Posts by Chris Miller 3550 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Apr 2007
As with any printer, anyone using one of these is likely to spend much more on consumables than the purchase price. You've given cost per page for some (presumably where the manufacturer has provided it - because they think it's a good selling point), but not all. A comparison table would be handy.
A spectrum easily differentiates between astronomical X-rays produced by synchrotron radiation and hot material. Since matter falling into a black hole can potentially convert a significant fraction of its mass to energy (by friction, tidal and other effects), there's plenty available to heat it to the point where thermal X-rays will be produced.
But what are these 'business benefits' from high-speed broadband? If your business model depends on delivering a 100Mb stream to all your (potential) customers, may I suggest that it is 'flawed'. I've nothing against people asking for and getting 1Gb Internet access, but I strongly object to paying for it through my taxes.
for spam texts? I can see that spam email exists because email is free - you only need a 1 in a million success rate to make a profit. But surely every text sent must cost *something* - even if they are using PAYG SIMs, surely no-one offers unlimited texts for £10 (or if they do, they should stop)?
Paris, because it's the closest to a 'confused' icon.
Swept-wing jet airliners are not like the Cessna on which you probably learned to fly. If you stall them (which there are multiple safeguards to prevent happening) the flight path can soon become irrecoverable. It's quite likely that, once AF447 was deep in the stall regime the pilots were merely front-seat observers of the unfolding accident. We'll probably never know whether the world's greatest pilot could have recovered the plane - no-one's ever going to recreate the conditions for real, and they are way outside the limits of what any simulator is certified to replicate.
Recommended reading: Handling the Big Jets: An Explanation of the Significant Difference in Flying Qualities Between Jet Transport Aeroplanes and Piston Engined Transport Aeroplanes
(David P. Davies, 1973)
You don't just 'blame the pilots' or 'blame the software'. Accidents in modern aircraft rarely have a single cause. And to say 'the pilot was insane' doesn't help much in preventing reoccurrences, which is the object of the exercise.
There were problems with (at least the UI of) the software. One particular instance was the fact that the stall warning was inhibited once the aircraft was fully stalled (essentially zero airspeed) - this is done to prevent erroneous warnings. From that point on, even when the Pitots unfroze and were working correctly, when the pilots tried to do the right thing (lower the nose) the airspeed exceeded the inhibition limit (but still far below stall speed) and the stall warning returned - a horrible trap.
Wow, you should be an aircraft systems designer - no-one ever thought of an altitude display, at least not until 1904. They knew their height and they knew they were descending, what they were (apparently) unable to recognise was that the plane was stalled and no amount of pulling back on the stick and firewalling the engines was going to change that.
There's at least one more: 'direct' law. In normal law (which is all you'd ever expect to see, unless there had been multiple failures in redundant systems - pilots only encounter 'alternate' law in the sim) it is (almost) impossible to exceed the safe envelope. So heaving back on the stick (while bad practice and utterly alien to anyone who'd learnt to fly on, say, a Cessna) is normally quite safe - but in this case it was fatal. The change from normal to alternate law is shown on the flight computer, but there were a lot of simultaneous announcements when the problem occurred - before the recovery of the black boxes, the only data was from the in flight transmission of engineering data which showed about 80 (IIRC) warnings in a few seconds.
You're quite right that only one pilot should be handling the aircraft at any one time - which is why the behaviour of the sidestick controls is not normally a problem. But this does highlight the lack of tactile feedback for the non-handling pilot, which those brought up on Boeings tend to dislike.
Despite all this, it should have been a non-event. All pilots are supposed to have memorised the appropriate settings of power and aircraft pitch to be used in the event of failure of the airspeed indication, which would have allowed AF447 to simply fly through the cloud until the pitots unfroze and all returned to normal. No-one has come up with a very satisfactory explanation of why the handling pilot reacted as he did.
It's a notorious 'false friend' (words in two languages that sound similar but have different meanings), so:
02:08:03 (Robert) Tu peux éventuellement le tirer un peu à gauche. = You might need to go left a bit.
Apart from that, it's all very sad. The icing on a couple of airspeed probes caused experienced pilots to drop an otherwise perfectly servicable plane into the drink with the loss of over 200 lives. It raises issues with the automation software and the pilot training - which in this case combined to cause an accident.
Sadly, that requires the cretins* who draw up the contracts to have properly identified what they were looking for in the first place, so not much chance of that.
* Possibly a bit harsh (if only to those suffering from congenital hypothyroidism), but that's £400 for every household in the country, so I think I'm entitled. Mind you, the private sector is capable of making an equal Horlicks of these things. A big part of the problem is those negotiating these contracts will experience this only once or at most a handful of times in their career. Whereas the supplier will have a team of lawyers, negotiators and salespeople who do nothing else but. Guess who's likely to come out ahead? Outsourcing - the new triumph of hope over experience.
But they've all either:
(a) moved on to greater things - looking at you Mr Watmore (Permanent Secretary to the Cabinet Office, replacing GO'D); or
(b) taken enhanced early retirement at 50 with a 6-figure pension (or a 7-figure pay-off) and joined the boards of the very companies that have been the beneficiaries of their largesse.
Nothing to see here, move along please.
About 4 minutes into his discussion of cyberwar, he says something like: "treating a denial of service attack as cyberwar is like an invading army landing on your beaches, rushing up the shore and then pushing in front of the line at the post office." Classic.
There's a built-in 'green' energy levy to subsidise landowners and wealthy householders to install pointless PV, wind farms etc that can generate humungous financial returns by taxing energy costs (necessarily penalising the poorest most). Now those subsidies have been cut in half, listen to those piggies screaming for their swill!
"Domestic energy bills will fall by 7 per cent says Huhne, but only if we use a third less electricity." And how will this reduction take place? Are magic pixies going to heat my house and my food? Why not tell the truth (oh, of course, he's a politician) and say energy bills will rise by 25%, hitting the poorest (who spend far more of their net income on energy) hardest.
Still, at least our sacrifice is not in vain - it will cancel out increased emissions from India and China by, oh, about a week. Cretins.
There are <6,000 staff working for DEFRA according to their own stats: http://data.defra.gov.uk/WMI/Defra-WMI-1108.csv
So they're spending (just with IBM, mind you) over £16,000 per head. That's some pretty impressive laptops - or are they equipping every farm in the country with their own AIX system? I almost wouldn't mind if government computing wasn't such utter crap - I happened to be talking to someone at the DWP just today and they were worried that a 4MB attachment might blow their mailbox limit. Hey guys - the 1990s called, they want their mail server back.
Remember this next time someone tries to tell you that there's no scope for cost reduction in the civil service.
The NotW were unlikely to be interested in deep political secrets, more 'Police chief in 3 in a bed love-nest romp' stuff. One would hope (or am I being naive?) that cabinet ministers or chief constables would be provided with secure phones and email to be used in the course of their duties. But they still have a private life in which they may use their own mobile phone or Gmail/Hotmail. I would imagine it's the latter stuff that is more in danger of being targeted or hacked.
Fair point, but I'd have thought any such effect would be minuscule and tend to cancel out as the satellite orbits. I've not seen any proposals to break out of earth orbit using solar sails (which would be vastly bigger than any solar panel array). You get your spacecraft to escape velocity first then deploy the sails.
Let me guess: Britain and Scandinavia implement the directive straight away (with Britain gold-plating the legislation to create lots of highly paid jobs for pointless bureaucrats). Germany plans to implement it, but it requires the agreement of all 16 Länder, which takes an unfeasibly long time. France finds lots of constitutional arguments to ignore it, and the rest of the EU doesn't even realise it's a requirement.
No change from any other piece of EU law, then.
Those of us lucky enough to be at Live2011 saw that he's much better in person than on screen*. He started by saying something like: "I've been asked to speak on the work being done at CERN, but since I've been told you're all a bunch of geeks (guilty), I thought I'd try to explain why neutrinos travelling faster than light would be such a big deal". He then proceeded to give the clearest explanation I've seen of why faster than light information transfer would break cause and effect (if Einstein is correct). The best presentation of an extremely good day.
* Where he can be all too easily parodied - as all those sub-Culshaw spoofs on YouTube demonstrate.
Yes, Premium Economy is still available and an increasing number of competitors have copied it - BA call theirs World Traveller Plus - even some 'bucket and spade' lines are offering it on longer flights, eg Cancun (from UK). It's a reasonable deal (particularly on longer flights), but you can still expect to pay roughly double the price of an economy ticket (which is reasonable, since you're occupying double the space). Service is slightly better than economy, but (obviously) much less than Club to avoid cannibalising those tickets (which cost roughly twice as much again).
FWIW unless you really can't fit in an economy seat, I don't consider these upgrades value for money (if I'm paying from my own pocket). If you can burn otherwise useless air miles or blag a free upgrade then fine, but I'd much rather spend a grand (or several) upgrading my hotel at destination, where I'm going to be staying several days rather than several hours. But YMMV.
General relativity permits time travel in certain extreme circumstances. It is (theoretically) possible to travel along a space-like path around a rapidly spinning black hole* that would allow you to return to your starting point before you set off. Most likely, this indicates that relativity breaks down near black holes. But anyone who's taken relevant undergraduate physics classes will be aware that relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible - even though they have both passed every experimental test we have been able to construct.
* a stellar-mass black hole won't work, the tidal effects would destroy any physical object trying to follow such a path. It could be possible with a galactic-mass black hole, but they are not likely to spin sufficiently rapidly.
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