Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7408 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
My Mum-in-law has an old brick end terrace, no cavity walls. She has good loft insulation, but can't add external wall insulation (conservation area). Adding internal dry lining would shrink the already small rooms even further, it's also a minefield because if it isn't done properly it can create huge problems with damp.
Sometimes you can only do your best, and live with it.
Governments capping prices sounds very nice, but if it still costs more to generate the energy the difference must be financed somehow. Most likely taxes, or borrowing where the interest is paid from taxes.
Either way we pay for the energy, directly or through tax.
Look at the current idiocy in the UK, where the radio never stops telling us how every household is entitled to government handouts, while that same government is inflicting the highest taxes in 70 years on us.
This is sophistry.
Not at all, nothing I posted was false or deceptive.
Do you deny that Liz Truss was sacked by the parliamentary Conservative party?
Now that is sophistry. The parliamentarty party cannot sack the PM, only the King has that authority. At most the party can make the PM's position untenable, so that (s)he decides to resign (as they did to Truss and her two predecessors), but sacking simply isn't possible.
This is not merely theoretical; it has happened.
Not that I remember. The problem is that it's an all or nothing model, the parliament can't remove individual members, it only has the nuclear option of dismissing the whole commission, which protects the commission members. Out of 8 motions of censure, none was ever adopted by the parliament.
The closest they came was in 1999 when the notoriously corrupt commission led by Jacques Santer resigned en masse, ahead of a probable sacking. Edith Cresson was the real bad apple (she famously appointed her dentist as an HIV advisor, despite him knowing nothing of the subject), and the French refused to recall her. She still gets her EU pension.
the strictest guidelines, requiring third-party certification
I wouldn't bet on the final regulations actually requiring 3rd-party certification. They say that "to be allowed on the EU market, manufacturers have to demonstrate they follow best practice...", so in all likelihood that will end up like the fairly useless "CE mark", where manufacturers are simply allowed to self-certify compliance. Rather like ISO9001 certification, a manufacturer will need to set up a department (yourself for a one-man show) with lots of pretty documentation saying what they do, put someone with CISSP certification in charge (yourself again), and be prepared to bullshit the auditors when they occasionally show up. Best-case it might make the developers a little more aware of potential problems, but since you already are...
Moi, cynical?
it will keep the MKZ fairly well centered in the middle of the lane by itself.
That would be lethal round here. Narrow country roads with white lines along the edge, so the LCA systems force the car away from the verge into the centre of the road. Likely into the path of the oncoming HGV or bus which more than fills it's own 'lane'.
I'm waiting for the first tourist unfamiliar with narrow roads and these gadgets to be killed. The court case will be interesting.
Only annoyance is that it's really difficult to distinguish 2mm, 2.5mm and 2.54mm spacings.
And bigger sizes.
Back in the 80s/90s there were some traffic accidents in the UK caused by towed caravans coming unhitched. The problem was that some people had older caravans which had 2" socket hitches (50.8mm), but the ball on the towbar of their modern Japanese and European cars was 50mm. They looked the same, but that 0.8mm difference, added to a bit of wear on the old socket, meant that one good bump in the road & the caravan could part company with the car...
Those are two different issues. The customer can request an imperial quantity, and the trader can sell it, but to be legal the measuring equipment used has to have metric units. It may also have imperial ones, but imperial-only is illegal. The weights and measures act requires that scales be officially certified, and ones that have only imperial measures cannot now be.
Metric is certainly more convenient for calculations, but in many situations it's more a question of familiarity than of which is "best".
Tell someone in the US or UK that a location is 20 miles away and they don't visualise that as a linear distance, rather they will think "too far to walk", or "half an hour's drive". 32km is meaningless to them in that context. The reverse would be true for people who grew up with metric units. I grew up in that period when we learned both, and have lived in places with miles and places with km, it is useful to know both.
Much the same is true of ºC/ºF, in daily life the number doesn't matter, what's important is "shirtsleeves or coat?".
Legal, yes, but it meant that market traders and greengrocers had to replace all their scales with ones that showed metric measurements as well as imperial. They could not legally use imperial-only ones, even for a customer who requested "half a stone of potatoes". Petty bureaucracy at it's worst.
It depends on what you want from your job. I was always happy to give a little more than required when it was necessary. It paid off handsomely over the years in terms of pay rises, bonuses, promotions etc. although I still made sure I kept a good balance between work and life.
Other colleagues whinged about being "passed over" or unappreciated, but they were usually the clockwatchers who never did one minute more than their contact required.
If people want to do the strict minimum, and are happy with no career prospects, good for them. Some of us want more from our lives.
For free, you also get a cloud-based store for all your passwords, Bitwarden Web Vault;
Why is this necessarily any more secure than LastPass, or any other password manager? At the end of the day, most of these breaches come down to human error and/or social engineering, and being open source doesn't magically exempt software from that sort of attack. Personally I have no particular desire to delegate my password security to a third party, whether they are stored "in the cloud" or not.
I'm reminded of this IEEE article https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete. People with medical implants finding that they just switched off because the supplier no longer supported them, which is quite horrifying.
The biggest problem in any automated disaster recovery setup, not just with aircraft, is that reliably determining WTF has happened is very difficult. Humans still tend to be better (but not necessarily faster) at it than machines, which are limited by the scenarios they've been programmed to expect.
I remember a 1980s BA shuttle flight operated by the new 757, where the landing was more than a little firm (not dangerously so, just unexpected). As we taxied the pilot came on the intercom and apologised for the hard touchdown, saying "sorry about the bump, it's the first time we've flown one of these and we thought we'd see how it managed on its own."
I was glad he waited until after the landing to tell us that.
The Belfast Telegraph isn't necessarily the most reliable of news sources, but they do claim to have some info that it's a ransomware attack:
(paywalled, but you can read the 1st paragraph)
