Posts by Alan Brown 15092 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"The only advantage Maplin are left with compared to online sites is the ability to get items within a very short time, so long as you can get to a store during working hours."
.... And they have it in stock
I gave up relying on their stock checker a few years ago after several fruitless trips.
> (If I want to buy a battery I DON'T want to have to carry it down a big long staircase before I pay for it!!)
Get the staff to do that (they hate it but they'll do it) - but wtf are you buying batteries from Halfrauds and paying 100% extra for it anyway? Even europarts are cheaper and that's not saying much.
WRT changing bulbs.
Removing those panels is a doddle if you have the right tool at hand - and as long as you _mark_ the position of the boltheads on flanges it's generally easier to remove the headlight, change the bulb and put it back than risk bleeding to death trying to do it in-situ (if you change a headlamb bulb you're supposed to realign the lights anyway - not that anyone ever does)
"If tomorrow will do, I order from hassle-free Farnell."
As with RS, you pay a 50%-100% premium for that "hassle free one stop shop" over getting it directly from their supplier - and as I've discovered a bunch of times the range that Farnell carry of XYZ manufacturer is 2-5% of the upstream supplier's catalogue.
If you need anything vaguely mechanical, check Moss Express first.
"As the article explained in length: leaving crash protection on would have resulted in drone doing another fly-around."
The _CORRECT_ protocol for ground conditions that your aircraft can't handle is to divert to another landing site. This applies whether the pilot is human of a computer.
The salient point is that the "pilot" is Ex-RAF.
This is a good example of why airlines no longer hire ex-military pilots(*). They consistently ignore safety rules and press on regardless.
It was known more than 5 years ago that US Army drones have a far lower crash rate on landing (it's almost zero) than USAF ones - and that's specifically because disabling the anti-crash systems or attempting to manually land a drone is a disciplinary matter in the US Army
(*) At least not without forcing them to go through civil flight school to get their bad habits knocked out.
In this case they do have jurisduction (under US law) thanks to the long arm statutes.
Basically: If you "do business" in a state (which is interpreted as dealing directly with customers in that state) then you fall under the state court's jurisdiction.
Any decision against a foreign entity has to be endorsed by courts in that foreign jurisdiction to be enforced but that is seldom refused - because there's a reciprocal principle of commerce at work and things would get very messy, very quickly. Even notionally "unfriendly" countries usually uphold commercially-related legal decisions.
The only way to avoid this kind of long-arm stuff is to specifically state you won't do business with people in XYZ areas - and this does happen. The effect is to push responsibility onto the customers for making a false declaration (however if it's just a smokescreen and the company makes no effort to verify location then they're still covered)
"Now I can buy half as much again in a single 2.5" case with better performance."
(5 months later, when I have real pricing and specs)
Half as much again, in a single 2.5" case with 10,000 times the performance (conservatively) and at 7% of the price of the array I purchased 12 years ago.
Oh and it draws 4watts max(ok, 100 watts wrapped in a server), vs 5kW
"The Feds gave the ISP's regional monopolies and huge subsidies to built the infrastructure, but in many cases they did not do what they promised to do."
You mean individual states. The telcos were granted mergers and legislated local monopolies in exchange for promised work that never got done (Although the PUC commissioners seem to have sone very well out of it) - the final result is that AT&T has been reassembled without that pesky "universal service" committment from its 1930s antitrust settlements AND is in 2 pieces so that the feds can't replay that antitrust action.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html
"there is at most about three seconds to notice it in the sky (and it is a very small object in a very big sky), carefully examine it and conclude that it is a drone and not a greater spotted grebe"
Or a plastic bag, which is what the last "drone sighting" over heathrow was most likely to be (yes, they can end up wafting about at 1000 feet if caught in an updraft)
As has been pointed out in various places, the decline in reported bird-misses in the UK has been matched by the increase in reported drone near misses.
> How are the "waves of starving urbanites" going to get to the rural areas? Walk?
Probably - and it's unlikely that there are enough bullets to stop them (bearing in mind that when you run out of bullets, the surviveors are going to rip you limb-from-limb, so you'd better ensure you have enough before you start shotting)
FEMA and the US environment agency have "urban evacuation" high on their list of worst possible environmental disasters.The only reason we can survive in the kinds of numbers we do is because of heavy population concentrations.
"I heard some organization in the US (FEMA?) once did a study of the results of an EMP strong enough to knock out all the infrastructure in North America. Their conclusion was apparently 80% mortality after the first year. That's WITHOUT ANY nukes going off."
Yes it was FEMA, in the late 1990s. They documented how fragile the US electrical distribution system was and how long it would take to replace the core transformers at risk (several million dollars apiece, 2-3 year construction time, no spares).
The european grid was much more robust - primarily because of much shorter transmission line runs.
This report was in response to the large solar flare which hit earth in 1989 (it knocked out parts of the Canadian power grid) and made people start wondering seriously what effects a Carrington-level solar flare would have (up to that point people were ridiculed as doomsayers, and that's despite a large 1950s event having quite an impact. The difference was in the intervening 40 years electricity had become utterly critical infrastructure).
The USA (and most other countries) have been taking steps to minimise the effects and damage ever since. The biggest problem is induced large DC offsets in transmission lines causing transformers to saturate and overheat but appropriate rejigging of the way things are connected can avoid that happening.
Because the grids are so heavily interconnected an overload failure in one part of the country can rapidly escalate into cascade failures everywhere. It's possible to design more robustness in, but that costs money and accountants won't approve it until they're personally affected.
> There's a reason why the Japanese surrendered so fast. (They didn't know the US had run out of bombs.)
Untrue.
They were already contemplating surrender and the amount of damage the US had already inflicted on Japan(*) meant that news of the scale of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs didn't arrive for several days. As far as the japanese hierarchy was concerned it was just another massive US air attack
(*) Most large cities had already been bombed flat and the death toll from one night raid on Tokyo was higher than either of the nuclear bombs.
The bombs did provide enough impetus to push the remaining hawks in the japanese military to one side and surrender quickly, but they may have surrendered in a few months anyway.
The USA didn't know that at the time. Fog of war and all that...
> Even if it was 90% mortality (which I doubt) the human race would survive.
You're right to doubt. Whilst the multi-megaton bombs scared the shit out of people during the Cold War the reality was that by the mid 1960s targetting accuracy was good enough that only 50-150kt weapons were being used for strategic weapons (only slightly smaller on tactical nukes)
There's almost nothing left now over 100kt (most of the H-bombs can be dialled from 5-150kt, but the standard setting is around 50kt or less and antisubmarine ones can be dialled as low as 0.3kt). In any case nuclear weapons are an expensive boondoggle that noone can actually use. War simulations verified that to the point where it was reported in 1979 that US military commanders who used nuclear weapons in battlefield simulations only ever did so once. In all subsequent simulation runs they'd surrender rather than nuke even if the _other_ guy was tossing nukes.
The best use for nukes now is to expand the swords-to-plowshears program.
"The main problem with ATO in wet weather is that the braking rate is too much for the low rail adhesion."
In other words, ATO is fine. The implementation is a failure.
Design for braking distances must cater to "worst case conditions", not "optimal".
Someone needs taking out the back and re-educating with a brick to the side of the head.
"Getting rid of ticket barriers and stupid, stop-based pricing would also be a great idea."
Indeed. Anything which encourages people out of their cars and onto public transport inside zone 4 would be a good thing.
Then again, whilst a travelcard is nearly 20 squid from my station (I'm outside Zone6), it gets me to Waterloo/Victoria in 45 minutes at worst (vs 2-3 hours by car) and parking alone runs to about £12/day, so it's economic. If they could solve the issue of "no services home past 11:30pm" I'd be much happier though. (Night busses don't go to many places in zone 6, let alone beyond and it's a £40 taxi fare from the last night bus stop to home)
WRT "spending vast sums of money": This is exactly what's needed, along with using eminent domain more often. The UK rail network has suffered decades of underinvestment(*) compared to our european cousins and it shows. The money spent on Trident would go a long way towards a decent rail network (as would starting work on HS2 simultaneously at Birmingham and Manchester, building towards each other and south from B'ham. By the time the line reached the Chilterns they'd have finally decided on final routing and it could be completed quickly, vs taking 20 years from the time routes are decided.)
(*) Under private companies, BR and Railtrack alike.
DLR was designed from the outset for automatic trains, with the luxury of not opening lines until all the work was done and thoroughly tested.
All the other lines are conversions from manually-controlled systems with work generally done under enormous time pressure in a few hours window each night in old tunnels full of god-knows-what and testing also has to be crammed into that window.
One of the main reasons given for not putting in extra tunnels is cost, but the cost of only having one line in each direction with no resilience and no ability to take a line out of service for proper heavy maintenance (some tunnels are still running on century old rail which should have been replaced years ago, and as such are subject to low speed limits) far outweighed the cost of boring new ones a long time ago. Doing it this way would allow safe 24 hour services too.
Crossrail _could_ have addressed this, but oh no, the same blinkered mentality applies. 10-20 years after opening when heavy work is required it's going to have the same problems as the current lines do.
A brave politician and TFL head would take the bull by the horns and announce major new programs but this is unlikely to ever happen.
Aeroflot has been extremely safe for at least 15 years.
The problem is there are a pletheora of russian airlines, many having splintered off Aeroflot and still using aircraft painted up with Aeroflot's logo - and it's those ones which are still falling out of the sky with monotonous regularity.
In other words, be very careful who you fly with.
In other news, one of the single largest contributors to civil air transport safety was the decision most airlines made in the 1990s to stop recruiting ex-military pilots. Originally this was due to a shortage of them that forced more reliance on flight schools, but it soon became clear that civil-trained pilots were much safer because unlike military pilots they'd assess the situation and take into account the number of people behind them, rather than taking a gung-ho approach and try to land no matter what.
It's actually possible to RAID your UPS systems and run everything via the UPS rather than introduce a switchbreak (large systems use a flywheel and this has the effect of supplying conditioned power to the site).
It's also possible to RAID the generators that back the UPSes.
As someone else has mentioned, the problem is managers looking to get a bonus for cutting costs who end up ripping resiliance out of the systems. I wonder if they'd be so keen if they were made liable for the costs of system failures if it traces back to their cost-cutting.
"they chickened-out of forcing BT to get its grubby paws off of OpenReach."
People should be lobbying the Competition and Markets authority, not Ofcom.
Ofcom is composed of people who come from the telco industry and who will go back to the telco industry. They have a vested interest in not rocking the boat too much.
The comparable case to BT/Openreach in New Zealand was forced by their ministry of commerce, not by their version of Ofcom. Once you start quantifying the damage to the economy caused by market abuse you have a strong case that Ofcom can't ignore.
"Yes it is an incomplete picture but is not without its uses"
There are 3 factors at play.
1: Your xDSL speed/line quality. This can be obtained by interrogating your router.
2: Backhaul from the local exchange to the ISP
3: ISP connectivity to the rest of the world.
There have been more than a few instances in the UK of 1 and 3 being fine, but 2 being oversubscribed - and usually because Openreach have been footdragging on providing link upgrades.
Ofcom's ruling on Openreach doesn't go far enough. It needs to be separate shareholding/board of directors/CEO from BT and the easiest way to achieve it is to make doing that split a condition of any more broadband funding.
I really am surprised the Competition and Markets Authority hasn't stepped in and forced this issue. BT's ongoing market abuse has quantifiable damage to the UK economy - which is why when New Zealand looked at the proposal for BT/Openreach model there, they said "NO" and forced a complete split.
"Entanet's excuse"
You get what you pay for.
For £50/month I get unlimited data AND full speed at all times on 80/20, plus a UK helpdesk which more often than not is a techie, rather than a semi-literate half-trained simian (accents and locations vary, a chimp is a chimp whether in Yorkshire or Bangalore), along with the usual phone service and unlimited local calling, etc.
Sure I could shave it down a bit by tweaking my packages but I like not having to worry about nastygrams for going over 2TB/month because something I host got popular (Yes, I'm allowed to host services too)
"Seems to me that the best solution would be to require "legitimate" users of caller ID spoofing, such as the above, to post a large £££ bond with the telco"
The problem is that a VOIP or ISDN origin call can set any callerID they want.
BT started countering the problem some years back (for ISDN origin) by only allowing CID of the numbers allocated to the ISDN connection. Anything else (such as 0800/0300/0845) has to be specifically authorised.
Unfortunately BT is not the only telco providing ISDN in the UK and most of the rest are not diligent. In any case it still doesn't stop spoofing from VOIP origin (calls from my personal VOIP show the userID as the origin number - which doesn't even look like a valid number - without the domain name on the end.)
"But a service which allows anyone to spoof any number? That just doesn't sound like there could be a legitimate reason for using it."
There isn't - and there are a few such services in the UK.
Meantime I'm getting spam telesales calls using spoofed London numbers (unallocated), trying to sell me on fake injury insurance claims.
"non-profit organization.."
That doesn't mean what you think it means.
Non-profits are free to pay out obscene amounts of money to employees and others. They're not free to return profits to their stakeholders.
The game they're playing is an ancient scam pulled by thousands of non-profits worldwide.
The best thing you can do is sic the IRS onto them and try to get the non-profit status revoked, but with that amount of money in their legal war chest iy might be hard to achieve.
"Start looking at personal bank accounts & life styles of ICANN personnel & family members."
And ex-ICANN heads. Particularly the ones who moved on to DNS registry companies and have a long, documented history of the kind of shenanigans detailed in the article well before they came to ICANN.
"Apple was founded on theft and Infringement with it's original GUI being stolen from Xerox Parc."
And trolling, suing (unsucessfully) to try and prevent Windows being sold, based on "Look and Feel" - http://lowendmac.com/2006/the-apple-vs-microsoft-gui-lawsuit/
GEM was also wiped off PCs about the same time by Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_Environment_Manager
"What % of US$, Euro €, Yen, Pounds etc are potentially forged bills/notes"
For the UK, actual printed/minted cash accounts for 3% of the money in circulation.
Which means that forged currency isn't a particularly large threat.
"There's ultimately no gold in a vault somewhere backing up every bill. They're only worth what the market believes they're worth."
Which means that forged currency IS a particularly large threat. If people stop accepting payments using XYZ currency then it's valueless - and it's worth bearing in mind that this was the final straw for the Roman Empire(*). Once people stopped accepting roman currency the empire collapsed within 18 months.
(*) In the roman case, after centuries of debasement, a revaluation of the currency intended to bolster confidence had the unintended effect that people refused to accept older coins. It didn't matter that the new coins were OK, what counts in currency is the confidence you can spend it. You can't eat a gold coin.
"you'd have to persuade North Korea's greatest protectors and fans to cut it off."
That would be Russia, not China. The chinese put up with the Norks as a buffer between them and the decadent west but they don't particularly approve of what they do (oil and electricity supplies have been cut off on several occasions, but the Norks keep getting most of their stuff over the russian border)
Of course if the Koreas were unified, then the USA/UN would have no mandate to stay on the peninsula and the US military bases at Okinawa would probably close or be drastically scaled down too.
"Strange that the paper that includes paper store bags that I put into the trench for my runner beans degrades very nicely thank you very much"
Put a couple of newspapers under 2-3 feet of soil and dig them up 6 months later, then rebury them and dig them up 5 years later. They won't have degraded much, if at all
That's the kind of conditions in landfill. Even food waste doesn't break down much (the breakdown tends to be anaerobic, which is why landfill emits so much methane)
Adding to the comment about paper bags:
They are quite expensive to recycle (in terms of energy use) and as recycling shortens the fibres which make it up (chopping...), paper can only be recycled a few times.
In most cases (paper and plastic) it's less expensive and uses fewer raw materials/energy to simply burn the bags (paper or plastic) for fuel and make new ones. In the specific case of plastic bags the energy used to recycle the things uses enough oil to make several new ones. It's even worse for plastic bottles as they need washing and the energy requirements for any with a paper label are insane (you can't allow paper fibres into the plastic recycling process. It results in films with holes in them (bad bags) or plastic extrusions/molds with major weaknesses)
From the retailer point of view, plastic bags are 1/10 the price of paper ones, even if you use "bags for life"
The big mistake (of course) is attempting to recycle glass bottles into glass bottles or plastic bags/bottles into more of the same. Turning the glass into insulation wool is an example of intelligent recycling - you don't have to worry about the myriad mixed grades/colours that would otherwise need separating. The same thing can be done for plastics but the energy costs mentioned above come into play. Metals are much easier to recycle and the only reason they "need" to be cleaned is to prevent attracting vermin whilst they're waiting to be melted down.
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