* Posts by BristolBachelor

2200 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2009

Million-dollar new disk tech could be USELESS for array vendors

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Re: Wow...so intriguing...

I'd also mention that vacuum is much, much thinner than helium, so if you can't make something that can keep helium in, you certainly can't keep a vacuum in. Also as soon as you put anything consumer grade in a vacuum, almost everything outgasses, meaning you end up with no vacuum.

I suppose that they could always fit a turbomolecular pump to every drive, but it might cancel out the capacity density improvements .

10,000 km road trip proves Galileo satnav works, says ESA

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Re: GPS in smartphones

I have a dedicated GPS that shows me a map. When I turn it on, and tell it to keep the map on the screen the whole time, the batteries only last 30 minutes. My smartphone does much better than that (and does other things too).

Now, if you are talking about a GPS that just displays Lat/Long as 7-segment digits on a monochrome LCD display, then you may be right, but if that is all your GPS does, then it is a design FAIL. Climbing over the local moutains I need something more than Lat/Long - and paper maps don't survive the weather (particularly driven rain/snow) up there.

China confirms Jade Rabbit lunar rover has conked out

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FAIL

"NASA (and others) have successfully sent rovers, China is coping their work."
I have it on good authority that the NASA programs were largely developed on paper - invented by the Chinese, so obvious copying there. Also there are some rumours that the rockets were actually based on German technology - again more copying.

Sorry; I've got lost somewhere. What exactly was your point? (Where's the twat icon?)

Boffins hose down fiery Li-ion batteries with industrial lubricant

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Boffin

Re: what about over discharge ?

What over-discharge does, is it causes the copper electrode to dissolve (Below about 2V for normal Li-Ion tech). If you then recharge the cell, the copper is re-deposited. However the copper is not re-deposited evenly - it tends to grow dendrites because the surface charge is higher at the peak of the dendrite, causing more copper to be deposited there than elsewhere.

Over subsequent charge-discharge cycles, the dendrite(s) tend to puncture the insulation between the positive and negative electrodes and cause a leakage path for current. If the dendrite heats up too much, it may start off a chain reaction. Most Li-Ion cells use a cobalt based chemistry, which enters thermal runaway above about 150°C, or about 100°C if the cell has been abused. IMHO if the electrolyte is inflammable or not doesn’t make much difference if the cell electrodes are thermally degrading at approx. 2000°C

Android users running old OS versions? Not anymore, say latest stats

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Re: android upgrade debate

It seems to be less and less relevant now. Google seems to stick most of the required stuff in some Google supplied "apps" that automagically update in the background, regardless of what actual firmware you have. The actual firmware of the phone now doesn't seem to do very much that affects apps, so it doesn't seem to be so critical that it is always updated.

Boffins tell ALIEN twin-sunned planets: You're adopted

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It also suggests that their simulation is perfect and therefore the planets must come from somewhere else.

Even though the simulations say that all asteroids close-in are the "warm-born" type, and all those far out are the "cold-born" type, even though a sample of asteroids in our solar system shows a fair number in the wrong place. Once again, showing that something is wrong in the simulations. (Also possibly supporting the idea of Jupiter type planets moving inward and outward).

NSA, GCHQ, accused of hacking Belgian smartcard crypto guru

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Facepalm

Re: This is a big problem for LinkedIn too

I don't follow how this solves anything. Imagine that NSA hacks a real person. The NSA then use that person's account to post a link to their chosen honeypot. How does the real person having a public key change anything?

Chinese Moon rover, lander duo wake up after two-week snooze

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Re: I'm surprised that in 2014...

I think Britain is a bit northern for most efficient launches to orbit (France happens to still own a bit of land near the equator, and is friendly). In addition, the laws here are so awful, that people who could launch here go somewhere else to do it instead. The UK gov used to have quite a nice small rocket; I think there's still one in Leicester (along with the only Soyez outside of the former USSR), but they gave up on it after disasterous attempts of work sharing a 3-stage rocket with European partners.

However, some very, very nice CCDs for space use come out of Britain, including almost 1 billion pixels worth launched very recently. Also you can easily get the rest of the kit in Britain, and cheaply too, if you are happy with the cutsy little birds that come from Surry Satellites. Look up Disaster Monitoring Constellation (DMC)

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Re: reading required @Naughtyhorse

"prolly dont count cos it's downhill all the way there!
I tend to think that everything is uphill from the surface of the Earth; it's just in the opposite direction. For example do you think that pushing a car from stationary to 30MPH is harder than stopping one that is driving towards you at 30MPH?

Army spaffed millions up the wall on flawed Capita online recruiting system - report

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Re: Capita SIMS

"SQL escape character but you'd think a big, well established team would have a library of utility methods to handle this."
But someone isn't typing the surname into a SQL query are they?; they're typing it into a form (god I hope!)

What the hell happens when Robert '); DROP TABLE students; joins the school??

Has Intel side-stepped NGOs on conflict minerals in its chips?

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Re: The real issue with the Dodd-Frank Method @wEASELnO7

As I read it, instead of certifying every worker and their dog, you do the analysis, and if that says it comes from somewhere else, then you stop. Only if it says it comes from a conflict area, do you go looking for certificates showing that it is conflict free.

Of course those certificates could still be fakes, in just the same way that they could doing what the NGOs propose, but what it means is that you don't go chasing certificates for every gramme of the stuff irrespective of whether it comes from a conflict region or not.

Snapchat: In 'theory' you could hack... Oh CRAP is that 4.6 MILLION users' details?

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Joke

Re: > if they can't guarantee that ephemeral really is ephemeral

I think I've seem something similar...

First law of NSA:

If you know it, the NSA knows it.

Second law of NSA:

Even if you don't know it, chances are that the NSA knows it

Now THAT'S a sunroof: Solar-powered family car emerges from Ford labs

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In Spain

The problems in Spain are: Very few people have access to parking that can see the sky. Normally you are all shoe-horned into a skyscraper with underground parking. There are some people living in villages that still have individual housing, but normally their disposable income prohibits buying cars like this.

If you do have above-ground parking, it has a shade, because otherwise the paint on the car doesn't last 5 years, and your hands melt on the steering wheel. You could possibly remove the sunshade for this car, but then you'd use a lot of your 8*300w of "free eleccy" running the aircon to cool-down the car. (Sunpower claim that their best panels are 21.5% efficient, so in Spain you are looking at 8kw*0.885 = 7kw of heating!! a fair amount of that will probably end up inside the car)

You pay through the nose to have an electrical supply to your dwelling that can push more than 3kW. If you actaully have more than 10kW available, you are effectively non-domestic and can't get a tarrif which is limited by the government, so the leccy companies can charge you whatever they want. Also you probably don't have any way of getting your electrical supply down to your parking space in the garage. I hope that the charger is intelligent to only consume as much power as you have available at any moment in time.

Want access to mobe users' location, camera, phone ID? EXPLAIN YOURSELVES - ICO

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I think the examples given need expanding. For example I am exempt as a private person storing the contact details of my friends a family. Surely as soon as a company accesses that data for their puposes, they ought to declare it and be registered (e.g. drop box needing access to your contacts - why? What do they do with info?)

Tube be or not tube be: Apple’s CYLINDRICAL Mac Pro is out tomorrow

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Coat

You have missed the point. The Mac Air has impressive packaging, and so makes for a better portable.

However, this is a desktop. To get close to a normal Mac Pro, you have to add an external HDD enclose, complete with a straggly cable. For the 2nd Ethernet port you'll also need another adaptor (the Mac Pro will easily saturate a Gbit port and normally uses 2 bonded). For video or audio work, you'll also need an external PCIe enclosure for your pro capture cards. Also despite waiting years for it, it can only tke 64GB of ram? The old ones have that! A standard 16GB max is also poor showing, our laptops have that much!

The old Mac Pro is better in every way except the processors. Very, very disappointed.

XMAS SPACEWALK planned to fix ISS's dicky cooling gear

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Alien

Re: No Christmas presents for astronauts

But what if the othrr astronauts didn't like you, and stuck a fake alian outside your window to scare you when you woke up?

GCHQ spooks told: Break Huawei's grip on 'The Cell'

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Re: Yeah ... right....

from univertsities and ISPs you say? I seem to remember reading something about state sponsored hackers breaking into a university in order to then break into the major comms links in China. I think the wistle-blower was Snowdon or somesuch. Can remember if he said who was actually doing the nasty.

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Re: Not that I buy into this US-led paranoia about Huawei kit...

I think that System-X by GPT predates Thatherism by quite a bit (complete with parallel routing to copy all your packets to Cheltenham). GPT wss certainly a very private company.

Beauty firm Avon sticks spike heel into $125m SAP-based sales project

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Re: SAP=[S]tops [A]ll [P]rogress

My last company replaced their old systems with SAP. The old front-end was web based and in-house. The backend ran on AS400 and was creaky but ok.

The new SAP system was so expensive, there was 1 license per 50 users, and the users went back to submitting paper forms to the person with the license. It also didn't help that in the SAP UI you had to raise an order against a fixed cost centre, and then go back and amend the order to add an auxilliary field with the cost-centre in it, because for some reason if you didn't, it couldn't assign costs properly, and sometimes went ahead with orders before they had even been reviewed, let alone authorised. A simple mistake in the UI caused all sorts of pain that took hours to resolve.

I'm very glad to be somewhere else now.

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Joke

Re: SAP

SAP

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh !

The next line goes?

SaviourFailure of the universe

Apple CEO Cook breaks YEARS OF SILENCE, finally speaks to El Reg hack

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Re: "Best" is just not a word

No news on the new Mac Pro, no.

But there is a new model due soon - the Mac minipro. However this one needs a Thunderbolt to Ethernet cable, a collection of Thunderbolt to Sata cables, and a Thunderbolt to PCI enclose to come close to a Mac Pro, but still won't even support the amount of RAM that a Mac pro from years ago supports :(

Security guru Bruce Schneier to leave employer BT

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Joke

Re: Unfortunately, he will probably be constrained

But haven't BT just dissolved that very contract?

Enraged by lengthy Sky broadband outage? Blame BT Openreach cable thieves

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Re: A simple suggestion

"...if the cable is more than a mile long, they actually make more money from the selling of the copper than it costs to replace the copper with fibre."
Is that so? And they tell me that to dig up the mile long cable from the exchange to my house, and put in a fibre router at each end will cost HOW MUCH?? Tell you what. For the 2nd-hand price of the copper wire, I'd gladly pay for fibre to my house.

French gov used fake Google certificate to read its workers' traffic

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Joke

Re: Human Error

The Human error was when a human ended their sentence with "...and they'll never know."

ICANN posts guidelines to avoid gTLD mix-ups

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Re: This might be a stupid comment, but...

I don't understand why you would want all your internal systems to have to talk to one another using a label that you use for external things (e.g. TMs / brands). If I do this, does my internal mail server or file server have to respond on all of the domains we have?

When my company does a complete re-branding, do I have to go around and change everything internally because the marketing department now sells things under a different name?

Should I change things so that the old names no longer resolve too, or should I keep a cname record for every different name/brand that the company has used for the last 20 years?

<sarc>On a related point if I have to use FQDNs for everything internal, should I also dump 10.1 ? Can I still buy 20,000 public IP addresses anywhere?</sarc>

SpaceX Falcon 9 reaches MONEY RING with successful launch

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Re: @Bristolbatchelor

The way it seems to me is that the F9 would facilitate China or India having a satellite in orbit. In the case of the Thales bird, it seems obvious that some in the US do not want China to have any satellites, so they get upset even when a European company manufactures a satellite for them, without using any "special sauce" ITAR components.

You also have to consider that the only reason Europe developed their own launcher was because of the conditions that the US put on launching anything for someone other than the US - and this was for it's best friends of the UK and France!

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Re: How about a little perspective here?

"Well, he could always offer to loft birds for India or China."
I'm not sure that he could. Apart from the fact that India and China want to build their domestic capabilities, there are problems with trying to sell services to China (India I'm not sure). A certain senator would have a fit if he even read your comment.

The F9 would certainly be blocked for export, even if it used not a single component that was previously declaired ITAR (International Trade in Arms Regulations). Also talking to the Chinese (and possibly Indians) so that they knew enough to fly their bird on one would probably get you locked-up. As far as actually putting something in space for China goes, well just look at what happened to Thales. They developed a satellite that didn't use any American ITAR parts, specifically so that they could export it without ITAR issues. Even after they proved that it didn't use any ITAR restricted parts, the US still wouldn't leave them alone. It was as if China should not be able to have satellites.

I think that the F9 will get enough customers from the US and maybe Europe without having to worry about chasing orders in China and upsetting the big bad Wolf.

Gadget world's metals irreplaceable, say boffins

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Re: Shortage scaremongering

I read a report that said mining the old rubbish dumps in the US was now a cost-effective way of getting Aluminium. The report said that the weight of aluminium that could be extracted per tonne/volume of waste dug up was comparable or more than the volume extraced from bauxite mining. What's more, the cost/energy to separate and re-cycle the aluminium was less than that needed to reduce bauxite to aluminium.

I don't think that will ever be the case with these other elements because of the tiny quantities involved compared to the volume of rubbish we make, and it would be nice to think that we actually recycled everything rather than burying it.

Confessions of a porn site boss: How the net porn industry flopped

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Joke

Re: so that was you?

Did they start along the lines of "Hi I'm Dave from AT&T, how am I helping you?"

Solar enthusiasts rays idea of 'leccy farms on MOON, drones

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Re: A solution in search of a problem

Ledswinger; you also forgot to mention that putting a turbine on the rooftop tends to propagate all sorts of nasty vibrations into the structure of the building, which then tends to fail with parts crumbling away and cracks appearing. For me that is a more serious problem than low efficiency.

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Re: Blinded by the light

The systems I've seen proposed using light, use lasers. That means a very, very narrow band and very easy to filter (like filtering out low pressure sodium lamps). They also have quite a low power density to make them eye-safe, including for binocular users (viewing a very large telescope by eye, I don't know).

The systems are done to get 24hour power (except 70 minutes during the equinoxes), and use lasers rather than huge mirrors because the conversion efficiency in space is better than on Earth, and the final conversion efficiency on Earth with a very narrow wavelegth range can be quite good.

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Trollface

Re: Energy though the atmosphere...

"It is not feasible to beam energy through the atmosphere"
My solar powered calculator begs to differ.

I thought I was being DDOSed. Turns out I'm not that important...

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@Bobthe2nd

I'd agree with you to a point (although back in the day, Demon actually required people to run their own SMTP servers and supplied a dos app to do it for them). However, I think that now, most ISPs shut down anything that looks like an open mail relay, and SPAMHaus blocks pretty much the rest of them (including whole blocks of dynamic IP addresses just in case).

I would guess that nowadays most spam either comes from cooperative ISPs, or trojen installed applets that either send the mail directly, send it via your email provider, or log in to someone else's webmail and sends it from there.

Haitian snapper humbles photo giants AFP, Getty Images in $1.2m copyright victory

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@Mark 65

AFAIK it is already illegal (criminal act) or unlawful (can't remember which) to remove identifying or copyright information from digital media. Unfortunately I can't remember the details, and have no way to search for them from here. I seem to remember that somewhere in the huge ???.gov.uk pile of websites, that there is an introduction to copyright and does spell it out.

KILL SWITCH 'BLOCKED by cell operators' to pad PROFITS, thunders D.A.

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Note 3

The Note 3 has an option that even if reset "completely" to manufacturer defaults, it won't work unless logged in to the original Samsung account. No idea if it works if someone just flashes it with cyanogenmod though.

The truth about mystery Trojan found in space

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Re: Bah!

So which media scanner should they use? The one installed here and updated daily by those good people at McAfee certaiy doesn't detect everything that's out there in the wild from day 1.

Mandatory HTTP 2.0 encryption proposal sparks hot debate

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Re: I must admit to having wondered

I'd also add that in the beginning, a lot of protocols were debugged by hand - you'd use telnet to connect to a deamon running FTP HTTP or whatever, and talk to it, trying different possibilities to break it or find out why it just plain didn't work.

That's probably a good reason for most stuff being in clear text and English/nmenonics.

SPACE, the FINAL FRONTIER: These are the images of the star probe Cassini

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Boffin

Re: tasking...shudder

No, sorry "Tasking" in this context is correct, and it is a technical term. You upload a series of tasks for the craft to do, and so you use the gerund of the word to say "tasking". Whether the use of the word in the more general sense is correct or not (along with gems like "nominal") I leave as an exercise for the grammar nazis aficionados:)

Falkland Islands almost BLITZED from space by plunging European ion-rocket craft

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Re: Recycling - More bits of crud in orbit

It's more like about 25% of it will come down as pieces. The rest will turn into dust in the atmosphere (e.g. vaporise and then condense). None will be left in orbit.

Also as far as dust in the atmosphere goes, the amount of it will be insignificant compared to the natural space dust that lands in the atmosphere every day.

Latest global menace: ELECTROPULSE NORKS, apparently

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In other news

"Apparently" Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.

Despite having acess to everyone's email and phone calls, I wouldn't rely on them knowing anything.

Google 'fesses up: Yup, we're KILLING OFF IE9 support for Gmail, Apps

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Re: So when they say dropping support..

To be honest it really pisses me off when they go and change a perfectly good, working site. If using IE9 forced you to a static version of the page, at least you always know where you are, and you know it will alwasy work the way you want it to (Bloody hell, where is the button to launch the calendar today?)

The problem is; they will just say FK you and either serve you up a dog's dinner, rendered badly, or refuse to work.

Reding: NSA, friends don't spy on friends. Europe, let's team up for our own SPOOK CLUB

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Joke

'level the playing field'

"level the playing field"

The best way to be sure is to take off and nuke it from orbit. Or is that a bit over the top?

'Only nuclear power can save humanity', say Global Warming high priests

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Meh

When you say nobody, I assume that you mean except all of us - with our contributions to JET (Joint European Torus) and ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor )

Oh, and that's just a couple of them - there are other tori as well, plus a few smatterings of high-power laser pulses being used to ignite small pellets.

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Re: Quite right too....

Don't forget that government debt is MUCH cheaper than corporate debt too, so the long-term costs would be lower. The problem is that they don't want that much debt to show up on their books, because it looks bad.

Helium-filled disks lift off: You can't keep these 6TB beasts down

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Re: Wouldn't a vacuum be better?

No. It's very hard to hold a vacuum. lots of things start to evaporate at very low pressures, including things that you thought were solid.

For example in CRTs, you need a reactive element (called a getter) that reacts with an trace gasses in the tube as they are emitted from the various parts of the tube, just to keep the vacuum. Apart from the problem of it not staying a vacuum, you may also start to have problems with some of your components evaporating away causing failure.

UK.gov BANS iPads from Cabinet over foreign eavesdropper fears

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Joke

You missed off making the rooms air-tight. They just need to ensure that they can open the doors each time there is an election to change over the MPs

Fiery bits of Euro satellite to rain down on Earth this weekend

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Re: Why didn't they...

Because it would've needed several times more fuel than it was actually launched with, plus an extra rocket system, comprising at least 2 nozzles, plus various extra tanks, valves, pipework, control systems...

It's a bit like asking why a car doesn't have a built-in recycling system for when it reaches the end of it's life - and having to carry it around with itself everywhere. By that point, it would no longer work as a car.

However, the new polar MetOp sats are just going through a re-quote to have enough fuel to do this. In their case, they already have the rocket motors and the rest of the stuff for their mission, however the fuel to control de-orbit is still 2x what is needed for the entire 7 year mission. So it's a major upgrade in tank size and associated changes to the platform, but should allow the left over bits to land in the Pacific.

Cameron pledges public access to list of who REALLY owns firms

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Re: as an aside...

You can already offset your legitamate costs of earning your salary against your tax liability. For example as a Chartered Engineer, I have to pay certain sums of money every year to various groups. I can declare these payments to avoid paying tax on the money I earned to make those payments. Exactly like a company.

However the physical and mental pain of doing so hurts more than the money I would make through the tax saving, so I don't.

TalkTalk to block nuisance calls with no help AT ALL from Huawei

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Re: Mr

That sounds like harassment to me. If there happens to be someone sensitive in your household, who gets easily worried by this (happened to an ex) - you should report the calls as a crime to your telco. Number withheld will not help them; they can be traced and told to stop it.