Posts by Vic

Re: Mark 85 What? No pitot covers?

<blockqoute>This led to many accidents, a common one being the captain touching the pitot tube. How would that harm him? They were electrically heated to avoid icing up in flight

</blockqoute>

Cobblers.

All the pitot tubes I've used are electrically heated. There's a switch to turn the heater on. I use it on the second walk-round because it drains the battery.

It's part of the check to grab the pitot and check the heater is working. Some days, it's hard to tell if it is...

Vic.

> I wonder if that number is all that bad

Yeah, it is.

Vic.

Scrappies need to get with the plan and not pay up for scrap without a history.

That'll be the Scrap Metal Dealers Act 2013, then.

Vic.

> Actually, it was 1605.

Gone tea-time?

And I thought I was a late starter...

Vic.

Re: Goto

> ALWAYS add braces around blocks of code

They haven't got you writing python yet, then?

Vic.

Re: Administrating a domain is a black art...

> Can't burn all of them

I believe the pertinent phrase is "Every Little Helps"...

Vic.

Re: Reliant Robin?

> yes it bloody hurt when you slid off that long slippery seat.

Taught you to look out for potholes, though, with that tiny front wheel...

Vic.

Re: @NumptyScrub When Big Brother Is After You

> It's on again at 20:00 this evening, and I'll probably watch it now

Best not to.

It is an exceedingly disappointing attempt to bridge the brand over to another, younger actor...

Vic.

Re: That's not actually possible...

> Show me a .gov.uk site with the full text of the "British Constitution" that you claim exists, or you have FAILED

The UK not having a single written constitution, that's clearly an impossible task. But if you take a look at this judiciary.gov.uk page, you'll see the following text :-

The United Kingdom, famously and almost uniquely, does not have a constitution that is contained in a written constitutional instrument. Its constitution is to be found in the statutes passed by Parliament and in the common law, the law developed over the centuries in the decisions of the courts.

So it's clear from the above that the UK *does* have a constitution - just not a single docuemt we can call "the constitution document".

HTH

Vic.

Re: >"fake up a bitmapped screen by making use of a character-based display"

> An idea they undoubtedly got from the VIC-20, where it had been SOP for a couple of years.

It predates that; I had it on a UK101...

Vic.

Re: Really?

> Some elements of Abrams Trek seem more sophisticated and thought out

...And then he covers the whole lot in shitloads of lens flare :-(

Vic.

Re: What?

Raise a complaint with the ICO.

Clearly the company are completely inept and need a good thrashing.

*chortle*

Vic.

Re: To use or not to use computers, that is the question

Nowadays: Car's msfiring. It's a coil pack. No you have to buy the whole bank. No, you can't get to it without stripping the whole intake off. That's 6 hours labour please.

If only it were that simple...

It's a Mass Air Flow sensor. OK, so that didn't fix it, it's a coolant temperature sensor.

No joy? OK, it's a lambda sensor.

Still not running? Must be the throttle body. Or the ECU.

Yes, a main VW dealer did try all that on, and offer £1000 trade-in for the car against a new model on the grounds that, at 8 years old, it was at the end of its life.

I fixed the car. Took me half an hour. It was an interconnect fault, as you'd expect with symptoms like that. But VW still charged my missus nearly a grand for the work they did, and were quoting £2.5K for what they wanted to do...

Vic.

Re: Oh really?

> Knowing a subject doesn't mean you are capable of teaching it.

I once had a week's skiing lessons with a member of the Italian Olympic ski team.

She is undoubtedly the best skier I've ever had the privilege to ski with.

But she was a totally useless teacher. She just didn't get that making us stand still in the cold for 5mins meant the single corner we then made wasn't going to be superb...

Vic.

Re: PFY

> ?

PFY

HTH, HAND, etc.

Vic.

Re: Thanks for the great idea JMJ!

But he can dodge your tax by switching to a Theremin - not a line of software inside!

Irrelevant. He's demanding that phone users pay a levy when they've got no music in their phones, so we should insist that professional musicians should pay a levy for the software in some instruments, without which said instruments would be unusable.

That many instruments contain no such software makes no difference, if we use Jarre's logic[1].

Vic.

[1] Ha!

Re: Patently Insane Insanity

> what is the collective for a pack of lawyers ?

A "mendacium" ?

Vic.

Re: pip pip pip pip...

We had original Prestel terminals at college. They were just BBC Micro's in a box with different ROMs.

They weren't original Prestel terminals, then. Prestel predates the BBC micro...

We were playing with it in the '70s. The potential was immediately obvious - but the product was doomed to failure on account of BT's pricing.

France did viewdata rather better with its Minitel system - it was affordable for yer average types. It is rumoured that Minitel's success was one of the main reasons for slow Internet uptake in the country...

Vic.

> You might be able to use the ANPR box in conjunction with a pressure strip embedded in the road

Such pressure hoses are used for measuring vehicle weight - but IME, this is purely for census gathering, not enforcement of any kind...

Vic.

Re: Well, I figured that the canuck sigint spooks would get outed before too long

> I change my IMEI weekly

Probably not good advice, as it's frequently illegal to do so.

US Law governing IMEI change

UK Law governing IMEI change

There will doubtless be similar laws in other jurisdictions, but someone else can look those up.

Vic.

Re: Integration

>> I really don't think I'd have had much trouble kicking it in with both feet.

> Try it, then come and tell us.

Older cars with a rubber sealing strip aren't so bad - you put your feet in the corner of the screen and push against the seat, and the glass pops out.

Newer cars with bonded screens - i.e. pretty much everything on the road at the moment - will likely be very much harder...

Vic.

Re: Once upon a time....

> If the handle wire gets pulled during the accident (distinct possibility

Like I said, you've never worked in the automotive industry, have you?

> http://www.nhtsa.gov/cars/rules/rulings/DoorLocks/DoorLocks_NPRM.html

This basically disagrees with your premise. For example, from the (small) section on Door Locks :-

"We are proposing to retain the existing requirements for door locks largely as is"

"All exterior door locks must be capable of being unlocked from the interior of the vehicle"

If you go through the article, you'll notice that it pertains to specifications for the "door latch". This si what I previously referred to as a "door catch" - feel free to substitute the US term for mine fi you like.

What you should note, however, is that the proposal is to ensure the correct operation of door latches/catches - *not* door locks. Your "supporting" material is arguing with you...

Vic.

> ukip seems to be the right way to go

UKIP is very much the wrong way to go.

It just might be better than all the others...

Vic.

Re: Poles do and Die

> Plenty of Poles decorated for their service in RAF

The BNP had an advert made up a few years with a Spitfire in the background to try to the whole "national pride" thing.

They picked an image of a squadron that was staffed entirely of Polish pilots...

Laugh? I nearly paid my Poll Tax.

Vic.

Re: Lost the plot

> CMOS silicon is very tolerant of high temperatures.

Yeah, after a fashion...

The problem of high Tj isn't instant catastrophic failure, it's a reduction in device longevity; the chip simply doesn't last as long as it otherwise would.

In some markets, that makes no difference - devices are obsoleted long before they fail. Other markets would simply not accept that sort of lifespan...

Vic.

Re: @bazza I shouldn't laugh, but...

> I've never seen the things I buy advertised on Google.

If I'm not using AdBlock or similar, I *always* see the things I buy advertisied on Google.

*After* I've bought them.

I cannot be alone in this...

Vic.

Re: The ISP is to blame not the sender

> In SPF there are two flags ~all or -all

There's also ?all, meaning "everything else should be treated as if we hadn't said anything at all". There's also "+all", which is there for orthogonality, but entirely harmful in practice[1].

> it was highly reasonable of us to adhere to their SPF records

Yes. If the domain owner says "this is forged", it's correct to believe it be forged...

Vic.

Re: What's the problem? Linux cloned Unix, Android cloned Java.

> If Paterson just copied the CP/M API - and didn't copied CP/M code

The story is that QDOS was a copy of far more than just the API, it was a simple rip of the codebase.

It's many years since I've seen anything approaching evidence, though. It looked quite compelling at the time, but I wasn't interested enough to save it away, nor even to check too carefully.

Vic.

Re: Okay so in the event that the license goes then..

> The BBC owns lots of content the UK license pay shelled out for

Very little modern stuff, actually.

Most programnmes are now produced by independent companies, with some rights sold to the BBC. That means the coprights generally don't belong to the BBC, so what they can do is somewhat limited...

Vic.

Re: >sit too far from their screens to benefit from HD

> I don't know if the problem is the frame rate, or the resolution

Neither.

For most people, it's simply the compression artefacts - text is all high-frequency information, and those values just get quantised out of the DCT.

In the UK - I don't know if it happens elsewhere as well - they've developed this *really* annoying habit of shrinking the credits to about a quarter of the screen so they can shjow an advert for another programme. And voice over as well.

Vic.

Re: Finally he makes sense

> pretty damned obvious the classic theory on black holes was wrong

All theories are wrong - if they weren't we'd know everything.

The point of each of the surviving theories is that they each model reality more closely than what went before...

Vic.

Re: Good...

> Apple are sitting on a vast cash pile

Why does that make me think of Smaug? :-)

Vic.