"So say we sell 5% more cars because they are cheaper, that might not be enough to make up for the increased costs. "
Nor will it be enough to make up for the 10% WTO default import tarriff.
End result: carmaking will move out of the UK.
15045 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Once in, the Commission proposes law sometimes with the help of the Council but not always. Parliament can a) amend it and send it back or b) can only send it back saying if they like it or not (more often used now) or c) have no say at all (Canada trade deal)."
Even after that, individual country parliaments can accept or reject it.
"for reasons which completely escape me"
Simple: even those in favour of PR wouldn't accept it (it's much harder to change a second time, than reject the offer and go for something better later).
The New Zealand model would have been much better:
1: Stay with FPP or move to PR
2: If moving to PR, which version do you want?
"Having this country being 'run' by a PM that hasn't won their spot by a majority vote at a general election."
No party has won an actual, _real_ majority vote at a general election in a very long time.
The Conservatives and Labour have been trading places based on receiving 33-35% of the vote. Hardly a majority. Gerrymandering is what makes most of the difference.
Anyway, voters elect the party. The party selects its leader and he selects his cabinet. Any idea that you're voting for _anyone_ as prime minister is misguided at best.
"Wish I could drive that far without doing something really really stupid."
Most people average something stupid every 10 miles.
It's only because there's so much "space" built into our road rules that we routinely get away with it - and that's also why most of the time a crash is caused by a combination of multiple foul ups.
'get back to the speed you previously set'
One of my cow-orkers has a late model VW Golf (not a diesel) and the degree of acceleration when you press the button is based on the "mode" the car is in.
Under normal circumstances it accelerates slowly. If left in sport mode then it'll ram you back into your seat.
The same thing happens when it's come up behind a slow car (adaptive cruise control) and you pull out to pass. As he always "drives it like he stole it", it stays in sport mode permanently.
"hump sticks happen more often than trailer guillotines"
Hump sticks happen when rig drivers aren't paying attention. If they were, they wouldn't go over the hump in the first place - most humps large enough to snag a rig tend to be signposted for precisely this kind of reason.
A classic example of rig operator stupidity got reported a couple of months back where a rig operator took an (IIRC) 89,000 pound rig onto a historic bridge rated for 10 tons maximum - with utterly predictable results. Her excuse was that she thought 89,000 pounds was less than 10 tons, but that didn't prevent her being stuck with the bill for not only being rescued, but for replacing the bridge (insurance policies tend not to cover acts of gross negligence)
When you start digging into the real reasons for resistance to safety features on US rigs it comes down to 2 main ones:
1: Extra weight == less payload
2: Tractors and trailers tend to be changed around a lot, so side impact rails suitable for one combination may not be effective on another or may snag the rear of the tractor in extreme cases.
It's interesting to note the IHRC crash videos linked elsewhere in this thread which show USA trailer rear bars simply snapping off at 50% and 35% impact overlap. That wouldn't be tolerated in the UK and liability would fall back on the fabricators.
With regard to the Tesla: This guy drove around with dashcam on most of the time and was a regular youtube poster. Presumably the camera was running that day and this will help the NHTSA determine actual faults. I'm picking that the "other cars which saw and slowed down" were further away than the Tesla was - at some point it a T-boning just happens "in your lap" and there's not much which can be done.
"Experience and the ability to predict other drivers actions is a skill that cannot be taught, it is learned, ususally over 10-20 years of driving."
It can be taught, but it requires the recipients have a will to learn. Most monkeys are far too impatient for that shit.
The fact that it _can_ be taught means that AIs can learn it, which means that their driving ability and anticipation factors will improve. They're already better than most drivers most of the time(*)
(*) Most drivers only think 3-4 seconds ahead at most, which explains the infamous 3 second cycle (3 seconds on the loud pedal, 3 seconds off it - and bus drivers are particularly bad for this habit(**)). Training them to look 12 seconds ahead and think 30 seconds ahead is what gets much smoother traffic flows and less annoyed passengers.
(**) now you're aware of this phemonenon, you'll notice it more often. It occurs most often on open road where the driver "hunts" on either side of the speed limit rather than using more gentle throttle movements to keep more-or-less on speed. Motorcyclists are more likely to exhibit this kind of behaviour when driving cars, for some reason.
" unless we have a self driving car, the driver really should need to be in charge i.e. remain holding the steering wheel..."
Given some of the stupidity we've seen (climbing into the back seat, etc) it's arguable that the autopilot should disengage if the seat is vacated or seatbelt disengaged (let's not get into arguments about your "right" not to wear a seatbelt. If you want to opt out of the safety system then I want to opt out of paying for your medical care when you go through the windscreen/out the side windows/out the rear windows/crush and kill the guy in the seat in front of you - all of which I've had to deal within many many miles of driving on rural roads and being first-on-scene at a crash)
"Those are still rare in the U.S."
They were rare in the EU until legally mandated. federal regulations really should be amended.
Ditto on rear under-ride bars. A lot of research went into finding the best ways of setting these up and it turned out that a crumple model worked better than totally rigid bars.
The current problem is that if a fold- under tail lift is used you can't fit the bars. I'm expecting to see a mandate on some kind of crash mitigation being required for these installations sooner or later.
"However, Jesus, be alert enough not to end up under a truck. If you can't do that, get a taxi."
The number of crashes I've seen where the meatsack at the wheel _SHOULD_ have seen an obstruction on the road but didn't gives me no confidence in most meatsacks.
Tesla will analyse and fix this. That changed expertise will go out to _every_ Tesla on the road. Such lessons are not passed on nearly so easily to meatsacks, which is why "car drove under truck" is a relatively common occurence. The only thing newsworthy in the story is that it was a Tesla.
"sensors shouldn't have to handle sun-blindness, drivers should."
Drivers can't(*) - and if a trucker pulls out across traffic flow he's supposed to be giving way to, then there's a huge degree of culpability.
(*)Sunstrike is a large factor in crashes in the half hour before sunset and after sunrise. Silver/white/grey vehicles are disproportionately involved in them.
"Google, et al, have not taken ANYTHING from Oracle that they weren't advertising publicly. In fact, they've implemented the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY to provide a Java substitute that could ever work. "
Bear in mind that they did this because they had a choice of a slimmed down version of Java which didn't do what was needed or the full fat version which required hefty licensing. There was no middle ground and Sun/Oracle wouldn't budge.
"No, the NRA didn't "gun down" anything. They followed the DMCA and filed a cease-and-desist."
They misused the DMCA and filed an illegal cease-and-desist for a protected work.
This might be the case that finally sees perjury penalties being used, but then again it probably won't be.
"A-10s are meat on the table for any kind of fighter"
A10s are not fighters. They're ground attack aircraft (hence the "A" designation)
For that matter F35s aren't meant to be either. They're Close Air Support and Ground Attack aircraft.
F22s are supposed to take care of the pesky aspect of taking out any SAM and airborne opponents. The F35 is intended to go in and do the mopping up once air superiority has been established and was supposed to be a cheap alternative once the expensive F22 had done its job.
F22 got "too expensive", so was discontinued and F35 expanded into multirole functions.
The Ironic thing being that "cheap" F35s are now more expensive per piece than the "expensive" F22s with the price tag continuing to increase by the day. It should have been dumped (like the F111B was) and replaced with a better design (F14 and 15 were both cheap jets to fill the gap that the F111B cancellation opened up), but the procurement and manufacture model has deliberately been setup so that cancellation willl affect too many senators' pork.
It's not for nothing that it's nicknamed the Jet that ate the Pentagon. The primary lesson learned from the F111B exercise was how to set things up so that they can't possibly be cancelled.
"I still wish we'd managed to sort out the new carriers' power"
It wasn't the power that precluded F35Cs
BAE Systems are building the ships.
BAE Systems are providing mantainence contracts for the F35
BAE Systems quoted more than the price of a new ship to convert the existing ones from skiramp to flattop - the price being close to the actual cost of conversion ($100 million) PLUS the amount it would lose out on from not having the F35 contract.
"The air wing of each carrier will consist of 12 F-35Bs."
Given that one carrier is going to be laid up more-or-less permanently as soon as it's launched, the only good news about this is that we'll only need to buy 12 F35s
The less said about HMS Sitting Duck and HMS White Elephant the better.
"The Leave campaign was entirely based on emotion and fantasy."
And that's about the best summary. Farage is no fool, he knew bloody well that getting a leave vote would be bad for the kind of business he himself was in. He's a Court Jester.
The looks on his and Boris' faces said a lot. They've entered a "Mouse that Roared" scenario and don't really know what to do next.
> The current "plan" seems to be to introduce some form of "points-based" system for controlling which furriners can work in the UK
We already HAVE a point-based system for controlling which non-EU furriners can work here.
This is not going to be extended to EU citizens, no matter how much wishful thinking Call me Dave and his mates are trying to push out. Such a move would automatically mean the end of any free trade agreement or negotiations involved.
"The Europeans are making it clear that we can't keep the relationship we currently have, where free trade goes with free movement of people. "
I think you've got it bass-ackwards there.
The EU is saying to the UK that the UK _CANNOT_ have free trade without free movement.
The UK is trying to get tree trade without the free movement and that's simply something that will not be allowed. The UK has been whining and footstamping in the EU like a petulent child, getting concession after concession, but this is a step too far and the thing that will cause the entire EU to close ranks and say "NO", along with cancelling every single existing concession.
There are 2 choices on the way forward:
Brexit: Start from scratch with no concessions and no free trade.
No-Brexit: Keep Free trade and free movement and try to retain some of the remaining concessions, otherwise we'll lose the lot.
The UK is about to be spanked and sent to its room with no supper. We are not a global power and haven't been for 70+ years - and don't think the Commonwealth will be any more sympathetic than the EU. This is hardnosed business stuff where if any outside country senses a weakness in negotiations they'll exploit it (just like New Zealand did in 1938-9 to lever a 100-year food supply contract at above-market rates. They weren't being friendly and sending all that mutton for free.)
"If they desperately want to trade with us they'll come to a deal"
The point being they don't need to. Seriously. They won't be that desperate.
If it all falls through to WTO rules then there's shitloads of extra paperwork for anyone making anything here and exporting to europe or vice versa. There's also a 10% tarriff on motor vehicles.
The UK is a small market compared to the EU, which means that EU companies don't need to be bothered with the paperwork, but UK companies do (which means extra costs and difficulties) - and that 10% tarriff means that pretty much every multinational automaker is going to run down production in the UK vs mainland factories simply in order to remain competitive - which in turn means that all the suppliers to the factories here will suffer. Carmaking is a large chunk of what remains of the UK economy.
The extra paperwork means than any outfit with a substantial sales presence in the EU is going to move where the paperwork (and costs) are reduced.
Banks are already moving, as they can't take uncertainty. It's nice having all that stuff here in terms of tax take but once an avalanche has started the pebbles don't get to vote. Even if the businesses themselves don't pay much tax, the employees do.
As for salaries: depressed pay is a "thing" right across the EU and London/SE England is just an extreme example of where it hasn't kept pace with costs. I know a bunch of UK people who've moved to Romania for various support work and are very happy. It's not what you get paid which counts, it's how much you have left at the end of the month.
I'm pretty firmly convinced that Brexit or no Brexit, now that that companies have started moving out, that can't be reversed. The kind of incentives needed to keep them in the UK are illegal under EU rules and probably insufficient if outside the EU.
Stuff that was under negotiation has been "reset" at best.
And this is just the EIB. Other stuff which was being negotiated has just "gone away". The impact on UK university research is major, as uk.gov was putting bugger-all in directly.
Expect to see a lot of layoffs in UK research over the next 6 months.
"That's a very unlikely possibility"
Indeed: That kind of recession would show up pretty damned quickly inside a galaxy. There's simply too much "stuff" around for a black hole to be able to zip through stealthily at a large fraction of the speed of light (it'd need to be 80%+ to get that kind of redshift)
"ATA SECURE ERASE THAT HAS COME IN EVERY DRIVE SINCE 2001 KNOCKS 'EM DEAD."
Yup - and it DOES write out to the bad sectors and spare sectors too.
Dban is unnecessary Voodoo - there is no need to do hundreds of overwrites on modern drives.
Citation: http://www.howtogeek.com/115573/htg-explains-why-you-only-have-to-wipe-a-disk-once-to-erase-it/ and http://www.dban.org/node/40
TL;DR: Peter Gutmann's original research was performed on 10 and 20MB MFM stepper motor hard drives, which haven't been made or sold for more than 20 years. Voice coil head controllers are far more accurate in their tracking and the inter-track spacing in higher capacity drives is so small that the atomic force microscopy method doesn't work. (You need to be a three letter agency to be doing this kind of shit anyway, and finding 10kB of sensitive data amongst 200GB of erased stuff isn't going to be easy)
If the drive supports ATA secure erase: use it.
If not: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd{drive} is more than sufficient.
NOTE: If you have a self-encrypting drive then all that needs to be done is to change the key. That's what a ATA secure erase does on these ones and is why the secure erase only takes a couple of minutes on such drives.
ATA erase and ATA secure erase were implemented as a direct response to Peter Gutmann's security papers. It was clear that decent erasure methods were needed and this was the industry's response to the issue. The erasure provided by these methods is more than sufficient to prevent _any_ previously written data being extracted from a drive (Source: Personal discussions with Andre Hedrick when he was a member of the ATA technical committee.)
Unless the UK can negotiate a deal(*), any cars made in UK will be subject to WTO-standard 10% import duty when they land in the EU. Everything else will be subject to customs inspection and possible tarriffs
That alone is enough for the multinationals to relocate manufacture to the mainland. The remaining RHD market is too small to justify keeping the factories open.
Banks have already begun the move to the mainland. They can't stand for the uncertainty. Multinationals moving their HQs is a given for the same reason - especially the tech outfits.
Expect to see a string of announcements. Whether Brexit happens or not, the avalanche has been triggered and the pebbles can no longer vote.
(*) The odds of negotiating a deal are slim to neglibible. The EU wants this to HURT, so that other counties will think twice. If the UK parliament opts to ignore the brexit vote then any negotiations are going to be able negoiating the concessions we just lost (they're toast, like a petulent spoiled brat, Cameron pushed further than the EU will tolerate and everything gained thus far can be considered lost)
With linux: make sure you use the multithreaded IO scheduler when dealing with fast SSDs, otherwise all IO is singlethreaded (this is different to cfq/noop/deadline - those are all singlethreaded schedulers) and you'll max out (As Trevor discovered)
Which in practice means "add scsi_mod.use_blk_mq=1 to your grub boot options"
It does make a difference and it'd be interesting to see if Trevor can quantify it.
"Time for better hardware RAID?"
Software RAID has been eating hardware RAID's dogfood for years. The last time I bothered with HW raid cards was 5 years ago (£1200 apiece) - running SW raid on the same system was actually faster and had lower latency (SATA SSDs). The only advantage of HW RAID was battery backed write caching but once you have SSDs in play that advantage is mostly negated.
You can get PCIe expansion busses but the problem is that the bus itself becomes the bottleneck before very long.
"I regularly ended up with the SSDs faster than any of the operating systems in play could talk to before running out of CPU."
That was my experience on a far smaller scale too. These babies are _FAST_, which is good news when messing around with databases and spooling ~100 simultaneous backups (Bacula) across the network.
I was using Intel NVMe HHHL, but it was clear the card was outrunning the systems for everything real-world I wanted it to do.
"If they actually required a majority, I doubt we would get any MPs elected at all."
You would. The MMP model works fairly well at ensuring concensus politics is the order of the day.
The reality is that The Conservatives and Labour have been swapping places in the driving seat with both getting 33-35% of the total vote each (ie, around 2/3 of the voters NOT voting for whoever "wins")
In that sense you can say the referendum is much fairer than a general election. I voted remain, but we're stuck with the result and the fallout from it - which will be harsh no matter whether the UK remains or exits the EU (If it exits, it gets shafted. If it remains, it loses all special concessions)
I suggest that people start patching the canoe, locate a paddle, turn back downstream and get a decent navigator. It's one thing to keep digging when you're in a hole and another when it's the hull of the boat and shit creek is 40 fathoms deep.
"My guess is that after extensive negotiations we will end up with a worst deal than we have now,"
The Greek Scenario.
And you're correct.
To stay in the EU, the UK is going to have to give up most (if not all) of the concessions it previously had.
And that's not going to stop the banks moving. They've already started the machinery for doing so.
"We pay a shitload simply to be in the EU that represents a net overhead on trade export with the EU"
And that shitload of money primarily goes to ensure that european countries settle their differences without resorting to trade or hot wars.
And that the EU is self-sufficient in food.
The UK could have stayed out of the EU, but it would have gone even further up shit creek than it already had at the time it joined. "Made in Britain" was a warning label indicating badly designed, unserviceable devices shoddily assembled by a resentful workforce (ie, "avoid like the plague") and businesses (or govt departments) in former commonwealth countries only bought the stuff if a gun was held to their collective heads.
As an example of how much of warning label: When New Zealand gave Japanese cars the same import tarriff as British and Australian ones in 1971, UK cars went from ~40% of the market to under 3% in 12 months. The stench was so bad that when GM tried to revive the Vauxhall brand in the late 1990s, noone would buy the cars until the badges were replaced with Opel ones.
Even that "great british institution" of rolls royce wasn't immune. My local mechanic services a couple of 1973 rollers and he regards them as badly made pieces of shit.
the moment a company is told their equipment is participating in a DoS attack, their liabilities for not disconnecting it or mitigating the attack start stacking up - and the moment they're told, their liability insurers will be saying "anything from this point onwards is NOT convered"
Ditto on ISPs.
The cure for botnets is simple and brutal - make the hacking victims pay through the nose. Hitting them in the wallet is the fastest way of making any organisation pay attention to network security.
Small claims courts may not set precedents, but they are supposed to influence decisions.
Unfortunately, USA small claims judges(*) are frequently biased - which has resulted in many TCPA actions having to go up to higher courts before being kicked back down to small claims with direct instructions to the judges to obey the law(**).
(*) To be more precise, lay judges. They're not necessarily legally qualified and it shows.
(**) Many judges don't like the statutory damages contained in the TCPA and throw out cases on the basis that it will excessively harm the business, particularly in cases where the business being sued is the one which hired the lawbreakers, not the lawbreakers themselves (TCPA holds them jointly and severally liable). Judgements from further up the food chain make it clear that this is the intent - a death of 1 million paper cuts on offenders, pour encourager les autres.
"Thats a lot of power for 3.2Gb of storage on the top end card."
At the access speeds we're talking about, no it's not. The micron cards Trevor just reviewed have comparable power draw at full song.
If you're not thrashing the crap out of them then they'll draw a hell of a lot less power.