Posts by Alan Brown

Need a green traffic light all the way home? Easy with insecure street signals, say researchers

Re: Why the different standards?

"Nobody hassled the stop sign makers for having bolts that could be unscrewed."

Why should they? It's the stop sign INSTALLERS who failed in this case.

Google robo-car backs into bendy-bus in California

Re: Bus vs. meat bag

"Ride of the Valkyries"

National Express on the M4 are prone to sitting 6 feet off your tail at 50mph in bumper-to-bumper traffic as it hits the elevated section.

I hate to think what would happen if someone had to stop in a hurry.

Re: Blind-sided?

" it's whether they are capable of driving in a variety of road conditions."

Most humans can't.

4wd owners being the obvious "can't drive on snow/icy conditions" contenders. It always amuses me to see 3 or 4 on their roof on the way to work when it does snow.

Re: Blind-sided?

" I always though they were camera driven rather than fully autonomous."

There's a PDP11 under the cabin doing trhe legwork on every single one.

Gotta love VMS

Re: Blind-sided?

"Some of the subways in Nürnberg, Germany, are driverless."

So is the Docklands Light Rail.

Don't let the idiot up front confuse you. They like to sit there to pretend they're something other than door watchers.

Re: Blind-sided?

" I would suspect that so far the crashes-per-mile ratio greatly favors human drivers."

No, by a factor of about 10, even if the computer was at fault in all the recorded incidents so far.

Re: Blind-sided?

"Okay, but why didn't the vehicle sense the impending crash and halt in time? "

Even if it did, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the bus had simply kept going and crashed into the car. Drivers don't give a shit. They're not paid enough to.

Re: Skytran Vs autonomous cars

"115 years ago. And it still works ."

Until it doesn't. At which point extracting passengers requires a fire engine with a ladder. It's happened on multiple occasions.

Going back about the same period (and more practical), elevated moving pavements existed. and should be reconsidered.

Re: Bus vs. meat bag

Not just Florida. As a cyclist on a roundabout I got deliberately sidewiped by a bus driver barging his way through many years ago.

Things got so bad in that town that the cops stationed themselves on one side of an intersection one day and ticketed 30 bus drivers in an afternoon for refusing to give way to cyclists.

Spanish cops discover illegally parked flying car

Re: Rag Week?

It's not an urban legend. The point is with small light cars that sooner or later someone you know will try it and the sports team is likely strong enough to suceed.

Fiat 500s were a favourite for being carried up several flights of steps in my high school (usually deposited on the landing outside the teacher in question's classroom) and at one point a mini managed to make an appearance on the roof of a 12-floor building at my local polytechnic (not as difficult as it sounds - the freight elevator went to the top floor and it was a quick carry from there to the roof. The sods responsible for that one lifted it on top of some ventilation kit so it was more visible and damaged both the car and building services in the process.)

The nasty one was where drunken rugby players at the university sports bar picked up a bunch of small cars parked outside and set them all sideways on the building's services driveway down the side - which had a 2 foot deep ditch on either side of the driveway. Much hilarity and they all went home. Sometime later the netball players who owned the cars couldn't get out and one dropped both wheels in the ditch trying to get out. From that day forwards the services driveway gate was firmly chained shut at all times (which only led to people parking in front of it, then getting towed for blocking a fire lane.)

NASA funds new supersonic airliner research

Re: Supersonic flight

It's not possible to eliminate it, but it's possible to make it less of a "bang" and more of a "whoompf"

With approriate shaping it's also possible to direct most of the energy sideways . NASA's previous SST research aircraft looked like a jelly mould on the lower half.

VMware licence changes put users on upgrade treadmill

Gotta pay

For the inevitable GPL lawsuit loss

Photographer hassled by Port of Tyne for filming a sign on a wall

"For a bit of a lark, he put varying amounts of each into metal tins"

Wrapping them in newspaper has the same effect. My Chemistry teacher blew the bottom out of the school swimming pool pulling that stunt.

Re: Unfortunately... you're wrong

"That's why the charge against a joyrider isn't theft, it's taking and driving away."

In other countries, that's theft by conversion of chattels - aka "car conversion"

Re: Who arrests the watchmen?

"So go on, enlighten me. What offense has been committed and what exactly are you expecting the police officers to do about it?"

Assault, for starters.

Attempted aggravted theft too.

VMware's GPL violation case rolls into German court

"It has already been a dead parrot for years. "

A zombie dead parrot.

If VMWare prevail, that would mean SCO has no case because it would have no copyright standing even if it had authored the tiny code fragments in question, because they're tiny code fragments, not substantive parts.

VMWare is playing a dangerous game. If they managed to prevail the precedents it would set would be such that just about every tech player in existence would be piling in to get it overturned.

As it is, there's more than enough prior caselaw in Germany that they have about as much chance of prevailing as a snowball remaining intact in the inner firey pits of hell. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the judge orders substantial damages to ensure Hellwig's legal costs are settled too. German judges don't like companies playing the game of "The law is not about who's right or wrong, but who has deeper pockets"

"SCO/Caldera would've given both kidneys, nuts, and legs for a case like this..."

Actually it's a case that if VMware prevailed, would mean that SCO vs IBM would be a dead parrot.

Re: Hardly surprising

"That leaves people like SFC or Free Software Foundation itself to finance Helwig (or another copyright holder) to fight the case."

FSF have effectively done so in a number of cases, although their preferred method is to have the copyright assigned to them and then drive the case themselves - this keeps a lid on costs.

They have pretty good lawyers, so most cases never hit the courts. Even Welte (gpl-violations.org) has seldom gone to court for his hundreds of sucesses.

Challenging the GPL as invalid makes it a simple copyright violation case and those are a slamdunk, which effectively means any company facing GPL cases is in double jeopardy. In Welte's case it's straightforward because the infringers in question invariably package his standalone software.

This jeopardy is why VMWare are trying to challenge Helwig's assertion of copyright on parts of the kernel. Their strategy is to assert he doesn't have standing, which won't work. If they suceed then the effect would be that the kernel is uncopyrightable and at that point just about everyone would pile into appeal stage. German judges aren't stupid. A lot of USA ones would buy the argument at face value and deny Helwig's standing, which would then mean appeals up to assert that and several years' delay until it got back to a trial itself - at which point he'd be out of money.

Chip chomped after debug backdoor found in Android phones

Re: Held to ransom

"They are limited in what they can do because Mediatek don't release source code"

Which is a pretty blatant GPL violation. I'm surprised that Welte hasn't hauled a few Mediatek distributors into german courts.

Computers abort SpaceX Falcon 9 launch

Re: *Doesn't apply to fireworks

" So the Shuttle, or anything else with solid boosters, can abort in exactly the same way as this did."

Shuttle had an "interesting" launch mode.

Light the main engines. The kick would make the entire stack swing. When it swung back (about 3 seconds) the SRBs would be lit simultaneously.

At that point it was impossible to hold it down. The launch clamps couldn't hold the entire thrust back. For that matter they couldn't hold back the thrust of _one_ lit SRB (and in any case the pad's underpinnings couldn't withstand the erosion of one being run to completion whilst being held there)

The single biggest risk of any shuttle launch was one of the SRBs either not lighting, them not lighting simultaneously or any form of asymetric thrust out of them. At that point the chinese village incident would seem minor.

The thing really was a rube-goldberg (heath robinson) clusterfuck of epic proportions and the miracle is that more people weren't killed along the way.

Re: No more holds for boats downrange

"The boat in question belonged to the US Navy."

Someone's about to be promoted to captaining a desk.

Irate IT distributors chase Amazon over unpaid bills

Amazon's "Uh oh" moment:

"we are told of two distributors, one US-based and the other a UK national, that have decided to simply walk away from Amazon."

If more start doing that, Amazon's purported business advantage goes out the door. They're already swamped in counterfeit goods so having legit disties bailing out simply reinforces that side of things.

New York judge blocks FBI demand for Apple help to unlock iPhone

"Given even the FBI director thinks the issue is too big for the Courts and should be settled by Congress "

USA courts have a record of striking down laws that clash with the constitution and one compelling speech would go down in double quick time.

"This judge, at least, agrees but the other one appears to think that this kind of thing is fine."

Fairly common. USA lower court judges frequently don't believe the constitution applies to them.

The 1st and 9th circuit court of appeals have ruled that filming police is perfectly illegal, yet a district judge in the 3rd circuit has not only ruled the other way, but called those decisions out and challenged them on it. It could end up being a career-limiting decision.

Nearly a million retail jobs will be destroyed by the march of tech, warns trade body

"Yes,pensioners do have it tough"

And they're going to have it tougher.

Baby Boomers have been sold a fraud for decades about how much they needed to save in order to keep themselves in old age. They happily went along with it because it meant more cash in their pockets through the 70s,80s,90s but the reality is that what they paid in taxes and NI mostly went straight out the revolving door to pensioners of the time. With an increasing ratio of penioners to wagearners the choices are 40% taxes on a 25k income to support pensions or cutting pensions or raising retirement age.

Pensioners vote, but those kinds of tax rates mean that younger people will be motivated to do so as well, simply in order to avoid being the sheep in "democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner".

In many ways, having so many boomers retiring is one way of hiding unemployment, but it's entirely possible their grandchildren and great grandchildren might well decide to stop paying the bills they've inherited and toss the fogies under a passing bus.

Re: ...and a 100 million jobs will be exported to Chinese slaves

Chinese workers are already earning as much as US minimum wage and the rates are increasing - it's getting harder to recruit migrants from the inner provinces to the coastal ones where the factories are and harder to retain them once trained.

better transportation links are helping, but at some point logistics of labour will dictate inland factories for the stuff which can't be robotised - Foxxcon is already the world's largest user of robots on assembly lines - and the trains will haul freight not people.

Re: Why so long?

"Alternatively, RF tag everything and just require payment for the items scanned."

With current technology, attempts to do this have ended up scanning the stuff in the basket of the shopper behind too.

Re: A million jobs lost

"there'll eventually be a large un-ignorable amount unemployable people as the economy marches on to bigger and better things."

For the most part, robots are taking over the dirty, boring and dangerous things.

if you've been indoctrinated all your life that you're going to be a coalminer when you leave school then the pit closing is a calamity, If you've been shown other paths then the world isn't nearly so gloomy.

The Village Idiot Syndrome says that the village idiot can pitch hay with the rest of the yokels, but you wouldn't want him driving your John Deere tractor into a ditch. It overlooks that the village idiot might be a fantastic artist or isd otherwise useful in other areas. (I work with a guy who's a fantastic mathematician - professor emeritus - but don't let him near anything mechanical or expect him to hold much of a conversation. In another era he'd be the village idiot)

Re: In Other News...

"...the freight industry reports that there are 250,000[1] new driving jobs being created every year"

Only until robot drivers take over - which will happen sooner than robot shopkeepers.

Re: A shift to more valuable jobs in analysis...

But a robot can't kick your package around the courier warehouse nearly as well as a human can.

If you ever have someone griping about packaging being expensive, show him (always a him) the videos of courier abuse sitting on Youtube. The most egrarious examples happen inside the warehouses.

Re: WTF?

"He's probably had experience of receiving a HDD in an envelope"

Return it, "refused, inadequate packaging, transport damage"

I did that enough times to our suppliers that they got the hint - and made sure WD/Seagate were notified of the serial numbers so they couldn't palm them off on some other poor schmuck.

Re: Hmmmm

> The death of the "high street" is due to the clone-a-shop retail outlets.

And councils putting in parking meters, plus constantly raising business rates as more and more businesses decide they've had enough and get the fuck out of Dodge.

A classic example was Dorking: The town axed half hour parking charges and doubled the 1 hour rates on the basis that they needed the income (which is actually illegal, parking revenue is not to be used as general income) - the end result was that parking revenue HALVED. Most businesses reported a downturn on sales too. People just go where the parking is easy and free instead - it's called voting with your wallet.

Nuisance call blocking firms fined £170,000 ... for making nuisance calls

Re: I wish O2'd stop calling me

Ask them what colour their underwear is and if they've ever wondered what their own liver tastes like.

The more you can reduce the caller to tears, the more likely it is you'll be on their "never ever call again" list.

ICO fined cold-call firm £350k – so directors put it into liquidation

Re: Not sure if this is even still possible. . .

"In the UK that would probably be committing an illegal harassment offence."

In the USA it's mail fraud and it happens regularly with occasional prosecutions.

Noone was ever prosecuted when it happened to Alan Ralsky.

"But this only applies if there's significant reason to believe that the directors are dodgy."

Only needs to be knowingly acting illegally - and both the "directors" have a string of such companies behind them.

"One of the primary concepts encapsulated in limited liability exists to ring fence the debts of a company. If it didn't, then you could go straight after the directors and their personal assets."

Directors are not held harmless for illegal activities - and knowingly engaging in illegal activities is sufficient grounds for "piercing the company veil" to hold all officers personally liable.

The ICO _could_ get their money if they're willing to go to court and get a declaratory judgement, however they can't be arsed - all they care about is issuing press releases about "XYZ fine issued, woo woo"

Re: I'm sick of such PPI calls

What annoys me is that the doctors' surgery and the local council all register as "withheld"

Anyone who does that to me gets a recorded message to callback without callerid block or dial a (expensive) 070 number instead.

I'd use a 090 and charge £15 a shot, but £1.50 per minute is enough and I get this number for £5/year vs £50 for the 090

the 070 is also given to businesses. If they want to circulate my number for marketing purposes then the callers can pay for the privilege.

Re: I'm sick of such PPI calls

"It probably won't stop the overseas callers but I suspect that if the politicians were to define and pass the law and the CPS prosecute a test case or three we would see many of these vanish from the UK."

Overseas callers usually trace back to UK companies.

The problem in the UK is that an overseas origin is used to play "not my problem mate".

German and USA enforcement agencies trace things through to the local origin and have been known to kick in doors without warning.

Re: I'm sick of such PPI calls

It's perfectly possible for the telcos to filter spoofed Caller ID.

BT already do it on their ISDN lines (you can set any callerID you want on ISDN), restricting allowable CLI to the assigned numbers on the trunks.

Unsurprisingly when they did that, all the phone spammers they had, went away.

CLI is what's presented to the end user. There's another layer - ANI - used for billing purposes and if stuff is coming in that doesn't match then telcos are in a position to refuse to complete the call on fraud prevention grounds. (For that matter mobilecos are also able to refuse SMSes based on fake message centre data, but they won't)

I rather suspect that the plague of PPI scammers will only end when a few of the PPI scammers meet grisely ends. I'll happily crowdsource such an event too.

Re: Clear message to other firms...

At some point Mr Kidd's going to irritate someone who has poor self control and the means to make life extremely, personally uncomfortable.

Limited liability is for the shareholders.

Directors can and should be held fully accountable for illegal actions.

It's perfectly possible to write rules so that when companies go titsup, the fines pass to the directors, but the ICO won't do it (it's also possible to make sure fines can't be counted against taxable income, but the ICO donesn't bother with that either)

Oh look. Brighton Huh?

Registered Address

Bridgestones Limited

125-127 Union Street

Oldham

Lancashire

OL1 1TE

United Kingdom

Telephone

Unknown

Trading Address

125-127 Union Street

Oldham

Lancashire

OL1 1TE

Telephone

Add telephone

Description

Prodial Ltd was incorporated on 07 Nov 2014 and is located in Lancashire. The company's status is listed as "Liquidation" and it currently has one director. The company's first director was Mr Louis Kidd. Prodial Ltd does not have any subsidiaries.

That name's popped up before in these kinds of cases.

https://www.endole.co.uk/company/09300430/prodial-ltd has a bunch more information. The usual suspects show up again and again.

ICO fines PPI claims firm £80,000 over 1.3m spam SMS deluge

Re: How about the number brokers?

" BT will sell your line number regardless of what you enter in the telephone preferences. "

A section 11 DPA notice would make such an act a criminal offence.

I make a point of flinging them at companies when I setup new accounts.

Intravenous hangover clinics don't work, could land you in hospital

Re: Don't do needles, kids!

"So in other words, a pint and a half of water, a heaping tablespoon of sugar, two pinches of epsom salt, and a pinch each of table salt and salt substitute?"

And a shot of the hair fo the dog (which kills the withdrawal symptoms).

There's a lot to be said for a Bloody Mary the morning after the night before (and a scalp massage)

Re: Old school remedy

"So do modern-day tech divers[1] :-) "

And welders

Google screening missed hundreds of malicious Android apps, researchers say

Re: Is that all?

The queen is not a giant lizard.

Just look at her. At best she's a not very large lizard.

on the other hand, Philip......

Institute of Directors: Make broadband speeds 1000x faster than today's puny 2020 target

"Our digital economy has grown in spite of, not because of, our digital infrastructure."

And that's about the point of it.

One of the biggest drivers of the separation of Telco and Linesco in the NZ version of BT and Openreach were reports from the commerce ministries about how much the monopoly abuse was costing the economy.

Such analysis seems sorely lacking from UK government bodies. The damage being done is a commercial matter, not telecommunications and OFCOM is incompetent to assess it. It's no surprise they won't cleave openreach. The NZ version of OFCOM proved equally reluctant to do so and the push came from the treasury and commerce ministries (simple lever: Any further broadband funding is contingent on separation.)

SpaceX: launch, check. Landing? Needs work

Re: my swivel chair has 5 legs

Your swivel chair may have 5 legs, but launch mass isn't a consideration for it.

Apollo landers had 4 legs because they couldn't guarantee stability for 3 and 5 was too heavy.

Re: Problem appears to be clockwise rotation

" it appears the rocket still has a slight 2-3mph clockwise rotation/motion 'spin' in the final few seconds"

Unlikely. SpaceX don't spin-stabilise on the way down - for the very simple reason that centrifugal forces (ok ok, centripetal) sloshes the fuel around the sides of the rocket and subsequently starves the engines (this was discovered even before they attempted barge landings)

The grid thingies are there to keep it _from_ spinning as well as to guide it back to landing.

It looks to me that as the rockets shut off, that leg popped. Elon's still doing better than anyone else who's tried this shit and we don't have telemetry telling us what went wrong. He does. :)

Re: smuggling in from space

> I think 140 Km is above the atmosphere and "in space".

It's still in the exophere. That said, it's a better vacuum than anything we can cook up on earth.

Re: Time warp to 1962

"Unlike most rockets, Sea Dragon was made of thick steal and used simple brute force engineering. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Dragon_(rocket)

It was impressive and would have worked. It still could if someone was rich and brave enough to fund it.

One of the problems with building it is that if the prototype fails you probably can't afford to build another and if it works you've just put most of the rocket launching business, out of business.

As for brute-force - it was designed to be built in a _shipyard_, using standard shipbuilding techniques. none of this namby-pamby aeronautics shit.