Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Speed limiters arrive for all new cars in the European Union

Re: Good

The number of motorists who don't stop at red lights, zebra crossings, roundabouts, junctions etc. mean that we need to actually limit their maximum speed.

How does limiting their speed make them stop at red lights?

Re: Good

Pretty much the whole of the UK, speed cameras are set to trigger at speed limit + 10% +2, so even in a 30mph zone it won't trigger until you are doing 35mph or more

Do bear in mind that part of the reason for that is that the camera hardware has tolerances, so when it clocks you at 30 you might be doing anywhere from maybe 28-32. If the camera is reading, say, 5% high then passing it at a real 35 might cause it to register 38.5, well into the "+10% +2" zone.

Re: "Ghastly,... it all is. Absolutely ghastly."

we now can't drive a car older than Euro 4 into a city without paying extortionate toll charges.

AFAIK cars over 40 years old are considered "classics" and can be exempted from the ULEZ. Pick something nice from 1983 or before, maybe a Nissan 300ZX, Bentley Mulsanne?

Re: Changing Country - what then?

Not all of them. My recent VW-group car requires me to dig through the menu options and select "Right-hand traffic" in order to get the lights to dip appropriately, and I also have to manually change the "units" setting from MPH to km/h.

Re: Ah, but France

And yet France has a road fatality rate nearly twice that of the UK (45 per million, compared to 25 in the UK).

Might, in part, be because being caught drink-driving will only get you points for a first offence (unless you're way over the limit and/or cause an accident), so a lot of people think it's not really serious.

I frequently use a local road which has a 60MPH limit, but for some reason the VW GPS thinks that about 200m of it, on a straight clear road with no other roads beside, over, or under, is limited to 40. As I enter that bit the car beeps frantically, and given the traffic levels I'd run the risk of being rear-ended if it actually slowed the car down quickly.

Re: Cut the grass

You'll probably get ticketed by the council for vandalism!

Re: Made a better idiot!

ABS is not designed to improve braking efficiency, it is designed to prevent the wheels locking under hard braking, so that you retain steering control and can more easily avoid an obstacle. A car with ABS won't stop faster than one without, and on snow it may actually take further to stop since the best braking in soft snow can happen when you build up a wedge of snow in front of locked wheels.

Re: Mixed feelings about this

Can we have a special detector that accelerates in that case?

Re: Good

as per whichever law dictated it in the first place it will turn itself back on every time I start the car

Not a law, but NCAP "safety" standards. To get a 5* rating now requires that cars be fitted with so-called active safety devices, including lane assist, automatic braking, etc. If you can switch it off permanently (as I can on my 3-year-old car) you'd now get a lower NCAP rating, and no manufacturer wants the marketing disadvantage of that.

Re: The devil is in the detail

I've had older cars (15-20 years ago) where the CC did that, but any newer cars I've owned, usually those with now-standard ABS, are quite capable of braking to maintain the preset limit when going downhill.

Re: DO NOT WANT

The technology works and is useful.

The technology does not work, and could only be said to be useful for drivers who aren't paying attention. Drivers like that should turn in their licences and use buses or taxis, which would improve road safety far more than any imperfect gadgets could do.

Re: Good

When I was learning to drive 45+ years ago, the driving instructor was quite clear that briefly exceeding the speed limit when overtaking was completely acceptable, provided that you returned to it when the manoeuvre was completed. It ensured that you spent less time actually overtaking, which is inherently safer than remaining on the wrong side of the road for longer, simply to stay within an arbitrary limit which cannot be correct for every mile of a given road. Obviously you didn't start the manoeuvre, at any speed, if it wasn't safe to complete it.

That, of course, was in the days when people were actually taught to drive, rather than being taught to pass a driving test.

There is no honor among RAM thieves – but sometimes there is karma

We used to have an annual budget for new test systems for the QA lab. Any systems ordered were always specced to the max: twin large disks, full RAM, nice screens. Needless to say all the 'extra' components found their way into developers' desktop systems fairly quickly. After all, a QA lab system is fine with a tired low-res screen, and it only needs a disk big enough to hold the software under test & logs. I'm sure our managers were aware of this, but turned a blind eye to the "perks" as long as they weren't pushed too far.

EU officials say X’s paid-for blue check deceives users and breaks law

Re: The European Commission is an executive branch

It takes its instructions from the member states

Well, "it listens to the opinions of the member states" might be more accurate.

CISA broke into a US federal agency, and no one noticed for a full 5 months

Re: Seems like a complete shit show but...

CVE-2022-21587 is in Oracle E-business suite, so probably not Solaris-specific.

Outback shocker left Aussie techie with a secret not worth sharing

AFAIK powerful electric arcs generate a lot of UV. Sunburnt retinas are not good.

More than enough to boil the battery acid into steam, resulting in a burst battery and boiling sulphuric acid spraying around. Not something to try at home.

Maybe he should have checked why the first fuse blew, before just replacing it.

I remember someone at Uni who was wearing a metal watch strap which came unclipped as he was working on a 200V DC motor. It fell across the terminals, he was very lucky to get away with only a bad circular burn right around his wrist.

UK minister recalls two planning decisions which blocked datacenter investment

Re: Failure to consider uses of waste heat

Some friends in France have district heating to their apartment block. It's permanently run at such a temperature that they have windows open even on snowy days in order to "regulate" the temperature. Endless complaints never have any effect.

Labour wins race to lead UK, but few would envy the load in its tech in-tray

It's the rallying cry of the far right.

And of the far left.

Re: ... but being some part of the single market ...

the European project is work in progress…

A bit like nuclear fusion...

there's nothing of it left for him to worry about.

People like Abbot, Long-Bailey and Rayner are still there, Corbyn's still an MP and would be welcomed back into the fold by them if Starmer wasn't there to stop it. If I were Starmer I wouldn't be sanguine about it. To quote another unpleasant politico: "they havent gone away, you know"

No, I didn't say he was trustworthy, I said that he has a position that he is willing to speak to and defend. I disagree completely with him on almost everything, but he doesn't try and hide his nastiness behind waffle and weasel-words.

Oh, that "'they're all the same" started well before Johnson, when Cameron declared himself the "heir to Blair" and abandoned any pretence of being on the right. Blairite Labour centrists have forced the Left out, and Tory wets have forced out the Right. They are all the same, both offering warmed-over New Labour policies with some different glitter on the surface, and indeed that opens the door for populists with unfounded claims who can take advantage of the resultant apathy and low turnouts. It's a dangerous situation.

Still odd how Europe is taking a very long overdue move away from the left

I think that's much the same situation as in the UK, just from a different starting point. Take France, where Macron did a Blair and dragged the socialists to the centre, thus getting a big vote as the dynamic new boy offering change. 7 years on the French have decided that they don't like his changes, but there are no serious moderate alternatives on either the left or the right, since the moderate parties imploded. End result is that people vote pick an extremist party purely as an anti-Macron kicking. Neither the RN or LFI have economically or socially credible policies.

The problem with the 2-round system in France is that the coming second round will now be a purely tactical one, those even vaguely on the right will vote RN to keep Melenchon away from power, while the centre & left are horse-trading candidates to try & block the RN. It looks like the result is going to be a hung parliament, with Macron, as President, spending the next 3 years trying to block either side from doing anything too crazy. Maybe he's hoping that by the next Presidential election Le Pen & Melenchon will both be so discredited that his protege Attal will have a chance at being elected President?

Re: ... but being some part of the single market ...

FPTP is currently not offering that. PR?

Be careful what you wish for. The LibDems got 3.5m votes and 71 seats (interestingly, that almost exactly corresponds to a proportion of the vote), Reform got 4m votes but only 4 seats. PR would have given Reform more seats than the LDs, and the Reform + Tory seat count would far surpass Labour. Is that really what you want?

Frankly, I'd rather someone who I disagree with than someone who can't just give a straight answer.

Me too, and they are indeed sadly lacking in UK politics. I have to admit that Corbyn is one, although I totally disagree with his political and economic policies. On the other side, David (Lord) Frost speaks convincingly from conviction on the centre-right. As you said, it was actually refreshing to hear Farage answering interviewers' questions with an initial direct "Yes" or "No", before explaining himself, instead of the weasel-words employed by too many senior Labour and Tory politicians.

I'd have to disagree with you about conviction being a general characteristic of Reform, though. Farage, perhaps, but too many of the other candidates are just troublemakers. In my constituency the Reform candidate didn't even show up any any hustings, it was clearly intended merely as an anti-Tory box to tick on the ballot. Many did.

I doubt Farage will go anywhere much. The Reform vote was primarily a "who can we pick to kick Sunak, but not by voting Labour" one, I seriously doubt if many of those who voted for Farage would expect, or want, to see Reform anywhere near power. A bit like UKIP/Brexit parties, as soon as they'd had their single-issue impact, their votes evaporated.

It is interesting to see that Labour's share of the vote barely changed, except in Scotland. Their landslide was almost entirely down to the core Tory vote going to Reform or the LibDems. This was an anti-Tory vote, largely by Tory voters, not really pro-Reform or pro-Labour.

The big question now is how long Starmer can hang on for before the Labour left get the knives out, especially since Corbyn survived. Starmer doesn't have either the personality or the ego of Tony Blair, so seems much less likely to be able to hold the party together now that they don't have to worry about another election for 5 years. I'd give him a year during which he can still blame the Tories for everything, then internal Labour politics and factional fighting will get tricky.

Kindle sputters out: Amazon's e-readers couldn't download content for a short time

Me too, and that also allows me to download borrowed e-books from my local library & put them on my Kindle, without having to read them via Adobe Digital Editions.

EV world in serious trouble if China cuts off rare earth materials

I agree, but if that's the plan it might be a little better to have the new supply chains in place before breaking the old ones. Unfortunately too many politicians prefer grandstanding gestures without proper planning, assuming that solutions will just appear. That's one of the reasons they're getting a kicking in elections, and a major force behind the worrying rise of left- and right-wing extremism.

So, at the same time as European governments are forcing us to buy EVs, those same governments are pissing off the countries which supply the materials needed to make them? No wonder elections are producing crazy results. Are there any politicians out there actually capable of logical, joined-up, thinking?

Switzerland to end 2024 with an analog FM broadcast-killing bang

Re: Broadcast power of DAB+ compared to FM broadcast

Bandwidth in Mhz for DAB+ seems to be limited to 1.5Mhz and that is not a lot of bandwidth for high quality music in digital format. FM has maximum bandwidth of 270kHz with RDS.

That 1.5MHz figure is for a DAB+ multiplex, which carries many stations within it, usually 10-12. The figure you quote for FM is for a single station, and isn't the maximum bandwidth (FM theoretically has infinite bandwidth) but simply a convenient approximation, you can work with less. As for power output, the characteristics are different, you can't assume that 10kW FM and 10kW DAB have the same broadcast characteristics or range.

CISA looked at C/C++ projects and found a lot of C/C++ code. Wanna redo any of it in Rust?

Re: The Rust Evangelism Strike Force...

how can a buggy compiler hurt me?

Ever read Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust?

'Skeleton Key' attack unlocks the worst of AI, says Microsoft

Yes, much to the chemistry teacher's amusement.

Re: Scunthorpe, here we come!

"Real" intelligence does that sort of post filtering. I know in what company I may, or may not, use a word like "fuck", or if someone asks me how to make a Molotov cocktail I can use my judgement whether I reply or not, and in how much detail, depending on what I know of the person posing the question. After many decades of life experience I'm hopefully better at making those calls now that I used to be, but no AI is ever going to get that experience because no-one is going to spend 20 years parenting it. LLMs will never be intelligent, at best they might become well-informed psychopaths.

Nokia to sell submarine network business to France in $375M deal

Re: Well

Bought by Cable & Wireless about 30 years ago, IIRC.

Glastonbury to turn festivalgoer pee into eco-friendly fertilizer

Re: Fertiliser has an "s", you do know?

Bored with, bored of is a horrible neologism.

British Airways blames T5 luggage chaos on fault 'outside of our control'

Re: Unloading baggage - how hard can it be?

A lot of the baggage arriving at LHR isn't intended to stay there, it needs to be routed to another flight. I'd expect that much of the complexity is in the scanning and rerouting of bags as they come out of the containers. Some bags will go directly to the onward flight, but others will be held in a store for several hours before the connecting flight shows up on the system, and a destination for the bags is known. IIRC they handle over 100m bags per year, that's not far off 300k bags per day on average.

If you're using Polyfill.io code on your site – like 100,000+ are – remove it immediately

So they could legitimately patch the script, without notifying you, and the url wouldn't change but the hash would now be different.

Isn't that the whole idea? The script was changed and so is not the one that you (presumably) tested your site with, so you no longer pull in the changed script, for security.

Whether it was "legitimately" patched or not is irrelevant, since you cannot know if the change was legitimate or not. It's a change and therefore a security risk until you've tested it and accepted the new version. If you can't keep up with testing changes, then download a known safe version & host it yourself.

BOFH: Why's the network so slow?

I once woke up in bed, stark naked, two naked women with me and have zero memory of how or indeed what had happened to get me there or after I got there.

Did you still have your wallet?

Re: Mornington Crescent?

On a Tuesday?

The X Window System is still hanging on at 40

Re: Network access

It would have been good to have something like SSL wrapped X11

Isn't that basically what you get with "ssh -X" ?

systemd 256.1: Now slightly less likely to delete /home

Re: ...Boccassi is Poettering's colleague at Microsoft

If only it would end...

I would upvote you, but that would spoil your perfect 42 upvotes.

Footage of Nigel Farage blowing up Rishi Sunak's Minecraft mansion 'not real'

Re: Assessment of the Tories since 2010

That's because since Cameron the Tories have simply aped Tony Blair, Cameron even styled himself as the "heir to Blair". It never seemed to occur to them that if the voters rejected Blair, it perhaps wasn't a good idea to offer an alternative that was just a watered-down rehash of New Labour with a bit of a spin.

When people vote Conservative it isn't because they just want the country run by the Conservative party, they want it run by Conservative policies, and the Tories haven't offered that for 30 years. This is why those voters are picking Reform, not because they expect, or want, Farage & co to win any seats but simply to give the Tories a kicking and get them back to moderate right wing Conservative policies, instead of Sunak's high tax, high spend, big state social democrat stance, which hardly differs from Starmer.

Looks like they're going to get that kicking, and Tory HQ has noone to blame but themselves.

Re: "Quite funny though"

So when someone games the system to that extent, is the fault wholly with them, or with the disfunctional system that allows it?

Re: UK media must be near the bottom of the pile

I could write the process of how to go about codifying this on one side of an A4, unfortunately the challenge will be that too many people have an interest in the UK Constitution being a bit vague.

Much the same is true of EU legislation as well, though. The core rules for most things could be written on one side of A4, but getting 27 countries to agree on it would be impossible. That's why they each need 20,000+ lines of carefully curated text, so that everything is sufficiently vague and ambiguous that each member can interpret and present them to their citizens in an acceptable way.

Battery electric vehicles lose their spark in Europe as hybrids steal the show

I have a PHEV and do quite a few local journeys, for shopping etc., and in most cases I can complete them within the battery range, occasionally seeing it switch to battery a mile or two from home. I always plug it in at home, but never in a public point since that's more expensive than using petrol. I'd say that over the couple of years I've had it I have covered maybe 20% of total mileage on electricity.

Considering the purchase price it will certainly never pay for itself in fuel savings, but that's not why I bought it.