Posts by Voland's right hand 5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011
And the million-miles thing? Yeah, I don't think so.
There is no technical reason for everything except the battery to last much more than a million miles. That is the long term killer advantage of properly done electric and properly not hybrid (Not Pri(ck)us abominations). The wear, tear and servicables are an order of magnitude less than on a normal internal combustion.
Now the battery lasting 1M - different story. I have to see that to believe that.
Finally, only a 500 mile round trip on a "tankfull"? Total show stopper.
Not in some other places (not California). That is what you are ALLOWED to do with one driver in 24h in order not to endanger the others. 500 miles at 55mph is 9h. If you are caught driving more than 10h per day in this country (based on your tachograph reading) you can kiss your class A goodbye. Straight away.
I would not want to be the first driver to run out of electrons a few miles from a charger because they'd used too much power taking off from traffic lights which can be almost every block in US cities.
Ever heard of regenerative breaking? The biggest difference between a leccy and an a gasoline vehicle is that a leccy vehicle recoups >60% of the stop/stop cycle.
If there are chargers at truck service areas, truck is a good candidate for electric. It has a pre-defined range which is ~ 500 miles per day. 60 miles per hour (speed limiter), mandatory limits per day and mandatory rest periods which end up with ~ 500 miles per day with one driver.
Finally proper aerodynamics on a truck though. Applause. It is about time someone built something that does not look like (and has the air resistance) of a brick privy.
Fake news as a service boomed during the referendum and really became mainstream during US election. There were whole factories in some really interesting places like f.e. rural Macedonia producing stories and publishing them.
It has been a mainstream "as a service" operation for several years now. This report is way out of date.
There is an interesting corollary to the fact that it is mainstream - this means that you can no longer eliminate election skew by an external actor(*). Stuff comes from nowhere, made-to-measure and built on a contract. Even if you ban one source, the next one will be published via a different one. So eliminating troll factories as attempted at the moment is actually counterproductive - it is better to deal with enemies you know then surprise attacks coming out of nowhere.
I will not call it interference as it is something which has been done since humans came up with the election concept. Spreading rumours to influence elections is a millennia old sport. The difference is the scale, speed and cost reduction.
It also shines light on just how much would an antivirus package ex-filtrate if it decides that something is potential malware.
While the goal is "for the greater good", the functionality and capability does not go well with operating it on machines which contain classified data.
This is applicable to ALL modern commercial antivirus packages and doubly so to the free ones (AV vendors use the free versions as an early warning/capture net).
f cyclist on a country lane with no street lighting, in the dark .
Could be worse. Could have no lights, dark clothing and drunk and zig-zagging across the whole road. I was unfortunate to have to try avoiding those twice in the last year. The second was so shitfaced that he fell of the bike in front of me.
you can be damn sure that I would claim on the insurance for the damage
Sure you will not. The cost of the damage to a bicycle in an average scrape with a car is significantly LESS than the excess on any insurance policy I know. I have been literally run over by a classic case of "woman driving off in cold weather" and the only damage to the bicycle was a write-off wheel worth 30 quid (*). That is less than the excess on my credit card insurance for crying out loud.
If you have more damage to the bicycle, you are probably in hospital as well and we are looking at an "insurance situation as we know it".
That is different from the cost to the car where a single item of bodyshop work is PAST the excess level. So frankly, if the cyclists are insured, the only people to benefit will be the drivers.
That may not be such a bad thing after all. Will make some people cycle more sanely.
Her husband actually showed up with a new wheel at my house the next day and tried to explain me that I am full of it and he cleaned the ice off her car. It took 30 seconds to show him that this does not help with the demisting and his wife was driving with a 30cm by 30cm visibility cleared of fog on the inside off the windshield. At which point he realized that they are lucky I did not press on the case and left.
He got away with it in as much as he is now serving an 18 month sentence, yes.
A driver who deliberately removed his brakes and went on the road to kill a pedestrian by driving like a nutter would have been given up to 15 years, The more common number in a case where the modifications to the vehicle have been deliberate is ~ 7 years. He got only a year and a half.
Do I need to say more?
We also need legislation to make the (small number) of nutter cyclist
Absolutely. I wish I could give you +10.
I cycle and maintain the cycles for the family where everyone cycles. Some of us clock > 4k per year cycling in an urban environment. As a responsible cyclist I would like to sign under this, despite knowing that it is a very tough one in the UK. Just to be clear - I also drive (clocking > 18k in a some years).
UK has no identity document requirement, so the only option the police has it to impound the cycle and/or arrest the person on the spot for the worst cases. I remember when they used to do the former (I have never seen them do the latter). Nowdays - they cannot be arsed. As some other people noted - the legislation is mostly there, just nobody can be bothered to enforce it.
There are plenty of people who deserve being arrested and/or having their precious >400£ bicycles put into a garbage press in front of them too. I see anything between 2 and 5 idiots per mile cycled who jump red lights, bunny hop in front of cars, have no lights while wearing dark clothing during the hours of darkness, ignore priority at roundabouts and worst of all have no brakes (the f*** fixie riders).
As far as the legislation - all for it. The case when a woman got killed in broad daylight by a cyclist on a fixie without brakes and he GOT AWAY WITH IT with only 19th century legislation being applicable comes to mind. Cycling dangerously and cycling on a not road-worthy bicycle should be punishable offences. Same as it is for driving and cars.
discovered that a weblink in Skype messaging gets visited in under 10 seconds
That is normal as the new Skype attempts to generate a inline preview. All the other usual suspects do it too.
Now, what else do they do with this information as well as how they relate it to you personally and how do they map it onto advertising are a different story.
This is one of the many reasons why MSFT killed the p2p early skype protocol. It was observing how F***book, Google, etc are correlating messaging with web views in a way usable for printing money and it could not print money the same way. From that point on the days of p2p skype were numbered.
Is Belgium generally known for being anti-cryptography?
Not really.
The case is not about cryptography. It is about running a communications service and does it constitute a telecom operation as defined in law. A telecom operator in nearly all countries must provide lawful intercept, usually based on court order. The side effect of this is that you are not allowed to run a completely opaque service as an operator. Users can run it. Companies can supply software to them to do so. Telcos and Service operators cannot.
In any case - it is old news as far as MSFT is concerned as their service is now cloud-centric and with no end-to-end encryption. So while they probably could not provide intercept on the old Skype protocol, they have no issues doing it today.
candidate X's position on section 702 would leave the US open to terrorist attack, Senator Y supports keeping Americans safe"
Which is one of the reasons why most of Europe (not counting UK here as it has no concept of written constitution) have the right to privacy of correspondence as a constitutional right. The ones that do not (once again except UK) have a law to that effect. The chapter 23.2 from the RF constitution I quoted earlier is a cut-n-paste+translate from the German one (if memory serves me right).
USA has NO right to privacy of correspondence period. Neither in law, nor in constitution. There is a patchwork of precedent derived from litigating correspondence related cases on 4th amendment grounds, but they do not make up a law. As a result, using 9/11 as a precedent Mr Shrub and Co have successfully pushed into production a system which would make Stazi proud (*).
(*)No comment on UK. It is pointless to comment when a country is competing with Saudi Arabia to be the last country in the world to have a written constitution and the concept of fundamental rights.
Closes to Section 702 shitshow is: http://constrf.ru/razdel-1/glava-2/st-23-krf
Section 2 to be more exact: Quoting:
Статья 23 Конституции РФ
1. Каждый имеет право на неприкосновенность частной жизни, личную и семейную тайну, защиту своей чести и доброго имени.
2. Каждый имеет право на тайну переписки, телефонных переговоров, почтовых, телеграфных и иных сообщений. Ограничение этого права допускается только на основании судебного решения.
Translation of section 2:
Everyone has the right to secrecy of his correspondence, telephone conversations, mail, telegraph or any other means of communications. This right may be restricted only by a court decision.
I believe the American equivalent is the second amendment - everyone has the right to bare guns.
Matter of life priorities: Guns GOOOOOOD, tits bad, Guns GOOOOOD, privacy bad. Sharing is caring you know. Always share everything with BIG BROTHER too.
I know, I should put some SARCASM tags, but cannot be arsed to.
One more thing I missed in the article.
The range of any British Artillery is under 25km - both the AS90 and the Challenger cannot throw anywhere near the range of the ancient 1950-es BM21 if it is firing modern ammunition - it is 45km. The newer ones - Tornado and Whirlwind throw to 100+.
It will take not artillery - it will take rockets and the Royal Artillery has in total as many launchers as one Russian or Chinese artillery regiment. Old ones too. Only the yanks, Turks and Greeks in Nato have the upgrades to throw to 140km and beyond. Royal Artillery does not, so if (god forbid) the UK army will ever meet an opponent armed with these it will need to rely on friendly air support (F35, cough, cough, sputter, cough, cough, sputter) instead.
Whole thing reads like lots of bull which is somewhat away from reality.
1. The Russian Army have long sold off and disposed off BM21 Grad described in the article which also does not have some of the capabilities described. BM21 is not in active service in the Russian army any more. This differs from Ukraine, Donbass rebels and everyone around them (Armenia, Azeri, etc) who still use them. BM21 is a war crime weapon by modern standards - it wipes out indiscriminately whole areas and is used predominantly against civilian targets (some footage of how it is done by Ukraine can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYu73JKDUZw . And here is the result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcc-cgWpU0Y - hospitals, firestations and other "military targets". Worthy of our other sponsored darlings the Taleban.
2. The Russians are now at: Tornado-G (which can be mistaken for Grad as it uses the same caliber) and Whirlwind (Смерч) - 2 generations after that. The main weapon deployed by both is not thermobaric (though they have that in the arsenal). The main weapon is cassettes with guided individual elements each of which can take out nearly any armoured vehicle or tank presently in use (it attacks from top).
3. The article missed the BIGGEST difference in Russian drone deployment scenarios compared to NATO and the biggest danger. Russian drones can be launched as a munition by the actual multiple rocket launcher. As a result, instead of a slow propeller driven spotter drone (as used by NATO) which can be picked up by radar from 30-40 kms out and taken out early on by a suitable AAA system there is a rocket munition which traverses the distance between the battery and the approximate target area in less than a minute. It reports within a minute tops, the targets are programmed and the battery opens up. Then it gets really ugly. The range is up to 100km for both systems presently in use (instead of under 30km for Grad). Presently, NATO forces have little or no defence against anything like this.
4. If stuff out of point "3" above was used anywhere around Crimea or Donbass we would have known about it. As the systems in question are _NOT_ inside Ukraine and some of the munitions (especially the drone one) have not been exported it would have signified irrefutable evidence of Russian involvement. It would have been all over the press (and there would have been much more dead than 2 battalions).
The significantly low(er) budget Dune miniseries done by the sci-fi channel are light years ahead of the 1984 David Lynch idiocy which had an order of magnitude higher budget. Similarly, a season of Babylon5, Stargate, etc was created on a fraction of the money used on a StarTrek Deep Space 9 or Star Trek NG per-season budget. Huge Budget does not necessarily make a good movie. Rogue one had only 3 quarters of the budget used by The Force Awakens delivering a significantly better film in the process.
Just, it was implemented that way anywhere,
It was implemented NOWHERE. NOT a single "communist" country has ever pretended to implement communism. What they pretended to was to implement "socialism" with various adjectives describing it as an interim stage towards communism.
The mere fact that you are saying "implemented" and "communism" in one sentence means you have got way too much propaganda brainwashing and you do not actually know a single bit about the ideological drivel which was used to justify various interesting approaches in the Eastern block.
The actual system there was a THEOCRACY. You HAD to believe in the bright future of communism. That is what the posters (this one) said and you really needed that belief, because:
1. The communist party manifesto is an ideal to subscribe to (chunks of it are plagiarized out of the Sermon on the Mount).
2. The first volume of the Das Capital sorta makes sense. It is an interesting take on things to say the least
3. By the time you are at volume 3 you are in WTF land.
4. The only way to contend with Lenin's syphilitic drivel is to fervently believe in it. It is not WTF, it is beyond WTF land - most of the arguments fail basic formal logic requirements.
5. The stuff "built on top" of Lenin or god forbid the stuff ghost-written for Stalin or Brezhnev is totally out of the lunatic asylum. We are not talking belief here, we are talking belief at the level at which lunatics in the US mid-west believe in Rapture and/or some bearded lunatics believe in the veracity of some of the stuff attributed to Muhammed.
6. That is why "communists" persecuted religion that much as well - a state religion in a theocracy does not tolerate any competition.
7. I can continue here - party hierarchy (religious) in parallel to the society one, persecution of heretics, elimination of heretics (Joseph Jugashvilli style) - the list can be continued on many, many pages.
There was NEVER communism in any society on earth. There will probably never be. There were vicious oligarchical homicidal theocracies masquerading as "socialist societies striving to become communist". That is not communism as a societal order. In any sense.
UBI is a horrible idea. It will destroy democracy and hand all power to a tiny ruling elite. (Even more than they have currently.)
Concur. It leads to stuff like this: https://www.goodreads.com/series/61988-owner-trilogy
If you are not sufficiently horrified by page 30 you bloody well should be.
I have seen time and again companies failing to grok that time recording is a double edged sword.
You can have all kinds of interesting issues with it. If you allow employees to record time correctly you end up with liabilities for overtime. If you force the employees to record time incorrectly you have different liabilities instead. Specifically, billing a customer for anything which explicitly contains hours worked while falsifying time records in some jurisdictions is by both precedent and actual law a form of fraud. Me and a couple of my US colleagues had some interesting time explaining this to the pointy haired idiots in one large and well known UK company which were insisting that timesheets are filled 4 days in advance. They even tied up managerial bonuses to their teams submitting for 4 days in advance deadline.
There are other issues too. There are jurisdictions (one nice thing about Colorado) where if you quit your overtime will be paid regardless of what your contract says about it provided it is documented. It also has to be paid immediately on the date you leave - no ifs, no buts, no coconuts. And so on.
All in all, it is a can of worms which a company should not open unless it is ready to deal with the the financial and legal consequences.
I can think of at least several companies I was unfortunate to work for in UK which did exactly the same.
None of them could be arsed to pay a single penny for overtime though. So, at the time, I could not get what the deal is and why are my manager and the Human Remains droid being so persistent that I falsify my timesheet.
Being older (and hopefully wiser) now, I know that there is sufficient precedent base regarding "time in lieu" on both overtime and travel to threaten them with a tribunal case and bugger off for several 2 week holidays in a year courtesy of accrued and unpaid overtime and travel time. In order to do that you have to have it recorded, documented and acknowledged (and that is exactly the reason why they are asking you to falsify it).
An excuse to have a spyware device in every room. How quaint.
If it is communication you are after, a second hand 79xx series VOIP phone is 20£ on ebay. While in theory, you need a per phone license and a Call manager to run the setup in practice anyone who buys them for 20£ runs them using Asterisk(*). Add 50£ for a BananaPi (I would not want to run VOIP for more than one phone on a Razzie with its "entertaining" Ethernet) or a similar amount for a second hand NUC or a hackable "Thin" Client and you have a grand total of < 200 per household which you can actually use to communicate with the outside world as well.
Compare that versus a 200£ spyware device in each room. Sorry, no contest.
(*)I have ~10 of those - one off ebay, one bought 15 years ago for real money and the rest collected from skip diving at various places I worked for.
Teenager upstairs... That gives me an idea. How about:
Step 1: Upload an alternative phrasebook with Father Jack Hackett's vocabulary in them in a large Toy Shop, in let's say Oxford Street.
Step 2: Select a Daily Fail reader of your choice and suggest that as a toy for his/her little Daily Fail conditioned progeny
Step 3. Observe the fallout (including the inevitable article in the Daily Fail).
deflecting what could be a big hole
Wishful thinking I am afraid. It will take a "Small Soldiers" level incident (and paying for the fallout) for them to take notice. Anything else is just +/- a few percent on the PR budget (but not the development one - there ain't any, it's all ODM).
would use them on something with more margin than a $1000 iphone , like a $100,000 Range Rover
Who told you that the target iPhone does not provide access to something else which as valuable as a 100K Chelsea tractor (or even more).
If you have decided to spend a few hundred quid to defeat biometrics it is not just for any phone. It is for the phone of a particular mark.
A Russian spy in need for hacking into Estonian state institutions has absolutely ZERO need to be in Estonia. In fact, that would be the last country he would be if he needs to do it.
Now Estonia desperately needing to continue cranking the anti-Russian hysteria to get more NATO "support" and more justification to disenfranchise their minorities.
That is a completely different story. <SARCASM>Totally unrelated you know</SARCASM>
It is dying because it continues not to deliver what the customer want.
I would add to that list:
Excellent A12 notebooks with a Radeon R7 which are deliberately crippled by small RAM, slow rusty spinner and a battery the size of what went into netbooks (while being half-empty inside the shell and having a DVD drive take half of the remaining space).
You know, Intel is BETTER (according to HP marketing). And when it is not, the spec will be crippled until it does look so. Repeatedly. And after that they are wondering why we do not want to buy their shite.
Fact remains, despite all the hard work that has gone into LibreOffice, it remains a major step down
Depends in what.
You may have a point regarding Excel vs LibreOffice Calc especially for large and complex spreadsheets. Microsoft knows exactly what is keeping most businesses from migrating - it is the beancounter (especially the one with a joke MBA) and his precious planning spreadshet with the magic formulae which has had zero testing, zero documentation and is something any software engineer would be fired for. It has optimized excel over the years and this shows till this day when you try to run excel and calc side by side (especially with abominable input).
You really need to have your brain examined if you are trying to make the same point about other functionality. For example, let's take the Microsoft formula editor vs its LibreOffice equivalent. LibreOffice has stolen a lot from (La)TeX in that area and is several light years ahead of MSFT which cannot even get a trivial equation with a sum and 2 indexes right.
Same goes for structured and disciplined document writing support - both Word vs Writer and PowerPoint vs Impress. Microsoft till this day cannot get global document style information right - it breaks the moment it moves from one machine to another. That is also one of the reasons most people who use predominately Orifice never learn to use an editor the way it should be used in a business setting - "live by the template, die by the template"· They continuously format by hand using the fonts menu which breaks even further as a document moves between people.
I can continue the second list ad naseum, but all in all - unless you have excel vs calc in mind, I beg to differ.
There is a significant amount of software which relies on an Access database backend - but its mere existence does not constitute a good reason to migrate to such software at this point in the evolution of IT.
Access is the "little evil". 99% of apps talk to it via odbc and can be made to talk to an alternative database backend.
The large evil is all the planning, construction and utilities. A large city council needs to churn a gigantic pile of civil engineering and utilities approval work per year. Like it or not AutoCad and its brethren remain a resolutely Windows-Only affair so any ideas of migrating a whole city council to Linux for the time being are in the realm of science fiction. Doubly so in the absence of a mandated open document format for CAD submissions.
They couldn't make things work (within the budget, or at all).
Do we like it or not there is a significant amount of software which is available only on Windows. While it is possible to port it to Linux or replace it, a single city (regardless how big) does not have the "weight" to push this through.
Doubly so if there is no interop mandate or backend standard mandate. The Munich project could succeed if it was in one of the Benelux or Scandinavian countries which introduced mandates on open specs for all of government held data. Germany also mulled this one, but did not follow through. Hence the result.
Last, but not least, the one too many Linux desktop revolutions combined with one too many strategy turns by SuSe nailed the final nail in the coffin of this project.
Other news outlets are reporting that Uber are planning on taking this all the way to the Supreme Court.
It will not change a thing.
What is a real pity that this will not result HMRC getting a backdated NI bill from them back to 2nd of July 2012. Any other company would have had to pay exactly this with HMRC interest rates. This is not because the NI and the tax are not due, it is because HMRC will most likely not pursue them the same way they would pursue a small taxi company or your corner mom and pop shop.
How far down
A couple of millimetres.
The real issue for Uber is not the minimum wage and not the holiday entitlement. The real issue is that it will either have to foot the NI bill for all of its employees or force all of them to register as LTDs and operate proper accounting (and once again - pay NI and taxes). Which does not get Uber very far because if they work predominantly with Uber, IR35 strikes again and Uber still has to pay NI and income tax at source.
It is the skimping on this which makes Uber "competitive". The moment it has to start paying ALL applicable taxes it stops being competitive. The cost will be the same or worse than a well run cab/private hire company.
Then there's the serious explosives, like RDX or PETN.
Making RDX is significantly easier than making STABLE smokeless gunpowder (aka nitrocellulose), TNT or nytroglicerine. On the subject of smokeless gunpowder stability read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_battleship_Libert%C3%A9
How many western countries currently have the death penalty for apostasy or homosexuality or adultery?
You would be surprised by how many people in western countries would like to introduce these. I suggest a re-educational visit to Utah or rural Poland to expand your cultural horizons.
Where hackers haven't directly influenced polls, they've undermined our faith in democracy
I find the idea of "faith in democracy" and the implicit "we have not undermined what they have democratically elected" quite entertaining.
60+ cases in Latin America in this century alone. Post WW2 Iran, Post fall of the wall Eastern Europe (something I have observed first hand from very close), you name it. In most cases replacing democratically elected governments with dictatorships and cleptocracies. This is in addition to replacing "their" dictatorships and cleptocracies with "ours" of course - these probably contribute 60 more (at least) in the second half of the 20th century alone.
We have no moral ground to bitch about "them" influencing public opinion. If you cannot take the heat get out of the kitchen.
it might not have been readily apparent why the shape was how it was.
Gawd can people stop repeating this pathological nationalistic drivel which has no basis in engineering and actual aviation history.
The "subtle" form of the Concorde wing: It was tested by Tupolev including going WAY BEYOND that and chronologically EARLIER than that. The prototype is still sitting in a hangar somewhere and pictures are available. It flew several years before the "final form" of the Concorde wing took to the air. The name in Russian is "оживальное крыло" and it was something both sides of the Iron curtain experimented extensively on during the rather short period when 2M+ bombers seemed like a good idea. The claim that it is exclusive to Concorde (which sports only a minimal variant of this design) is a fairy tale - there are Mig, Boeing, etc prototypes flown with that design long before that.
I cannot be arsed to look for a better pic, this is just fishing for 5 seconds of google images specifically for Tu-144: http://www.razlib.ru/tehnicheskie_nauki/sverhzvukovye_samolety/pic_310.jpg
Tupolev dropped it exactly because he got significantly lower cost to manufacture, similar hypersonic performance and better low speed performance with the canards. End of the day it is an engineering problem. If something can be built with the same or better final result using a significantly simpler and lower cost to manufacture that is what should be done.
As far as the question of "who stole from whom" - they both stole from XB-70. Massively.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
