* Posts by Alan Brown

15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008

Iconic Land Rover Defender may make a comeback by 2019

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Needling me?

> What the hell is wrong with once in a while admitting that a British product was and is actually the best there is?

Nothing at all, when it's true. The harsh reality is that "Made in Britain" became a warning label for most countries by the 1970s and stayed that way until the late 1990s.

The reason that Toyota wiped the floor with the Landcruiser was because it was reliable, had a chassis that didn't break and it went places that Landrovers couldn't - contrary to the jibe about 1940s technology, for many years Landcruiser engines were licensed, metricated Chevrolet ones. The landcruiser 4.0 right up to the mid 1980s was a metric version of the Blueflame engine dating from the late 1930s.

I spent many years working for an outfit where the job required spending lots of time in (and driving to the top of) New Zealand's many mountains. Landrovers were the least reliable vehicles, Landcruisers the most. Landrovers had toolkits because they needed to. You really don't want to be stuck 4000 feet up a ridge with a cold front rolling in carrying 4 feet of snow and 100mph winds. Landcruisers had them "just in case" and most of the time they'd never been opened in 10 years.

The final nail in the coffin was simple TCO - Landies cost twice as much to run as Landcruisers when all the costs of breakdowns, servicing, etc were taken into account.

Trying to production-line Defenders will be difficult. Even up to the very last they were almost entirely hand-assembled, unlike Landrover's other lines.

Watt the f... Dim smart meters caught simply making up readings

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Meter accuracy

It's the latter. The test is only performed with resistive or reactive loads, not complex ones.

Alan Brown Silver badge

For the troll:

Geologically, CO2 spikes go hand-in-hand with Oceanic Anoxic Events, usually seeing a drop of around 50% in atmospheric oxygen levels each time it happens (not really surprising as about half our breathable oxygen comes from the oceans)

Now figure out the equivalent pressure altitude for 11% oxygen. This is a scenario you may want to avoid, unless you want your descendants to be oxygen-starvation damaged apes. We are _very_ susceptable to oxygen changes and only 2 ethnic groups have genetic adaptions to high altitudes in a way that doesn't result in significantly shortened lifespans.

. (But it may already be too late as the deepwater anoxic zones are spreading.)

Alan Brown Silver badge

1: My condensing Combi boiler's been in service for 13 years and never missed a beat - not even a clogged heat exchanger and I live in a high lime area (*). Just because some uk makers *ahem*potterton*ahem produced steaming piles of dingo kidneys doesn't mean they all did.

2: The reason for pushing Combis isn't efficiency. It's NOX. Over half the NOX measured in urban areas is from boiler systems, not cars - and the worst offenders are quite old (often high CO-emitting flow through systems). As of 2003, there are NOX limits for boilers which mean that pretty much only combi boilers will comply.

(*) No, I don't have any of the magic anti-liming thingies. They're almost all snake oil except for the ion exchange ones.

The secret is _design_. Mains water isn't fed through the flame unit heat exchanger. Water from the heating loop is: and when a tap is turned on, the loop is diverted to a secondary water-water heat exchanger to give hot water. As the mains water is never heated up past 70C, lime wont change its chemical structure and as a result you only have to deal with the same rates of formation seen on cold lines. The same maker (Bosch) also make sure their circuits aren't static sensitive or touchy about power cleanliness and from the look of it every board has a good layer of conformal coating too.

It's pretty clear that Potterton and friends inherited the same slap-dash designers that made British Leyland such a staggering world success.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Well there is a simple answer to all of this

Yes but the supply charge is steep.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Sheesh...

I expected much better from the Register. The salient points from the article that got cribbed from were completely missed.

1: Most of the meters tested WEREN'T smart meters (but the ones that were, were just as inaccurate

2: the 2 under-reporting meters were the only ones using Hall Effect sensors.

3: All the rest overreported

4: The grossly overreporting ones used Rogowski coils

5: ALL the meters were accurate with purely resistive or reactive loads (capacitance or inductance)

6: Complex loads are the problem:

The problem arises when switchmode PSUs comprise most of the load - their spiky current draw (the input side is rectified to DC and fed through into a storage capacitor - current is only drawn when the rectified DC voltage exceeds the capacitor's voltage, leading to current usually only being drawn through the top 10-15% of the voltage curve.

The meters interpret this as a _much_ bigger equivalent resistive load

These kinds of current draws are a bigger and bigger problem on grids. They strain distribution transformers (current capacity (ie VA) needs to be larger for any given wattage rating) and frequently cause high currents to flow in the neutral line in 3-phase systems (ie, your street main) and in some cases have caused DC offsets to earth, which _really_ messes up transformers.

Whilst there have been rules about eliminating this kind of current draw on PCs and other such PSUs for years (mainly because of the problems caused in office buildings by lots of the things - they can trip out ELCBs as one example of nuisance value), smaller domestic kit hasn't been required to have correction circuitry built in - as the majority of domestic load these days is lighting, the tests were done using CFL and LED lamps as the loads to see how accurate the meters were under such conditions. Switchmode PSUs are in everything these days, so it's quite possible the errors are significant in £££ terms (having it indicate you drew 5kWh in lighting over a month isn't a big error on 1kWh given the cost per kWh)

On the other hand (and not mentioned in the original article) the EU is harmonising rules on all switchmode PSUs requiring their current draw is more-or-less in phase and non-complex, so this problem might go away soon anyway.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Errrmmm....

It doesn't matter, it's the same on single phase meters.

And it's not JUST smart meters. It's any meter using an electronic pickup circuit of the type mentioned, and some of those models are 20+ years old.

The 2 meters which under reported were the only 2 meters using Hall Effect sensors

You're Donald Trump's sysadmin. You've got data leaks coming out the *ss. What to do

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Hackers who break security are called "Crackers" and other hackers view such individuals as one would view naval lint!"

There's another layer down on the hierarchy: Script Kiddies. Crackers write attack scripts. Script kiddies use them on a click-n-drool basis with no real understanding of what they're doing - and the primary motivation being "for the lulz"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Simple enough

I'm concerned that the people pulling the strings are trying to make the Gilded Shitgoblin so pathologically unacceptable that when they do kick him out the population will heave sigh of relief and accept anyone else into the position even if merely "unacceptable" - eg Pence.

It's a bit like when you have a bunch of drunken abusive relatives and one of them is so bad that even THEY can't stand him and remove him from the family fathering. You still have a bunch of drunken abusive relatives to deal with.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Bad Actors

"the problem is bad actors who are doing what they know to be illegal."

And leakers who are making sure the world finds out.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: seriously Trevor

"The more high energy photons you're exposed to, the greater the chances you'll develop a cancer."

In practical terms, gamma radiation is so high energy that it tends to kill cells outright, trigger apoptosis or cause their neighbours to kill them.

ditto Alpha and Beta radiation. You have to be exposed to staggeringly large amounts of non-lethal ionising radiation before it starts increasing cancer risks - and the primary mode seems to be killing off enough cells that the immune system gets compromised, so that normal mutations aren't spotted and killed.

If you really want to give someone cancer, give them a beryllium sandwich.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: seriously Trevor

> You're talking about "irrelevantly increased background radiation" for the overwhelming majority of the world and "mild-to-irrelevant increased cancer risk" to a few specific areas in Japan proper. Areas that have been fenced off.

Most of those fenced off areas haven't actually had any change in their radiation levels.

The japanese govt slashed allowable radiation levels by 90% in the days following Fukushima, making many areas which weren't anywhere near Fukushima "Dangerously radioactive" - by Japanese standards we'd need to evacuate the Yorkshire dales and Helsinki (then again, radioactive zombies might explain the likes of Nora Batty along with Finnish Heavy Metal bands.)

Looking objectively at Three Mile Island (which is now being cleaned up and worth a few stories - TREVOR!!!), Fukushima, Snake River and Chernoybl, it's pretty clear that whilst they could be better, safety systems are actually pretty good - and if molten salt fuelled ones get running they'll be even safer because they can't have radioactive steam explosions, contaminated water leaking out or hydrogen explosions.

As for "dangerously high levels of radioactivity at Fukushima" - yes there are - Inside the containment vessel, which is doing exactly what it's designed to do and keeping the hot stuff from getting out.

Instead of poking that bear with waldos which can't take the radioactivity - and thus become more nuisance scrap metal getting in the way when cleanup gets underway - it's better to just make sure that groundwater is kept out of the way and leave it alone for a couple of decades - the same kind of meltdown happened at TMI and it's now safe enough to take apart.

There were a dozen other plants along the same coastline which got hit by the same earthquake and same tsunami. They all came through just fine. Yes, safety deficiencies were found at most of them and restarting has been delayed until those are fixed, but the point about safety on nuclear sites is that there are so many layers of safety you have to have a pretty spectacularly bad series of cockups to actually have a meltdown (Fukushima was savable. Tepco management caused the meltdown. It would have been worse if the chief engineer onsite hadn't managed to grow a backbone, tell them to go fuck themselves and get on with saving the day.)

Quite frankly, the Japanese plant which worries me is Monju - and that's been effectively out of action for nearly two decades. What you can do with 50-500 tons of supposedly "not radioactive" sodium metal in the basement is an interesting question (What bozo thought liquid sodium was a great coolant? Hello? Oxygen+hot sodium == boom!) and isn't helped by the japanese government's ongoing refusal to be open about what's there, how much is there and what state it's in.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: seriously Trevor

"It decays via beta emission into Barium 137(m) which pukes out a gamma ray on its way to ground state. The Barium is what's bad for your health."

Yup and there's good evidence that all that polonium fizzing away in a smoker's lungs(*) doesn't do diddly squat through radioactive damage and it's when it breaks down to barium or beryllium on the way to ground state that it causes trouble. Beryllium is particularly bad news.

(*) Polonium? Yup. It collects on the fur on tobacco leaves and tobacco companies have been trying to figure out a way to get rid of it for 50 years - so far, no sucess. The EPA wrote it up a while back: https://www3.epa.gov/radtown/tobacco.html

Obfacts of the day:

- A pack-a-day for 20 years smoker's lungs are seriously radioactive - so much so that they count in the top 5 "most radioactive places on earth" and would be treated as high level radioactive waste if dumped on the grounds of a nuclear power plant.

- So is a truckload of bananas (not not as radioactive as the lungs) and they've been known to set off radiological detectors tuned for bombs or bomb materials at ports.

- The cancer rates in Hiroshima and Nagasaki spiked for a couple of years after the bombs (mostly due to gamma-burst radiation exposure damaging immune systems and leaving exposed people slightly more vulnerable to all diseases for a few years) and since then have been about 0.25% higher than normal "background" rates in Japan.

- Coal plants emit more radioactive materials around the planet each year than several Chernobyl class events.

- If they were subject to the same radioactive emissions limits as nuclear plants, every coal power station on the planet would be shut down tomorrow.

- Enhanced thyroid screening around Chernoybl turned up a vastly increased tumour rate - but so did enhanced thyroid screening in Korea with no nuclear events in sight. The funny thing is when you go looking for something you didn't previously check for, you'll find it. Correlation is not Causality. (Look that statement up)

- It's worth looking into the size of the plumes from USA continental atmospheric nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s (Hint, they weren't small, they went over populated areas and yet noone was evacuated)

On the other hand:

- Since the start of the industrial revolution, burning coal has been the prime driver of the world oceanic mercury level more than doubling - and I'm more concerned about mercury poisoning from my tuna than about radioactives, thankyouverymuch. Mecuric compounds sequestered in fish fats pass up the food chain and keep on poisoning over a span of centuries. Radioactives break down.

- You might like to look up "Minamata bay" sometime.

- In the same period, ocean acidity has increased by 30% and anoxic deadspots have been spreading. More recently, measurements of dissolved oxygen levels have been decreasing slightly. You might want to look up "anoxic oceanic event" and "Leptav sea methane" then consider what happens if 2-5Gigatons of carbon pops up into the atmosphere or hydrosphere from all that Methane Clathrate warming up (and then there's the tsunamis - look up "Storegga Slide" sometime)

- Cancer rates downwind of coal-fired power stations are _significantly_(as in, more than 10%) higher than background levels

- The _2_ largest environmental disasters in the USA so far in the 21st century were coal power plant ash slurry pond dam breaches (Deepwater Horizon isn't even 3rd) and there are around 5000 more of them that the EPA is aware of and worried about.

So yes, let's worry about a small amount of radioactive material which can be detected from a distance and ignore the elephant in the room of the possibility of atmospheric oxygen levels dropping to 15% (equivalent to about 7000 foot altitude) or possibly as low as 11% (about the same as 11-14,000 foot altitude(**). Bugger sea level changes, that's a side show. Once you're below 11%, oxygen starts having major trouble crossing into the bloodstream.

(**) Human physiology reacts to reduced oxygen levels by thickening the blood, leading to congestive heart failure (it happens sooner or later, sooner is also known as altitude sickness, later is a shortened lifespan and sluggish mental state). There are only 2 ethnic groups which have adapted to continuous life at high altitudes without ill-effects and unless you're of Tibetan or Nepalese descent you're not one of them.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: seriously Trevor

"You don't seem to understand which country gave birth to the series that image is from, nor how hugely popular it was."

The popularity extending to the lady being portrayed in the image, who by all accounts thought it was hilarious.

It's a very unhealthy sign when a nation can't take having fun poked at its establishment and leadership and an even unhealthier one when the leaders themselves can hand out abuse but can't stand to be on the receiving end of a few jibes.

https://t.co/NPtY1497NG

It's amazing how much the folk calling liberals "special snowflakes" can't actually take it when it's dished back. Did you lot chew on a few too many windowsills as babies?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: seriously Trevor

Trevor is perfectly correct about Fukushima.

1500 people died in the evacuation - not a single one from any kind of radiation exposure (vs exposure to radiation hysteria). Some of the more direct deaths were patients moved during critical surgery who died before they even left the building.

If the population had been left where they were, the extra radiation exposure would be equivalent to a couple of chest xrays per year - and to put that in context you get more radiation exposure from 1-2 hours flying at 20,000k feet than from a chest xray.

As for the USA, a better trope would be a troupe of flying monkeys led by a sulfur-crested gilded shitgoblin that's bigging it up in the smoke and mirrors whilst people who want you to stay distracted frantically work levers behind a few curtains (Even Bannon is only a flying monkey).

What's needed about now is a mildly homocidal teenager with a few buckets of water and a small dog that goes for ankles of lever-pullers.

Alan Brown Silver badge

In a mess that big

I'd be resigning and issuing a covermyass letter.

You do NOT want to be in the middle when the shit hits the fan and you will NOT be thanked by manglement for hauling their gonads out of a vice (They'll either blame you for causing it, or fail to appreciate how close they came to being permanent staff at the ministry of silly walks)

Conversely you can make a lot of money from cleaning it up later

RAF pilot sacked for sending Airbus Voyager into sudden dive

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Interesting

"I'm not a pilot"

And there's the rub.

Understand this: On virtually all airliners the autopilot is disconnected (with a "bong" or other annunciator) the moment any of the controls is touched.

This has been the cause of a couple of crashes - pilot gets up to go to the can, knocks the yoke, noone heard the bong and the plane then slowly flies into the ground because everyone assumes Otto's in charge. There's a strong argument to make the noise louder or flash a light too but I'm not sure if that recommendation was ever implemented as an aviation order.

A trimmed aircraft in straight and level flight is going to keep doing doing that if nothing alters the controls for a long time - eventually slight imbalances will put it into a climb/dive/turn but that take several minutes to build up and is cumulative based on the initial imbalance.

Smart meter firm EDMI asked UK for £7m to change a single component

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Solar Panels

"I don't understand why the government isn't pushing more for micro-generation"

Because the VAST majority of installations don't pay off their installation costs before they finally break, even WITH any subsidies that might be paid to put them there.

Roof-mounted wind is a particularly nasty scam. If bearing and sail noise coupled into the building doesn't result in the things being removed quickly, you'll be lucky to get a few kWh/year on anything mounted that close to the ground. That's why the companies which were pushing them have virtually all quietly folded their tents and disappeared in the night. VAWTs were a particularly heavily pushed scam and none of the companies pushing them in the UK exist anymore, after taking large government grants and glowing media endorsements from journalists who can't be bothered doing simple math (or were paid schills)

Even for the larger windmills, government subsidies are usually far higher than direct income received (and don't forget: windmills/solar are paid at ridiculously feed-in rates with networks required to give them preference and idle their thermal stations, etc) - the 350 foot one by the M4 at reading produces less than £100k of energy but in 2011 was getting £130k of grants.

What's actually being farmed is subsidies - to the tune of 40% of the average annual domestic electricity bill being attributable to renewable subsidies, the cost of running backing capacity and the cost of overbuilding the grid and provision of peaking plant to handle wildly unpredictable sources switching in and out of the grid without warning or the ability to stop them - whilst only generating 4-6% of the annual energy production.

If you had to pay the full cost of your solar installation AND a battery bank to keep things balanced and weren't allowed to backfeed into the grid (ie, keep your overproduction in batteries and then draw on it later) you wouldn't do it, because it would cost twice as much as grid power - and that's despite the real cost of solar panels dropping by 80% in the last 2 decades and off-the-shelf efficiency going from 2%

to 10% - unfortunately their halflife point has also dropped from 12 years to 7-8 years, so you need to factor that into your caluculations.

Because of this, the same chickens are starting to come home to roost in the solar industry. All those outfits promising free electricker or lease income from panels on your roof are going titsup, but you still don't get to own the panels and if you put any of your own money into them, tough - you lost it and they belong to someone else anyway.

The amount of money that's been put into subsidising "renwables" in the UK over the last decade would have built more than a dozen Hinkley Points - each one cranking out more _reliable_ power than 1800-2200 windmills (the best capacity factor of the land-based ones installed around the UK is 24% of nameplate rating. The marine ones are slightly better - but all the big ones struggle to pay their way even with subsidies because they have a nasty habit of shredding their gearboxes - and sometimes those gearboxes catch fire. Byebye nacelle+tower and you'd better hope you're not downwind as the blades have been known to go up to 2 miles when they snap off.)

Why does _that_ matter? 2 reasons:

1: Solar and wind don't work very well in the UK's many still, cold winter nights.

2: Because carbon emissions need to be not only capped but obliterated(*), you can expect gas-boiler heating to be banned within 15 years and transportation to be pushed hard to a more-electric model.

If you comply with safety requirements and carpet the entire country in windmills and make all rooftops SolarPV, you can _just_ match existing carbon-thermal (ie, coal/oil/gas) electricity generation capacity. If you ignore the safety requirements then you might get 25% more.

The problem is that because of #2 above, demand for electrical energy in this country is going to go up by a factor of _at least_ 6, if not 8, even if it was made mandatory for all housing to have high-quality insulation and bugger the planning regulations on appearances.

So in other words, we've fucked our long-term abliity to provide power for ourselves (the interconnectors to france/netherlands/ireland only account for 5% of existing generation capacity and they cost even more to build/maintain than a nuclear power plant). As many have pointed out, the main reason for pushing "smart" meters with built-in cutoffs is most likely to have the ability be able to have rolling blackouts without cutting off "privileged" consumers.

(*) Yes, that one I put in above - the reason why carbon emissions are going to need to be stomped on.

It has nothing to do with rising sea levels, but a lot to do with the oceans.

Ocean acidity has increased by 50% since the start of the industrial revolution. Oceanic mercury has doubled. Oceanic radioactivity appears to have increased by even more than that (burning coal accounts for more radioactive emissions each year than a half-dozen chernobyls) - but none of those matter.

What _really_ matters is this: Oceanic oxygen levels are decreasing slightly everywhere as the water temperature has increased, but more importantly - anoxic zones are spreading. We get 50% of our atmosphere's oxygen from the oceans and in geology, Anoxic Oceanic Events (look 'em up) go hand in hand with CO2 spikes.

It wouldn't be hard for atmospheric O2 levels drop to 15% (the equivalent of moving to 7-8000 feet altitude) and it's not impossible to drop to 11-12% (equivalent to around 12-14000 feet) during an anoxic period.

Most mammalian physiology (and that of humans) reacts to reduced oxygen levels by thickening the blood. After a while this causes congestive heart failure (that's what altitude sickness is) and there are only 2 groups of humans who've evolved alternatives which don't cause long-term physical damage - unsurprisingly both of them are around the Himalayas - nepalese and tibetans.

Now, factor in the rising temperature, destabilising methane clathrate deposits worldwide and the good possibility that the current Leptav Sea methane plumes (1-2km wide according to reports(**)) will destabilise continental margin deposits in a way that would be on par with the Storegga Slide(***), but could be much worse if the ensuing tsunami destabilises other arctic deposits.

The way things are going there's a reasonable chance that meaningful sea level rises won't have much effect on civilisation, as 1/2 to 2/3 of the population will have died out by the time it happens. Malthus is a bastard but everyone was expecting starvation, not asphyxiation.

Someone I know postulated about 20 years ago that if we don't get off the planet, our descendants in 100k years would be oxygen-deprived apes barely surviving. I bet he wasn't thinking it might happen much sooner than that.

(**) The global methane survey found there are large sources of methane getting into the atmosphere that they couldn't account for or find the sources for. They were blaming farming as a possible source (all that recent media coverage about cow burps and rice paddies).

I work with a couple of the people involved and asked them if they'd factored the Laptev Sea in. They weren't even aware of the reports, and because all the orbiting instruments they used are only designed to pick up methane over land and aren't on polar orbits they wouldn't have picked oceanic emissions up.

... So now they're frantically trying to see if they can recalibrate the existing ones to detect methane over ice (easyish) or water (virtually impossible) to see if it's the missing source - but they still may not be able to look far enough north to confirm

(This is akin to the re-reading of NOAA satellite ozone readings in the 1970s to confirm that the Ozone Hole really existed - the processing scripts were setup to dump low or high detected levels as a calibration error and when that fudge(****) was taken out, the hole leapt into existance in the reports - in this case it's a lot harder as they weren't looking in the right direction and methane over water is extremely hard to measure)

. If the reports coming out of Russia are accurate then it would easily be the missing source.

(***) Lots of geologists and historians concentrate on the tsunami but miss the important point that the Storegga slide happened early in the knee point where the last ice age gave way to rapid warming and increased CO2 levels (ie, it's likely that the slide triggered the rapid increase in warming and northern climate changes, not that other way round).

The Storegga Slide released somewhere around 2-3 gigatonnes of methane into the atmosphere. There's at least 1 gigatonnes under the Laptev Sea and might be as much as 5 gigatonns.

Am I conspiracy theorist? Perhaps.

An alarmist? Perhaps.

I'd prefer to investigate this stuff and see if it might be plausible rather than poo-poo it offhand.

And I'd DEFINIETLY prefer that we prepare, just in case - It's better to be wrong than dead.

(****) Support staff inserting fudges into software to get results akin to what the lead scientist predicted is a common occurance. I've run into 2 cases of it where I worked in the last 15 years. In both cases the unfudged observations contained the seeds of important discoveries that allowed important theory tweaks - underscoring that the best science often starts with "Hmm, that's odd, I wasn't expecting _that_"

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The pi-zero w is less than £10 and I bet it would do all they need and more.

"Nonetheless the EU are determined to start regulating LEDs because of their power factor,"

yes, they're going to start regulating the things, but not because they're capacitive power factors.

LEDs (and just about everything with a switchmode supply too) use a bridge rectifier feeding a smoothing capactor. The result of _that_ is that no current is drawn until the line voltage exceeds the value of whatever's in the cap plus the diode drops - this leads to an _EXTREMELY_ spikey current draw around each voltage peak instead of any kind of sinusoidal current draw - and as a result when there are a lot of switchmode supplies in use in houses, significant currents start flowing in the neutral line in the street 3-phase system (along with the odd bit of DC offset) - and THAT cooks distribution transformers as well as generating a reasonable amount of RF interference.

Office buildings had the same issue years ago - the currents would trip out ELCBs and so most computer switchmode power suppliers are phase compensated and smoothed these days, but very few other consumer devices pay any attention to the issue and switchmodes have become ubiquitous in the last 20 years (Old-style isolated bobbin wall warts frequently used to dissipate more power internally than they could deliver to their load).

LED lamps tend to use series capactors to drop the voltage but all that does is offset the current spike by 90 degrees - It's still a spike. As lighting is still one of the largest continuous power draws in housing, it's a good first target for requirements about current draw conformality, but at the same time the flicker characteristic of those rectifier-fed/smoothed lamps has meant that there's been a lot of pressure on suppliers to use better circuits than a simple bridge rectifier fed from a capacitor tap and the rotten current draw characteristics from them is nowhere near as much of an issue as it was 3-4 years ago (almost all of them are far better than compact flourescents anyway. The prime reason I gave up on CFLs was because they killed the usability of any 433MHz remote controls I was using along with most infrared remotes used more than a couple of metres from the target. The Infrared and RF hash emitted from those pieces of garbage is mind-boggling)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The pi-zero w is less than £10 and I bet it would do all they need and more.

"I thought the whole idea was that you wouldn't need to read your meter"

he's talking about a non-smart meter. Mine's like this, mounted at floor level at the back of a cupboard in a corner that's difficult to get into because the cupboard door doesn't fully open due to a radiator in front of it.

I find the easiest way to get a reading is to use a smartphone camera and before that it was a pain in the arse.

The stupidest thing is that the entire installation is less than 20 years old as the building was rewired and my flat separated off into its own power feed in 1999. In other countries externally readable meters have been mandatory for new installations since the 1970s.

This entire farce is reminiscent of the inventiveness, can-do attitude and positive approach to customer service which made British Leyland such a staggering international (and then domestic) sucess story.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: The pi-zero w is less than £10 and I bet it would do all they need and more.

"until it can actually tell me when the price changes. "

And only me, and not allow changes by third parties, and for people on prepay card meters (who are being pushed these particularly hard), can guarantee that some toerag won't eat all their credit just for a wheeze.

These things are such a monumental fail that I suspect that the best way to make people see sense will be to publish attack vectors and then let the script kiddies have a field day - sooner or later they'll turn off the power of someone who needs it to stay alive.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ...nope ... @JamesPond

Interestingly, a scam emerged with them in Puerto Rico involving planting a large enough magnet on top to saturate the sensors.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: ...nope ...

I tried explaining that to someone who's supposed to be advising the vulnerable on financial matters.

Apparently I'm now a conspiracy nut who's seen one too many Matrix movies.

Two-thirds of TV Licensing prosecutions at one London court targeted women

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: TV

Thanks to deneral demographics, women are more likely to be home during the day and thanks to general society norms, less likely to whip out a camera when confronted on the doorstop (at which point the crapita droid will RUN, _not_ walk away in an effort to not be identified)

This is flat-out institutionalised bullying.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Several of crapita's brave chicken inspectors have been successfully prosecuted for aggaravated tresspass.

The whole thing is a mess - and remember that Crapita are contracted to TV licensing Limited - which is a private company wholly owned by the BBC and not beholden to such things as FOI law.

The idea of a private company being able to undertake _criminal_ prosecutions whilst acting under delegated government authority without being accountable for its activities sticks in the craw.

Prisoners' 'innovative' anti-IMSI catcher defence was ... er, tinfoil

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Screw downvotes

"Minor thing but personally think it's more an issue of cinema staff not wanting to chuck customers out who use their phones."

I've been to movies where someone in the audience has continued a very loud, very long converation for 30+ minutes whilst a movie's running.

If your'e a carer and you're on a break then someone needs to take over the responsibliity. Being on 24*7*365 duty is unfair on everyone.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Ready for the down votes, but...

Jamming wifi is already covered - the FCC has bared its fangs a few times, but Ofcom is the kind of regulator who avoid doing anything.

Theatres and others can be locked down fairly easily. I know of one multiplex that was built with RF in mind from the outset (the owner was a movie enthusiast and pissed off about yammerers) and phones simply don't work once you go into the threatres. No jammers needed.

As far as IMSI or not IMSI is concerned: It's actually better to build genuine mobile cells at or close to the prisons and then have them lockout call access to anything within N metres of the antennas in the directions matching the location of the prison (It's perfectly feasible to lockout where distance is greater than N and less than M too, or direct them to an authorised tapping system)

The problem witch cracking down on mobiles in jails is that it's worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of smuggled phones in the UK are used to keep in contact with family, due to over-restrictive access to and overly high pricing for the in-prison phones, not for other ongoing criminal shit.

Isolated lags end up with higher recidivism rates upon release and lack of family contact is also linked to higher in-prison violence levels so this genuinely needs addressing as a matter of high priority - at which point anything left inside the walls should be more nefarious and able to be stomped on hard. The whole "retribution/revenge" vs "reconciliation/repair" thing needs to be sorted out because you don't really want a revolving door where going to prison turns people into hardened crooks who will only ever know prison or a crminal life outside. The IMSI stuff is only tackling one part of a hugely complicated mess.

Health firm gets £200k slap after IVF patients' records leak online

Alan Brown Silver badge

£200k

Is just the ICO fine.

Affected people can also claim - and it might well be the death of 1 million paper cuts which actaully makes companies blink.

This is the kind of area where a few enterprising ambulance chasers could earn steady coin. The fact that the ICO's hit them with a large fine would make any civil case a matter of determining individual compensation levels rather than having to prove the leak.

Revealed: UK councils shrug at privacy worries, strap on body cams

Alan Brown Silver badge

" For instance why is it necessary to record so many traffic movements at so many locations? "

Statistical analysis of traffic flows in order to plan systems.

Such systems work best if individual cars can be identified to work out longer distance flow patterns (EG are cars taking the left or right route around an obstacle and are they rejoining the through flow afterwards or do they branch off to local destinations and as such need to be discounted from the calculations when you're trying to encourage through traffic not to take particular routes up rat runs) but as soon as they purpose has been achieved the identifying data should be purged. This period could be as short as 5 minutes.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What if I object?

"Only the police will get it under section 29 if they can also provide a good reason/time frame and description of the person(s) they are interested in."

Exactly. I've had requests for 4 hour windows and declined for exactly this reason.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What if I object?

yes, PC Copper tried pulling this on my neighbours and myself.

He didn't get away with it and the local police were forced to issue written apologies to everyone.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: What if I object?

"So if I decline to give my consent how is it legal for you to film me?"

Until the recording is published, you can't do anything.

Your right when a recording IS published, is limited to private legal action and you'd need to prove a case of actual damage under DPA rules (the argument would be that you were going about your private _lawful_ business and publication would prove detrimental.)

The same thing goes the other way. M. Jobsworth WasteofSpace has a very hard time stopping you filming them (even if you film on private property(*) the only recourse they have is to ask you to leave. Attempting to stop you filming may result in them facing assault charges) and an even harder job establishing a legal case against you for publishing them working in an official capacity as a govt employee (at any level of govt)

(*) There are exceptions but they're rigidly laid down in law. Filming in a court building or on certain nuclear/military sites or certain military personnel is a criminal offence - the former because of journalist ambushes in the waiting areas about a century ago and the latter two for obvious reasons.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Maybe some

" A bit like dashcams in cars these cameras so record in a loop continuously "

Speak for yourself.

My dashcams upload everything recorded to youtube when they connect to a known Wifi Network.

As with encryption, there are 2 approaches to data slurpers:

1: Limit what they get (but that means they only get the important stuff)

2: DROWN THEM.

(The rule of encryption is that once you start encrypting your messages or data, ENCRYPT EVERYTHING, including your laundry lists. That way an attacker may spend most of his time decrypting your stuff to find you needed to wash 4 pairs of socks. For more fun, make the laundry list a stronger cypher than the others so they think it's more valuable)

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Monitoring

"If councils just accepted all plastics"

They may as well. Because of paper contamination (labels) The only economic recycling path for them is to be blown into fibres and used as insulation.

Every other recycling option uses more oil than simply burning them as fuel and making new plastic from virgin oil

Licence-fee outsourcer Capita caught wringing BBC tax from vulnerable

Alan Brown Silver badge

There are strong arguments to go for the New Zealand model.

All broadcasters (TV and radio) are eligible for grants from the (ex-)licensing budget.

Funding for the state broadcaster is rigidly accounted for. Any programs sold overseas (or on DVD, etc) must have their grants paid back.

In the case of private broadcasters, they are made to pay interest on the grant too, but that's still better than the previous situation where they had the same model, but the state broadcasters (TV and radio - both commercial activities, unlike the BBC's stations here) got the money without any further obligations or reporting requirements and used most of it to prop up their commercial radio network.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Let the advertisers pay?

"I hate Adverts on TV. Not having ad breaks for 20 mins per hour is worth the TV license fee."

in some countries you got TV license fees AND 24 minutes per hour of adverts on the state channels.

Unsurprisingly more than 1/3 of people refused to pay licenses and the costs of trying to collect coupled with a couple of convictions of TVL inspectors for criminal behaviour on doorsteps resulted in them being abolished.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Quite correct

"Also its a license to use a TV receiver"

Whilst I pay the fee, that's my fundamental objection to the current structure as well. It dates back to the days of radio receiver licenses and radio receiving licenses were abolished specifically because they were impossible to enforce.

TVs being much larger and bulkier were regarded as "easier" but that hasn't been true for over 20 years.

Alan Brown Silver badge

TVL staffers are civilians with NO powers whatsoever. They cannot enter your premises (unless invited) without a warrant and police attending and putting a foot in your door when you're closing it on them is aggravated trespass.

There are plenty of warnings of "never talk to them" and "if you do talk to them, make sure you video it" - they generally run away at the first sign of a camera in any case. It's both perfectly legal to follow them to see what they drive off in and to publish the footage on Youtube or other sites without obscuring number plates if they've been behaving in a menacing manner (Public interest defence to a DPA civil claim, which is the only kind of legal action possible for the aggrieved party - As someone attempting to act on matters carrying criminal penalties they'd have a hard time proving a right to not being publically identified, in the same way the police can't stop anyone filming them or publishing the footage)

Disclosure: I have a TV license. That doesn't stop them sending demands and threats of site visits (which never materialise) - that's been going on for nearly 20 years.

Because not having one is a criminal matter:

1: It's not up to me to prove a have a license when they show up, it's up to them to prove I don't.

2: Standing on the doorstep accusing of not having a license loud enough for passers-by to hear is probably legally actionable slander.

Then again, where I live, pointing out to the same passers-by that someone is a TV licensing inspector results in a "hostile" gathering in short order. It's amazing how fast they can run.

NHS patient letters meant for GPs went undelivered for years

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Crime

"Private "mail" companies don't have those obligation in law"

In this particular case, these letters never entered any mail system, and as such were never subject to any form of regulation.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"Access by clinicians and other nhs staff has separate levels of access and is logged and checked."

Not nearly as well as you may think. It's only logged and checked if using the official NHS interfaces.

Direct file reading or database queries are not logged or checked.

Alan Brown Silver badge

"mistakenly"

This wasn't a mistake. (Get paid for sending stuff but don't bother sending it)

The only 'mistake' was storing the undelivered mail instead of destroying it (or being caught)

This is no different to cases where posties are discovered to have been hoarding undelivered mail for years. Half a million letters doesn't take up as much space as you might think (I'm aware of cases where 50,000 letters were found stuffed under a bed)

Unless the storage environment was provably secure then personal data for everyone affectdd should be considered as "at risk"

Ofcom mulls selling UK govt's IPv4 cache amid IPv6 rollout flak

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Selling IPs?

IANA only own addresses dating to when they were created and Jon Postel handed administration of IP space over to them

Virtually all class A allocations were assigned by Jon Postel before IANA was created and as such are regarded as personal property.

Jon's the only person who could rescind the allocations and he died nearly 20 years ago.

I know it's several years since the article was written but IPv6 is still a clusterfuck in the UK and the easiest way to make IPv4 valueless is to use IPv6. There are vested interests at work here.

Citizens Advice slams 'unfair' broadband compensation scheme

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: If Only OfCom Did What They Were Paid For...

"The ASA are a worse joke though."

Like the premium rate "regulator" they're a trade association which until about a decade ago only existed to give the illusion of industry self-regulation and avoid government intervention. They are not regulators in any legal sense.

The Internet changed that and scams abound. both groups started getting their feet held to the fire and didn't like it - threatening to refuse complaints from people who stated they were tracking performance resulted in real regulators starting to look over their shoulders and not being impressed.

The changes in responsiveness from both since 2004 have been a direct result of being told "if you don't do a satisfactory job self regulating, WE WILL" - and of course represent the absolute minimum effort to keep government regulators out.

The fun part is that FOI law states that organisations delegated responsiblity from government bodes or performing a role which would otherwise be performed by government agencies are subject to FOI coverage - Both the ASA and PPP (or whatever it's calling itself this week) have been resisting FOI requests and that could still result in independent government regulators stepping in.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Simple solution...

"The thing to remember is that, relatively speaking, we mostly get very cheap internet."

Compared to the USA yes - but the USA has legislated local monopolies and zero competition across most of the country. Most people have a choice of _one_ supplier for Internet (DSL or cable, few areas where they overlap and virtually nothing else)

Compared to other countries which supposedly have competition in the market our prices are high and speeds are low.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "Compensation" is crap anyway

"I would assume that "no one home" etc. provide reasonable grounds for refusing compensation"

You'd assume that, but when there's CCTV recorded evidence showing they didn't bother showing up, you'd assume wrong.

Not to mention the BTOR linesman who turned up and sat outside for 20 minutes (under the CCTV camera) before driving off without setting foot outside the van, or the one who came in to "fix your broadband fault" and then went and sat in his van for an hour before driving off when he realised it was supposed to be an installation. Or the one who showed up to discover that none of the preparatory work had been done, so went off to do it and never came back.

Conversations with various people indicate that Openreach don't pay people for travelling between jobs or allocate enough time for travel, resulting in contractors dumping jobs they can't get to - pulling the "noone was home" stunt means they get paid - they're "independent contractors" paid per job (even though prohibited from working for anyone except Openreach)

This is all familiar stuff - and it's worth noting that the same thing was happening in New Zealand when the telco there ran a BT/Openreach pseudo-separation model in the hope of staving off government intervention - it stopped cold when their version of Openreach was fully separated into a separate company and the newly independent lines company had a significant commercial interest in not pissing off their customers (the other telcos). It transformed into a rapidly responding company overnight and the effect of real "level playing field" access has had a galvanising effect on the NZ market. (For starters there's no more incumbent telco double dipping by insisting that their equipment is used on data tail circuits, etc and that alone is hundreds per month, per connection in operating cost reductions for ISPs)

As for TalkTalk - as there was an existing ADSL connection they were being paid and LLU means they make more from ADSL2 services than VDSL2, so there's no incentive for them to sort the issue out. By making customers wait, this strings out the higher income and the wait period is just long enough to dissuade switching to another provider thanks to the mandatory 14 day delay involved in changeovers.

In any case they did try to bill for non-existent VDSL services.

Apple to Europe: It's our job to design Ireland's tax system, not yours

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: "will skedaddle to the next corporate hideaway"

> I can see none of those companies going to Sofia or Budapest - or they would be already there.

Actually they are. The largest ramp up of technical jobs in the EU is happening in both countries along with Romania.

Buda and Pest are separate cities now btw.

Alan Brown Silver badge

Is police corruption in Ireland as bad as in a country which just promoted the person responsible for the killing of a brazilian electrician, issuing of fabricated press releases and the subsequent coverups into the top policing position in its largest city?

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: Fascinating

" Of course this was reigned in during the Roosevelt era"

It was reined in on several occasions in US history. At least major anti-trust 4 interventions in the 19th century alone.

Speaking in Tech: Taxing robot labour for benefit glorious taxpayer

Alan Brown Silver badge

How much are robots paid? Will it be PAYE?

(Yes, if called Andrew and making carved objects, they might be paid, but that's an exception)

NZ High Court rules US can extradite Kim Dotcom after all

Alan Brown Silver badge

Re: One Key Issue

"how did Dotcom violate US law"

By having equipment in the USA, he was doing business there. Long arm statute.