Posts by jollyboyspecial

BT is ditching workers faster than your internet connection with 55,000 for chop by 2030

Re: Did I get this right?

Passed is a weasel word of ever I heard one. Yes fibre passes my property. There are two poles on the street behind my house and the fibre between them runs right past the end of my garden but openreach have categorically refused to connect me to either of those poles as my d-side comes in underground from the other side of the property. Having been in the industry for a long time I know that connecting me to either of those poles is simpler, practical and perfectly legal. OR's documentation shows that our street is fed underground so as far as they are concerned the poles may as well be on another planet. But I'm also willing to bet that they will class the fibre as passing my house and every other house on my side of the street.

If you don't believe that OR can be this ridiculous consider the things that can block them from visiting a premises to resolve a fault. For example we have a site with the street address 44-48 High Street. One day we reported a fault only to be told that OR couldn't dispatch an engineer due to an ORDI issue. Knowing that ORDI stands for openreach data integrity issue I asked what the problem with their database was. They came back and told me that the address on their database for the circuit was 44-48 but according to the post office there was no such address. I checked the PAF and there were 44, 46 and 48 in there but not 44-48. There was also an entry for our business but without a street number. OR had happily installed the circuit to that address but were now telling me that they couldn't dispatch an engineer to fix a fault because the address they had didn't match the address on the PAF. It took them a week to correct the issue! All they did was change the address on their systems and that took 5 working days.

Re: Did I get this right?

"We'll all have FTTP by the end of the decade?"

No.

What they mean is that they will have finished rolling out FTTP to all the premises they intend to roll it out to. That's not even close to all premises.

I've been told by Openreach that they have finished the rollout in my village, but I can't get FTTP.

OR: But we've got fibre on every pole they said.

Me: But what about all the premises (ie anything built after about 1970) that aren't fed from a pole.

OR: The rollout is just to do poles. We don't do underground fed premises on this rollout.

The more modern housing is fed underground because somebody at the post office (as it was then) decided that underground feeds were more "modern". The underground cables don't even run in ducts, they just go under roads and pavements a few inches below the surface. Cable breaks due to roadworks aren't uncommon. We've had two outages on our street this year. One when they installed some new drains that took out a couple of houses and one that took out the whole street when they were installing some new kerb stones.

Talking to one of the engineers that came to fix the latter he told me why OR weren't rolling out to premises where the d-side is underground. They simply don't have the time or the money to start digging up roads to lay in new d-sides to all the underground fed properties. And from what the engineer told me properties like that aren't included in the rollout project.

I did hear rumours that there were plans to use G.Fast to bring any properties still on copper up to 1Gbps however there are a couple of problems with that.

The first is that G.Fast might be capable of 1Gbps, but only over very short distances, probably below 100m and the loss over greater distances is much worse than with VDSL. The vast majority of cable runs from the DSLAM to the property on FTTC are well over 100m so in a nutshell G.Fast isn't going to be giving very many people anything like a Gig.

The other and more pressing problem is this: The majority of AIO street cabs deployed by OR just happen to be Huawei. GOV.UK have banned the use of Huawei kit in any solution delivering 1Gbps to the end customer. As such OR can't now use G.Fast to deliver "ultrafast" broadband to residential customers without ripping out their street cabs and replacing them with another manufacturer's kit. This might well be more expensive than doing the job right and laying copper into every premises. The best solution I can see is actually doing what they should have done in the first place and putting in poles and feeding aerially all those premises originally fed underground.

Oh and to anybody who says that fibre is irrelevant because 5G will deliver over 1Gbps I can only say have you any idea how far away we are from delivering 5G to every premises in the country? And have you any idea how many properties in the UK can't get a reliable mobile signal of any type at all?

Electric two-wheelers are set to scoot past EVs in road race

The article seems to conflate motorcycles and scooters into a single group of PTWs. Which is a mistake.

It must be over thirty years ago I first heard the term PTW bandied about. It was used by some British industry group as some kind of sales/political pitch. The idea was it seems to try to convince the buying public and politicians that bikes were a lovely friendly and dull mode of transport. Convincing politicians was important as there has been a lot of anti-motorcycle legislation in the eighties mostly coming from a place of simply not liking dirty smelly motorcyclists and their dirty smelly steeds.

It was not unlike the old "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" advertising from a couple of decades before.

In some parts of the world, particularly east Asia, a scooters are pretty much a commodity. In many parts of the word a motorcycle is a luxury toy. That only comes out on sunny days. The two are very different things from the point of view of their use, even though mechanically they may be quite similar.

"Apple, however, has warned the vibrations produced by the German manufacturer's machines can damage its iPhone"

That iPhones apparently can't cope with the vibrations from two wheelers (powered or otherwise) show what a joke Apple are. Their advertising shows people enjoying an "active lifestyle" with their iProducts, but apparently not so active that it involves two wheeled vehicles.

Microsoft will upgrade Windows 10 21H2 users whether they like it or not

There are so many people moaning about MS on here while continuing to use Windows

There's a simple solution you know...

Re: @bombastic bob - pwned

"Computer is yours as you paid for it. Onto the other hand, Windows OS is not. You've only paid for the privilege of using it."

And that's pretty much it in a nutshell. If you paid for Windows then you probably haven't read the contract. And if you didn't pay for for it you definitely didn't read it.

National newspaper duped into running GPT-4-written rage-click opinion piece

Re: I used to get get published in the Irish Times. This doesn't surprise me...

I was once told that half the letters in local rags and half the callers on radio call ins were from bored students. I was then later told that while they may be bored these students are actually doing it as part of their course work. Presumably you get credits for winding up Jeremy Vine.

AI isn't the issue, not even a little bit

Remember when the mainstream media used to try to work in a Titter angle to any minor story even when Twitter was only peripherally connected? AI is the new twitter.

Whether the story and byline photo were AI generated is utterly irrelevant to the main meat of this story. The primary issue here is that a major news outlet ran a piece that was utter tripe simply because they thought it would generate controversy. They didn't care a jot where it came from, they just saw it as something that would generate traffic and publicity in equal part.

The "fact" that it was AI generated is quite convenient for them. So convenient in fact that any reasonable person might wonder if the announcement it was AI generated was part of the plan. "Look lads, if we get called out on running this shoite what we do is claim we've been duped by a sophisticated AI scam. If that doesn't take the heat off we'll put Elon Musk in frame."

Intel says Friday's mystery 'security update' microcode isn't really a security update

NA

NA (rather N/A) has always meant Not Applicable in most contexts. Who decided this meant Not Available?

Cops crack gang that used bots to book and resell immigration appointments

Do they ever learn?

Remember the news story not long ago where driving test appointments were being block booked and then sold on at a huge profit?

Not only do gov.uk not learn from a technical point of view, but they don't learn from a legal point of view either. Shirley it's easy to make it a specific crime to profit from this sort of carry on. That wouldn't actually stop it from happening because there will always be somebody willing to take the risk of prosecution. What such legislation would do it make it easier, cheaper and quicker to prosecute. Which would be better for the public purse, but also more and quicker prosecution would then present more of a deterrent.

Oh and whoever mentioned event tickets earlier. The government keep on telling us they are concerned about ticket scalping but when challenged to do something about it they say it's complicated. No it isn't there's an easy start, just make selling tickets for more than their face value a crime. Oh and yes that does mean that charging an "admin fee" on the sale of tickets would be illegal. And so it fucking should be. I get tired of seeing a list price on a ticket and then learning there's several pounds "admin fee" per ticket. If you're ordering online how can there possibly be an admin fee per ticket? Maybe per sale (although I'm not even sold on that) but PER TICKET?

Again this wouldn't stop people selling on tickets at inflated prices, but making it a specific offence would make prosecution easier and therefore make it more of a deterrent.

In short legislation will never stamp out this king of shite, but it can reduce the problem

An unexpectedly fresh blast from the past, Freespire 9.5 has landed

Except this one predates the majority...

India calls for all mobile phones to include FM radios

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

"With 3.5mm jack one can listen and charge at the same time."

I've seen wired headphones for sale with a piggyback connector so you can listen and charge at the same time. I would have thought the need for that isn't all that common.

Re: It isn't that they don't enable the FM radio

"Is this the flip side of "we never sell those because they're always out of stock"?"

I remember once being told "sorry we don't stock those anymore because there's no demand, you're the second person I've told that today." Clearly irony detectors were out of stock as well.

Is there anything tape can’t fix? This techie used it to defeat the Sun

When optical mice first became popular I had a corner office manager call me up to say that on sunny days his mouse would misbehave, but whenever he had hold of it and was therefore blocking the sunlight the problems would disappear. My first thought was "and monkeys fly out of my butt". However on reaching the sun drenched office I saw the mouse cursor moving randomly even though the mouse itself wasn't moving. I picked up a pad and held it above the mouse to create a shadow and the random movement ceased.

Expecting the issue to be a faulty mouse I'd taken a spare down with me. By good fortune the new mouse was black and wasn't affected by sunlight.

I learned something that day. Not all managers are idiots.

You'll [BZZ] like Intel’s [BZZ] NUC 13 Pro once the fan [BZZ] stops blowing

The problem is that there are very few situations where you actually need (rather than want) something quite that small. VESA mount? There are small form factor PCs with VESA mounts. For any given spec a small form factor PC seems to be cheaper than a NUC. And the beauty of that small form factor PC is that it tends to have more upgrade options than a NUC.

I've never been able to quite grasp the point of a NUC. I'm sure there are niche issues for them. We have a few driving wall mounted monitors in the office. A friend of mine spent quite a lot on a NUC as a home media server, but with external storage it actually takes up more space than the PC I use for the same job.

Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM

Re: Auditors

Reminds me of the insurance inspector who came to our works one day. Given how accident prone he turned out to be I think he was probably in the wrong job.

The inspection was for our traveling crane to confirm repairs had been carried out correctly following an insurance claim. The injector managed to take the cover plate off the control for the travelling crane without first isolating the power. And if you guessed that received an impressive shock and that the resultant burns ended in a trip to A&E then you guessed right.

More was to follow however. He'd parked his car right outside the loading bay in an area covered with yellow cross hatching and "No Parking" signs. While he was at A&E somebody swung out of the loading bay in a fork lift full of of castings and clipped the car. This resulted in relatively minor damge to the car. Minor that is until two heavy castings rolled off the forklift onto the car, one landed on the boot lid and the other went through the back window.

Many years ago I attended a fascinating demonstration.

The first part of the demonstration was in a dummy room with normal atmosphere. A match was struck and dropped on a sofa. The resulting first was rapid and terrifying.

The second part was an identical chamber with an identical sofa, this time however the atmosphere was different in an unspecified way. Matches were struck repeatedly and dropped on the sofa. The matches would initially flare as normal but go out almost immediately. Even when the match was struck right against the sofa the match would go out without any more than scorching the upholstery. A blowtorch was applied to the sofa, the upholstery started to burn but the flames died as soon as the blowtorch was removed. The mystery atmosphere was revealed to be that oxygen content was sligthly reduced. IIRC the concentration was between 17 and 18%.

This was incredibly effective at preventing fires. Some stuff would burn at these concentrations of oxygen but not nearly as quickly or violently. A system to achieve this would not be difficult to build for a contained environment like a datacentre. An office building or residential space may be more difficult. And you wouldn't even need to use any noxious gasses. Nitrogen would do the job. Another good thing is that this wouldn't be harmful to humans, maybe it wouldn't be comfortable for somebody with low blood oxygen levels but I'd go out on a limb and say that firstly somebody in that condition shouldn't be at work and secondly even if they were it's not something that's suddenly going to kill them. They'd probably get short of breath and need to leave the room.

I was always surprised that there wasn't a wider uptake of this sort of solution for environments like DCs. Sure it may cost a little to run 24/7 but I would have thought preventing fires from starting in the first place was preferable to waiting for them to start and then putting them out. I remember one DC having a minor fire, not only was the power to the DC cut as a precaution but when fire fighters turned up they wouldn't let anybody back into the building until they had completed safety checks. This level of downtime was very costly. There was also the cost of getting the halon tank refiled. And the cost of getting somebody in to repair the damage done by the halon system being triggered. And of course the risk of running without a fire suppressant system for a couple of days until the tank could be refilled.

Re: death trap

"I've never really understood why the discharge has to be so violent. It's obviously important to get a lot of gas everywhere in the room, quickly, but would a gradual 20 seconds versus explosive 2 seconds really make much difference?"

A slow release will not flood every nook and cranny with gas. An explosive release will come close. especially if more gas is emitted than the volume of the room.

Microsoft pushes users to the Edge in Outlook, Teams

Outlook is Outlook. And my chosen browser is my chosen browser.

Opening web links from outlook in a different browser (ie Edge) is not going to help me "stay focussed" it's going to irritate the hell out of me.

I suspect that Microsoft are working on the assumption that as soon as end users see Edge they'll never want to leave. But that's not going to work. Everybody is used to whatever browser they use and anything else is irritating when you first use it simply because it's different. Sure we're not in the days of IE6 anymore, no browser is a complete turd. But forcing a browser on you isn't going to change your opinion it's just going to make you swear.

However I don't think anybody will successfully be able to prevent microsoft from doing this just so long as Apple remain able to force everybody to use their browser (yes I know you think you're using Firefox, but you're not you're just using a firefox shell wrapped around Apple's chosen browser). If anybody tries to claim MS are being anticompetitive they will point out that they still give you a choice (if only the first time) but it's still more choice than Apple give their users.

It's about time that MS, Apple and Google were forced to stop this shit and give consumers a real choice.

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

Re: Linux desktop

" Windows only works on the buyer's PC because someone has taken the time and expense to ensure that it does, i.e. they've have done the buyer's 'installation' work for them - reflected in the price, of course."

Well no.

I've had no issues installing windows on anything for well over a decade. I've often had problems installing various flavours. It used to be finding drivers that was the big issue. These days it's just getting stuff to work. Recently I was setting up a media server on an old i3 PC. Mint installed fine but there was an annoying problem, left alone for any length of time the OS world simply freeze, absolutely nothing you could do to make it respond other than restart. Nothing in the logs to suggest what had happened. The best I could get from any support forum was "it must be the hardware". So I tried windows 10 which installed with no issues as had Mint. The difference was that Windows has been entirely stable since.

I'm 99% certain the issue was likely to be driver interpretability rather than Linux itself, but that's still a problem with Linux as an ecosystem.

UK PM Sunak plans to allocate just £1bn to semiconductor industry

Re: Makes sense

@codejunky you're the one who introduced the word "macroelectronics" to this thread. As such you're the OP.

So what did the OP mean it to mean? You're the OP you must know.

You know why he calls it Unicorn Kingdom? Because it's a bleeding fantasy.

You're missing the point. Other countries are doing it. The EU, the US, Japan, China do this stuff all the time. If governments don't subsidise industries they can't compete and they fail. It's an unfortunate part of late capitalism. Sadly it's impossible not to join in, if you don't join in you'll soon have no industry left.

One of the arguments given for leaving the EU was that state aid rules were very restrictive. State aid rules in the EU may be restrictive, but they are also not well policed. Some countries (Ireland for example) are well known for giving tax breaks to foreign companies to encourage investment, this is against EU rules but goes ignored. Other countries (France and Spain spring to mind) give companies aid to bid for work in foreign countries, again this is against the rules but ignored. The irony is that Brexit was supposed to allow the UK to do this as much as we wanted, but unfortunately the government either don't seem to have the money to do so or more likely do not have the political will to do it properly.

Re: "the proof is in the pudding"

The proof is in the pudding is an Americanism that's creeping it's way into English English. To quote Calvin and Hobbes "eventually we can make language an impediment to understanding"

UK emergency services take DIY approach amid 12-year wait for comms upgrade

Re: Record incompetence

The government? Unfortunately the government seldom get involved unless embarrassing enough questions are asked in the house. You can argue that relevant ministers should be riding the relevent civil servants backs, but that's (unfortunately) not how it works.

No doubt the relevant civil servants in charge of this have changed roles once a year since this all started maybe these projects would actually work better if it wasn't for civil service musical chairs.

US watchdog grounds SpaceX Starship after that explosion

Most powerful

I understand that it was running 6 motors down, or about 80% power. Was it still the most powerful rocket ever launched?

Top Gear

Basically they had exactly the same problem as Top Gear did with their Reliant "Shuttle" and that cost considerably less. That never flew again...

China space agency reckons Zhurong Mars rover has probably been done in by dust

Should have got Huawei to build it. I hear their stuff calls home all the time.

Tokyo has millions of surplus Wi-Fi access points that should be shared with blockchain, says NTT

Re: Good idea, strange choice of tech

Keeping any personally identifiable data indefinitely isn't b just questionable. In a lot of territories it's downright illegal.

The technology may be there but there are a lot of other issues.

I can see that folks will be concerned about the security of their personal or business networks with random strangers connecting to their APs. I can also v see that Pele would be concerned for the security of their devices when connected to random strangers APs.

The biggest concerns I see however are not in any way technological, they are contractual.

Does your contract with your connectivity provider allow you to resell their services? If not you'd potentially be in breach of contract with your ISP were you to sign up for this.

Does your contract with your ISP state that you are legally responsible for anything that goes on over your connection? If so how do these people suggest you overcome that?

And v what about folks with data limits on their contracts?

The only way I can see these hurdles being overcome is if NTT enter into contracts with ISPs who will of course want their cut.

Re: I have a hammer, everything is nails

Consumer WiFi sharing is brand new is it?

Been tried before although not necessarily in a model where AP owners would be paid. And there is the big issue people were nervous of signing up to share their WiFi where the only benefit was to use other people's WiFi.

There are a lot of concers here about security, but if you offer people money some of them will forget about security concerns just for the promise of micropayments.

Microsoft nopes out after Twitter starts charging $$$ for API access

Here we go again

Mush might be able to do arithmetic, but he doesn't understand reality.

He makes the assumption that is n clients use a service for free then n clients will pay for it. So if n people have a blue tick for free and we start charging 8 bucks a month that will be $8n additional revenue a month. Nope. High profile celebs might be able to afford 8 bucks a month, but they are high profile, they have millions of followers, so the blue tick is meaningless for them so they won't pay. Then there are folks with many fewer followers. They are going to do a quick cost benefit analysis - is that blue tick worth 8 bucks a month to them? Simple solution let the blue tick lapse and see if you actually lose any revenue as a result. If you do then start paying for the blue tick. If not then do nothing.

Same with the API. Mush has clearly assumed that n users means $42000n of revenue. Likewise clients are immediately going to question whether twitter API access is worth $42K a month.

Then there's the assumption he clearly made that advertising revenue would remain flat or even increase after he bought the company. Unsurprisingly when he started to make changes to the platform some existing advertisers took the decision to review their advertising spend with Twitter. Some withdrew and some "paused" their spending.

In every case Mush's first response has been to start making threats. This is not how you carry on in business if you are wise. Start making threats and not only are you unlikely to win people back, but you are also likely to frighten away people who are wavering.

When Mush valued Twitter at a lot less than he paid for it some people said it proved he was an idiot, I wondered if it was actually some sort of ruse to get a tax write down. I'm actually starting to side more and more with those who say he's an idiot.

The reason that Youtube is absolutely rammed with advertising is that Google's plan to get loads of premium subscribers failed and continues to fail. This is an absolutely perfect example of the fact that most people are not willing to pay for a service that they get for free. It also shows that people will put up with advertising rather than pay for a service - most of us were raised on TV with advertising every few minutes. The final thing that it shows is that Google are very good at dealing with advertisers and rule one is don't alienate your advertisers. But then they've always been an advertising company.

Mush doesn't understand any of this, but his arrogance means he looked at a business about which he knew almost nothing and decided that he knew everything.

I'm not one of those people who's predicting that twitter will totally collapse and disapear. However at some point Mush will realise that there's no way he's getting a quick ROI. The question is whether he'll change tack and try to grow revenue slowly as a long term plan or whether he admits defeat and sells up at a (massive) loss. One thing's for sure, whatever he does he will never admit that any of the failings were his fault.

With a mighty hand, and an outstretched arm, Musk scraps Pope's blue tick

It appears that lots and lots of blue ticks are coming back without the account holders paying for them. And this is probably the top of a slippery slope for twitter.

It seems that Mush has realised that his plan is fundamentally flawed. Charging 8 bucks a month for a blue tick might sound like a money spinner, but the problem is that it still doesn't rival the revenue from advertising. Several high profile scooby holders stated very publicly that they had absolutely no intention of paying for a blue tick. Some had even started they would leave twitter were they forced to pay. Twitter's and revenue depends very much on the volume of posts and the volume of interaction with this posts. Lose high profile accounts and you lose ad revenue. But not only that, lose accounts with a high enough profile and other account holders start to wonder if it's worth hanging around.

It was reported earlier in the weekend that accounts with more than a million followers were starting to get their ticks back without paying. However it also seems some accounts with fewer than a million followers are also getting their ticks back. However some accounts with many millions of followers still have no tick. There may be some logic behind who gets their ticks for free (apologies to Mark Knopfler for that one) but it isn't apparent.

Whatever the logic where does Mush draw the line? One account holder gets their tick back and another doesn't. The second account holder makes a public fuss, do they get their tick back too? If there is no published policy on how you get a free tick will people sue? If it says you have to pay and some people get them without paying with no published policy would a lawsuit succeed?

Florida folks dragged out of bed by false emergency texts

Re: Why would anyone leave these turned on?

The emergency alerts override the DND setting

Re: Fancy that

"We have somebody permission to raise flood plain land in order to build on it. Now land further downstream that didn't used to flood had become flood plain. Your house just happens to be on that new flood plain. Incoming flood water. Oh and enjoy your increased future insurance premiums. You have no legal recourse because this will be defined as an act of God rather than an act of inept planning authorities."

It's quite long but I think that covers it.

Seagate hit with $300m penalty for selling sanctioned storage to Huawei

@devee there are essentially only three significant HDD manufacturers in the world. Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba (in order of market share).

Huawei masters the great vanishing act as UK sales evaporate

Re: A loss to end users

You're welcome to buy a Huawei phone if you want. The sanctions don't affect phones.

Brit cops rapped over app that recorded 200k phone calls

Re: ACR - I used that. It's one of the few (2) apps I actually paid for.

The Samsung phone app only does call recording in certain territories, just like Google

Re: ACR - I used that. It's one of the few (2) apps I actually paid for.

Recording personal calls and recording business (or in this case police) calls are very different things.

This story is about calls recorded by police officers and police employees in the course of their business and nothing to do with personal calls. So introducing a moan about not being able to record personal calls is entirely irrelevant.

FWIW Google have not crippled call recording for the entire planet and even if they happed to have done so in your territory there are plenty of apps around which allow you to record calls.

"The police officers were themselves unaware that calls would be recorded and so were the people on the other end of the line"

The police officers didn't know that an app with "call recorder" in the name would record calls? In which case plod are more stupid than most people think. However I think that in this case it's the regulator who is being dumb, I'm sure the police knew the calls were being recorded, but were ignorant of the fact that it would be a breach of more than one regulation. Ignorance is however no excuse in law - as I am sure PC plod is well aware.

UK government scraps smart motorway plans, cites high costs and low public confidence

Smart Motorways are not the problem

There is a fundamental misunderstanding of what constitutes a smart motorway.

Smart motorways were introduced as a (semi) automatic traffic management solution. At around about the same time as smart motorways were first being trialled there was also a move to widen a lot of motorways by adding an extra lane. For various reasons that almost all boil down to cost it was also decided that there were places where an extra lane could not be added. Temporary all lane running was trialled as a solution. In a handful of locations where widening the road was prohibitively expensive the use of the emergency lane as a running lane controlled by overhead signs was introduced. These systems were generally manually controlled.

After widening had taken place on some motorways (mostly in the south east naturally) some bright spark in the ministry of transport thought they could save a load of money by introducing permanent all lane running on smart motorways. The argument being that running on the emergency lane could be switched off when required. This was not part of what the traffic experts had envisaged for smart motorways. This was just some bean counter hijacking the smart motorway project to save a whole load of money by cancelling infrastructure projects in the provinces (sound familiar?)

It was blindingly obvious to anybody that all lane running was a very bad idea whether it was part of a smart motorway or not. Whitehall mandarins argued that since modern vehicles are more reliable there was no need for the emergency lane and hey if somebody does buck the statistical trend (Sunak thinks we should all learn about statistics after all) and breaks down they can head for the left lane and the overhead cameras will spot them and close the lane. Firstly "more reliable" is not the same as "totally reliable". Also folks need to pull over to the emergency lane for all sorts of reasons other than mechanical failures (medical emergencies, punctures, etc.), And secondly despite government spin the emergency lane isn't just for stranded vehicles, as they like to call them these days. The emergency lane is also for use by the emergency services. When there has been an accident, fire or medical emergency the road motorway is often completely blocked. On an old style motorway even if traffic was completely stationary the emergency services could still get to the scene of the incident quickly using the hard shoulder. With all lane running it's not an option. Again the answer from the ivory towers of Whitehall is that the emergency lane can be closed to traffic to allow the emergency services to the scene. Except if every lane is full of stationary traffic where is the traffic in lane one going to go in order to clear that lane? Simple answer is it can't go anywhere.

None of this is the fault of smart motorways. It's the fault of all lane running which absolutely was not part of the plan for all lane running until somebody decided they wanted to cut costs.

What we have hear is a government that wants to cut costs, but needs a reason to stop investing in infrastructure. The unpopularlity of all lane running plus the public misunderstanding of what constitutes a smart motorway has given them the ideal excuse. Not only that but when people in the provinces moan about congestion on their out of date and underfunded motorway system* Whitehall can put the blame right back on those people who complain - "well you didn't want smart motorways" they will say assuming that this will excuse them from solving the problem of congested motorways. Which of course it won't, if a motorway needs more lanes then the solution is to build more lanes. The curious thing about our current government is that they seem to think that when they throw this sort of spin out there people are just going to accept it, they seem genuinely surprised and hurt when people refuse to accept their spin.

*It's not a system. Britain's motorways have been an uncoordinated and unintegrated mess since day one.

Marketing biz sent 107 million spam emails... to just 437k people

Re: What a joke

It's often the case that these kinds of companies are merely shells. In these cases a fine is usually enough to prompt the directors to declare the company bankrupt. In such cases it's long been my belief that the directors should be prosecuted.

Yes I know the whole point of a limited company is that it limits the liability of the directors, however I don't think this should be the case where fines are levied. Were it the case that directors became personally liable for such fines upon voluntary liquidation of the company I think a lot of these quite obviously deliberate breaches of the rules would stop overnight.

IT boss arrested over Cash App exec Bob Lee death

Musk tweeting inaccurate information? Shome mishtake Shurely?

Re: Parsing it Out

They are working to bring the killer to justice. The SFPD have started the investigation is ongoing.

It's not their fault if you have trouble understanding the English language

Beijing lists the stuff it wants generative AI to censor

What the Chinese state gets up to has never, ever had anything to do with socialism or communism. As with the USSR and indeed Hitler's Germany, communism and socialism were words used by potential dictators to garner support among the great unwashed in order to gain power. That the Chinese government is still claiming to be communist or socialist after so many decades of evidence to the contrary is frankly ridiculous. One of the things that has supported their continued claim to be communist is the capitalist world's fear of real socialism. It has therefore suited the narrative of the west, particularly the US, to point at the likes of China and say "this is communism, it's evil."

Theranos founder Holmes ordered to jail after appeal snub

I often wonder if this thing didn't actually start out at intentional fraud.

If you don't know much about how lab tests are done you might think something like: if it only takes a few drops of blood and a little machine to test for a particular disease, why can't you test for all diseases the same way? It might then be a logical leap to get to why couldn't you use the same few drops of blood to test for multiple diseases? And if you think that's a sensible question then, why couldn't you do that with one machine.

Now a sensible, intelligent person would probably have done a little research at that point to find out if there were good answers to those questions. The current wisdom is of course that some blood tests are quite complicated and require more than a few drops of blood. Testing for one disease will generally render the sample useless for further tests. And given the answers to the first two questions the third question is a none starter.

However, maybe just maybe you somehow got to question three without properly considering the first two questions. You saw a machine used to test for a single ailment from a few drops of blood and being impetuous and arrogant you thought "I bet I could develop a bigger version of this machine that could diagnose multiple conditions from just a few drops of blood and from there decided to stay up a company to do so.

If course if you were going to do this then you'd need to employ doctors and scientists and even if you were pretty rich you'd need investment. So you go out to get investment. Rather than being entirely honest you tell potential investors that you are developing this machine. The honest thing might have been to say that you were researching the viability of such a machine, but hey you're arrogant enough to know you're going to succeed.

Investment secured you start pulling a team together at which point you start to learn that maybe this is going to be harder than you thought. Not only would you need to make the machine, you'd even need to develop some new testing technologies. But hey you're arrogant, you know you'll succeed, but maybe it's going to take more investment.

At some point in this process you've probably lost confidence in your convictions the question of course is at what point did they go from thinking that maybe they could succeed to knowing they couldn't? And were they still chasing investment at that point?

I don't think we're dealing with a couple of idiots here. They seem reasonably intelligent people. So *if* they originally thought they could succeed then they must have arrived at the realisation that they probably wouldn't fairly quickly.

The puzzling thing for me is that while there have been many cons that followed a similar pattern most such cons involved cutting and running, or at least planning to cut and run. In this case if they did plan to cut and run they were clearly a long way from reaching that part of the plan when it all fell apart. Which gets me back again to the question, was it arrogance or stupidity?

Google to kill Dropcam, Nest Secure hardware next year

Re: Why would anyone with half a brain buy anything from Google?

"I think the question can be broadened to "Why would anyone buy any of this smart shit, at all?". It's just unnecessary shiny crap which nobody really needs."

Unfortunately the entirety of late capitalism will collapse if not enough people buy shiny crap that they don't need. And besides it's human nature to buy pointless shiny crap, whenever I hear stories of magpies collecting shiny crap I think "no, that's people you're thinking of". What's really needed is regulation that this shit continues to be supported for a fixed period of time after it is sold. And the the guaranteed support period should be clearly displayed on the packaging.

This shit is the ultimate in built in obsolescence.

Re: Why would anyone with half a brain buy anything from Google?

"Really, the question is why would with half a brain buy into an ecosystem that requires a server somewhere that could be switched off with no functional continuity option?"

This is becoming more and more common, even for devices and software that should function perfectly well without connection to a server. Switch the device on and it won't function until it's called home. That behaviour that security services find so suspicious when Huawei do it.

What I find bizarre is that when companies switch off servers they are puzzled that customers complain and don't want to buy a replacement device from them.

Tesla Semi, out since December, already facing a recall over brakes

"Tesla trucks not so much because of the Musk effect: promising lots and delivering pretty much nothing of it."

We've all heard the old adage: Under promise, over deliver

The Musk version is: Over promise, take the money, don't deliver