Posts by John Brown (no body) 25360 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
"Are they really building planes in the 21st centuary and using physical paper to track everything? Surely it would all have been computerised decades ago?"
Language. It's a funny old thing. Sometimes changing so rapidly it's hard to keep up, other times it seems stuck in the past. Do you still "dial" a phone? Have video "footage" on your digital phone/camera?
"The UK regulator I work for has a hugely significant legal case coming up that has implications for almost every person in the UK."
Oooh, that's tickled my curiosity bone! But based on the little you said about yourself and the upcoming case, I fully understand that you almost certainly can't elaborate any further on the matter. I'll keep an eye on the news :-)
"I'd forbid Boeing to sell any more planes into the commercial market until they come up with the documentation."
Their biggest competitor is Airbus, a "foreign" company. Boeing are already protected somewhat by having large tarifs on imported aircraft. WHich is odd when those same aircraft are allowed to fly into the USA so long as it's not a US owned/operated company flying them without tarifs. There's no way in hell the US Gov would penalise Boeing in any way which might give a foreign competitor any sort of advantage, no matter the seriousness.
<There are some problems with your post.
The title is too long.> Chopped it :-)
And yet, accessing those MS online service still requires that you have an OS installed on a local device so as to be able to connect and interact with them. And there are still notable differences in functionality, look and feel when access those online service from Firefox/Chromium etc on FreeBSD or Linux compared with Edge/Windows.
No one seems to have picked up on the hypocrisy of Apple "punishing" a subsidiary because it suspects it might in the future break Ts&Cs based on another divisions or parents past behaviour. And yet, that is exactly how Apple "protects" itself from local laws, regulations and taxes, ie by claiming that other parts of Apple are not Apple and are separate companies paying royalties to use Apple branding etc. Apple are now claiming those sort of fictional separations are in fact fictional and should be ignored. That should make an interesting precedent when it comes to regulating and/or punishing Apple "as a whole" when Apple (local) breaks the rules.
Remember, when Apply store employees want to unionise, each and every Apple Store claims to be a separate and individual business so any vote at one Apple Store has no effect on any other Apple Store. Clearly Apple don't believe this any more. I wonder how many other impossible things they believe? Before or after breakfast.
Interestingly, in the early days of the railways in the UK, that's exactly what the rail companies did. "You want to use us to move your goods? Ok, but if you use any other form of transport, we'll cancel your contract". Rail would have killed the canal trade eventually anyway, but that practice took enormous amounts of trade from them almost overnight. That sort of practice is illegal now. I guess Google et al are getting away with it because "on a mobile phone" or something, but I don't see a difference. Using market power to force a certain behaviour is monopoly behaviour.
"We must start making systems genuinely resilient as opposed to just assuming that once inside the perimeter the attacker has free reign."
One of the clients I do some work at, I have admin access, but only over the users and what they can access or use and another login for some more advanced, high level stuff. I don't get admin access over the core systems, and over-use of my higher level creds will be queried, especially if it's used for stuff my lower level should be used for. A colleague, spending time at another client site, has both "standard" user and "admin" creds. His admin creds, for doing the same job as me, let him do pretty much anything, anywhere in the system. Madness! It's like they only have two security levels and absolutely no compartmentalisation.
The "out of the box experience" should always be a spartan desktop and certainly not be denigrated because that's what you get. After all, if I want go buy a new office desk, I don't want it covered with other peoples shit. I want to put my shit on it, where I want it and when I want it, not have to start by tidying it up and dumping someone else's choice of shit :-)
Forcing a "look and feel" and the same specific icons/gadgets/tools on every users desktop in a "one size fits all" mode of thinking with minimal user choice is what we get from MS, Apple and every "smart" phone maker out there! :-p
It's still very much a "work in progress" after a quick perusal of the FreeBSD Forums.
Ignore the first few snarky posts, (which is a bit unusual for those forums). Lots of links to patches, hints and clues to get stuff working, but seems to far from "mainstream ready". In fact according to the "official" FreeBSD Pi Wiki, the Pi 4 isn't fully supported yet, notably WiFi and audio "not supported" and the Pi 5 doen't even get a mention.
I don't think it's at the stage to make it worthy of a review yet, still at the tinkering stage, and based on the apparent Pi 4 hardware support, FreeBSD on Pi 5 won't be ready for a long while yet :-)
Copying or building on other experience?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyeEoNd7-qQ is a good summary of what's currently happening in Chinas space industry. It's not all one big Chinese government programme. Landspace seem to be at the SpaceX Grasshopper stage of development at the moment but don't seem to use the SpaceX ethos of build, crash, build again But they have the benefit of knowing what works. Whether it's all "copied" or "stolen" specs or home-grown based on what is publicly available, I shall leave to others to argue about.
Just why would the Chinese want to share with the Russians? Their space program seems to be doing fairly well as it is. Whether it's simply "standing on the shoulders of giants" or stealing what they want to help kickstart the technology doesn't really matter, they are doing it. I'd much rather hope they stop the sabre rattling though. I do worry they might decide to "do a Putin" if or when they feel the time is right. Xi seems to be going against Chinese tradition and be in a hurry to immortalise himself.
"Rockets aren't exactly the bee's knees for reliability."
A production rocket blowing up before reaching orbit is pretty rare these days. There's only been one human rated/crewed failure during launch and only two human rated/crewed failures during re-entry. (Soyuz 11 may count as a 3rd, but that happened during undocking).
The news to me was that there may be video calling going via a host provider is is masking the IP addresses of the participants! Although thinking about it, that would be the easy way to intercept data for building profiles etc. Now I'm envisioning Google/Facebook/X data centres with masses of servers doing voice and facial recognition on live video calls, all in the name of "privacy".
Personally, I've never assumed privacy on the Internet ever since I first looked into how email worked and realised it was the equivalent of sending a message through the public mail system on a postcard, ie pretty much since I first got an internet connection.
"Employer: Don't like what's on offer? Look at the long line of people behind you, maybe one of them will like it....
Applicant: I'll take it."
Yes, Victorian England was very much like that too. But in the last 150 years, things have moved on rather a lot. It's been a struggle, and there have been conflicts, problems and suffering along the way, but overall we are in a much better place in terms of employment law, health & safety in the workplace etc. It's no longer acceptable to factor in employee deaths as "part of doing business".
"Employers suddenly remembering why they wanted to offshore all the jobs in the first place. If your employer wants you to work from an office, you either do it, or you get another job. Or you be a whiny, entitled bitch about it and get the sack. Seems fair."
This would be the same employers who took "advantage" of work from home to employ people from a much wider catchment area, vastly increasing the competition for jobs and almost certainly in many cases depressing the salary levels at the same time, and now want those remote workers to commute 100's or even 1000's of miles to "the office". For those employees took on during covid when WFH was "here to stay", there is no "return" to the office. They never were based there. It's a considerable and significant change to their contract of employment which they are being forced to accept. In the UK and EU, that would be grounds for a "constructive dismissal" case, ie unrealistic and unreasonable contract changes.
Much of the above may or may not apply in this case, but it's part of the pattern, which is especially common under US employment laws where there is little to no protection on either side, but certainly far less so for the worker. The lack of protection, unfair employment contracts and "at will" is probably not great for small employers too since a worker can just walk out at any time and might be hard to replace to short notice.
"Did they choose to be contractors (exchanging more money for less benefits) or was it their only option?"
If the article and video is to be believed, they were on $19/Hr, so I doubt that was a pay increase/benefit loss as contractors over employees.
And likewise, they already won court cases where Google was declared a joint employer due to the level of control Google had over the employees day to day activities.
"If the meter isn't going to be in charge of all this then I fail to understand what we are spending billions rolling them out for."
Because while it's currently cheaper to charge at home and a very few energy providers offer methods to make it even cheaper, at some stage the governemnt is going to want to replace all that lost fuel duty currently paid on petrol and diesel.
The VED or "road tax" starts for EVs next year;
New zero-emission cars registered on or after 1 April 2025 will be liable to pay the lowest first-year rate of VED (which applies to vehicles with CO2 emissions 1 to 50g/km) currently £10 a year.
From the second year of registration onwards, they will move to the standard rate, currently £180 a year
Zero emission cars first registered between 1 April 2017 and 31 March 2025 will also pay the standard rate
So, expect some form of "duty" or surcharge when charging an EV, even at home, and smart meters being mandatory.
"The problem is that it clearly isn't a car."
True. On the other hand and to be fair, the limited road speed isn't that relevant since the only places you are going to be road driving is places you can't fly, such as in a city or town where getting as fast as 30mph is a bit optimistic any way :-)
If the lawyers get their $6B in shares and the right to sell immediately, isn't that going to cause a dip in the share price and thus "deprive" their clients? And after "discovery" etc, during the case, could these lawyers be wanting that "sell now" caveat because they know something about Tesla and there might well be insider trading?
"True or False? Obviously it disagrees with the Met Office's own data."
And yet, in your own post from only a short while earlier you personally posted a quote stating:
"England and Wales had their warmest February on record this year, the Met Office said on Friday."
Which clearly shows they were reporting what the Met Office said, not making up a "lie". But, of course, in your post I'm replying to, you conveniently cut the end off your OWN quote to chang the context and reinforce your own "truth".
"If you only get your 'news' from the Bbc,"
And there you go again, selectively quoting and implying I'm only using a single news source and therefore biased so you can build a straw man on a fake assertion when the facts were plainly in my post. Are you a politician or a 'terrorist'?
"Perhaps I look at more news sources than you do,"
I don't see the relevance of that comment. You specifically called out the BBC, hence the reason I quoted you in my reply, and since that is one of the news sources I use and have seen the evidence proving your assertions incorrect, I thought it best to mention it instead of having you post incorrect information and letting it stand uncorrected.
No, not really. SpaceX gets a fair bit of government/NASA funding but it's "free money", it's for specific tasks and/or missions, and interestingly, far, far less in most cases than the big incumbents. IIRC Boeing has had at least twice as much funding for Starliner as SpaceX got for Dragon and look where the two projects are now :-)
And yes, SpaceX had/has access to lost of NASA engineering and science research built up over decades. but then so has all of NASAs other partners and contractors. Boeing and the ULA group even have their OWN corporate R&D history going back decades and still manage to be over budget, over time and under performing. It's most likely top-heavy management rather than the engineers who just want to do the best job possible.
I went to school with identical twins who both had the same first initial and no middle names. That caused enough issues even back then, 45 years ago when it was just "human error" and fairly easily fixed. I dread to think how fucked up it must be nowadays with computers involved. As we all know, it takes a computer to truly fuck things up.
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