Posts by Alan Brown

Re: Really?

"A lift fan that rotates its thrust through 90 degrees? "

There's a gearbox on it which does that....

Re: Stupid... Just stupid...

"The Space Shuttle--...-- had the capability of automatic landings, "

Except for the step of lowering the landing gear.

Yes, really.

Re: Stupid... Just stupid...

"And those smarty-pants Soviets really made good use of that engineering brilliance, huh?"

Actually, they did. The decided the design was so utterly dangerous that they refused to man-rate it.

Re: What good does this fine do?

"Oh wow, the cops are fined 80,000 pounds, as if this will actually affect them..."

It would if the law contained provisions for personal liability.

Re: Pedantry

"On first reading 3.6.3 I thought the same - however, now read section 5, then go back to 3.6.3, and you'll pick up on something you may have missed the first time."

Which is that RFCs (Particularly older RFCs) are generally written in badly formed american colloquial english, with an assumption that the reader is already familiar with the subject in question and easy access to the RFC author for clarification (because they're just down the hall)

The number of ambiguous phrases in RFCs is a constant source of amusement and annoyance. I've been told of non-native english speakers _screaming_ in RFC authors faces that their interpretation of the RFC is perfectly valid, despite it being the polar opposite of that the authors intended.

Very few RFCs are actually standards - the ones that are, are called STD{XX} - and even those ones are badly written.

Re: Outlook Needs Some Options

" an option to always show the BCC line"

That assumes that users KNOW what "Bcc" means - in my experience most of them don't even understand "CC" until it's explained slowly, using small words

Re: "before the force recalled the mail"

"Has that ever been known to work when the email gets sent outside the organisation."

It usually doesn't work INSIDE the organisation. I can point to at leats a half dozen ways of ensuring that attempting it not only wont work but will highlight the message.

Re: Good decision

"However did this have to get to the Supreme Court?"

IP owners would have forced it up high even if lower courts had been upholding BT's position.

Law is mostly about who has deeper pockets and can afford to take it to court or keep it in court.

Re: Don't need your face mate, just the IMEI of your phone...

"clubs lately where they demand to have your ID and scan it"

on the face of it that would be a GDPR breach.

It'd be even more fun to let them scan it and then hit them with a subject access request.

The ICO will probably have words to say about such behaviour if their attention is drawn to it.

"The cameras will be mysteriously malfunctioning that day."

Whilst this might be acceptable in the USA, in the UK a judge will throw the case out.

Re: Good Luck

"But that costs money!"

Given the scale of the surveillance and storing the resulting data, it's probably cheaper than back door surveillance.

On the other hand you can't channel payments to most favoured suppliers and in return be treated to expensive sales trips to exotic places.

"while we have a housing crisis that has priced a generation out of owning their own homes, and reduced them to nothing more than life long serfs."

If you think that immigration has had more than about 2% influence on that then you're deluded.

The size of the average UK household has gone from 5-6 in the 1950s down to 1-2 now.

That's a tripling of requirements without even needing a population increase and whilst the government knew this was coming in the 1970s when all the pensioner flats it built were immediately occupied by DINKIES, it collectively stuck its fingers in its ears and chanted "neh neh neh, can't hear you" when faced with mounting evidence of lack of housing and accelerating north-south internal urban drift (the internal population movement from north to south is a hell of a lot larger than any foriegn migration and there's housing going effectively for free in many areas up north as a result)

Sucessive governments have been deliberately selling off housing to buy votes and profit from forced sales when the buyers found they couldn't cope, or flat out inertia whilst in the meantime rampant NIMBYism has prevented sorely needed expansions taking place. The Greenbelt isn't a cities' green lung, it's a way for bankers to put a moat between themselves and the hoi-polloi.

"The EU will be harder hit than the UK since we made 90% of the hardware and software. "

Uh huh. Which is why the makers and coders have been bought up or recruited off to Europe.

The UK is claiming ownership of something which is mostly being done by private outfits, under contract and the terms are no different to losing your deposit if you walk away from a house sale.

Re: Yet another Remoaner circle-jerk on El Reg.

"What do we offer them? banking and insurance, and associated services. Hardly anything that they cannot replicate.. and they can take it away from us with things like Tolbin tax."

They don't need to replicate it and they don't need to impose taxes either.

In case noone's noticed, the City has been preparing itself to shuffle off to the mainland since the referendum. In the sake way that there are rules saying "No non-EU members get access to PRS", there are also requirements for financial institutions handing european money to be within the EU.

The song and dance about Gallileo is a distraction from things with far greater economic impact that are going on.

Re: Someone remind me

"The UK also pushed very hard for the rules that explicitly exclude non-EU countries from building any part of Galileo."

It did, on behalf of the USA, in order to remove China from the consortium and prevent them getting access to high-accuracy positioning data.

The Chinese response was to dust off Beidou and update it. With an economy larger than the USA and not spending silly money on its military, China can afford to do such things (China's spending less on its _intrastructire_ projects such as high speed rail) than the US military budget and unlike military spending, infrastructure spending has tangible results at the end of the day.

Re: In perspective, Galileo isn't important

"I rather thought 1metre positioning was needed if you are aiming a cruise missile at Saddams underground bunker. "

Navstar GPS has been adequate for that for some time.

You need far better accuracy than 1 metre if you're going to have self-driving cars trundling around.

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

"But, wait, can you see Dacre and Rees-Mogg accepting that?"

Dacre and Rees-Mogg are rubbing their hands in glee at the thought of being able to throw out the inconveniences of things like the European Declaration of human rights (penned by British and American lawyers and not part of the EU's purview anyway)

The factor that "once out, going back in will involve all those special deals that we currently have won't be on the table anymore"hasn't sprung to mind, nor that in order to trade with the EU we're going to have to abide by their rules anyway.

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

"We the British do abide by the rules, and we are punished for it."

Including the rule about "Non-EU members are NOT allowed access to the military PRS signal"

Re: EU Are Being Vindictive

"Basically we have decided to get divorced, and now we are complaining that our ex would not give us the keys to the house in the beach."

And of course, we came to the marriage pretty abjectly penniless in the first place and have been an abusive partner the entire time, even when the partner was patching up our sick economy.

Re: If not doing something because it was "inconvenient" was the ciriteria for Brexit..

"The real reason is that the UK will no longer get juicy contracts to work on the thing. "

Yup and that's due to rules that the UK rammed through on behalf of the USA to keep China out of Gallileo.

You're right about Gallileo contracts being the tip of the iceberg. A _LOT_ of contracts have been ripped up and that started with any potential/under negotiation ones being ripped up the morning after the referendum.

karma is such a bitch.

Re: If not doing something because it was "inconvenient" was the ciriteria for Brexit..

"why bother making such a song and dance about being denied access in the first place?"

For the same reason that tthe EU is collectively heaving a sigh of relief that Britain's no longer involved: We can't go leaking sensitive shit to the USA anymore and as such our usefulness is majorly limited.

What? You thought the special relationship was because they liked us? You should look up Thomas Jefferson's speech where he promised to destroy the UK as an economic power - something the USA effectively did with lend-lease as the coup-de-grace.

The EU stopped thinking about the USA as a close ally a while back. Threatening to blow Gallileo satellites out of orbit if they didn't shut down when the US demanded it underscored that point, as did the screaming temper tantrums that forced China out of the consortium and got the UK to force through the "No non-EU members" rule as a proxy troll to keep them out.

If you think those premature maser failures weren't industrial sabotage then you should think again.

Re: Well

"Did you know that according to the EU (suggested by the French, could it have been anybody else) snails are classed as fish! "

They're mollusks, as are most shellfish(*) and share the same green blood There's a method in that madness.

(*) Crustaceans aren't shellfish.

Re: Well @Anon Coward

"The wonderful thing is that their words aren't readily forgotten, especially when we have the internet and archived articles to go back to."

Until about ten years ago that wasn't the case, in terms of how many people knew how to find that information and also because "reputation management companies" were starting to bury it.

Thankfully the search engines have developed a resistance to that kind of manipulation, just as they developed resistances to other forms of manipulation.

Politicians (and most civil servants) haven't caught on yet that they can't rely on whatever they said being forgotten 6 weeks later. Everyone is a journalist now and everyone is able to pull up archived data rather than just a few determined loonies.

Re: Not an "autopilot"

"It was too easy to lose concentration when the CC was doing the work - not a good idea on a 70 MPH motorway."

There's plenty going on around you. ACC is great inasmuch as you don't have to worry about having to regulate your speed, but that simply gives you more time to look out for other drivers hellbent on killing everyone around them.

Then again if you're losing concentration with CC on, you ARE one of those drivers. Don't touch the radio.

Re: Not an "autopilot"

> It's about time they banned these driver "aids".

The USA's NTSB has assessed the aids as reducing the crash rate in Teslas by at least 40% over non-assisted vehicles.

Most people regard driving as a chore and the same people letting themselves be killed by adaptove cruise controls are even more likely to be killing themselves or those around them if they were 100% in manual control.

Back in the 1980s the most common causes of fatal crashes was "Driver spent so much time fiddling with the radio and not looking at the road that vehicle crossed centreline into oncoming traffic/left road and hit a tree". Even a radio isn't necessary. For one crash I'm aware of (car drove under an 18-wheeler on a dead straight road) the driver's hand was still gripping the pack of sandwiches in the bag on the passenger seat when they cut her body out of the vehicle.

Re: Lack of LIDAR

"Tesla cheaped out by not including a LIDAR"

Which is funny, because my 15yo Nissan has one in its ACC.

Re: After the last childish outburst...

"The problem here is that it seems people treat them as though they are. Like the bell end in the UK a few weeks ago who was filmed climbing into the passenger seat of his car with the autopilot engaged. "

Climbing into the back or passenger seat has been a "thing" for quite a while - but it wouldn't be hard to prevent either. The cars have weight switches in the seats and can tell when someone's pulling this shit but it takes someone to program the things to recognise "naughty driver" activities.

Re: After the last childish outburst...

"Air France 447 flew into the Atlantic precisely because the autopilot bombed out and the human crew had lost all spatial awareness and weren't in a position to take effective control... seems familiar."

It was worse than that. the pilots were so disoriented that _they_ flew the aircraft into the deck in their blind panic.

If they'd let go of the sticks the aircraft would have returned to level flight. It was only an iced-up pitot (one of 3). They were so busy "trying to regain control" and fighting with each other that they didn't spend any time actually assessing the situation. You may as well have had Minions in the front seats.

Re: How in it done in Europe

"Dutch Rijkswaterstaat designed sophisticated crash cushions called RIMOBs in the 1980s."

Plastic 44 gallon barrels full of water (water attenuators) are much cheaper and just as effective for the most part. They're don't require complex engineering works to setup and can be replaced in minutes when someone does drive into them.

Fitch barriers (same principle but using sand) are equally effective and only slightly more expensive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_attenuator and http://www.plasticjersey.com/ (water filled plastic jerseys are attenutaors too. Their concrete brethren are not.)

Even if more permanent barriers are deployed/destroyed, these kinds of attenuators are often dropped in temporarily whilst replacement works are arranged. The youtube video of how dangerous the leadup to that gore is, has other shock value in that there's no kind of attenuator at all - not having one and not physically coning off the gore would be a criminal matter in a lot of countries.

Re: Aircraft autopilot ... terrain-following radar to avoid collisions.

"The Sukhoi scandal:"

The captain of the jet was Alexander Yablontsev (57), a former Russian test pilot;

Human factors to the fore again - and yet another example of why ex-military fliers are a poor choice for civil transportation. They tend to press-on regardless when anyone sensible and cautious would have diverted. Being able to safely land 95% of the time is one thing but cleanup after the last 5% is problematic and unlike a military aircraft the people sitting in the back didn't sign on for that risk.

Re: OlaM

"For them, it seems, autopilot is not the right word"

It has nothing to do with age.

_MOST_ non aviators/seamen think that an autopilot is some magical device that can handle everything thrown at it.

"BUT, it won't do so quietly."

The autopilot will.

"Trust me, you'll have all sorts of alarms and flashing lights going off in the cockpit and extremely loud voices telling you to "PULL UP. PULL UP"."

None of those are connected to the autopilot, nor will they pull up for you.

The Germanwings aircraft that crashed into a french mountain a few years back had been programmed to do it by the suicidal pilot. It didn't try to avoid the obstacle, all it did was fly in the direction and height it was told to go at.