Posts by Alan Brown 15079 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
Apart from the minor issue of pressurised (inhabitable) volume being at a premium.
At least until Bigelow get to put a few large balloon modules up there and not just the toy one that's bolted on at the moment.
I wonder if the free flying ones can be captured, reorbited and attached?
"Advertising is Big Business on the Interwebs. Free Market Rules are required for Big Business. Laws are just Suggestions to Big Business."
There's a _very_ easy way of dealing with this.
_All_ advertising is for _something_. _All_ advertising is done on behalf of a hirer.
Make the hirer _jointly and severally liable_ for the violations - watch how fast the illegal activities dry up even if the Big Business thinks "they're only suggestions"
Example: USA - Telephone Consumer Protection Act 1998 ("The Junk Fax Law") - pretty much stopped the flood tide of junk faxes overnight and caused people like Sanford Wallace to move into email spam instead. Only criminal groups like fax.,com were left in operation and the only legitimate companies who hired them were mom-and-pop outfits who'd been conned into believing it was legal - something they were _very_ quickly disabused of.
"It is the plethora of code included from third party sites including, but not limited to, Facebook icons, Google analytics and javascript / css libraries."
Yup, there's been a screaming match at $orkplace about this (particularly relating to google analytics). You'd think people don't know how to run website analysis scripts anymore.
"Storyville, The Internet’s Dirtiest Secrets:"
I don't need to see that.
Having spent time working with "cleaners" in the past, I'll say that one one of the single greatest problems is that companies create such positions and then staff them with people they specifically want to fail at it - they systematically _prevent_ them from taking action and deny them resources to get the job done, then toss them under a bus when they burn out.
The ONLY way to make companies change their ways is to hold their feet to the fire and hold C-level management individually accountable for their actions. Otherwise what you get is hollow assurances and meaningless box ticking exercises so they can _say_ they're taking action whilst spending as little money as possible and possibly getting rid of "troublesome employees" whose "sin" has been wanting to do the right thing.
> When I log into Chase, I get cookies and scripts from .ru and .cn
In the USA there may not be _federal_ privacy legislation, but a significant number of the states have privacy legislation that is almost as good as GDPR and has long-arm statutes. Everyone focusses on California because of its population and misses the others with even tougher laws.
If you live in one of those states it's worth notifying the local privacy commissioner
"Local government IT and I suspect main government IT is normally managed by self serving knobs. "
A few quiet words (via a proxy if need be) to the ICO would be in order then.
Alternatively a few quiet words with a group of lawyers explaining how useful this would be whilst executing a Norwich Pharmaceutical order might have an even more interesting effect.
"I'd be looking to charge Facebook board of directors with aiding and abetting a criminal act and start arresting every FB director who attempts to cross a participating border"
Unfortunately, red-noticing FB C-suite execs like that would get all NZ Interpol red-notices binned, pretty much permanently across most of the world.
Which would be a pity, given that there are 20-30 open at the moment for quite good reasons (sometimes all-but forgotten about - one relating to the Rainbow Warrior affair fired recently when a certain French citizen crossed the border into Switzerland - they don't expire.)
Due to the rules of NZ's extremely comprehensive state-run medical insurance schemes (ACC for injuries and the more NHS-like system for general medical care), anyone receiving medical care from a state-run or state funded medical provider (which is virtually all of them - there are no 100% private emergency rooms) automatically waives the right to sue for physical or mental injuries - and the only way to sidestep that is to decline ACC coverage at the point of first treatment (& stump up full fees)
It was a pragmatic decision made circa 1974 to stem an increasing flood of spurious claims - any right to sue rests with the insurer - ACC - and you can be sure they _DO_ sue and they have _VERY DEEP POCKETS_ along with government backing when they choose to do so.
Most of the time a simple arbitration ruling is issued, fines are levied against employers who screwed up and that's that unless there's a compelling need to rewrite Health and Safety rules (Most of the time workplace accidenmts result from such rules being ignored and NZ's H&S are well thought out without the kind of jobsworthianness found in other countries).
Occasionally an employer will contest a ruling and then the large cannons are hauled out (It's invariably multinationals who think they can subvert the H&S rules, then contest findings and they invariably lose. Local outfits are told by their lawyers to shut up and pay the fines or it'll just get more costly. NZ's laws and regulations are rooted in the general concept of "Legislate/regulate as necessary and _only_ as necessary."
"Start with the gun laws, seems this may be the case in NZ."
NZ's gun laws are pretty good - to the point that the vast majority of "mass killings" over the years have been performed with double barrel shotguns. More knee-jerk gun control laws won't help the issue.
OTOH _Enforcement_ of NZ's gun laws (particularly the need for psychological assessment before being declared fit to possess category E weapons and general mental health assessment) is lacking - and that's down to an overly complacent/lazy police force. (If you think "Gene Hunt" (or worse) mentality you're about right - look at the gung ho way Kim Dotcom's place was raided. UK police who've moved to NZ have generally found they can't stomach it and left again. Tales abound in e2nz.com)
I've had dealings with regional police in NZ. Unless handed everything on a silver platter they're unlikely to take action to prevent crime occurring(+) and even when organised crime rings settle in the country it takes concerted prodding to get them to notice - cf Rathkeale Rovers having a substantial number of family units circulating in the country - police now acknowledging at least 32 known offenders, but only 4 in custody/one able to flee the country in less than 24 hours after being released on bail using on a relative's passport - and this only because annoyed citizens started researching and piling material to a height which couldn't be ignored - tie ins also noted to multi-billion dollar drug smuggling, so the roofing/driveway scams seem to be a distraction tactic in both Australia and NZ - the more being dug up, the more obvious it is becoming that this organised crime 'family' has been resident in AU/NZ for at least 20 if not 30+ years)
(+) In a number of cases the _police_ have been the criminals. NZ has had a notable number of criminal convictions overturned in the House of Lords where the Law Lords pointed out obviously fabricated evidence and made very harsh criticisms of policecondust and judiciary's over-cozy relationships with them - NZ's response was to remove the House of Lords as the independent highest court so that couldn't happen anymore.
In _most_ cases over the years it's come out that NZ police failed to heed warnings of erratic or extremist behaviour in the days/weeks/months leading up to an incident - Aromoana is held out as the classic case because of its horror, the use of automatic weapons and rural isolation, but there are dozens more cases of murders where the police were warned week/months beforehand but stood by and did nothing until triggers were pulled.
NZ has one of the highest per-capita gun ownership rates in the western world (at one point substantially higher than the USA) and one of the lowest firearms-involved(*) crime rates so they must be doing most things right, however when they do get things wrong, they get them very very wrong.
(*) Virtually every case has involved stolen weapons(**), locally manufactured weapons or ones which have been smuggled in/been in criminal circulation for decades (***)
(**) Securing your weapons is a big deal and having stuff stolen is grounds for license revokation. Despite individual weapons not needing registration (they used to, it was found to be ineffective) owners are required to keep records of serial numbers, etc.
(***) It's _difficult_ to smuggle things into a country that's 3 hours flight from anywhere else and some of the stuff criminals have predates effective gun laws enacted 50 years ago
"I have noticed similar things on Facebook before, and I have reported it to them, but they come back saying it does not go against their community standards. "
At which point a pdf out of their response and the pages in question to your local anti-terrorist police hotline is the appropriate next step.
"Officially they've not existed, and it's apparently even offensive now to say they are, "
New Zealand has far more problems than it likes to let on and the usual response to anyone pointing the issues out is mass ostracisation for daring to break step from the "accepted legends" of 'Rugby, Racing and Beer', 'Clean Green'(*), 'egalitarianism'(**)and the 'Fair Go'
Whatever you do, don't bother with Transparency International NZ "perceptions" reports - bearing in mind that TINZ NZ is 100% government funded, kicked out (and issued trespass notices to) its actual researchers and activists about 20 years ago and has remained 100% opaque since around 2002.
This is the "NZ Way" of dealing with problems - pretend they don't exist and if that doesn't work, shut down or take over the outfits showing them up.
(*) This one is particularly pernicious as NZ has some of the most polluted rivers in the world and spent the best part of 60 years denying increasing levels of pollutants by desperately clinging to the "it can't happen here" mentality,
(**) Unless you're a brown NZer or a poor NZer or not in the right Old Boys' Club,
It's a social environment which has allowed issues like this (and rampant systemic corruption) to fester for decades without being dealt with because the first step to dealing with such issues is to admit they're actually occurring.
Corruption has been a particularly difficult issue to address because the _only_ legal definitions of it in NZ are related to bribery - the other corrupt practices defined by the OECD aren't touched and as such are regarded as "acceptable" - in fact a number of them are "standard practice", if not outright encouraged, particularly nepotism/cronyism and influence peddling.
The government likes to deflect the issue too - I was peripherally involved in an incident in the early 2000s which resulted in the discovery that WINZ (welfare) and IRD (tax department) staff in _every_ office throughout the country were illegally selling personal information of individuals to private investigators and debt collectors(***) which resulted in thousands of staff being investigated and several prosecutions. Interestingly enough - although it was established this had been going on for many years, _nobody_ at branch management level or higher was "found to be involved" and the official government line was "These are all isolated cases of individual fraud"
(***) The IT contractors who discovered this came under severe economic and physical pressure to not take it to the police and the backlash shut their company down. The staffers who broke step and went to the police ended up leaving the country as a direct result of having been identified as the whistleblowers.
In this case, it means that people have been _viewing_ and _distributing_ terrorist material in the UK - are openly discussing it in a public place and are probably continuing to do so.
I'd put it to the police in those terms too - their calls are recorded, so failing to act on that information reflects badly on the forces concerned (and the OP should be escalating that up his local police's food chain until he gets to someone who realises the significamce of what's just transpired in terms of the size of the failing - I'd suggest the chief constable or area commander as a starting point)
"Presumably the alarm went up fairly quickly."
By all accounts NZ Police contacted Facebook within minutes of the video beginning to stream, whilst it was still streaming and FB stonewalled them.
At that point I'd be looking to charge Facebook staff with aiding and abetting a criminal act and start arresting every FB employee who sets foot inside the country.
"There is only one SINGLE reason that moderation isn't as affective as it ought to be: the almighty buck"
Yup and the only way to change that is to make it more expensive to not stop this stuff getting online than to have a bunch of (expensive) people or algorithms doing the work.
As for enforcement: That's the more-or-less easy part. Companies make money by doing business in XYZ countries. You can be DEAD sure that even if they claim that you're doing business with Facebook Ireleand despite being in France, that there are Facebook sales staff in France who can be pinned with corporate responsibliity, etc.
Once you start making individuals in the _entire_ company structure susceptable to arrest for criminality (not _just_ the c-suite, but they get to be in the firing line too) you can ensure that companies toe the line (and I'm mentioning sales staff with particular pointedness here as targetting them tends to have has the greatest "wakeup" effect along with illegality tending to flow from this area anyway)
As I understand it, the problem with the US "medicare for all" situation is that it's perceived as "compulsary medical insurance which many low age earners can't afford to have taken out of their pay packet"
How much of that is FUD I don't know, but It's certainly been put that way to me on a number of occasions.
The thing that's never mentioned is how those same low wage earners can afford medical expenses if they're not insured and the apparent answer in the USA is "They can't" - this is like the 1850s UK Liberal party view of the world where the poor were expected to die quietly (At the same time, London alone had a murder rate of at least 30/day and the rich cowered behind 12 foot walls topped with broken glass. I think I prefer the current situation and would prefer not to go back to the "good old days", thanks)
"According to him, whilst most frauds were committed by claimants or their relatives, "
The same attitude prevailed in New Zealand until they rolled out a (very expensive) system linking up welfare, tax and banking systems in the early 1990s.
What immediately fell out was that almost _all_ fraud was prepetrated by WINZ(DHSS equivalent) _staff_ (usually involving ficticious claimants and/or diverting payments of deceased persons), with actual genuine welfare fraud by beneficiaries being vanishingly rare.
This was later massaged to be "claimant fraud" in official histories - but it should have been detectable without spending $140million because in most cases all the payments for various claimants were going to the same bank account (NZ dropped cash payouts and went to bank transfers in the early 1980s).
The attitude still prevails, despite regular busts of similar slightly more sophisticated WINZ staff scams (they've learned to use different bank accounts and generate multiple tax identities, but "living beyond your apparent income" is hard to hide in the long term)
"a huge company swearing blind that it has 100% evidence of fraud which then turns out to be 100% made up."
Perjury, malicious prosecution, _personal_ liability of the various Post Office C-suite staff.
And that's without the families of the people (multiples, not just one) who were harrassed into suicide taking action for corporate manslaughter.
The primary reason that Post Office don't want Horizon exposed is that "certain individuals" face lengthy periods detained at her majesty's pleasure and/or being personally stripped of everything they own (or have fobbed off to the kids/wife/family trust to avoid it being nabbed), in addition to the corporate liabilities.
"I watched an amazing documentary about the US tapping underwater cables owned by Russia and Russia doing the same back."
If anyone has doubts about the US's ability and determination to tap cables anywhere, look up the SSN-23 Jimmy Carter and its predecessor SSN-683 Parche
- Attributed as being a key resource of the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, Parche is said to be "the most highly decorated vessel in U.S. history."
"Cost is the reason we do not mind landfills. "
If there was a market for thorium, the amount in coal ash slurry ponds (thanks to concentration effects of burning off the coal) makes it economic to mine them for the Thorium and pull out a bunch of rare earths as a byproduct.
That would solve a rather nasty environmental problem and make money in one hit.
Cost is not the primary obstruction to mining landfills BTW. The primary obstruction is that most of them tend to be built over or close to/inside populated areas.
Rare earths are everywhere in our soils and slightly more concentrated in some locations.
The problem is that one of them is thorium - very slightly radioactve (15 billion year halflife) and another is uranium (only slightly more radioactive at 4-6 billion year halflife), so you can't put them back in the hole in the ground you got them from.
If some use could be found for them then the rare earth shortage would be addressed overnight. Hmmm. I wonder what possible uses they could have?
(Hint: LFTR)
"That bag must get a lot bigger over time ...."
I turned up at a job one day with a stationwagon packed to the brim with test equipment and didn't need any of it (or any screwdrivers). Unplugging the equipment from one outlet and plugging it into another was all was needed.
To be fair the job had been causing trouble for 20+ years and noone had ever gotten to the bottom of it - the reason I was able to solve it was because I'd arrived after 5pm on Friday to find our equipment was plugged into non-essential power (despite the label on the outlet, the circuit number next to it traced to a breaker in the non-essential cabinet) and the batteries were running down. Plugging it into a working essential power circuit 3 feet away solved the problem permanently and the sulfated battery was replaced shortly afterwards, This was very much a "kicking it $1. Knowing where to kick it $9000" job.
It ingrained a habit of not only checking the power for weird faults but where the power is coming from. I've subsequently found things like untightened grubscrews and other stupidity causing supply issues. A rubber mallet isn't a silly thing to carry in your "kit of things" as it can be used to jar loose electrical connections in the building wiring and breaker cabinets... (and is tempting to use on "loose nuts" who won't shut up)
"but various flavours of Excel-derived hell, deep in actuarial hell where they work out how dead you are to five decimal places..."
I can understand working as an actuary (or supporting them), but any actuary worth his salt should know that using Excel for this kind of thing is like willingly flagellating oneself with a lemon zester and then taking a bath in rubbing alcohol.
This smacks of "We've been using Excel because that's all we know" - which is similar to the "when you have a hammer every problem is a nail" issue of "I use MySQL because it's the only database I know, never mind my requirement has grown to 5 dimensional JOINs it isn't designed to handle and another DB would be 50 times faster/90% smaller/[not need constant nursemaiding because mysql never shrinks its files] - it's too haaaard to learn 8 extra syntax words or even how to optimize my JOIN and WHERE syntax" (yes, that's my current rant after seeing a sub-2GB dataset causing 8GB+ query memory bloat and 30+ second execution time thanks to poorly chosen database and query syntax.)
Excel (or any spreadsheet) is a useful tool for small tasks - but it doesn't scale up to sizes where a database is a better choice. The problem is that people start using it and keep trying to scale to infinity instead of realising that they've passed the practical limits of what you can do with it - I saw an entire Area Health Board with a bunch of hospitals and thousands of employees run on it - it's no wonder their finances were a mess (and changes took hours to ripple through)
MySQL is a fantastic database for basic queries and small to medium datasets, but it doesn't scale up to multi GB datasets and complex JOINs (If you read High Performance MySQL chapter 4 you'll understand why - the book is 2 inches thick, and it's all about getting MySQL to do stuff that "just WORKS" on Postgres and others.). The problem is that people start using it and keep trying to scale to infinity and don't realise they've gone past its practical limits.
A large part of our job should also be telling people that it's time they graduated from a cargo bicycle to a delivery van or a delivery van to a heavy hauler, because their support/performance/reliability issues are because they've outgrown their software.
"As soon as any mention of the word computer is uttered"
Which is why I tend to describe myself as an IT storage systems specialist and have a script for those questions ("Your ISP is the best outfit to talk to for that, yes I know XYZ helpdesk is bad, have you tried one of the independents such as ABC?", "Printers have rubber pickup tyres that wear out, Have you checked yours aren't glazed and are you checking the curl in your paper to ensure you're putting it in the right way up?","Oh I only use Unix systems. I hardly ever touch Windows, Macs etc".)
My father learned the value of my work when I spent a day or so one visit cleaning up his computer on a visit (and told him he needed more memory at a cost of about $60). After I left, his kids (second marriage) removed the AV to play games & got reinfested. As I wasn't able to visit (10+ hour drive away) he took it to a local shop who charged him $400 for the delousing and quoted $200 for more memory. That entire branch of the family got a lot more respectful of my time afterwards.
"Neatly bypassing all that First Line investigation, all the stuff that's designed to filter out crap"
In a lot of cases, for one very simple reason - that stuff isn't helping the customer, it's actively obstructing him getting it fixed, so when he finally gets someone - _anyone_ - competent onsite he'll grab the opportunity with both hands.
"Should have told them to log a ticket!"
Yup.
Or logged one yourself - I'm _constantly_ on at our group about this and they think I'm being anally retentive about it but the reality is that by logging all these kinds of requests you either have something to point at when the PHBs start asking you to justify your existence or something for an edict from "on high" to be sent down telling staff to stop abusing the IT geeks' better nature.
(In the case of customers, it's also useful to show how much extra billable work you actually do as an involuntary upsell when onsite)
"After speaking to them, GDPR was blamed for being unable to communicate price changes to me."
That's BS.
GDPR explicitly _doesn't_ block a company sending you notices about changes to terms and conditions of an active contract (a price change comes under that category) and trading standards can get involved in that one.
It's the kind of thing where a letter from Dewey Cheatem and Howe starting "I act on behalf of Mr Donald Duck" sends chills down spines and has them backpedalling furiously.
"TFTP (Trivial/Telephone File Transfer Protocol) is a very insecure protocol from the depths of time"
Yup. The _only_ secure way to use it is only to enable the service when you need it, only for long enough to do exactly what you need to do and doublecheck that nothing snuck in whilst you had it enabled.
(If anything needs it for booting then it needs to be in its OWN isolated VLAN along with the TFTP server, and the server end needs to be locked down enough so that access is read-only)
Dear Seagate/WD: PLease keep investing huge amounts of R&D into your technologies.
By the time you have it ready for production SSD will have undercut you(*) and you'll go out of business that much faster
(*) SSD only needs to be 2-3 times the price of spinning rust to "undercut" it. The other advantages (power consumption, density, seek speeds, no susceptability to loud noises, etc etc) mean it's a no-brainer in a data centre for a hyperscaler just as much as for a domestic user (drives this size are write once read-never anyway, as are shingled drives in general)
"I believe the issue with continuing with the ISS is its running costs."
The bigger issue - as seen with MIR - is mould (or mold for the Websterites)
It's a sealed environment, you can't stop all spores getting up there and once something embeds itself into the insulation it's effectively impossible to remove/kill without endangering the crew too.
Some varieties eat plastics/metals, so eventually you have problems with hull integrity to worry about.
These organisms are TOUGH too. They've happily survived prolonged exposure to vacuum and high UV levels in lab tests. The higher radiation levels seem to drive faster evolution and selection for toughness.The upshot being that any long-term orbital hab stuff needs to make provision for disposal of either the entire thing after a couple of decades or disconnection/replacement of older modules without disturbing the overall structure.
"I find it rather worrying that somebody stupid enough and dishonest enough to do this would be employed as head of building control."
Having had lots of dealings with senior council employees (district and county) over building issues - I'm not at all surprised. Brown envelopes, family connections, matching ties and special handshakes seem to be the order of the day in many of them (particularly in the southeast of England)
I'm guessing he rubbed someone senior up the wrong way at about the same time as he got caught - because most councils will simply close ranks and hush things up in order to prevent reputational damage (one example, an auditor I was working with wrote a rather damning report on the very cozy relationships between management in one section of the council and contractors.. That report never saw the light of day, the council denied the investigation ever took place and the auditor is now working elsewhere, refusing to talk about it).
At some point grid operators are going to be allowed to insist that wind/solar operators NOT be allowed to dump power onto the grid in an uncontrolled manner, in order to avoid repeats of the South Australian fiasco. The hidden subsidy of top dollar payments has to go too.
Elon's battery bank works well but the cost of this kind of thing should be borne by the generators, not the grid operators.
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