Posts by Alan Brown 16473 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"Includes the right not to vote"
True, but in general not voting effectively increases the extremist vote - and if you're in the UK, where the marginal and swing seats decide the entire country, your vote is more important that you probably realise.
Voter turnout is low in national elections and abysmal in local body ones (Next month remember!) which is how extreme policies at council levels are getting through. Extremists invariably vote no matter what.
"Virgin Media certainly do - I sent seven 'return to sender' items back to them that way as they refused to stop sending marketing material - not had any from them for well over two years now....."
This is Eeeevil and I like it, as like you I've been unable to get them to stop even when hitting them with a DPA section 11 notice - the argument they use is that they target the address but not the name, so there's no section11 requirement to comply with.
"It says quite a lot about the attitude of the developer that they use an insult as the name placeholder."
Back in the 1980s, a certain UK bank sent out a large mailmerge (which failed) to high end customers which started with the salutation "Dear Rich Bastard"
Understandably their attempt to sell a premium product didn't work out so well.
"as a UK passport holder I find LHR pretty good nowadays. Not true for all the other people though, they face big queues"
This is a direct consequence of the number of immigration stations on duty.
LHR has far fewer than Schipol as one f'instance.
"Customer service? We've heard of it."
"The A380neo is like a gun held to the head of the entire aviation industry"
Unfortunately not.
The killer factor of the 747 turned out to be unrefueled range, NOT capacity. Big Twins have eating its advantage from the bottom up because of ETOPS. The 777 in particular has been cannibalising 747 sales for the last 20 years.
None of this was known when the A380 was first developed and introduced as ETOPS wasn't even around at that point and had only just been introduced respectively.
The remaining market segments for Big Quads are much smaller. Boeing saw this coming and Airbus didn't.
ETOPS was a long time coming because high power piston engined aircraft were spectacularly unreliable. More often than not a transcontinental flight arrived with fewer engines operating than it left with. It took 40 years of long haul jet operations to convince authorities that turbines were better.
"I've had to put a set of cheap wheels on my car after I lost one (and some suspension) in a hole that wasnt there the week before"
You can claim damage costs from your council - and oif they try to weasel out of it by claiming "noone had reported it", a small claims filing will change that tune very quickly.
One council had to pay out almost £1million for ONE pothole incident.
" The councils probably don't get any money from central government to fix them in the first place"
Virtually all potholes are a result of failure to do minor work like cleaning drains. They're a symptom that your council's been corner cutting for a long time.
Around these parts (not a million miles from Cock Lane) I filmed a drains contractor driving down the road, stopping at each one for 60-90 seconds, not bothering to get out and inspect, let alone clean 'em, then drive on to the next one. He noticed he was being filmed, got out of his truck and started being pretty aggressive (including demands to not be filmed etc), but also denied working under contract for the council. Unfortunately for him the logs showed that the company he was working for signed off the drains as cleaned, they were still blocked+flooding the next day and the youtube videos of his (lack of) work plus denials ended up in the hands of local councillors.
We (councillors and a couple of council auditors) suspected that particular rort was going on for a while, but it was nice to actually document it. Not that it mattered as the council refuses to do anything about the dodgy contractor - too many family hands in the cookie jar (and yes, this is in the SE of the UK)
On the subject of Cock Lane - the Crusader's work resulted in the council there closing the road to do resurfacing, estimating it to be closed for 4-6 days at a cost of about £50k. It actually took closer to 6 months and £350k because the roadbed was so badly damaged due to lack of drainage that it had to be completely rebuilt from scratch in a lot of places. Whilst rebuilding the lane the council also found that 3/4 of the roadside gullies had been paved over - which meant that water had built up, soaked into the roadbed and effectively destroyed it. So yes, the Cock Lane Crusader had a bloody good point.
"Most phones will give you no indication that this is happening."
This is prevalent enough that there are a couple of apps to warn you when connected to an unencrypted network.
Of course in some countries, 2G networks were unencrypted by law so that spooks could snoop - and so could everyone else.
"ZFS as a filesystem has been out of beta for years already"
Yes, and these point sub releases ARE betas at best. Nobody declares these things stable for production until they've been out for quite a while.
The actual versions being used on production systems are 0.7.5 or older. Everything newer is testing - and precisely because of these kinds of issues.
If you use bleeding edge, expect to bleed occasionally.
"Unfortunately I can't see what the ICO can do about unaddressed junk mail delivered by RM. "
It's the opt out database they maintain that's the issue - the fact that it expires after two years and the fact that having opted out, your wishes are being ignored.
the ICO subsumed Postwatch some years ago. They also handle postal regulation roles (which make make this somewhat easier than when the delivery side was handled by Postwatch)
"Instead, you need to opt out from their Door to Door junk every 98 weeks. It's a chore, but it usually works quite well."
(Parrot mode)
If you disagree with the fact that you have to keep optiong out of the Royal Mail's unaddressed mail "service" (ie, their junkmail leaflets), or that finding the optout on their website is akin to stumbling on a filing cabinet in an unlit disused lavatory with a "beware of the leopard sign" out front., then you should be rattling the ICO's cage about it.
The more people who complain about this, the more likely it is that the ICO will actully DO something to force the issue
And the more people who complain about posties ignoring the optouts and delivering leaflets anyway, the more likely it is that the ICO will start snapping on rubber gloves (yeah right).
One or two complaints they can ignore, but when they start getting dozens it's a lot harder.
"Except that they tell posties to ignore the 'no junk mail' notices and threaten disciplinary action if they don't deliver the leaflets,"
If you have proof of that, the ICO would love to hear from you.
That kind of evidence is what turns small fines for breaches into VERY LARGE ones.
" I wonder if the ICO would be interested if I sent it on to them every time the postie 'forgets' we've opted out - along with the numerous emails promising a full investigation and the postie getting a 'hats on interview' with the delivery office manager..."
Actually, they would - The case officer investigating is Aimee Smith.
They could have (gasp) sent them a postal mail leaflet instead,
No fine for that.
The Royal Mail's own unaddressed mail opt out "service" expires after 18 months. The ICO is looking into that (I suspect it's not legal to do that anymore), and the fact that posties frequently ignore it anyway (which is illegal, but enforcement is virtually impossible)
There's probably an IT angle on why they lose the optouts (maybe even a story for El Reg)
"the current ICO limit is £500K and few companies get hit with even a quarter of that. I think TalkTalk's £400k was the biggest so far. I wouldn't be at all surprised if most GDPR punishments were the usual £20k - £50k smack on the wrist."
One of the things driving GDPR is the fact that "some" governments (not mentioning any in particular) would abolish fines, whilst others have a "within living memory" history of governments who kept large files on anything and everything about their citizens.
The driving force behind GDPR is to ensure that 'smacks on the wrist' go away and that punishments are more-or-less the same across Europe. Brexit won't change that, as in order to continue trading with the EU, the UK will be required to abide by GDPR rules and post-Brexit won't get to play silly buggers with rule interpretations anymore like it used to (nor will it be able to ram unpopular shit through Brussels over everyone's objections, then enthusiastically implement it as home whilst blaming Brussels)
The current chocolate teapot status and Whitehall handcuffing of the ICO is going away, by order of the EU.
14 thumbs up over the weekend.
On a more expensive note in the UK and a reminder of how woo factors can affect us all: many local councils have taken to switching off street lights for part of the night (1am-4am) - most being flourescents on minor streets.
A quick calculation shows that the power savings is about 40p/year (at most), whilst the lamps are about £8 apiece and replacement cost is about £50 each (labour charge).
The average life of a flourescent tube is 8000 hours (when run 8 hours per day) or 1500 cycles. If you run them 4 hours per cycle then this shortens down to about 4000 hours - the cycle limit is due to the filaments in the ends of the things and electronic starters don't make much difference.
So in order to save a few hundred thousand pounds in electricity charges, councils are spending millions with lighting contractors instead (It's not an issue if they're LEDs of course, but led lamps can be dimmed down to 10% brightness/power consumption and instantly perk up if there's movement detected underneath).
Nice scam if you can sign up for it.
"anti-static spray for record players (snake oil stuff - an atomiser filled with distilled water made up with about 5% IPA)"
Snake oil is an understatement. Records work like ice skates - the stylus pressure momentarily liquifies the vinyl as it passes over it and any moisture on the record prevents this happening, resulting in the surface _ripping_ when inspecting under a microscope.
The only reliable way of "antistatic"ing was to use a negative air ioniser and a good old carbon brush (none of which which particularly well, but any form of charge on the record would pull dust from the air into the groves and then it'd get pressed into the liquified vinyl mentioned above). If you want to clean your records properly (a bloody good idea before first play), then getting hold of a Keith Monks Record cleaning machine was a good move (NOT snake oil)
Records get a huge charge just from being taken out of their sleeve. About the only way to keep it under control apart from the ioniser was to control humidity around 75-80%, but then you run into mould problems. :(
"Eventually, we learned that the cabinet was open at the bottom and had been sitting directly over the incoming mains to the plant; all disks were blank. "
Interesting BOFH excuse, but floppies were notorious for losing their contents without a mains cable in sight. Some brands (noted for their marketing claims of never forgetting) were particularly bad for bit rot.
On a serious note:
The _vast_ majority of hand problems with mice come from not using the things correctly.
You're supposed to lay your fingers _along_ the buttons and _squeeze_ them, not tap with the ends of your digits.
(Same issue with old morse code keys - poorly trained operators would get carpel tunnel too)
"I've never been a huge fan of wireless keyboards and mice in the office environment."
Nor me for more or less the same reason
"things weren't very sophisticated back then"
They're not that sophistocated now. Back then they didn't have authentication, so typing on one would result in all receivers picking up the characters. These days they just mutually interfere - which is almost as bad when you have more than a couple in close proximity.
"To be fair, those antennas are designed to radiate power horizontally outwards, "
Not that it would have mattered.
In the period between antennas being erected and transmitters being installed there would almost always be a flurry of complaints about radiation causing people to have XYZ problems. Usually before the feeder cables had even been run.
Nice to get those actually. Log 'em, take notes, get all symptoms, etc and encourage as much detail as you can get. It means you have good evidence of who your crackpots are before things go live and can be extremely useful later on.
"Amusing, but in that instance, why would he not have told the real reason?"
Presumably because he had done so and been ignored.
Most of these devices used to come with a night mode specifically to prevent such things happening and users would switch them off at the wall despite being specifically told not to.
We would find that we could happily bill them $140 per call out, just so they could save 1c in electricity.
"The first Ariane 5 launch and failure would of been a Reg story "
Bits of it are sitting less than 20 metres from where I am. They make a good illustration of why everything needs triplechecking and why assumption is the mother of all fuckups.
Oh - and why hydrazine is so fucking dangerous.
" By 2008, China had everything needed for the Beidou network"
China only went ahead with Beidou v2 (Compass) because it was kicked out of Gallileo at the USA's insistence.
It initially had no intention of building a V2 network and the Beidou v1 birds were _old_, which is why it signed into Gallileo.
Revisionism much?
"BAE alone files about 1000 applications every year of which I see about 10 filings per year."
BAE is not a british company anymore.
It's not even a european company anymore.
That's by design, else it couldn't be building stuff for the USA.
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