Posts by Unoriginal Handle 52 posts • joined 30 Oct 2016
"many incidents weren’t the result of lack of braking capacity in the vehicle, but lack of brake pressure applied."
The overwhelming majority of car crashes are the results of decisions or the lack of well before the brake pedal is applied, however firmly.
The only way the human driver will be given an incentive to improve their own skills is if it saves them money - which in essence is insurance companies giving discounts for decent ongoing driver training a la RoSPA ROADAR or IAM schemes (these are int he UK, I'm not aware of anything else similar elsewhere in the world).
I can see the logic - sort of - from the car manufacturers' points of view. "Let's eliminate the things which cause cars to come together, like not braking in time, crossing lanes, not looking properly into blind spots". The problem is that those speccing the systems to do this are probably in the same boat as other drivers in that the passed their tests many years ago and haven't had any standards checks since then.
I say this as someone who's a tutor for the local RoADAR group and sees a ex-police advanced driving instructor at least yearly to make sure I'm still up to scratch. And before anyone passes me a pork pie hat and some string back gloves you'd need to drive with me first to see if that particular stereotype fits.
Therium funded the litigation against the Post Office, and its probable that without that, the good work of all involved in bringing it to light wouldn't have succeeded as it has.
Therium fund stuff like this for a profit, so it's them who got the bulk of the initial settlement. I'm not keen on it, but I'm happy to be enlightened on any other way the appeal could have been funded.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252476622/Why-subpostmasters-are-calling-on-the-government-to-pay-Horizon-trial-costs
Not quite. They're prosecuted for burglary, which has no monetary value attached to it.
And the monetary losses are, from my dim and distant memories as a probationer constable in the late 80s, subsidiary to the emotional distress caused by knowing a complete stranger has had free rein in your castle.
https://www.cps.gov.uk/legal-guidance/theft-act-offences#:~:text=Section%209%20of%20the%201968,to%20inflict%20grievous%20bodily%20harm refers.
"Just wondering since I can't quite remember where I left mine about 50 years ago"
Was talking with a new girlfriend once about where and when we'd lost our respective virginities.
After I told my story, she said "I can't exactly remember where or when it was, but I've still got the box it came in."
And yes, I am leaving so soon...
"I'm curious why a bush pilot in Aus would use pounds?"
As the previous poster said, aviation - especially if flying an American designed light aircraft, uses a whole load of different units. Pounds for weight, inches for centre of gravity datums, potentially US gallons for fuel quantities. And the units used are specified in the aircraft manual which is a legal document so everything needs to be converted back to those units to make sure you're not over the max weight and the CG is within limits.
So you have to convert your USG fuel required into UK G or litres - and the potential for weight-affecting errors just here is massive if you're not on the ball as it's not volume you need, it's the actual weight...
Well yes they're MITM. But unless they stick a cert on my device they're not going to see anything useful beyond the first few packets of metadata as it's all pretty much encrypted.
And even if I was dumb enough to allow Apple to decrypt my data, cert pinning, client certs and the like knock a whole lot of other stuff out for the potential decryptor.
Worked for an ISP many years ago. Was involved with auditing user accounts and configs on sensitive switches and routers which controlled a fair chunk of the ISPs and their customers connectivity.
On being told I was made redundant, I handed the SecurID fob in to a senior colleague the same day, and got an email confirmation from them to confirm. No way I was going to open myself up to all sorts of problems if there were problems.
My foreign manager, on the other hand, is a completely different story and couldn't understand why I wouldn't fly to Europe for a few days, in my consultation period, when I had job interviews lined up...
Early 80s. University somewhere. Either under Ultrix on the old PDP/11 or the shiny new Vax 8600, likewise with Ultrix. But no per-user process limits...
Me, in my tinkering, had a shell script ( probably Bourne but who cares, and it doesn't matter ) which forked another background shell or copy of itself, slept for 5 seconds, then repeated.
When other users sat at terminals in the room with all the consoles started expressing confusion as to why they couldn't do anything I went off and sought the advice of one of the post-grad system admins. Who had to resort to rebooting the whole kit and caboodle to resolve the problem, and /I don't know how much of other peoples' work I lost.
Sorry, all...
On my honeymoon in 1991, driving through the French countryside near Darois (I think). Saw a sign pointing to the CAP aircraft factory. Knocked on the door and got a tour, seeing the raw materials (piles of wood) being turned into aircraft in stages. It appealed because at the time I'd just completed a PPL(A).
Got told to go to the nearby airfield the day after and look at the actual finished product. No trip in one, but seeing the transformation of the raw material to a finished aerobatic aircraft ticked my geek boxes...
The biggest gripe I've got with any sort of telematics which sends driving-related data to anyone, including insurance companies, is not the data itself but the poor interpretation.
Anyone who's done some sort of advanced driver training ( most likely in the UK, I've not seen it very prevalent else where) of the likes of IAM or RoSPA's ROADAR scheme ( https://www.iamroadsmart.com/ or https://www.roadar.org.uk/ ) will drive considerably differently than anyone else, and safer. That doesn't preclude firmer braking or harder acceleration, but both those activities would be pinged by
And a friend was hit by a young driver with telematics - he was too fast round a bend on a country round and while she stopped in a few feet, his marks were measured at about 45 yards. Telematics don't make things safer at the time, they tell you after the fact (or possibly not - what's too fast on a 60 mph piece of road where in reality 25-30mph is the top safe speed in the case above).
The way to better safer driving is to give the human the skills and the attitudes to deal adequately with anything the road might throw at them, and the only way to do that is to offer good insurance discounts for people with a demonstrated desire to improve their driving. But that's not going to happen unless it's mandated, so I'll keep my as-little-computerised-as-possible car off the Internet and drive it in the way I've been trained, and out of the way of everyone else out there who's not.
Key-related topic drift...
I worked in the Newbury offices of Cabletron, and we had a lab with all sorts of kit in it to simulate a network for the Spectrum software my team and I was supporting. We kept the lab locked because kit would be raided for urgent customer requirements ( i.e. rapid replacement of broken kit on site). But the key sometimes took a while to come back or we'd havr to go and find it.
Until the day the 8 x 4 metal door sign with "Lab" on it no longer stuck properly. So I used a split ring to attach the key to the sign, and funnily enough the key was always promptly returned from then on.
One particularly irksome colleague in a job far far away played golf on his work PC on a regular basis.
Someone (who, me?) added a "golf.bat" and changed precedence so it ran before the golf.com or gold.exe, whichever it was.
The golf.bat said something like "you're playing games in work time, your hard disk will be deleted", then paused for a moment and ran chkdsk /f in silent mode.
Time from starting playing golf to punching the power button - about 2 seconds, perhaps less.
"Just a continuation of the inexorable raising of the level of the presented interfaces in all hardware and software systems over time"
Yep, while underneath the complexities are very real. How many folks can use a browser to buy something over the Internet, compared with how many understand the interactions end to end which achieve that result? And the skills to understand that are few and far between.
It's what caught RBS out some years ago - no-one understood the whole picture in detail so each bit worked but the whole didn't.
Blocking an external management interface from direct access from the internet is an absolute must. If you have to, VPN access to the box and do it that way. If nothing else the logs on the box fill up with denied SSH requests and the filesystem gets to 100% and the box does funny things up to and including becoming unresponsive...
There are tools available commercially *now* which can protect endpoints of all sorts (laptops, servers, workstations, IoT, SCADA, ....) but a lot of customers are in the "I've got A/V, I'm sorted". No good if the A/V doesn't have a signature for the malware being used against them.
"You haven't had the right to silence since 1994. You don't have to speak, but you'll be considered guilty if you don't."
Not quite. You still have the right to remain silent. But if you go "no comment" in an interview then drag something up in court which you knew but didn't mention during or after the interview, the court can infer adverse things from it.
You will be considered innocent, in the court's eyes, unless there is evidence beyond reasonable doubt that you are guilty. And it's the police service's job to find that evidence, not yours to provide evidence of innocence.
That said, I do think in the case referred to in the article that it's stretching things to suspect the gent involved of terrorism when apparently all he's done is to interview someone with potential evidence of US involvement in torture, in a similar manner to David Miranda's detention some years ago at Heathrow.
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