Posts by rg287 908 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Apr 2018
It's built into most GNSS chips as standard now. There are over 150 Android smartphones on the market which can receive Galileo (in addition to GPS and GLONASS) and it's been available on the iPhone since the X/8/8Plus were released in 2017.
There's no sticker, it's just baked into the chips by default, same as your handset being quad-band and being able to connect to networks using 2/3/4G in multiple countries, allowing for different regional spectrum allocations.
Hence bits of rockets and space shuttles being moved about the country to where they are needed for assembly.
To be fair, SpaceX also move rockets from the factory in California to their test centre in Texas and eventually to Florida (usually, sometimes California) for launch and recovery (and then back to California for refurb).
Transport in itself is relatively cheap. The problem is when those rockets are being built from bits supplied by 20 major Congress-selected sub-contractors in the appropriate districts, in some cases using components selected by Congress (i.e. SLS being largely cobbled together from old Shuttle components by former Shuttle suppliers). Any change request has to pass a dozen-plus desks. Far slower than wandering across the single design office in Hawthorne to the relevant department, having a chat with the team(s) your change might impact and sorting it out in half an hour over a coffee.
Not exactly. The thing is that Saturn V was built by so many subcontractors and suppliers that no unified set of plans really existed. NASA would receive completed assemblies and didn't necessarily have all the designs for them because they only needed to bolt it onto the next assembly, or ensure the electrical interfaces played nicely with its neighbours. And if they did have detailed drawings, they did not have exact manufacturing/production schemes of how those assemblies were fabricated and assembled.
Many parts were hand-crafted. When NASA set some junior engineers the task of reverse-engineering the F1 engine a few years ago they found all sorts of oddities on the unflown engines they pulled out of storage. In one case the injector plate at the bottom of the engine had a mark where the drill had come down in the wrong place. These days the whole plate would be rejected (nothing short of perfect). On this one they just moved the drill to the correct spot and carried on. Lots of undocumented modifications and procedures from the fabricators (hand-welding/machining). The (hand-built) F1 engine itself was being developed and iterated so fast that every one was basically a bit different. As the article notes, Apollo 4 flew with a test article Command Module which had been hacked about to qualify some mods for the production version. There was no locked down "Saturn V" specification.
So some stuff was never documented, much of it was spread out around the contractors, and of the stuff NASA had, some has ended up with museums or archives like the Smithsonian and other bits in NASA archives. And even then one set of drawings may only apply to one particular mission.
No jake, the poster was referring to Skorpions and other Eastern European military surplus automatics like the M-70/AKMs used in the Bataclan Shooting.
Not the more common semi-automatics (which can be bought legally all over Europe subject to having the relevant license - the UK is the only bit of Europe where you can't own pistols or centre-fire semi-autos). The only reason "Eastern Europe" is mentioned specifically is when we're talking about military stock that went missing after the Iron Curtain came down.
I don't think there's ever been a buy-back but I think it sounds like a good idea.
Strictly speaking yes there have, but only in respect of licensed firearms when the Government has banned something (1997/1988/2019) because civil forfeiture is not a thing in the UK.
The view on collecting illegal firearms is that you should be glad to be getting rid of a liability in an amnesty rather than collecting a 5-year custodial sentence.
Err, no, they are worried about a lot of Eastern block military surplus automatic weapons that were deactivated to older standards and ARE turning up reactivated. Yes anyone who can work a CNC machine can probably make a gun - but starting with half the work done for you makes it so much easier. This is not paranoia, it is in reaction to a Europe wide problem. Perhaps if the Police and Home Office publicised the issue a little better instead of keeping schtum about a possilble route to illegal 'Section 5' firearms acquisition the 'shooting community' would STFU.
If you or your kids live in a metropolitan city then there is the vanishing small, but still real, risk of being caught it a 'drive by' because your local drugs gang think its cool to own reactivated Skorpions. Unfortunately it is probalby extremely difficult to frame a law that makes an overly subtle differentiotion between e.g. Boer war and cold war era weapons.
Yet criminals also find it worth their time manufacturing their own, because the supplies of "weakly deactivated" firearms in the UK have dried up, no legitimate UK dealer or auction house will touch anything that doesn't bear a certificate of deactivation from the London or Birmingham Proof Houses and Border Force will take a dim view on people trying to import such.
It is very sensible to make it inconvenient for criminals to acquire firearms. But once you have reached that point (and we are well past it), it can only be addressed through enforcement.
Even a total ban on private ownership of firearms would not prevent criminals smuggling or manufacturing their own - lathes aren't licensed.
Additionally, whilst there is some concern about "automatics", firearms crime committed with automatic weapons is more or less zero. 50% of all firearms crime is committed with pistols (that ban in 1997 worked then), and a chunk of the rest is with "imitation firearms" and then perennial favourite - the sawn-off shotgun. There are a few notable cases - Ellis/Shakespeare being gunned down with a MAC-10 in 2003, but in most cases it seems the (non-)availability of ammunition to feed a full-auto along with their relative rarity makes them at most a status symbol rather than a practical weapon.
"Reversing" a UK-spec deactivation is tantamount to building a new firearm from scratch.
Which is why organised gangs have stopped doing that and are just making their own firearms from scratch (Gun factory uncovered in Sussex) - which is easier and more reliable than doing "bespoke" reactivations of whatever becomes available on the deact/collectors market, and leaves no paper trail back to the white market. Or just smuggling them in from Eastern Europe (60 guns found in car at Dover).
Any metalwork teacher worth their salt could churn out sensible quantities of handguns on a small lathe or mill. This isn't magic knowledge. It's not hard once you've sorted out a pattern.
It is understood that the series about the magical adventures of a tween occultist is quite popular, spawning several Hollywood adaptations.
There's nothing Hollywood about the adaptations - not since the (rapidly-snubbed) American proposals involved turning the setting into a US-style High School with cheerleaders and magical sparkling pom-poms...
Proudly made in Britain (Leavesden) using finest British creative and technical talent and not a little bit of top-grade boffinry. Whilst the studio tour may be a nerd-fest for fans, it includes some props and set items which are often assumed to be CGI but in fact were achieved as cunning practical effects, very refreshing in today's world of virtual sets and digital-everything and interesting for those of a technical disposition whilst the kids are gorging on Potter-everything.
Ethically, certainly.
I suppose a broad interpretation might hold that by broadcasting it the NHS Trust themselves had breached that clause, though I doubt a court would go for that other than to say "upgrade post haste". They certainly wouldn't convict anyone. One might also question whether the information is sufficiently specific that GDPR is applicable... unencrypted broadcast of identifiable medical information opens a whole different can of worms which could hold a lot more pain for the Trust.
48 Interception and disclosure of messages
(1) A person commits an offence if, without lawful authority-
(a) he uses wireless telegraphy apparatus with intent to obtain information as to the contents, sender or addressee of a message (whether sent by means of wireless telegraphy or not) of which neither he nor a person on whose behalf he is acting is an intended recipient, or
(b) he discloses information as to the contents, sender or addressee of such a message.
So both counts - not only was he snooping, but broadcasting on the web to boot. Entirely illegal and a prosecution would inevitably succeed short of some epic incompetence on the part of the Police or Prosecution to throw the case.
Whether a prosecution would be brought is another matter. There's a pretty limited public interest case here (the CPS prosecutes if such action is in the public interest AND is likely to succeed) and as the ABC trials showed, one should not expect that publicly-available information be ignored "because anything else just isn't cricket".
If a greyhat can do it, a blackhat can. The scope potentially includes - say - terrorists monitoring transmissions to plan/target attacks. A prosecution of this guy won't stop that. In the absence of demonstrated harm there is no public interest in a prosecution - only in securing the insecure systems.
(thus why you can't easily block Windows 10's telemetry--it doesn't use DNS).
Bits of it do. Various MS telemetry domains appear at the top of my Pi-Hole's "most blocked" list.
As you say though, they tend to fall back to hardcoded IPs if the domain doesn't resolve and some elements just use IPs by default anyway.
I could mention one (Olympic!) sport where the rulebook is written in German (the Governing Body being HQ'd in Germany) and "officially" provided in German and English.
In the event of a conflict, the (translated) English version takes precedence.
Not likely to ever be quite as catastrophic as say, aircraft maintenance manuals, but curious nonetheless.
Now it's a case of back-tracking those TOR requests. If you're not careful all you'll get is endpoints, which won't go down too well with the ACLU, EFF, and so on. It's hard work but I'm sure they'll find a few.
They'll no doubt have Operation Ore at the back of their minds. If the Americans have passed evidence of British users to British Police, then they will be double- and triple-checking that information after they acted like a bunch of absolute amateurs in 1999-2000.
After 2003 Operation Ore came under closer scrutiny, with police forces in the UK being criticised for their handling of the operation. The most common criticism was that they failed to determine whether or not the owners of credit cards in Landslide's database actually accessed any sites containing child porn, unlike in the US where it was determined in advance whether or not credit card subscribers had purchased child porn. Investigative journalist Duncan Campbell exposed these flaws in a series of articles in 2005 and 2007.
...
Many of the charges at the Landslide affiliated sites were made using stolen credit card information, and the police arrested the real owners of the credit cards, not the viewers. Thousands of credit card charges were made where there was no access to a site, or access only to a dummy site. When the police checked, seven years after Operation Ore commenced, they found 54,348 occurrences of stolen credit card information in the Landslide database. The British police failed to provide this information to the defendants, and in some cases implied that they had checked and found no evidence of credit card fraud when no such check had been done. Because of the nature of the charges, children were removed from homes immediately. In the two years it took the police to determine that thousands had been falsely accused, over 100 children had been removed from their homes and denied any unsupervised time with their fathers. The arrests also led to an estimated 33 suicides by 2007.
British Police have literal blood on their hands over their mishandling of the Operation Avalanche/Ore intelligence. They have the deeply unenviable job (for which I grant them the deepest respect and support) of acting quickly to protect children whilst also ensuring they don't swoop in and start calling people paedophiles (with the sort of "no smoke without fire" stain that follows such allegations and ruins lives) when there is significant uncertainty regarding endpoints and ownership/control of bitcoin wallets. If you're going to fling those sorts of allegations about, you need to be damn sure that you've collared the right person.
It says in the story that it can only "scuttle 10 meters"???
I'm kind of struggling to see the point. It's almost like the aeronautical equivalent of a selfie stick.
To be fair, it's a fairly speculative tech demonstrator which weighs just over a kilo. I assume the dimensions are fairly tiny and 10m is quite a lot of "walking" for it. Enough to refine the design for larger/more expensive vehicles that need to negotiate target terrain like difficult slopes.
Even comes complete with glowy red HAL light!
In all seriousness though, there's a fair chance this could end up burning - this is flying on the very first mission for ULA's new Vulcan rocket. It's literally a certification flight. I wish them the best and hope it won't end up burning on the pad in Florida.
First of all, the owner will know it happened and will want to retaliate (somehow).
"Somehow" would be the easy bit - if the MEV grabs hold of the rocket bell, all the victim has to do is fire their engine. The MEV may not be thrown off (depends on grappling mechanism) but it's unlikely to come out of the encounter well. You may well damage your bird as well with such a tactic but some people would consider that preferable to having their satellite carried away by a third party.
Once the UK is out of the EU, and provided that no agreement is reached - as looks almost certain at this point, there is no legal basis for a company or a person resident within the UK to continue holding a .eu domain name.
There's no legal basis for anyone to have a .su (Soviet Union) domain either, yet it remains in use even today.
Restricting future registrations would be quite reasonable, forcibly repatriating domains goes against every precedent set in the world of DNS over the past 30 years.
I can't for the life of me see the point in a .eu. If you're a business, does that mean you only and quite explicitly trade within the EU? Having branched into international business/exports from your mother country (whether .uk, .fr, .de, etc) you trade with Austria but not Switzerland? Or does it mean you have offices/production sites in multiple EU (and only EU) countries?
Surely just use a .com or the appropriate TLD for your country of origin (or a gTLD for your industry if you're feeling avant garde).
As for the European Institutions using .eu - pure vanity plates. If .org is good enough for the UN, then eu.org shouldn't be out of place (or indeed eu.int - .int being reserved precisely for those sorts of Intergovernmental Treaty Organisations - the African Union has "au.int", Council of Europe has "coe.int" - pretty much every other international organisation runs on .org or .int).
All that being said, the convention is that domains aren't cancelled. There's still the old .soviet TLD floating around FFS and that entity doesn't even exist any more! How the EU are making such a pig's ear of it is baffling. Of all the nonsense that needs to be sorted out to facilitate Brexit this should be literally the least of their problems.
600 armed officers seems a tad much for invading an ISP's premises, even if said ISP is located in a bunker. I mean come on, there's 450 of those guys who must have spent four hours just standing around.
It's Germany. The Police are routinely armed. "600 armed officers" is a tautology and just means "600 officers". One would assume there was a "breaching" group who did the initial entry and secured the premises, followed by a large contingent of specialist/forensic officers who were armed by dint of being German Police Officers, but weren't specifically members of the MP5-toting black-vest club.
There's "armed" and "armed".
Do they just accept that you can't stop it and just go in for massive redundancy and ECC these days?
That's been the SpaceX approach - forget paying $$$ for a rad-hardened chip, just fly 5 regular chips and vote between them. Of course most of their hardware to date (rocketry) doesn't actually spend much time in space, only Dragon has an endurance stretching into days and I'm not sure what they do with that.
Given their proposed StarLink satellites will be in LEO and have expected lifespans of a couple of years, the value proposition of rad-hardened chips is lower compared with a major science instrument or expensive GEO satellite which needs to last 10+years. If you've scaled to launching >5,000 satellites losing a few prematurely to radiation is just a cost of doing business.
Well they don't open fire as quickly as US police because the general population doesn't have guns.
Au contraire. Most of Europe has plenty of guns. Not as many as the US, but plenty nonetheless.
The Czech Republic even has concealed carry permits - 2/3 of legal gun owners have one.
The Czech homicide rate is half that of the UK (no, not the USA, the UK) despite the fact that people can and do walk the streets with guns on their hips.
Firearm violence has remarkably little to do with firearm ownership (otherwise Europe would have homicide rates 3-5x higher than the UK - which they don't). Violent crime correlates to societal failings, and in the US the relatively ready access to firearms translates to firearm violence, but if you took away the guns they'd just have high levels of knife crime instead. The firearms are - at most - a symptom.
It's mostly to do with culture, proper training of Police and the fact we have far fewer desperate people in Europe rendered bankrupt by medical bills/lack of social welfare.
Apple has assembled the Mac Pro at its factory in Austin since 2013.
Actually, this sentence is "half true".
The statement is 100% true. Not half.
The Mac Pro has been assembled by Flextronics at their Austin factory since 2013. All of them.
It is true that the Mac Pro is a niche, high-end product for creative professionals, which is why they make it in the US - because it is a low-volume product and most orders are slightly-custom, which does not suit the FoxConn way of doing things (make 10million identical 64GB iPhones, then make 10million 128GB iPhones, rinse and repeat).
It is true that crowing about "Assembled in the USA" is a bit hollow when the vast majority of their products are assembled in China and most of the components come from China or Taiwan one way or another.
But the statement is true and there has been no "Made in China" variety of Mac Pro since 2013.
Let's be clear here - illegally entering the country and then trying to claim asylum is not an approved method of claiming asylum.
Folks who do that are rightfully detained until processed and deported.
And just like any other common criminal, no you can't have your kids/family with you in jail.
Even if we accepted that as true (which it isn't), that doesn't make up for the kids-in-cages as opposed to kids-in-social-care/foster-homes/sensible and humane accommodations pending the outcome of their asylum application.
But then as the only country in the world to have avoided ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child we shouldn't really expect any more from the failed society that calls itself the USA.
As for the War on Drugs. Yes... It's gone swimmingly. How many thousand guns have the ATF sold to cartels in botched sting operations? How about that delightful episode where the DEA appropriated a truck to use in a sting, got the driver shot dead and the truck shot up, then refused to pay for repairs...
Let's face it, the ATF and DEA enjoy their job too much. They don't want to do themselves out of business - so they keep sending merchandise and guns the way of the cartels to keep up a competent opposition against whom they can play out their Hollywood action scripts "operations".
It worked well enough - barring a certain Marine sniper incident - until the Task Force mysteriously disappeared one day.
Nothing mysterious about it. They were rebranded JTF-North when Counter-Terror was added to their remit.
all your phones will need to be replaced.
Not strictly true - CPE exists that a conventional phone can plug into, which handles the analogue-SIP conversion.
But since those are not in widespread usage (aside from people who have already moved to SIP and have them for that reason), that means replacing all your routers instead of your phones!
There's also an increasing number of people who don't have/use their landline number anyway. We don't have a phone plugged in at all. All voice calls are via mobile - whether over cellular connection or routed over Wifi-Calling. Don't want or need a "landline" number, SIP or otherwise.
YMMV, and things like telecare, monitored alarms and other embedded/legacy devices are the obvious tricky cases here. An awful lot of domestic users however have already subconsciously made the switch and just won't notice.
So delete the app?
The app is typically a final step of setup that you install on a computer or phone, sold as a management tool to sucker you into ink subscriptions along with a few basic management functions/ink levels instead of logging into the printer's admin panel via a browser.
Epson tried to pull a similar one when setting up my printer. I did - briefly - have the app on my phone. Then I deleted it. It never touched my desktop, laptop nor the wife's devices. But they can all print. If HP want to reliably collect data, then it needs to be the printer phoning home. It's no good if just one device for the household has the app installed!
And in the meantime, do we know if the slurp goes back via the main company URL or via another that could be added to a Pi-Hole?
Or you could just block the internal IP of the printer from accessing the internet at your router. If you don't plan on using cloud print or any such stuff, then why does it need internet access at all? LAN yes, WAN no.
Or set network details statically rather than on DHCP and just leave the default gateway blank or set to 127.0.0.1...
What the ESA is really doing in such a low orbit is up for speculation.
Read the article. Aeolus only has a 3-year lifespan due to the operational requirements of the observations it is doing, the desired spatial resolution, and the dusk-dawn sun-synchronous orbit. Plenty of Earth Observation Satellites are in low orbits if they need to be. Others are in higher orbits, particularly if spatial resolution isn't too important (you don't need sub-metre pixels if you're measuring ocean surface temperatures).
Get real. Maybe 30% could charge one EV at home, perhaps only 10% could charge 2.
More than 50% of the UK live in a detached (25%) or semi-detached house (32%). Detached and semi-detached houses invariably have a private drive/off-road parking and could charge one or two EVs (grid connection notwithstanding - but the parking space is there. moreover, two-car households tend to see one car there most of the time whilst the other is used by a commuter - if the connection is that poor, one can charge in the day, the other at night).
26% live in terraces. These are a bit more gnarly - Of the 200+ terrace houses on my road, >70% have a drive at the front (converted front garden) or a garage/parking space down "the backs", where they could sensibly charge. The ones at the bottom of the road might struggle, but a trivial analysis would indicate that your "30%" figure is utter rollocks, just like 67% of all statistics.
Likewise, of the 14% who live in flats... well my wife's old flat, and the new-build flat a friend has just moved into both came with dedicated parking spaces - charging facilities could be fitted. This will not be universal of course, but again, "flat" does not necessarily imply "no parking", though the installation of charging points would involve the cooperation of the landlord/residents association.
London is different, but 85% of us don't live in London, and a non-trivial proportion of the 43% of Londoners who live in a flat/apartment don't own a car to begin with because they have sensible public transport, rendering the question moot.
I know other charging networks are available but unless they are thinking of putting in a useful system so that everyone can superfast charge within 10 miles of home they might as well not have put fingers to keyboard.
Why would you need to superfast charge within 10miles of home?
Why would you wilfully take the NG statement out of context?
You buy an EV, which >70% of households can charge at home. This does not need to be "superfast" because superfast charging accelerates wear-and-tear on the battery. Most people's lives involve popping round to the shops or a 15-30 mile commute which is trivially covered by overnight charging from a 13A wall socket or - if you're keen - a 9kW charger. Average mileage is 7,900miles/year, which is 22miles/day. If you're a motorway warrior who does >200miles/day most days then by all means buy a hybrid which you can carry on topping up with dinosaur juice.
The point of the 54-location calculation is that with well under 100 super-fast locations, you can trivially dispense with range anxiety for the minority of journeys that are >200miles because anyone going long distance will pass 3-4 locations where they can get a fast 20-30min charge. For >50% of households, a regular 13Amp wall charger will cover daily charging needs and they can stop at a fast charger on occasional long-distance jaunts.
They're not proposing that those 54 locations are the only locations anyone would ever charge at and that we'd all queue up to charge there routinely as we do for a petrol stations. I have to question whether you are on psycho-active drugs to imagine such a thing. Or you're just a troll. For shame.
"WTF? Who is going to drive 100 mile round trip detour to charge their car? And what happens if everyone within 100 mile circle want to use the charging point?"
WTF? Why on earth would you try and set up such a ludicrous straw man (though what's more concerning is the number of upvotes you have).
The point of 99% of drivers being within 50miles of a charge point is that just a relatively small number of public charging locations can cover most people if they need a charge point to get home - where they will have a home charger (and yes, that includes a large number of people living on terraces).
It addresses range anxiety for the relatively small proportion of journeys which are greater than 20miles.
Nobody is going to be sat at home thinking "only got 55miles left in the battery, better drive 50miles to top up".
What a bizarre thing to suggest.
If they're dedicated to reducing carbon emissions, one has to wonder what the review of HS2 is about - other than to establish that yes, in fact it should interconnect with HS1 to allow straight-through services to the continent from "provincial Britain".
Manchester Airport alone has ~9 daily flights to Paris-CDG. If one considers the time it takes to get touched up by "security", clear customs at CDG and then sit for an additional hour on the RER getting into the city from the airport, a High-Speed service from Manchester could deliver the same journey time with a table, power socket and wifi for a fraction of the per-seat carbon emissions.
Rinse and repeat for Birmingham airport, and destinations including Amsterdam, Brussels, etc.
The fact that it is viable to run multiple daily flights between Manchester and Glasgow reflects on the parlous state of our railways and should be a source of national embarrassment. It's time to stop pussy-footing around national infrastructure. Get HS2 and HS3/"Northern Powerhouse Rail" built, and get Phase 3 up to Glasgow & Edinburgh.
The failure to interconnect HS2 with continental rail access can only be a result of brown envelopes being punted at the DfT from the short-haul airlines.
To be honest, I thought "Crown Sterling" put it in a very similar category to other young organisations trying to make themselves sound established, grand and reliable - respected investment broker Stratton Oakmont comes to mind...
eldakka
Your understanding is correct re: marketing - it's opt-in. Amazon don't need my consent to ship the product I ordered to my home address nor to bill me for it. They do need my consent to send daily offers or marketing materials.
However, Purpose (d) vital interests - is not for businesses. It generally applies to things like schools, councils and case workers (public sector type stuff) - they do not need your consent to maintain information about pupils nor to pass/share information with the relevant authorities if they suspected (for instance) child abuse to be taking place at home. (d) can overlap a bit with (e) processing is necessary for the performance of a task carried out in the public interest or in the exercise of official authority vested in the controller; which covers all manner of sins for Police, Security services, etc, etc.
Keeping records for tax/fraud/chargeback purposes would be Lawful Purpose (c) processing is necessary for compliance with a legal obligation to which the controller is subject;
A lot of companies asked for her account login details as proof of identity, which is actually a pretty good idea, Pavur opined. But when one gaming company tried it, he simply said he'd forgotten the login and they sent it anyway.
Presumably not her password? And certainly not by e-mail? Companies have just spent years teaching users that they will never ask for your password!
It seems like there's a simple solution for this in cases where the user has some form of online account (gaming, shopping, etc):
Only send SARs to the e-mail address attached to the account. Want it sent to a different e-mail? Login and change it. Forgotten your creds? Do a password reset. At the very least, this means you're limiting it to the person in control of the account (which could have been hijacked of course, but that's a different matter). You're immediately limiting requests coming in from arbitrary email addresses.
Since you have an obligation to respond to GDPR requests regardless (having established identity), you would then need a fallback process for someone who insists that they want the SAR delivered to a secondary email address and not the one attached to their account - but you can make the process relatively onerous to put people off that option unless they're genuinely serious about it.
Is that a contract limit, because I get ~70Mb/s from FTTC? (Zen, speed test using fast.com.)
I'd imagine so. Gigaclear came through my uncle's village 18months ago. He gets 100Mb, but being FTTP he could opt for 250/500/1000Mb if he wanted to pay the money. The difference of course is FTTP connections tend to be synchronous unlike FTTC.
However there are a few fairly remote farms. FTTP might be as economical as FTTC for these.
The cost-benefit certainly comes out in favour of FTTP by simple dint that FTTC won't do squat for the farms if they're more than half a mile or so from the cabinet. FTTP will undoubtedly be more expensive, so the equation looks like:
FTTC - £ : Zero benefit over current ADSL, won't get past 1-2Mb anyway
FTTP - ££(£) : Future-proofed for the next 50 years
Yes. They got all excited when OpenReach wrote to tell them that Fibre was coming. And then (as I suspected they would) they pointlessly installed FTTC to a cabinet on a rural road where most houses were 1-3miles away, and aside from two close by, VDSL would result in a less reliable connection for literally every other line.
FTTP is being driven by consumer demand - just not the consumers it's being delivered to. My parent's entire road signed up for "Fibre", and the cabinet was duly upgraded to FTTC. Precisely two houses have taken it because VDSL is not reliable over the majority of lines. OpenReach and Ofcom are apparently labouring under the impression that people's failure to upgrade means they're "happy" with their 1Mb ADSL.
The people who want FTTP are the ones who don't have the luxury of upgrading from 1Mb ADSL, because even if the cabinet is notionally offering FTTC/VDSL, it makes no difference to the residences on the end of 2miles of corroded CCA.
See also, those (even inside the M25!) on oft-overlooked EO lines who were some of the last to get ADSL and in many cases still can't get VDSL because there's no space in the exchange for the hardware.
I've said it (many times) before and I'll say it again. This shouldn't be about taking people from 50Mb VDSL to 1Gb FTTP. It's about taking people from flaky 1Mb ADSL to literally anything better.
But what about the Second Amendment? The Supreme Court has already ruled that it's an individual right AND that a militia can be one person.
What about it? The Second Amendment apparently does not guarantee your right to own full-auto. They have also accepted as constitutional that felons may not own firearms. That means the Supreme Court have accepted that not all arms are equal, and that the 2A does not apply equally to all individuals regardless of circumstance. It is not an absolute right - it is subject to conditions and clauses.
Therefore, what "arms" are covered by the Second Amendment and under what conditions are entirely open to interpretation. The Supreme Court have interpreted it one way, in the future it could be interpreted differently - such as saying (like in Europe) that it's perfectly permissible to own a firearm but you need a license and rigorous background check, or that the firearms must be registered.
1. The US no longer can forcibly put someone in a mental health facility--except in extreme circumstances.
The overwhelming majority of public-funded mental health facilities in the US are attached to prisons or are otherwise part of the judicial/penal system.
Unless you can afford to check into a private clinic or you have insurance covering mental health (not likely!) the only way to access public mental healthcare is by getting arrested.
Figure out what's wrong with that and get back to us.
Remove Guns and you will reduce the number of killings, significantly.
You might stem the mass shootings (or replace them with a Nice-style truck/van-rampage), but in the scheme of the USA's annual ~15,000 firearm homicides, most are 1s and 2s - not 15s or 20s.
In individual murders - often domestic violence or a targeted attack - the ability to run away is generally constrained compared with running away from a public space where someone has started lashing out with a machete. It might help a bit, but it wouldn't address the desperation of people being bankrupted by medical bills or losing their job on a whim because the US has a shocking lack of employment rights. Gangs will still gun down rivals, domestic violence will still occur, and the destitute will still rob gas stations and corner shops in desperation.
Whilst the mass shootings are shocking for their frequency and regularity, the truly shocking thing is that they are not all that significant in America's wider homicide statistics.
Additionally, the vast majority occur in the top-10 metro areas. This points to a significant social aspect compared with some rural states which have firearm ownership at >95% but homicide rates better than the UK (Vermont for instance generally hovers from 1.1-1.5/100k and Iowa is ~1.5/100k, comparable with the UK's 1.2 and way below the US average of 5.3/100k).
That was many years ago... tell me again that our firearms restrictions don't work?
Read what I actually said. They don't work any better than the restrictions in France or Germany. When was the last mass shooting in Denmark?
Licensing is a very good thing - I am arguing in favour of it. Arbitrary prohibition of certain classes of firearm is utterly pointless - as evidenced by most of Europe having better homicide rates than the UK.
Why would you insist on making a fatuous comparison to the USA which has NO licensing and NO registration of firearms and then pretending that their problems are because they're allowed to own firearms which are commonly owned all over Europe? The problem is not that such firearms are legal to own, merely that they have no licensing getting in the way of owning them.
But by all means focus on the AR15 as the root of all evil and let's not consider that America's failed society, absence of social welfare, socialised healthcare and abominable media practices might have more to do with violence than the simple availability of firearms. If it was "just the guns" then Prague and Geneva would be warzones.
As to the UK banning semi-auto rifles, not quite true.
You require a firearms license to own semi-auto rifle in .22 and .223 calibres
1. I wasn't going to get into the .22 exception. It wasn't relevant the point is that we didn't fiddle around with nonsense like "semi auto rifles that have a pistol grip and a bayonet lug" under some delusion that an AR15 is more deadly than a functionally identical mechanism in a traditional wooden stock. We banned that whole class of firearms (which did very little for public safety but at least had some internal logical consistency), with the exception of .22s
2. If you're going to nitpick, don't make silly mistakes yourself. You cannot own a semi-auto in .223. The only semi-auto rifles permissible in the UK are those chambered in .22rimfire (Firearms Amendment Act 1988, Section 1). All centre-fire calibres are out for semi-auto - from .223 through the .30s and up to .50.
You've copy-pasta'd numbers without understanding them.
39,773 people died of gunshot wounds in 2017. Less than half of them (~14,500) were murdered. The rest (55-60% in a normal year) were suicides.
I would gently suggest that focussing on the firearm might be to focus on a symptom rather than a root cause - like bankruptcy due to medical bills, lack of social welfare, employee rights, mental healthcare provision, etc, etc.
Of course the US relationship with firearms is bizarre. They desperately need to introduce a Federal licensing and registration regime (but will never make it fly, in part due to scare stories about heavy-handed UK legislation, which distracts from German/Czech/Norwegian policies which balance liberty with public safeguarding). It would take years for such a system to get a meaningful proportion of in-circulation guns onto the register, but in the long-run it would be worth it.
Talk of banning this, that and the other should of course be disregarded as virtue signalling and/or political posturing. Prohibitions don't work. We know this, Europe has proved it. Policy should be based on evidence, not people's gut feelings (because people's guts are rubbish at statistics and probability - it's why people play the Lottery).
If banning guns worked, then the UK would be the safest place in Europe (Britain being unique in Europe in having prohibited pistols and semi-auto rifles - even highly specialised Olympic target pistols, not just Glocks et al!)
As it is, our homicide rate is ~1.2/100k. That's basically the same as France and Germany (which, like the rest of Europe both allow private ownership of firearms for target shooting in approved clubs, as well as for hunting) and nearly double that of Italy (0.7/100k).
It's also double that of the Czech Republic (0.6/100k). Czechia in interesting because although their licensing is very strict, they've not really banned anything. Hence why stag parties go to Prague to shoot AK47s at commercial ranges. In fact they even allow Concealed Carry (with a permit), and about 2.5% of Czech citizens have one (c.f. 650,000/1% of Brits owning a gun). Per capita they have 3x as many gun owners and most of those people have the right to walk the streets with a concealed weapon. You can own more or less anything - if you jump through the hoops and prove your good character. And yet the streets of Prague are not flowing with blood. Quite the opposite.
The evidence seems to be that licensing and registration (as per all of Europe) is a very good and effective policy, as part of a mature culture of using and respecting firearms as tools rather than fetishing them as a symbol of muh freedom.
By contrast, arbitrary prohibitions of certain types of firearm (as per the UK - pistols) has more or less zero effect on crime or even mass murders, and zero effect on organised crime. People can still make bombs, drive trucks into crowds and dismember people in the street with machetes. Notably, firearms crime in the UK rose both before and after Dunblane. The changes to legislation made no difference to the crims who were already smuggling guns in because the white market was already too well regulated. That trend didn't taper off until 2004 when the Police actually did some enforcement (Op Trident).
People talk about "gun control" without actually thinking about it, or appreciating that there is no such thing. Anyone who does not make the basic differentiation between licensing and prohibition and the appropriate/proportionate use of either is on a hiding to nowhere and will struggle to formulate effective public policy.
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