Posts by EU time zones 16 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Oct 2009
Correct - for a long time Sark had no Company Law, so any Company incorporated there could do as it pleased. The catch - the Directors had to be Sark residents so a lot of controlled-from-elsewhere companies had a couple of Sark residents as their tame Directors who would vote as they were told, for a small stipend. It was called 'The Sark Lark' the the City. A bit like the Cayman Islands and Panama, but colder and closer.
Arguing about FTTC/FTTP versus Cu is simply pointless. Once you've got Cu laid, it's a lot less expensive to address the really big unmet demand - lack of decent upload speed - by investing in G.Fast. My conversations with OpenReach engineers suggest that Cu management is a lot more quality focussed than it used to be with frequent post-job QA inspections. Maintaining fibre is just as expensive once third-parties start opening up the fibre ducts...
But the key point that Gov and BT both miss is that Internet connectivity is the only sensible way to deliver cellphone coverage to rural communities. The penny is slowly dropping in their tiny minds now they've started to consider how many fibre backhauls they will need for 5G. Once you're into that scale of longhaul fibre laying you can consider a properly integrated service where a rural community, struggling to load animal movements into DEFRA's website via dial-up or ADSL, can have symmetrical fibre to the community - THEN you can sprinkle around femto-cells, FFTH for those who will pay for it, FTTC/G.Fast for everyone else and suddenly all of the major unmet need is taken care of.
My chums tell me that 5000 new fibre backhauls will be needed for 5G rollout in the Republic of Ireland. Think what that number might be for England. Or Wales. The locals don't want it in rural Scotland - it's been tried and they complained so loudly that it was stopped. But to be fair, if the detour for a closed road in the West Highlands is >100miles, I wouldn't want it either. Have to find a way to lay new fibre that doesn't close roads...
Oh please! A fibre strung on a pole will necessarily be a multi-strand thing, so repairing 2<n> fibres when it's knocked over - in the middle of a Canadian winter will be even *more* difficult than repairing Cu - simple IDC connections each one. Ever seen a field fibre splicing unit at work? In a 40mph wind?
Even though you specifically mention ISP to neighbourhood, it *still* won't be a single fibre pair. It's almost the same cost to lay 96pair fibre as 48pair - the cable isn't the cost, it's the positioning and fixing. So everyone always lays more pairs than their initial need.
Hmm, not correct either. Engines most definitely can stall - it's called compressor stall. It was a huge issue for years on SR71A, and super-stall on rear-mounted planes like VC10 tends to flame out (stall) the engines from the turbulent air from the stalled wings. Side-slipping some military jets also kills the pilot as the airflow into the engine intakes flames them out - they stall.
Well no. Thiomersal continued to be used as a preservative for vaccines in some countries. And since we learnt that we really know very little about organo-heavy metal compounds since Minemata disease and the Camelford problem it wasn't such a crazy concern.
Show me ONE single safety study (not efficacy study) for MMR that isn't contaminated by manufacturer money or vested interest and I'll go quiet and read it. Just one will do.
Truth is that we never needed a vaccine against mumps, and the MMR campaign produced an epidemic of adult mumps which is quite a nasty disease, compared with the very mild and often un-noticed childhood illness. And if the rubella vaccine were a car, you'd be entitled to your money back, it's so poor. Compare it to vaccines against Hep B, for example. It's not very good.
So single-disease measles vaccination is a great improvement, but the vaccine bullies refuse to have the NHS pay for it in the UK - too busy trying to cover their backsides after squandering £1BN on Tamiflu which has been shown to be no better than placebo. Or last year's influenza vaccine, which worked, just not against the most prevalent strain in circulation.
It's all bound up in the gigantic assumption that objective data is good and subjective data is bad. Which is the root of a lot of the high-tech hangup thinking. I was in the lab end of Clinical Trials, and we could honestly be sure about our objective, lab-data only because we ran lots of QC, we controlled our environments etc. All very CLIA (USA) and Clinical Pathology Accreditation Ltd (UK, RCPath). And then the Home Office, to save a few quid, outsourced all of the forensic labs work to some liars and incompetents who couldn't even prevent sample switching, let alone assure good quality. And we haven't begun to near the end of that clusterf**k.
You *can* cope with human subjective interpretation, it's all well established science, BUT IT'S REALLY EXPENSIVE. At *least* two different observers have to asses the data themselves, provide their answer and then a third party has to compare the results. We used to do this for University Exam marking - any papers more than 1 grade apart from the two markings had to be re-marked.
Would I have my diagnosis performed by an AI-machine. Not if I can help it, and will reach for the family lawyers if I find that it has been.
Except that a Smart Meter can turn off your supply remotely. Imagine a failing system that shut down the meters and then finally fell over.
Integration is both a strength and a weakness.
Or if you are old, 'All eggs in one basket'.
Only EVER link up things that really need to be connected. And even then, plan to cope when the linkage breaks.
Our University m/f at Southampton in 1975 was still 1900 series. Room full of punch-card machines, one always going flat-out interpolating, as some jobs delivered their output on non-decoded punched-cards.
The new ICL 2970 didn't come on line until about 1976 or thereabouts.
The more you dive the more you realise that it's essential to have two of everything: First Stage, Second Stage, time, depth measurement, increasingly dive computer, often a second bottle. Your life - and perhaps your buddy's - depends on it.
And that's just for normal Sport SCUBA - the Technical stuff is an order of magnitude more reliant on technology.
I have a nice letter from Professor Martin Severs reassuring me that the NHS has respected my decision not to allow sharing of my records with outside organisations. Except that we know that one of the NHS suppliers somehow forgot about this and sold my records anyway.
The Bio-statisticians I worked with in the 1990s claimed that they could de-anonymise my records, given a 4-digit postcode and my age decade in about 30min. *That's* why our data is valuable.
*Everyone* has something to hide in their medical records - even if you think you haven't you don't know what a potential employer might find out that means you aren't considered for a job.
NHS security model was fine with paper records - only your immediate health-care providers could access your notes. But on computer, *everyone* can access your notes. Look how insecure Police National Computer is. You think NHS data is as well secured?
Lack of effective Attitude Control System (or process) - widely assumed to be part of the psyche there. And yet Toyota pioneered the approach, in car assembly, that *any* employee can stop the line if there is a problem - in the '60s and 70's in the USA that would get you fired by GM, Ford et al.
The Techie/Manager interface is always a challenge: my solution? Pay the head Techie so much money that the Managers and Money realise that there's a reason why they pay that person so much, and that it would be a waste to ignore their advice, warnings etc. Don Quixote at your service.
Portugal the only country on Blighty time? What about the Republic of Ireland?
And Greece - isn't that part of the EU? Is it on the same time zone as Spain?
We tried having daylight saving time all through the winter many decades ago (and I'm not referring to WWII) - we didn't like it then and ill-informed comment by this author won't make us like it now.
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