Posts by Grandad

Did this airliner land in the North Sea? No. So what happened? El Reg probes flight tracker site oddity

Re: Obviously not GPS jamming

About 30 years ago I went to a talk about problems encountered during the Falklands war. The carrier based aircraft used INS type location systems as did the ships themselves. The planes had to be calibrated back at base in the UK which was fine normally as they were intended for a war in Europe. When they went on sorties in the South Atlantic and with poor visibility the drift on their inertial systems meant they had great difficulty finding the carrier. Not good when you are running low on fuel. Apparently the ship board systems could not talk to the planes to enable a reset of the gyros.

Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Re: 65 ton???

No 65,000 tons is not the same as 65,000 tonnes:

1 ton = 2240 pounds (lbs) avoisdupois or 20 hundredweight (cwt)

1 tonne = 1000 kilograms (Kg)

1 Kg = 2.20462Lbs

Then there are short tons and long tons but that is just too complicated

Sky 'fesses up to broken fibre cables as cause of outage woes

It's probably all caused by the massive civil engineering works in and around Runcorn and Widnes due to the construction of the new Runcorn-Widnes crossing over the Mersey otherwise known as the Merseyside Gateway!! They would never notice a few cables being dug up.

All right, who guessed 'street mapping' for those mystery Apple vans? Congratulations

Use English when in the UK

I hope they will also blur licenCe plates too

Smart meters in UK homes will only save folks a lousy £26 a year

What about gas?

Scanning through all these interesting comments it seems most folk are only considering smart electricity meters but as I understand it they intend to make gas meters smart too. Does that mean 2 displays and when the heating is on on a cold night it indicates that I should turn the boiler off. My existing gas meter is a mechanical device and a very small pressure drop across it drives the cogs and dials. I guess a smart meter will need an electricity supply which I will have to pay for. If they use batteries they won't last long judging by the number of charges my mobile needs.

Also what happens when the hackers decide to have fun and turn the power off or screw up the readings. As I understand it the smart meters have little serious security built in.

Re: Idiots

Or put less water in a standard one

Re: My Electricity supplier

I believe they can't charge you for more than 12 months usage if you have requested a bill and they have not sent one. There is a code of practice from 2006 on this.

Britain'll look like rural Albania without fracking – House of Lords report

Re: US gas 1/3 price of UK gas.

As the adult human body is ca 60% water it would probably need more energy to burn the hypothermised OAPs. I suppose you could leave them out to sun dry though but maybe there's not enough sun either.

BOFH: Backup server's failed? We have a backup backup server

Those hydrocarbons should make it all go with a bang, how about ammonia?