Posts by Alan Brown

"Essentially, the Bosch people programmed the cheating version and gave a copy to VW"

It's a test mode and it's an _essential_ part of the system for development and diagnostic purposes.

As I understand it, when Bosch found out about what was happening it complained pretty loudly to VW and attempted to tip off the regulators.

"And a similar amount die due to people who should not be driving on the roads so why not ban cars altogether?"

In the USA perhaps. In the UK the figure attributeable to this is down in the low hundreds.

"It's been reported elseware that 50,000 people in the UK die every year due to cars that shouldn't have passed emissions tests emitting illegal levels of pollution"

It's all relative.

NOX emissions are only a problem in heavily built up areas and in places like the immediate vicinity of the M25 (go 100 metres either side and the levels are fine). The penalty for reducing NOX is increasing CO2/poor mileage.

ECU processing power is thousands of times higher than it was 15 years ago and NOX sensors are 1/100 the cost they were a decade ago. It's perfectly possible to make a car system which sniffs the intake air and switches to low emissions mode when local conditions are getting bad.

That said, around HALF of the NOX emissions in UK cities are from stationary sources, with almost all of that being boilers and almost all of those boilers being pre-1990s installations. There are residential streets in London where NOX levels can be 100 times the legal limit without an operating car in sight, thanks to a couple of these installations. They also tend to be extremely heavy CO emitters.

This is despite the emissions cheating on Euro5/6 vehicles. If car makers had been honest, then boilers would probably be 2/3 to 3/4 of the emissions by now (which demonstrates the laws of diminishing returns quite well - all the fuss about dieselgate and 40-60,000 of the heaviest emitters carry on with no attention paid whatesoever)

Boiler NOX emissions have been regulated since about 2004 but old installations are grandfathered for 20 years. Attempts to persuade owners of these boilers to upgrade (including offering to pay for the work) have been fruitless. It's not a case of them not affording to do it, they actively don't WANT to do it and they're likely to spend significant amounts of money resisting legistlative attempts to force them to change when the grandfathering runs out int he mid 2020s.

Re: Over the Air...

"Actual GPS co-ordinates of all the MOT centres would need to be used instead."

Ford got caught doing that in the 00's

Re: "...any visible smoke..."

Using veg oil (or a blend) reduces NOX and smoke dramatically, but the heavier oil gives startup difficulties. The bigger problems for busses and suchlike is the highly variable loadings and a decent hybrid drivetrain (NOT Boris busses) might go a long way towards solving that. (the existing ones are a bit of a faff, or constantly breaking - or both - quality british designs and all that.)

Re: "...any visible smoke..."

" belching great columns of black soot."

The black columns of soot aren't actually as much of a problem as you may think. Those are heavy particles which don't get deep into lungs and don't stay in the air very long.

The dangerous stuff is invisible and emitted by cars too - and cars running lean emit shitloads of NOX - it's one of the reasons the USA legislated stociometric fuel mixtures (they could have regulated tailpipe emissions and let makers solve the issue however they wanted but regulating fuel ratios meant cheap 3-way catalysts and meant that a lot of japanese R&D into high-milage/low NOX had to be thrown out. Advantage Detroit - and that's why VTEC and friends went away.)

Re: Bluechip Gofundme...

"Google, to get a head start on Mars Street View"

To have street view you need streets - and if you have streets, you'll get potholes and if you have potholes you'll lose the rover down one.

"By using an RTG instead of solar panels"

Solved in several ways - you KNOW when it will run out of power and can budget for a hard stop accordingly.

Re: 2 years Opportunity = Trump's new gin cabinet

"so instead he spent his weekend watching TV and angry tweeting"

Given the choice between that and golf, I suspect they now wish they'd let him golf.

Re: @ wolfetone

"As long as radar technology stays put which is not the case, and as long as every one of its anti reflecting tiles is carefully examined and replaced "

And as long as the avionics doesn't overheat. Opening the doors to cool things off negates the stealth.

Re: f-35 - air inferiority fighter-bomber

It's very good at its mission.

The thing is the mission is spending lots of money and making lots of profit for the people who make it and sell spare parts for it, not to fight wars.

Re: Pink Unicorn?

Fact: UFO reports are down by pilots.

So are bird reports.

In fact at Heathrow (along with most other airports) there's a near linear relationship between the decrease in bird sightings and the increase in drone sightings.

Never mind that the airspace around airports is heavily surveilled and anything with weather radar looking for microbursts is going to see drones lit up like christmas trees thanks to both their metal content and the doppler effects of the rotors.

Re: Pink Unicorn?

"If a DJI Phantom hits a rotor blade and leaves any sort of damage, that requires a new and very expensive rotor blade."

Which is _STILL_ cheaper than having to replace the rotor, gearboxes, tail, landing gear and crush seats after a rollover crash and you'll have evidence that it was actually a drone and not a plastic shopping bag caught in a wind gust.

I mention that specifically because of the case at Heathrow of a "dronestrike" which turned out to be exactly that - a plastic shopping bag which was still wrapped over the nose on inspection

Instructors aren't million-hour gods. In the case of light aircraft and helicoptors they're usually people with a few hundred hours under their belts working up to a commercial seat and when I was learning I had a couple allow me to make quite boneheaded procedural errors without them noticing it (busting height limits against an incoming civil transport and not squawking in military airspace. Minor, but should have been picked up on in the checklists.)

A quadcoptor drone flown into a helicoptor (even a R22) will be tossed into the ground _hard_ by the downwash if it gets that close - the outwash donut from the rotor disc in ground effect will probably flip it long before it gets near.

Re: It's all about control

"Despite Black Cab drivers having their number on display, they are very anonymous."

That's why they seem to think they can get away with nearly anything - in general they do unless there's an inspector about. Not only are those few and far between but the cabbies rapidly inform each other when they're about instead of letting the bad cabbies get caught. (Hint, you only need to be afraid of a taxi licensing inspector hailing a ride if you have something to hide.)

"drivers that have criminal records"

You mean people like John Worboys?

https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-are-black-cabs-safer-than-ubers

Black Cabs are one of the last City of London Guilds with arcane entry conditions which exert control over a much larger extent of Greater London than they should. TFL would do itself a tremendous favour if it restricted them to the square mile.

In any case in the longer term autonomous vehicles are the disruptive factor that noone seems to want to talk about with the potential to replace _both_ busses and taxis with 6-8 seater vehicles that are flexible enough to handle peak and offpeak requirements (the ability to peform entraining for peaks with pods breaking out for individual stops is a game changer)

I'd have more respect for black cabbies if they weren't generally assholes to other road users AND customers. If they want to keep their privileges then they need to do a better job of self-policing and removing drivers who don't conform to licensing conditions (especially refusing fares for invalid reasons) and don't drive safely. Passing the "knowledge" seems to be regarded as a substitute for a number of other essential skills.

Re: What a waste of time and money

Modified monkey brains

Which are modified insect eater mammilan brains

riding on reptile brains.

riding on fish brains.

And we're all riding on a large rock hurtling through the universe in in the general direction of the Great Attractor.

What that is, nobody knows. If we name it, do the stars start going out, silently, one by one?

Re: If the mass is 800 vs 700...

"The black hole left after the collapse of a giant star is so much smaller than the original star that the escape velocity increases from a few hundred kilometres per second to the speed of light. Less dense objects have a lower escape velocity than dense objects of the same mass."

Wrong on a number of levels.

Firstly, only a small amount of the mass of the original star actually forms the black hole. The rest blows off into space.

Which means that anything orbiting will see its escape velocity _at that orbit_ decrease dramatically.

But if you setup shop in orbit close to the event horizon, then yes your escape velocity will be high. That orbit will be well inside the diameter of the original star. (gravity follows the inverse square law of distance)

Fun quiz for the day: If you were to go straight up from earth to the distance of the moon's orbit, then you'll experience a gravitational pull from the earth of about 1/3 G - and start coming straight down again as soon as you stop counteracting that pull and lose any outward momentum you had. It's a long way to fall. At times like this, how long will you have to consider all those things your mother told you before you discover if the ground will be friendly?

Re: 4 billion years...

"the Earth is predicted to lose its oceans in a billion years or so. "

It will become too hot for life in about 500 million years. We'll be long-gone by then. In one way or another.

Re: @jake -- Films / TV-shows ever dramatize the collision of galaxies?

"It's a real eye opener as to the laws of physics with regard to automobiles."

There's a standard joke that most automobiles understand the laws of physics far better than the monkeys driving them.

Not today anyway.

power attracts the corruptible.

And in the case of US law enforcement, it's not just "one bad actor". There's a systemic problem.

"He is not personally liable for the debt."

As a shareholder, perhaps not.

As a DIRECTOR, deliberately engaging in criminal activity, _yes_, he is.

Limited liability only shields the shareholders and only if they don't know what's going on.

Re: Consumer refers to who's paying

"It's patently obvious that Microsoft actually wants everyone on 10"

As long as they're on 7 or higher to start with. I have a bunch of older kit and they won't accept those serial numbers.

Re: Consumer refers to who's paying

" If you buy a computer from an OEM or retail and it has Windows installed then part of the price that you pay goes to Microsoft for the Windows licence."

Having just had to do this for a bunch of desktop machines (where we had the choice between Freedos or "some flavour of windows"), it's about £80 for Windows10 home and £87 for Windows10 pro. The retail price is about £110

It's slightly cheaper for laptops, presumably because they tend to have fewer cores.

Re: Consumer refers to who's paying

> Consumer versions of Windows 10 are "free"

Except they're not. They cost about £80. All the "free" deals went away a while back.

Re: Driverless cars.

8 seats is about optimum for an autonomous vehicle to act as scheduled and hailed transport. You're going to see a melding of "bus" and "taxi" functions.

Busses are only (barely) economic in peak periods and they do levels of damage to roads that's wildly disproportionate to their carrying capacity (road damage is proportional to the 5th power of axle pressure). The rest of the time they're a subsidy pit, so if you can have a fleet that breaks off into taxi mode outside of peaks and during peaks doesn't hit every stop because it doesn't need to (you'd need to have vehicles staged and ready to jump in/out of service but at the inner end of the journey that is taken care of by varying endpoints). For commuter-style services in peak periods where the busses run nearly empty they can entrain themselves out to the service edge in order to achieve best speed/throughput, breaking up at the points where a normal bus would start filling.

If you can make busses/taxis convenient then noone feels the "need" to have a car. I found that out living in a number of asian cities where taxis and minibuses were at most a couple of minutes apart.

Re: To Arms My Brothers

"Let us take hammers to these deceitful weaving machines"

The issue with luddites was that a rapid change resulted in massive unemployment.

This time around there's a shortage of drivers and to be honest the way it's rolling out means that they probably won't be replacing humans as fast as they retire.

"Driving" on a nice road is fun. "Driving" in city traffic is a tedious and stressful pain in the arse, exacerbated by selfish cunts who cut up everything in sight and trash smooth traffic flows. Such twats should be strung up by the toes from a streetlight on the second offence and by the nipples with fishhooks for the third.

Re: A lot of 'hot air'

"String wires above the road ?"

Why not?

Re: A lot of 'hot air'

"The only thing that TfL wants is to have ZERO privately owned cars on the road in Central London."

True, but they also want to extract their pound of flesh from those who ply for hire on that road.

T'aint gonna happen.

One thing worth noting is that despite the horrors of the Ringways plan execution(*) and the Central Box, the original (1950s!) plan was for everything inside Ring 1 to be car-free and as pedestrianised as possible.

(*) The real problem was cheaping out and not taking account of the effects on the neighbouring properties. They should have been buying up 100metres each side.. Outer rings (and the new south circular) were planned to be in trenches to keep noise levels down. If you ever wondered why the M25 is so bad, it's because it's carrying _all_ the traffic intended for Rings 2,3 and 4, plus more besides.

Re: 2 birds one autonomous stone

" there is someone to blame when it crashes into a queue of nuns waiting for a bus"

At the average london traffic speed that would play out like the steamroller scene in Austin Powers.

"I'm pretty sure that while a Ltd company limits shareholders risk it doesn't shield against criminal behaviour."

Correct. The limit is on financial risk to shareholders, NOT risks to directors for knowingly engaging in illegal activities.

"Have even reported the mobile number they apparently use to call back if you press the "contact" button"

I'd arrange for someone to come visit. Then "deal" with them personally.

Re: Bigger teeth

The reality is that if you refuse to take a job because you are being required to break the law then you will be sanctioned.

This kind of thing will only stop when JC employees start facing criminal charges for forcing people into criminal activities.

Re: Bigger teeth

"This is supposedly a review of the place"

"Supposedly" being the operative word. More likely a schill review.