Posts by Alan Brown

Re: OPt-in vs/ opt-out

On the YT front there are a number of YT adblockers you can install

Re: adding unnecessary steps purely for the sake of legal compliance

> "I'm so fed up with the "Yes, do the thing that I really don't want" or "Ask me again next time, and every time after that" type choices. I want a "No, and don't ask me again" option."

EU/UK authorities are _supposed_ to prohibit this behaviour (it's also illegal in Australia and NZ)

Californian privacy legislation should do so too.

Other countries may vary but complaints to your privacy regulators are the squeaky wheel

Re: adding unnecessary steps purely for the sake of legal compliance

What annoys me is the inclusion of 3rd [arty javascript fomr companies we KNOW are not exactly GDPR friendly

Example: on THIS forum page I can see privacy/personal informatoin slurping javascript from Google Analytcs, Twitter. Facebook and Admedo

As soon as you're pulling in JS from offsite, you're stepping well outside the boundaries of "informed consent"

Re: There's nothing to put it in.

Shove the garbage in the trunk - which is done already. That's jettisoned just before reentry

All the small stuff is already disposed of this way because dumping small items would be an untrackable debris hazard

This pallet is big enough to track - and despite taking a couple of years to come down it's still unlikely to cause anyone to need to manouevre to dodge it

It'd be nice to have a "stick on" cubesat and ion drive to deorbit sich things faster though

Re: Rare Earths

"Why is this being taken back down...."

because rare earths, aren't

Nor are they particularly valuable or even hard to extract - the problem with rare earth mining is the amount of THORIUM that piles up - If Nixon hadn't killed ORL MSRE further development proposals in 1972 these would be thorium mines with a rare earth side gig

(Reminder: MSRE (salt loop) is not MSR (sodium loop). Salts don't burn easily and don't go far if they cool (and these ones don't mix with water). Getting water out of nuclear power would have been a Nucomen-->Diesel engine change and moving to thorium divorces nuclear power from dependence on weaponsmaking - 3% fuel is a byproduct of bombmaking, where what the warmongers WANT is depleted uranium to make bomb-grade plutonium and H-bomb casings out of. (All those protests around nuclear plant gates miss the real villain in the piece - that the weaponisation already happened before the reactor was even fired up)

and it had made it most of the way down before the TPS failed....

Might be better to look at skylab laftovers

Re: Public utility should be provided by public entity.

"Now, for the trains ..."

What did you expect when post 1948 what had happened was the British Leyland model (several competing companies rammed together under one roof with all the old managewment and rivalries failing to be removed, so treating each other as "the enemy" instead of looking outside the organisation where the dangers really lay)

Add 30 years of failure to invest and the result was inevitable. The fact that sucessive transport ministers had heavily family investments in road transport industries was "entirely coincidental" as they say (if you believe this, I have a drawbridge over the Thames to sell you)

The current open cronyism and graft in the British government (most visible since Regency days) is only notable for being OPEN. It's been like this for decades

Re: Public utility should be provided by public entity.

no need to renationalise

The issue is the vertically integrated monopoly and that's WHY New Zealoand cleaved the BT model when TCNZ offered it up - that cleaving was done by the Ministry of Commerce (not the comms regulator(*)) after detailing the economic damage that allowing rent-seekign behaviour had done in New Zealand AND the UK

Look at what's happened to Spark/Chorus over the last few years as a guide to what PROPERLY SEPARATED lines and serboices companies would be like

(*) Just like OFCOM, the NZ comms regulator was bleating that there was nothing wrong with the regulatory model and competition was working fine - which EMPHASISES that comms regulators need to stick with what they understand (technical regulation) instead of attempting to operate in areas well beyond their competence and training (competition, market manipulation and preventing anti-competitive/cartel behaviour)

Re: BT

"I guess my broadband provider is still using their infrastructure unfortunatey"

Helloooo SpaceX

Re: "like your favourite coffee table book."

"other countries do it too but usually not as crazily"

Allow me to introduce you to Franglish (Quebecous are the worst)

Re: Looking for that other technosignature

"firstly whether the radiological signatures of a nuclear war are likely to be unique enough to be detectible"

Realistically? No.

Fallout from weapons is both minor and shortlived. The long-term effects everyone worried about in the cold war (nuclear winter) was a result of many city-scale fires (Dresden/Tokyo, etc) carrying soot into the stratosphere where it can't be rained out in a short period of time

Re: @Wellyboot - nothing new here

Even removing a few asteroids is likely to have consequences, particularly if they're larger ones

Re: nothing new here

If you don't vaporise the sails on the first pulse

Re: Astro Boy

It's down the hall next to the faculty of advanced Thaumatology

Re: "`Oumuamua, the first-known foreign interstellar object to visit the Solar System"

In order to brake, one must point exhaust in the direction of travel (more or less, assuming ballsitic trajectories, which is approximately true outside of orbital dynamics and holds reasonably well for interstellar travel)

Such exhaust would promptly be lit up by the star you're braking towards and show as an "inverted comet"

Re: "Interstellar distances are so large..."

FTL travel ls likely impossible in 3D space

This is why so many SF stories use the device of folding through higher dimensions to achieve the travel - ( A Wrinkle in Time, etc) at which point a starship may be superflous

Re: Back in my contracting days...

As an employer it strikes me as a way of eliminating recruiting outfits (set the trap, see who bites, ensure they're put on the "Never do busines with this outfit again" list - no need to even ENTER into arguments about it - and let everyone else know why you've done so)

Re: What?

I'm tempted to add "experience in MOVA would be advantageous" and see what comes in

Re: I can't believe it's not real!

"I seem to remember there was a bug in the standard so you had to be careful designing the exercise so as not to use that bit of the standard."

It's not terribly robust in the presence of hawks/eagles

Re: Documentation

"Even more important, why things were not done that way?"

In such cases, not ONLY in the documentation but also as a comment in the config file adjacent to the item likely to be changed

Re: Experience is the best teacher

"Most of the time, the purpose of the change board is to make sure that adequate thought and planning has gone into the change"

Just like HOAs, a change board frequently gets taken over by someone who likes "power" and becomes difficult for the simple sake of being difficult

Re: Smoking

Rule of thumb: the best cure for keyboards doused in any kind of beverage is a bucket of (clean) water and leave it in there

It's easier to dewater and clean something up than to deal with corrosion if it's left

NB: I did run into a reuters terminal which used keyboards that literally had foil strips on blocks of polyurethane foam on the ens of the keystems. Drying that out was problematic as the foam didn't like IPA

Re: Smoking

"There are ( and were in 2007 ) air filtration systems that were more than capable of removing enough smoke."

Try as you might (and many motorway services restairants did), these areas still leaked noxious smells

Re: Smoking

> if non smokers don't like it they can go somewhere else..."

We did., in droves. Pubs and restaurants are still picking up returning custom from people who got out of the habit of going out because of smokers

Re: Fumming

There are, but thanifully most sensible designs are pushing LiFe (which doesn't burn much)

Even so, don't put em in your equipment racks unless they're very small and have extra containment

that would make NO DIFFERENCE WHATSOEVER - when a battery pack goes up nothing will stop it burning and it will outlast any extingushants you can provide

The only safe way to treat UPSes is to house them separately

Yup.

And I'll guarantee that anyone who pointed out the SPOF vulnerability was blasted with assurances "that will never happen"