Posts by hugo tyson 382 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Apr 2007
I think the most interesting thing about this is it's the first (significant) instance of a Company acting like a Country and doing diplomacy about a matter of principle. As predicted in lots of good modern sci-fi/near-future fiction. (as well as Hamilton's stuff with bad sex and zombies)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8414254.stm
"A suspected al-Qaeda gang was caught after a man was spotted filming potential targets on a mobile phone, police have said."
but actually they were smugglers. Nontheless, they're using this case to big up their habit of stopping people taking pictures.
What? They say they'll be stalling, steep turns and all that on the maiden flight? That's madness. Normally a maiden flight they don't even retract the undercarriage, nor go fast enough to need to, nor even go high enough to pressurise, do they? ...or have I spent too long reading history, when people were, um... careful?
Ain't it more likely that was a general statement about the whole flight-test programme, not the maiden flight specifically?
I saw Cameron talking about Avatar on breakfast TV this morning, and to my astonishment he asserted that though the film cost a huge amount to make, the ticket price remained the same, so we should all go and see it because it's such good value for money. What a wanker.
Get the DVD of Dead Snow and watch that instead. What's not to love?
Their position seems to be "we can arrest you on suspicion... because we are ignorant of chemistry, which allows us to suspect that substance A is the same as substance B." When it's not and the law and other matters of fact say it's not. Which pretty much brings the whole legal idea of suspicion into disrepute. Oh dear oh dear.
What next, suspicion of carrying a knife because that spoon is cutlery but we're not experts?
Harriers also have little ducts at nose and tail and wingtips, that squirt air to keep the thing in trim according to stick movements AIUI. They're really very small, like 5cm x 10cm so you'd not notice them. No doubt the F35 has similar, so two lift jets vs 4 (outlets) is no biggie.
What I would worry about is one of the engines stopping and the other keeping on... with the Harrier all the blow would ramp down evenly in an engine failure; the F35 will spin in pitch like a mad spinny thing making your ejection quite likely inverted, I imagine. ;-(
Maybe Harriers roll forward because they immediately shift the exhausts to back (from down) in order not to cook the deck/itself, and to get max weight on wheels, and thus can't help but roll forward a bit before the engine spools down to ground idle? Just guessing, causation could be that way round?
Methinks he means 9 instructions to calculate powers of 2, and 100,000 to bring up the GUI, read the registry and present the data in the font and local numerical convention of your choice ;-( Or read the text file into WordPad and have it present the characters.... ;-( or... or...
Point is there is no commonly used IO device that lets you present ASCII to a human in under 100,000 instructions.
@jeremy 3: Agree about poisonous booze and pharma* (sp?) and indeed poisonous food is also a possibility. And a real problem worthy of the word counterfeit.
People mustn't conflate those real problems with a "gucci" or "YSL" bag for 10 quid, a 20 quid "rolex" and so on at the Sunday market, where anyone buying it knows damned sure it's a cheap copy, else it wouldn't be that price. Given that *everyone* knows this, I fail to see how prosecuting anyone about it is in the public interest, yet TPTB waste time and money, and cause no end of public confusion by mixing up these cheap *harmless* copies with, say, meths to drink or fags that will kill you (sooner).
I suppose the law could insist they be called Guuci or YSJ or Rollex, or Ferrarri as is traditional...
"an ISP is told about a customer's copyright infringement or defamatory statement on pages it hosts" - that's not an ISP, it's an Internet Hosting Provider. Many ISPs are IHPs too. Point is, that's an entirely reasonable proposition - so long as due process and adequate proof is required before the page is removed. What's not reasonable is holding ISPs (not IHP) liable for something hosted on equipment that's only *connected* through the ISP. Common carrier defense and all that.
I don't get it. All the hot tubs I've ever seen, including our own US-made one, have only a low-pressure return pipe into the tub where you could put your fingers/todger, and the higher-pressure jets of course. All water intake is through an ancillary chamber into which tub water floods through a 20cm x (open to the sky) opening. Then through filters, about 30cm x 15cm cylinders. I can't see any way at all of getting injured by any of this. There's no "hole" you can poke a limb into, nor put a limb over to make a suction injury.
I suppose if you run it without the filters - and their slatted intake tubes - fitted for some reason you could get a suction injury - but then there are two inlets which would make that less likely in itself.
You could get a finger stuck in a jet when it's not running, but only by wilful idiocy.
Getting a finger trapped in the cover support mechanism seems more likely. Or even more likely "slipped over running to answer the phone with wet feet"? Now *that* one we have experienced. ;-)
Yeah, but if you were to hose your water into the street, say by breaking the pipe just after your meter, or pipe your gas to the roof and light a 20ft high flame 24/7 (without CORGI/GasSafe regs nor planning permission) and persistently do that after being told not to, I think you *would* be cut off. The point is not using a lot of resource, it's doing something illegal with that resource.
Not that I agree with this insane legislation, not that I disagree with any of the comments here, I just don't think the "if you use a lot of water/gas/leccy you just pay more" analogy is valid.
Phone makers can and do substantially change the internals of the phone without telling you, that is without changing the model number. "Continuous improvement" and all that - and cost savings for them. So there may not be a single memory map document for a SoNokyson THX1138, without a lookup on the phone's unique serial number. The point is this: maintaining yet another correct document for external people about the internals of the phone can cost a lot of money, think of updates several times a month from every manufacturer, review process every time anything is changed in the manufacturing stream for a particular model, &c &c. It's not that the makers keep it "secret", it's that it's not a trivial job to keep such info accurate and up to date.
Not from 2010 - no refuelling from next year, only tyre changes! Maybe they'll tow a fuel bowser.
Sounds like another BAT, great, more teams are welcome, but they'll not win anything for a few years, get fed up (cos septics can't take that) and quit/sell-out.
Pity they're not going to be called "Team America [Fsck yeah]" 'cos then they'd have a ready-made theme song...
"elude" versus "allude", apparantly. ;-)
All this arises because I and a 'Merkin say the following true statement in two different ways:
"The English word for English is English; the English word for American English is American English"
"The English word for English is English; the British word for English is American English, but the British word for British English is English - whoa, that's confusing..."
eBorders is contrary to International Law for seagoing vessels, which applies to recreational boaters; eBorders says a skipper must register your crew and ports of entry/exit 24h in advance, and then do what you registered to say you would. Even if a storm brews up or you have an equipment failure, or someone gets ill, or similar. The International Law of the Sea states a skipper must do what's right for safety of all aboard and other vessels, including changing plans, going later instead, going to a different port because of weather and so on.
I imagine the same applies to recreational aviation. Bad weather? Sorry, you must land where you said you would - even though the CAA will prosecute you for trying in that fog.
And of course, people making illicit journeys simply won't register, so it'll make no difference to them at all.
I guess TPTB have looked at the amount of traffic from Eire to UK and realized it's impractical; lets hope they realise the same applies to near-Europe too, soon.
...apparantly, cos suddenly there were a huge number of searches/hour all for the same subject:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8120324.stm
I expected that to be El Reg's first dead Jacko story.
Will the public's grief now move on enough that I can bring out my "I shot Lady Di" Tshirts?
I think the point (missed, or not) is that by any sane measure, none of these incidents is a *nuclear* incident nor a *radiation* leak, it's just water FFS.
So if RN were regulated by SEPA it would still not matter in the slightest, if SEPA were competant, which one would hope.
It's the regulations that are an ass, as well as the scaremongering journalists.
If it wasn't for the British in WWII, the USA would have had to wage the Nuclear-armed Cold War against either a) The Third Reich, controlling all Europe and Russia and N Africa, or b) The USSR controlling all Europe, Russia and N Africa. With all the British and German scientists you can think of in either case. It would have been... different...
Seriously and on-topic, it looks to me like the USA is approaching the issue assuming most people charge up at home overnight, using (extant) private infrastructure, whereas Europe/Japan is assuming most people charge up whilst parked at work/shopping centre/motorway service station ie. using (new) public or shared corporate or subsidized infrastructure. Not least 'cos the Old World has on-street or shared parking for many many people rather than a private garage each. It also kinda matches the different approach to public services in the two worlds.
Yeah, it's in the "but" isn't it. "I'm not a prude but..." yes they are; "I'm not a killjoy but..." yes they are.
"I don't want to interfere but...." "We don't want to meddle in peoples' private lives but..."
As always the govt is attacking the easy target and thus also making criminals of innocents, especially where they criminalise pix which "look like" schoolgirls, if the actresses are over-18, or are cartoons, they're making criminals of innocents over a victimless crime. Rather than actually hunting and prosecuting child molesters and rapists and torturers.
I've no idea what the US system is like, but IME a compromise agreement is final. If they cock-up and offer too much, and you sign the deal and they do, you are then entitled to the money. I have experienced being made redundant by a large US company (good guys not M$) and they appeared not to bother with converting dollars to sterling, how I laughed.
Of course if they paid an amount different from the compromise agreement, that's a banking error, but nontheless they rightly face a legal battle to get it back, especially as compromise agreements contain the promise not to bother each other again once the cash is paid!
AIUI home phone cells have to have GPS (in the USA) so they can broadcast their location as required by the CDMA standard and return it to the provider control systems as required by the E911 find-the-handset system.
Of course one could require the owner to type in the location - correctly - using the configuration browser interface, but would they? No.
- Huge
In the US, every cellular base station (transmitting tower) has the ability to specially listen for, and record the signal timing of, a small number of cellphones. This is law, to give the ability to locate people who call emergency 911. Given the accurate signal timing they can trilaterate a fairly accurate position - better then just Cell Id. But since the special search is in the base stations, you can only do it for a few phones at once in any particular geographical area, and it doesn't automagically tell the phone, so it's not even like a GPS in that sense. It's done that way so it works with all phones without modification.
So if they had asked the cellular provider to look for the particular phone of a missing guy as if he had called 911, then the network could have located him, provided his phone is on and has signal. But not using GPS, except in the 'tard usage that any positioning system is a GPS.
Of course that particular guy might have a GPS phone and a misunderstanding of how GPS works. Or a GPS phone + some tracker software. Who knows?
Black helicopter 'cos they know where you are...
And conspiracists suggest the TRS2 was canned (boo hiss) because Wilson's government had a Soviet spy in it, and they a) wanted UK not to have a superior interceptor and more importantly b) it would be lots easier to steal the secrets of the F-111 were it on RAF bases as well as USAF.
Bring back the TSR2! A northern 'plane museum recently noticed the Germans making new FW-190s and in response have made a new Halifax[*], just in case they're up to something... so surely we can get some TSR2s together!
*No, not a flying example. But now there is one whole one in the world instead of none ;->
I became convinced about 10 years ago that eventually there will be just two architectures, ARM and x86. x86 will be in all boxes which have a mains (or car) power supply and do not move (except with the vehicle) , ARM in all mobile battery powered devices. And they'll each interpret each other's code as required or an ANDF such as Java or Flash will be used for downloadable apps.
You never know, x86 WIN32 API might become one such ANDF. But mobile devices' ARMs will interpret it. I'm enjoying seeing it come true...
Go ARM, ARM FTW &c.
- Huge
PS Yeah of course there'll also be any number of 8 and 16bit controllers in application specific chips, completely hidden, I mean all the above at the UI/browser/application level.
@AC: it wasn't meant to be about speed itself; you're right though, I too regard speed cameras as being the same as the lottery, a tax on the stupid. My objection is that we seem to get cameras *instead* of policemen in cars, so no action on middle lane-hoggers tailgaters seatbelts and phone-users et al.
About the article: "cameras are sited on spots where the accident rate is usually above average." I think you mean "unusually above average" (for a particular, short, measurement period) hence RTM has a powerful effect. If the accident rate is above average (for that sort of location) for many years (ie. "usually" above average) then that's the normal rate for that location, so RTM won't be a strong effect.
As a white 40-something male, I must say I have thought about this regarding things I see on my walk to work, involving kids being daft, and my decision is that no way will I ever physically help a child. One real example, some young children on bikes with stabilizers were crossing at a pelican crossing, and they did all the right things, apart from one falling off half way across. The light went green again. Of course I helped by standing in the road to make sure no idiot driver/cyclist/motorcycle overtook the stationary vehicles, until the child got itself up, and back on the bike; another passer-by picked up the bike; but no way would I touch the child to help it back to its feet, 100% due to the wild accusations that can result, and the police's possible response.
I expect I'd make an exception for an actual open wound with arterial spurting, I think in that case you'd have a good defence. But I await the inevitable test case (or trial by meedja) of someone who called 999 but didn't otherwise help in an accident involving childruuun....
They might mean the hotplate under a coffee percolator, that's certainly not anything like as powerful as an actual 1kW electric cooker ring? To me a hotplate means a device for keeping warm something you already cooked, at low power, isn't it? Anything you cook on is a ring.
Paris because she'd have no clue in a kitchen too.
One can't help but be reminded of the fuss made by idiot Merkins when the Black Dyke Mills brass band went on tour... Should residents of Victoria (Oz) also complain that we think they're tall-hatted besuited gentlemen and crinoline-and-bonnet-wearing ladies from the Age of Steam when they refer to themselves?
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