. Lexus vehicles thus all have heated seats since it is a lot easier for the manufacturer just to say to a supplier "Give me X many front seats to usual spec" than to have several different specs.

BMW however thought they could play things a little differently: make drivers pay monthly rents to "unlock" features in cars.

To say the customers were displeased was an understatement; retro-fit activation kits became rife and the bad publicity hit the maker very hard indeed.

Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests

Re: Care?

Proclaiming something to be "Settled science" also sounds suspiciously like someone trying to shut down debate on a contentious issue.

It should be noted that Darwinian evolution is not regarded as "settled science" by biologists. Instead, the debate is still open and very interesting things like inheritance of gene promoter levels and other rapidly-changing evolutionary things have been noted. Not Lamarckianism per se, but getting quite close to information transmission from generation to generation. Oh, and then you have the interesting embryo nested in embryo thing that asexually-reproducing aphids do, so the adult mother influences whether her grand-daughters have wings or not.

By keeping a subject open and not settled, research is furthered and science benefits; shut the debate down and eventually everyone starts seeing cover=ups even when there aren't any.

Budget satellite drag sail shows space junk how to gracefully exit orbit

Re: Who's doing the evil research?

The point of the exercise is to create surface area which interacts with the extremely tenuous atmosphere still present at those heights. So, why not use a large amount of fine, metal-coated filament which will become statically charged as it deploys, together with small leaf-like bits of membrane which similarly become statically charged and end up sticking out in all directions. What you end up with is a huge, leafy cloud of fluff, which whilst it hasn't got the elegance and surface area of a sail is still a huge increase in surface area.

Attached to any satellite this will (at least at orbital heights) increase drag and help de-orbit the satellite; it should also be light enough that the thing breaking up should be a problem.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Re: Last rites ... hope not

No, really, stupendously crap ideas like this Bill deserve and need to die.