Posts by Dave Bell

It's at least arguable that there have been technical changes of the lifespan of this law.

Meanwhile, it is hard, from round-trip times, to figure out whether an IP address is in the UK or not. It may be that everything goes via a few nodes, such as Telehouse, in London. Or it may be that everything goes through a few nodes in Cheltenham.

The CPS might be close to honest, but can we trust their political lords and masters.

8 years on bail? nulli vendemus, nulli negabimus aut differemus, rectum aut justiciam

Other problems for VR

The graphics hardware, computer and display device, are looking to be a big barrier, but some VR concepts also seem to depend on fast internet connections, not just bandwidth but round-trip-times to servers. I have seen a figure of 40ms quoted before there start to be problems with people sharing an environment, but it hasn't been clear whether that includes the transmission time across the internet.

Maybe it's enough to wait for the 3D world model to download, and then a user can walk around the new building to see what it looks like, but as soon as you have somebody else in view, not in the next office, there will be problems.

You can cope with these problems with a monitor screen as a window on a virtual world. It's the new VR element, the head mounted display feeding each eye and overwhelming the other senses, which make any sluggishness a problem.

40ms? That's barely big enough to cover California. Bandwidth has increased enormously, but the round-trip times have hardly changed since I started using dial-up.

And I have not seen a convincing explanation of why I might be wrong. But it looks from here as if the VR-hype comes from a geographically localised cluster of enthusiasts around San Francisco Bay.

It's about control

I run Mint Linux, and v18.2 has just come out. It's based on the most recent Ubuntu LTS version.

There were a couple of big changes, but if I used the update process, I had the choice whether or not to use them. Do I switch the window manager? Do have make the jump from the 4.4 kernel to the 4.8 kernel?

Or I could install from scratch.

I used the update process, and then made the optional switches. It was all under my control.

I like being in control.

What do these surveys measure?

I have my doubts about some of these surveys.

I have been on ADSL since it was introduced in summer 2005. The speed has increased a couple of times, a change in contract details (it was throttled at first) and then a tech improvement. It's OK as a speed for a single user, and I don't feel any urge to go to FTTC. I may be moving before next summer anyway.

This whole "up to" speed advertising thing is an illusion, but some of the surveys I have seen seem a bit vague about how they compare fibre and ADSL. Also, I think my connection would be in the "up to 17Mbs" category, and that would drag down the averages even if, from distance to the exchange and the like, I would reckon my speed pretty good.

It does sounds as if there are genuine reasons to complain about the situation in London, but the way some of this is being reported is hiding the way in which many people may be deciding that there is no point in paying for the higher speeds.

It's more than just download speed

I get an adequate speed from ADSL, but upload speed is terrible, and if I was sharing a connection with a family, several people wanting to do different things, it wouldn't be enough. Some things, like VR headsets, are claimed to need low ping times to work well, and the UK's backbone network probably fails that test: everywhere seems to be abour 50ms from everywhere else in the UK.

That last problem may be why researchers are seeing people staring at the centre of a VR display, staying concentrated on the straight-ahead view. Is it bad design of VR, or is it that the slow ping times deter head movement by inducing motion sickness?

This might be why one long-established VR company keeps deferring the launch of a new product and keeps hyping it with a touring show. They can't get low enough ping times. The ping times I get today are rarely any better than I got with dial-up a quarter-century ago.

I have had cold sales calls to a domestic line, on the TPS list, from salesmen like this. They get abusive if you say no. They ring back if you hang up. The calling number is always withheld.

I suppose their calls are what keeps the Openreach engineers in employment. Honesty is becoming worthless.

I though a patent was supposed to describe the invention in sufficient detail to make a working copy

Nothing really new here.

I was seeing this general sort of selective herbicide technology in the sixties. It wasn't just herbicides that affected weeds but not the crop, but for certain sorts of crop it was already to cultivate to kill weeds between the crop rows, and it was trivial to use the same control system for a herbicide spray. It was called band-spraying.

I remember seeing ways of pulsing the spray on and off to hit non-crop plants at an early LAMMA show. I think that was when the show was at Lincoln, and that would put it in the last century, but I can't find the date when it moved to the Newark showground.

One of the problems that might have been solved is how the whole system behaves. You need some way of producing a cloud of liquid particles, usually a mix of water (as carrier) and pesticide, that are the right size particles to stick to the plant, not bounce off, when they hit, and large enough not to be too easily affected by wind, or evaporate too rapidly. There may be adjuvants, such as wetting agents. And somehow with the rapidly varying flow, you need to keep the pressure right, if you're using a hydraulic nozzle.

There are other ways of generating the droplets. with more control over droplet size, but I am not sure they can be used to aim the droplets.

This is starting to look like somebody having a clever idea about image recognition, which is good, who know sweet F.A. about actual farming.

We were in at the beginning of the Green Revolution, and I was coming home from school and doing things as routine that my teachers had been telling me were impossible.

At least my teachers knew about crop rotations. They did get confused about Jethro Tull.

Everything the EU did had to be made into British law by our politicians, and much the same for this, through the CAA. And issues like this should have been argued about before Mrs May even sent the "I quit" letter. Some of the problems are in the EU stage, others on the people, politicians and civil servants, in this country, but it's so convenient to blame the EU when you get something wrong.

I've seen it happen.

And people such as Boris Johnson lied to get the result they wanted, and the new PM rewarded them by giving them high office.

Labour are not that much better

They're all blaming the EU for the problems, and expect us to let them run the country. The EU doesn't have to be all that clever to look better than the British Parliament..

If you want to re-elect the party of lies, go ahead.

Don't expect me to be polite.

All these calls: scammers, illegal automated calls; don't give a company name and withhold their number.

How can you make an effective report when they do that?

Old laws, new internet.

There's been a lot of scary stuff in T&C lists, and at least some of it is about making the internet possible under copyright law. It has always been there, and sometimes the terms have been abusive.

The problem is that the internet depends on making copies of data, and the Berne Convention make the existence of copyright automatic. Part of it is a right to be identified as the creator.

At least the USA is signed up to the Berne Convention, but it's a minimum standard.

And that's why they want their non-exclusive licence to use your material. Just to make it visible to their other customers, there have to be copies.

Doing it in a way that would be clear in court is a bit tricky, but that problem has been as the root of a lot of arguments about the use of content. The scary part for me is that they rarely try to limit the licence to any particular service. It may be that they could be sued under bankruptcy law if Twitter went bust, and their T&C limited that use-licence just to Twitter, so that data had no value

This isn't entirely what the current argument about, though where you might sue an international company is a significant problem that the EU will care about. It comes with free trade. Likewise, where a company pays taxes.

It's another whole giant economy size can of worms that comes with deciding whose national rules apply to content.

Maintenance of an intelligent self-cleaning, mousetrap

Tabitha was officially recorded as "A very well-behaved cat."

When my mother died, several of the regular carers came to the funeral. They all asked how Tabitha was.

Can this Rentokil thingummy keep an old lady happy?

There's a lot of room for argument over who to blame, but I think it's the cops who need to take a hand now. It's not just about whether the BBC should have reported to them, or whether Facebook should have called for sample images. Some of it seems to be context driven, such as a not-all-that-blatant pic of a schoolgirl attracting a flood of abusive comments. I am not sure the cops can set all that definite a line, but they're the one who have seen the pictures, not us.

At the end of the day, they might need to interview the people involved under caution, and ask to see the letters between Facebook and the BBC. We're not getting quite the same story from the two of them.

Both could have made mistakes in this.

Are the Americans the best farmers?

The LAMMA show happened last week, and is focused on new tech for farming, and some of the older stuff, and I remember, back in the Nineties, seeing devices that were aiming pesticides at individual plants in a field. GPS isn't quite precise enough on it's own, look up "differential GPS", but a combine harvester with a yield meter could record just where the good and bad patches were in a field. Back then, with that sort of detailed info, it wasn't always certain what the fix was for the bad patches, it need some old-fashioned farming knowledge to get the "why".

John Deere produced a magazine called "The Furrow", and cousins in the USA sent my father a subscription. They were just catching on to stuff we had been doing in Europe for years. and average yoelds of crops such as wheat are still much lower in the USA/ You might wonder why the Americans still use bushels instead of the tonnes the rest of the world uses.

Times have changed, but US farming still looks a bit reckless. It came from the EU, but we had regulations on applying pesticides and fertiliser, things that work out as saving money, even though the overt purpose was to stop them getting into water supplies. I have heard about nitrates getting into American rivers and lakes: they cost money, and the protection rules British farmers have to follow to avert that mean they they're not throwing money away. Precision farming is part of that.

It's the same for pesticides. America allows pesticides that are banned in Europe, chemicals that, here, needed special protective clothing to use. and there is all sorts of detail about the droplet sizes of the spray I had to pay attention to. Also the wind. Yet I see American reports of really bad spray drift, suggesting the chemicals never reach the crop. More money wasted.

The trouble was that the politicians would say things such as "This only puts an extra 1% on the costs" and didn't seem to know the difference between the net and the gross. They haven't changed. It's possible that the politics of farming is dominated by land ownership, and land speculation, soaking up subsidies, rather than the problems of growing a crop.

It's still hard to beat a skilled man on a tractor, but when you can't afford more than one man per thousand acres a robot looks tempting. Back in my distant youth, even with tractors, you needed over 10 men per thousand acres. My father was, in his youth, ploughing with horses.

A lot of this stuff depends on imports. It's a long list. John Deere is an American company, though they have factories in Europe. We import fertiliser, pesticides, and fuel for tractors. We still have some British companies, but for many things it's one source for all of Europe. And it's just pot luck whether that source is in Britain or not.

The paperwork on the fertiliser I bought, most came from a factory near Rotterdam. The production depends on supplies of natural gas, and most now comes from Russia via a pipeline.

At least we still have good farmer. I am not convinced of the politicians and financial whiz-kids

I'm not sure how useful that map is.

The highest number of reports are where a lot of people live.

It does look as though London, for example, it getting hit worse than Birmingham, but none of use know enough about the Plusnet network to know what's different. In the past, I've often been told I am somewhere close to Milton Keynes, presumably because of the IP address, but the helpdesk staff seem to be based in Sheffield.

In the past, with other companies, I've known that a particular cluster of equipment had failed, but I wouldn't like to guess where my connection goes physically. The connection is working for me, but if it wasn't I doubt the red spot would show on that map.

Milton Keynes, incidentally, is legendary for having something falling down on it. There's a song.

Just what is Facebook?

While it isn't a universal, the idea of the "common carrier" as being a necessary protection for internet operations isn't a bad one. Here in the UK it is pretty weak in such contexts as libel. But a publisher isn't a carrier.

Companies such as Facebook seem to depend on being whichever needs the least work when the writ arrives, even when there is reason to think they're the other. What strikes me as making a difference is the way that so many news publishers on the internet use Facebook as a gatekeeper. If you want to comment on a story on a news site, maybe your local newspaper, you log in with your Facebook account, and there's no alternative.

This seems a reason to class them as a publisher. How is Facebook, thrusting "selected" adverts to you, different to one of those advertising monthlies, tied to a locality or to an industry, which is printed on paper and arrives through your letterbox?

And there are rules against adverts that look like "editorial" material.

Who will want to fly from England?

Are the people who can afford this going to be based in London?

Short answer is, we don'r know what Brexit will do. But I am not sure that there will be an airport sufficiently near New York with a local passenger pool that can sustain this. Paris, maybe, but don't forget that aircraft need reserve fuel for the unexpected, to get to an alternative destination, and the extra distance to, for instance, Frankfurt, might soak up that margin. And, even with TGV in mainland Europe, if total journey time matters, getting to the airport is critical.

It looks like all the eggs in one economic basket-case.

A suggestion for a test

I know some of these things are getting a bit old, no longer the white heat of modern technology, but I like the idea of seeing what works. I bought a second-hand Google Nexus because there were non-obvious problems with things like the magnetic sensing, and controlling my cheap phone for Google Cardboard was a struggle.

Well, we're past the cardboard cut-out stage, and you can get decent plastic phone-holders that work for specific models. Though it looks as though the idea is starting to fade.

It would still be a good thing to know whether it matches the Google standard for the magnetism sensor. Does that magnet on the Google Cardboard holder work? Or does it match some other phone? Is the sensor in the right place to work?

Another test: I know Pokemon Go is past the peak, but does it work? Maybe you can think of some other augmented reality game that would be a better test, but look at what a smartphone has to be able to do to make that game work.

As it is, all we get are a few pictures. And, really, that's a pretty simple problem. I've gotten better results with 80-year-old technology. What do those pictures really tell you about the Smartphone?

How do the crooks get paid?

What puzzles me is that the ransom demands appear to require an electronic payment. (I have seen a couple of screen captures.)

How the heck can they get their money through the banking system without being tracked down?