Posts by Dave314159ggggdffsdds 1854 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Apr 2019
The 'copying' seems to be overstated by a lot of sources. While the Soviets were apparently keen to steal designs for internal systems, the visual similarity of the two planes is largely because that's the shape SSTs needed to be, with the tech available; the proposed US designs are also generally very similarly shaped.
We used to say ashtrays were a labour-saving invention - instead of dropping cigarette ash all over the floor, we'd collect it in a dish so we could drop it all on the floor in one go.
Re screws, magnetic trays seem like the kind of crap your mother in law buys you for Christmas, but are in fact surprisingly useful.
"if they hadn't used the three years to make some changes, in January 2000 there would have been a total disaster."
No, there'd have been a fairly minor admin problem, growing over the months leading up to y2k, solvable by pencils and paper until the systems were fixed and the data could be entered.
There were two disjunct things, though. One was the small proportion of systems with potentially serious problems, where people got in ahead of time and fixed them. Then there was the vast majority of it, which was hype and scamming, aimed at businesses (and non-commercial enterprises) that could quite easily have dealt with any minor problems after they cropped up, if they ever did.
I worked for an it company a few years later where the extraordinarily cunty bosses boasted of having made over a million quid selling pointless 'y2k audits' to places that only used mass-market off the shelf software (which was obviously sorted by whoever published it), and kept a sucker list of the y2k marks they'd call whenever they had some new line of shit to peddle.
Dunno what your daughter has been telling you, but that wouldn't be a test fail on its own. It might be part of a totting up of minor faults, but she'd have had to have... IDK, these days, but at least a dozen.
Really, driving examiners seem to use their discretion quite well, on the whole. If someone plainly isn't ready to be out on the roads on their own, but doesn't commit any major faults, examiners will apply the letter of the law and find enough minors to fail the applicant. If someone is ready, the examiners will be more willing to let things slide.
The failure is also that apparently people are willing to pay significantly more than £62 for their tests, but the government doesn't introduce a sensible pricing model, with higher charges for more urgent bookings, and use the proceeds to properly fund the testing system so they can attract more testers.
TBF, it was the correct decision without the benefit of hindsight, and even with hindsight is arguably correct given how much of the tech (and even fibre itself) available at the time would have had to be replaced since.
Not doing a proper roll-out earlier than we did, but a decade or two after your example, is a whole different failure
"I would like to see the evidence to that claim."
I have no idea what the tankie you're (apparently) talking to normally defends, but that's a batshit crazy request. Are you seriously unaware that this is the case? There's endless coverage of the issues. Just for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/jan/05/head-of-britains-police-chiefs-says-force-is-institutionally-racist-gavin-stephens
Whatever that solicitor might have mistakenly believed, the actual reason they hung on so long in that realm was that there was case-law proving that faxes were acceptable as a matter of law for various purposes, but none proving email was. The situation has changed, obviously - quite a long time ago, as far as I remember.
https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/contact-or-visit-us/helplines/practice-advice-service/q-and-as/what-is-an-electronic-signature
So, it must have been some time after 2000 that it was actually tested in court.
The main reason surgeons don't operate on people they know, and, if wise, no-one works for people they know, is that sometimes stuff goes wrong (and disagreements arise) for reasons outside anyone's control, and it's better not to have an ongoing relationship outside the business at hand.
It's far less important in my line of business, but I have made that mistake in the past: I agreed to work for people I knew, the scope of the work turned out to be far greater than anticipated, leading to much bigger costs to them than expected, and even though I did a bit of a mates'-rates thing, they weren't happy and the whole thing left a nasty taste.
I think if we're being really pedantic, there have been some canard jets which could be counted as fore-and-aft biplanes. There are also at least two one-off jet-converted biplanes used for aerobatics: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-hereford-worcester-64788578
https://eaavintage.org/the-screamin-sasquatch/
The type of tape is backed with duck cloth, which is why it's called duck tape. The brand 'duck tape' came along much later. Duct tape, which is something very different, is much more recent than duck tape, but basically as soon as it appeared people started confusing the two.
That site you've linked is 100% wrong. Wikipedia gets it about right, though ironically the page is for 'duct' tape. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duct_tape
The Karman line is just another arbitrary definition. It's a perfectly reasonable one, but it's unreasonable to suggest it's the only one.
To quote the fount of all knowledge: "the later established Kármán line is more general and has no distinct physical significance, in that there is a rather gradual difference between the characteristics of the atmosphere at the line, and experts disagree on defining a distinct boundary where the atmosphere ends and space begins".
You also see slow speeds in big detached houses, where there is little interference from neighbouring properties. Combination of sheer distance (e.g. at the bottom of the garden) and lots of walls in the way. Generally it doesn't get slow enough to be noticeable, until you are trying to watch a high-quality stream on a laptop in the wrong part of the property, or some such, but it's not uncommon to see connections below 10mbps if you actually check.
"Hide your microwave-frequency WiFi router among a shedload of well-watered plant pots, and as long as enough actually gets past to be detectable at all, the tech /ought/ to deal with it."
This doesn't seem right. SNR matters a lot. Weaken the signal, SNR drops, and you end up on a slower connection. This absolutely happens in the wild, all the time. I have even, once, seen it with plants being the (apparent) main culprit; moving the plants, but not the router or receiving device, saw speed improvements. (Someone had tried to hide the router with a wall of greenery, but I didn't check whether it was the pots full of damp soil or the greenery which caused the signal attenuation - I imagine they'd have objected to pulling the plants out of the soil to satisfy my curiosity.)
The US seems to have heard the story of the three little pigs, but misunderstood it somewhat: they build their houses out of sticks and straw, and own guns to shoot the Big Bad Wolf. Unfortunately they can't shoot the hurricanes that huff and puff and blow their houses down.
The stats suggest that on average about half the cops in the US will shoot at someone in their career. Of course the mean isn't entirely helpful, because depending on where they work, some will be much more likely to never shoot anyone, and some will shoot several people (each). There are roughly 0.2% as many fatal shootings per year as the number of police, so over a 40 year career about 1 in 10-12 police will kill someone. Since it is heavily skewed towards cops in cities doing the shootings, it suggests the actual rate for those in cities is as high as 1 in 3-4 _killing people_ on the job.
Don't try to normalise that. It's _insane_.
That article is really strange - clearly written by a Liverpool fan trying to come up with mud to sling at Everton.
The reality is that in the UK stadiums are almost always privately funded, usually with councils charging large 'developer levies' for planning consent. The exceptions are either government-funded international sporting boondoggles like the Olympics, and cases of outright corruption like, say, Spurs paying off various Haringey councillors to get permission to do enough unconnected property development to be able to afford their new stadium.
What an idiotic list. A weird, cherry-picked group of disparate projects, abandoned for various reasons, at various stages, dating back at least 80 years.
Reaction Engines was dropped because they didn't have a commercially viable product in the pipeline. That's why they couldn't attract further funding from industry.
Bloodhound was a private vanity project that ran out of cash when the big bills started to come in.
TSR2 was a failed 50s military procurement program that no-one thinks should have been continued.
APT took forever to build and get working, but it was completed. It just wasn't purchased because it wasn't better than the alternative in service at the time.
HS2N never got off the drawing board.
Lorenzo was a massive waste of government money; the archetype of government being unable to commission IT projects. But it never got even close to working.
And the London Ringways?! That doesn't meet even a single one of your criteria. It wasn't wildly expensive. It didn't 'fail' as such. It was largely cancelled because it turned out to be an appallingly awful idea.
Clearly you aren't interested in facts that conflict with your alt-right conspiracy nut nonsense.
"Isn't lithium difficult to buy?"
No. It's one of the most common elements on the planet. There is loads of production, most of which goes to batteries. This is a trivial amount on that scale, making it entirely feasible to outbid battery manufacturers.
It's a really bizarre piece. The criticism is that a project that has just gained funding to move from planning to construction has only done planning so far.
We could perhaps debate whether the UK should be funding fusion research or leaving it to other countries at this time, but that isn't what's been done here. FWIW, funding at this scale - £2.5bn over 7+ years - is not even a rounding error on the UK's current budget of ~£1.25 trillion.
That's a weird, propaganda-like quibble. It's like comparing the amount of energy needed to start a car with the power produced in the first second the engine is running. The problem with experimental fusion reactors is that they don't run for very long. If that problem is solved, along with the NIF managing to produce net power, then it doesn't really matter how much energy (within reason) it takes to start the reactor.
"actually have some coppers on the street"
Proven not to work, but keep going with this Daily Mail nonsense...
What the police actually do about theft is try to find the people who buy the phones and ship them out of the country, because it's basically impossible to catch every little scrote committing minor property crimes.
A month? You've clearly never been in this line of work. Way back when I was practically a sprog I used to do the grunt work for one of these companies. They paid us grunts enough from three (nominal) shifts, usually totalling about 6-8 hours, on a Friday evening and Saturday morning, that it paid somewhat better than full-time junior-ish sysadmin work. IIRC was ~£500 for the three 'shifts'. We can reasonably assume they were charging the clients double that.
I would guess that at equivalent rates today, plus mark-up, the BOFH would have cleared more like a year's pay for a weekend's work. Or rather, not a weekend's work, but as long as it took to change the floor-button labels in the lift, and the signs on the office doors...
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