Posts by hoofie 63 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2017
To be fair, if you read various books on this whole scandal, the financial outcome and the money taken to pay fees was made very, very clear at the beginning. The only way this was ever going to happen was via a litigation funder who would shoulder the risk.
The court cases were very risky and the Post Office did their utmost to run the clock down so the plantiffs would run out of money. At one point they had more or less runout of money - if the Post Office lawyers found out they may well have sought to keep it going so the legal actions would have been abandoned.
However - the main issue is still the absolutely terrible miscarriages of justice - innocent people went to jail or committed suicide over this and the contract between the postmaster and the Post Office [which many never saw] was such that any deficit was automatically your problem. Also there was no protocol or mechanism or any analysis of the discrepancies : computer says you owe us 20,000 quid. Pay up - and when you do we will prosecute you for False Accounting since the system was designed is such as way as to set people up [as theft was funnily enough almost impossible to prove in court due to the lack of evidence].
It's an absolute trainwreck of deceit and injustice. There are senior figures who were in the Post Office and Fujitsu who should be in the Criminal Court dock about this. They stood up in Court and said Horizon is infallible plus the various Acts had the provision that computers basically could not be wrong unless the Defence could prove otherwise; which couldn't be done anyway as the Defendants had no way of doing so.
If Reach think the FCC is going to allow them to blast 50w out at the edge of the microwave ISM Band they are smoking the good stuff.
They will be operating under an FCC experimental and scientific licence at the moment which basically means dummy loads and faraday cages [if they bothered to do it legally].
This RF wireless transmission bollocks pops up every couple of years as apparently the laws of physics can be bent by good marketing videos and PR puff.
Note the website has sweet f-al on the technology itself.
I was a student in the mid 80's in Silicon Glen. There were strong links between various Uni's and the Semiconductor plants.
I spent on and off 2 years at National Semiconductor whilst getting my EE Degree from what was then Paisley College of Technology which had strong links with them. My final year project was based on chip fabrication and utilised wafers from Nat Semi
All gone now.
A number of years ago on a new hospital build with lots of IT
It was time for the power down test on a data center. A proper power test - severing of supplies etc to test data centre failover.
Everyone in a room. For some reason Data Storage guys were adamant they needed a soft shutdown because anything else would knack the arrays.
Idiot here popped up and pointed out that if they were going to be damaged they weren't a lot of use in a major power loss scenario.
All hell breaks loose with lots of angry questions from the customer to the Storage specialists.
At that point I made my excuses and left before I got lynched.
We had a couple of customers interested in them a few years ago for use in Iron Ore Mining and electrical utilities. Unfortunately their biggest drawback was cooling - they would not have handled the outdoor temperatures in an Australian summer plus are useless in sunlight. Also no GPS or magnetic compass on it [bear with me...]
It could have been an absolute game-changer if an electrical crew could put them on, look at a piece of equipment and get all the stats and info on it. Not impossible but too many basic drawbacks. Same with mining - overlay crucial data and graphics on them.
It's a workable tool for indoors use with a lot of programming effort but 10mins is about the max you can cope with the weight on your head.
Ironically Google glass was much more appropriate but it was killed.
Any attempt by the Iranian Proxies in the area to get any kind of aerial capability will be removed from the surface of the Earth tout-suite. Iran are currently too far away plus Syria for all their fun and games know from painful experience what will happen if they step too far out of line.
Egypt, Jordan and firmly in the "my enemies-enemy is my friend" territory at the moment plus the first two also have long and painful memories of the result of their last unfriendly engagement with the Israeli military.
<cough>Hunterston B Nuclear station puts about a GW into the grid with Torness adding the same BUT it will shutdown for good next month with only another 8 years or so of life in Torness</cough>
Thanks to the SNPs seemingly fanatical hatred of oil/gas/nuclear Scotland is going to be royally screwed for base load supply in the next 5-10 years. I can remember as a lad in Glasgow in the 70s having to use a candle to light my way up the stairs to bed thanks to the power cuts. Looks like those times will be coming back.
The mob I work for have grown from nothing to $250m ozzie in 20 years with the same guy at the helm. He is aggressive on business but we have bent over backwards to treat people with respect and NOT let people go during the GFC, Covid etc and it's noticeable how many people have been here for more than 10 years.
It seems to be a US thing where being an utter prick as a boss in charge of a very large company is seen as good whereas in Europe etc. it's seen as an absolute no-no and not part of the social compact between company and employee.
Good CEO's attract and keep talent in the business.
The reporter who broke the whole Theranos story, John Carreyrou, worked for the WSJ which is owned by Murdoch and was given full reign and editorial support and ended up costing Murdoch a very large sum of money indeed.
He is on record as saying their was no pressure put on him whatsoever
You can easily communicate to/from a low earth orbit Amateur Radio satellite with a 30 quid handheld radio. Telemetry is piss-easy to download with modern SDR radio dongles. I've sent data packets up the ISS on 10W from the West Coast of Australia and had them re-transmitted down to the East Coast.
That's of course Amateur Stuff which is designed to be accessible.
Last year an Amateur operator found an old "Military" satellite that turned out to be alive. Reverse Engineering a signal/data stream is easier with modern computers and technology - the cost/effort to getting the raw signal is a lot lower than it was 20 years ago.
You utter twat.
Go and read the Hansard reports from the time. Michael Foot, a Labour Leader who was unfairly maligned by the press, explicitly supported Military Action.
Unlike many of the communist morons in his party at the time, Foot had seen in WW2 what would happen when you didn't defend your own people and what dictators could do.
In about 1990 or so, I was privy to seeing a military-grade RS232 encryption device with its case open. All compartmentalised with gold chips, EMP protection etc.It was used for serial comms across phone lines between some government departments.
And voila - the encryption key was loaded via paper tape. Apparently the reason was the key could be instantly destroyed.
Here in my local market IBM is a joke.
Their 5 years gigs are coming to an end so they are being kicked out and replaced with a more nimble Tier 2 player. All of their extravagant promises have never been fulfilled with a procession of people being steadily replaced by India-based employees with a stunning level of ignorance of the product and business. Remember - the really good Indian Developers/Specialists have already left for the US/UK/Australia/NZ. I should know; I've employed many of them.
If we go back 5 plus years the local IBM was a very different place - I worked alongside some quality people then at customers who were a pleasure to deal with. Needless to say all have since left IBM, mostly not by choice.
At a Federal level they are still a big player but their recent performance has not exactly been stellar but scale is what matters at that level not quality.
I've got about 5 PI's running in various modes - one is a telescope controller, one runs as a APRS gateway for Amateur Radio and one acts as an SSTV receiver for ISS piccies and others.
The first 2 are headless, the last one sits in a case with a PI touchscreen display.
I really don't see the need for this - all you need is an old keyboard, monitor and mouse at a pinch.
So basically it's moving towards a Virtual Bank - hire in all services you need and just stick a name over the top.
Outsourcing your ENTIRE banking IT landscape to IBM and just "supervise" - what could possibly go wrong ?
Is anyone organising a bulk order for popcorn ? We are just at the opening titles of this saga and it will run and run.
I once scored a promo flight on Concorde from the Middle East to London - cost me a couple of hundred quid extra on the normal BA Economy Ticket in 1992.
When I was checking in I met someone I knew. She had a standby ticket for the normal BA flight which was leaving at the same time and was promptly handed a Concorde Ticket instead since the normal flight was full. #jammybastard
The problem with nuclear propulsion was cost, complexity and manning requirements. Since they are using F35 there is no need for steam for catapults [the US are going down the route of electromagnetic catapults].
Cost was probably the biggest issue - whilst they are eye-wateringly expensive as they stand, if we had gone down the nuclear route there would only have been one. Two carriers offer much more flexibility than a single hull [ask the French...]
It's hard enough getting Nuclear qualified engineering staff for the underwater brethren - add two Nuclear carriers on top of that and it's a no-go. Also some friendly ports [e.g. New Zealand] aren't so friendly if nuclear boats are asking to come alongside.
From that what I gather the whole nuclear propulsion question was seriously considered - the UK has the technology to do it - but was ruled out early on as just not a good choice.
The US supercarriers are impressive but apparently envious glances are being stolen from across the pond at the non-nuclear option plus the very high levels of automation on the QE class carriers means the manning requirements are much, much lower than the US - the latter is especially relevant as the US Navy tends to train a sailor for one job only whereas the RN has always worked on the basis of multi-skilling the crew e.g. a steward or chef would also be first-aid trained and act as a medic or damage control crew member.
It's really great to see the Senior Service sailing the world's oceans again with a proper maritime strike force - suitable for putting the frighteners on uppity foreign types, annoying the French [which I'd suggest has ALWAYS been the purpose of the RN] and delivering exceptional cocktail parties.
When you reply to the tender you will indicate your proposed cost, conditions of sales, tender terms etc.
Even if you include delivery and installation you will have a lovely set of exclusions that makes sure it's the CUSTOMERS responsibility to have somewhere to put it, suitable utilities services, air conditioning, suitable floors etc.
As a vendor you cannot carry the can for the customer being completely unable to organise a pissup in a brewery.
Sometime in the early 2000's I think. We pulled a server from a hosting company somewhere in London after they had repeatedly dropped the ball etc.
On getting the server back to the office [we jumped in a taxi to their site, unplugged it and legged it out the door] a cursory examination showed it was full of ripped DVD's of films etc. Interesting as it all it did was host a rather large website.
Now I know for a fact none of us did it [why ?] - turned out the "Admin" staff at the facility has used it for storage. That was quite useful as we were in dispute about the remaining bill.When presented with displays of the files, who created them according to the logs and dark threats of suing them [the organisation I worked for was 90% lawyers] they suddenly decided not to pursue payment.
There were so f***ing hopeless they couldn't even cover their tracks properly.
You are thinking of Cosmic Radiation which does have enough energy to cause random errors in Modern electronics. That's been known about for decades and is countered by "Radiation Hardening"
You also have to be outside the atmosphere to be at severe risk but there is an increased risk to aircraft cabin crew, passengers who travel constantly at high altitudes.
Yet he still won an election that was Labor's for the taking. Dutton got back in despite huge efforts by that paragon of electoral fairness Getup! to unseat him. His vote went UP not down.
If there is one thing the last election showed, Australians do not like being lectured by progressives.
From what I've read of it the ultimate problem was a poisonous command atmosphere, lack of training and shortage of personnel.
It's a warship being navigated - it literally is not rocket science, navies have been doing it around the world for centuries.
The US military hammers down any individuality in it's Officers and Men - Ratings are trained for one task alone and not encouraged to think out of the box. It's stunning that the bridge on a US Navy Warship could be so dis-functional - but it was.
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