Posts by Alan Brown 16473 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
"And well deserved. One could spend time customising a screed for one particular gig only to have the pimp send it out for something quite different."
Not to mention the asswipes who reactivate your existence on their mailing lists a couple of years after you've told them to delete your data.
(Not just recruiters. Asda have done this twice)
It's _exactly_ this threat that's needed.
If you want evidence of how well this works in practice, look at the stats of the US junk fax industry before and after the passing of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
Yes, there are still junk faxers, but putting most of the small fly-by-nighters out of business (by making the hirers liable for damages too - which rapidly let to a dearth of companies willing to pay for fax advertising) left the authorities more able to go after the egrarious offenders such as fax.com
"The only thing these sanctions achieved was to prop up the regimes which most likely would have fallen by themselves without the US helpfully obliging by supplying a very visible and loud external threat."
What makes you think that wasn't the intention?
And that as a reciprocal action the loud threats from "certain cartoon characters" aren't used to prop things up in the US of A?
" So I now backup critical stuff to two hard drives "
Backup strategies should never allow for _fewer_ than 2 _separate_ copies. This is the core of GFS type policies.
Archiving is another kettle of fish - failure to restore is a measured risk and should be taken into account.
"when principals will stop pressuring subcontracting companies to get the lower price,"
One of the bigger problems is subcontractors farming things out when their contract prohibits this from happening. Because it's a breach of contract it's covered up and the effort that goes into the coverup far exceeds any effort checking compliance at the sub-subcontractor.
Corporations exist to shield investors from financial risk
There is _nothing_ protecting irresponsible management from personal liablity for negligence or recklessness.
Adam Smith (The one who's regarded as a titan economic theory) felt that the concept of corporate managers was fatally flawed because such people had temptation to steal and/or play fast&loose with other people's money. He's been proven right many times since he raised his misgivings about corporate structures.
"You don't need to threaten to batter down the door with a sledgehammer- when you'd be welcome, if you simply knocked.........."
You sir, are a threat to the sales of sledgehammers and door breaching rams. As such you are to be regarded as a terrorist!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK06Hl5DkrI - sums up the USA attitude.
"2. Privacy Figleaf completely shrivelled out of existence."
MS have at least attempted to keep european data in Europe.
Google refused to provide _any_ guarantees on the sanctity of european personal data, in particular they wouldn't provide any statements about whether any european data which made its way to the USA would be handled in accordance with EU law (which is what Safe Harbour is supposed to entail)
"police officers duped into believe that it's a legitimate operation because GCHQ ordered it"
New Zealand police didn't need an excuse to be gung ho. The corruption in that organisation runs from the top to the bottom (not so much "bent coppers", but the even worse Gene Hunt "Noble Cause" type of corruption(*)) when it comes to "getting a bad guy by any means possible", along with overly credulous belief of any foreign "expert" whose pronouncements align with their interests. ("We know he's a bad guy because XYZ said he is"). Being able to kick in doors and raid using helicopters and tactics normally only seen in hollywood films was just too much of an opportunity for the people involved to pass up.
The illegal raids they'd performed in other operations(**) along with evidence planting and manipulation(***) have sometimes(****) resulted in cases being overturned, but with the government pressuring the courts to "make it happen", the Dotcom case is the final straw in proving that NZ really is a Banana Dominion.
People may not take bribes in NZ (although this appears to be changing rapidly), but influence peddling, cronyism and power-based corrupt activities are rife (and usually not illegal under NZ law - bribery is pretty much the only kind of corruption which is explicitly illegal)
(*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_cause_corruption
(**) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_Zealand_police_raids
(***) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_miscarriage_of_justice_cases#New_Zealand is just the tip of the iceberg there.
(****) It is a brave judge who criticises the NZ Police, given the systemic retaliation that happens when they do - that's a (paraphrased) comment made by a NZ high court judge I knew in the early 1990s.
" Of course other countries' courts might take a dim view of that well-known US abuse of process, the fishing expedition."
But would it be dim enough to incarcerate US representatives for doing it?
The FBI agents who stole evidence in the Kim Dotcom case got clean away with it, as did the remaining USA legal team in New Zealand. A pissed off judge could have starting putting people in the cells for contempt, but chose not to and the whole cartoon exercise continued.
"I watched the decline in mpg across 5 same model cars, doing the same runs nearly every day"
And yet over the last decade I've manged the opposite in my car. If I drive it like I stole it then it gets the same poor milage it used to get 15 years ago when I did that.
That said, if there's an ethanol blend at the pump, avoid it unless it's substantially cheaper. Think in terms of miles per pound not miles per gallon. (Premium grade has slightly lower energy density than 91, so unless your car _requires_ that fuel, using it will get _lower_ milage than using 91. Even higher grades frequently use ethanol blends to achieve the knock resistance and the power gains with higher compression engines come from being able to pack more fuel into the cylinders, not from the fuel)
"The downside is that its under MUCH higher stress and will probably develop faults far sooner than a less stressed engine."
IOW the lifespan of such an engine is likely to be 200,000 miles instead of the 800-900,000 miles most engines have been able to get since the 1990s.
You can get the milage out of these whizzers as long as you stay out of turbo boost zones all the time, but bear in mind that accelerating briskly to a speed and then staying at it in top gear will use less fuel than crawling slowly upwards in speed using the gears. Even with that, the increased milage is tiny compared to what can be gained by paying attention to what's ahead and avoiding unnecessary braking. Unless you're in a hybrid, every bit of braking (engine or friction) is kinetic energy being tossed overboard as heat.
"I have a design (for other purposes) that can detect the NOx levels.. and the whole thing costs 300£, screen included."
There's another track which could be followed. NOX is only a problem in certain dense urban areas (levels are only concerning in London inside the inner london ring road, on A abd B roads out to the north/south circular and major routes out to the M25, plus the M25 itself)
An _adaptive_ NOX response would allow for higher efficiency when environmental NOX is low, switching to lower emissions when NOX levels start climbing. This is perfectly feasible and economic with modern engine control systems, but our laws assume the technology of 20 years ago which was unable to handle these kinds of variables.
It still wouldn't solve the London NOX problem, especially in the Hackney, Finsbury Park and Golders Green hot spots. With vehicle NOX now accounting for less than half of the total, you're rapidly into the laws of diminishing returns. There are some streets in London which have 10 times the EU limits during overnight winter periods when there are _no_ vehicles recorded running on them.
"I have long said that the pollution levels in London, for example, prove withoud doubt that large diesel engines, in this case, buses, emmit SEVERAL times the max ammount of NOx permitted, as streets with only buses demonstrate. No doubt about it."
You'd be wrong though. In 2009, only 60% of NOX in London was generated by vheicles. The rest came from stationay sources - almost entirely 1970s era boilers with unsealed flues. These also emit copious quantities of carbon monoxide and inspectors could identify individual properties thanks to the scale of the emissions - only 40,50,000 boilers are responsible for at least 90% of the stationary-source NOX in London.
The relevance to vehicles is that even with cheating, Euro5 and 6 did reduce real-world emissions and that, along with retirement of older vehicles and the "clean air zones" means that vehicle-sourced NOX is well down on what it was in 2009 and non-vehicular NOX is something over 60% of the total of what's left.
Boiler emissions have been regulated since 2003 - and NOX was why councils were pushing condensing systems hard before this (condensing boilers emit almost zero NOX as it's absorbed into the water), however _existing_ systems are grandfathered against enforcement for around 20 years.
Most owners of these boilers have been approached and informed how polluting their installations are and offers have been made to assist in upgrading, however they generallly refuse point blank to do so and will stay refusniks until legally compelled to do so. Almost all of the offenders are wealthy individuals who can trivially replace their boiler installation. Money is not the issue and there are hints that attempts to force the issue will be strongly resisted in the courts when the NOX exemptions are removed.
Of course _who_ these people are is confidential data and can't be leaked. Being named and shamed might be a motivator but it's not a tactic that can be used, especially when the polluters have political clout and money.
"That generally requires the offense to have also been illegal in the country you are extraditing from."
It also requires the agreement and assistance of local plod - who have to do the "picking up" and other legwork. Handing over to US marshals only happens when the plane lands in the USA.
"The FBI and USA spooks in general would like to have complete access to everything and anything that is in the USA or can be tricked, coerced or downright kidnapped to be in USA territory. "
Salient point about "kidnapped" - FBI agents _stole_ data disks in the Kim Dotcom extradition case and breached a court order by removing them from New Zealand to the USA after a high court judge had explicitly ordered that they not do that.
Said judge was unimpressed, but for some reason didn't declare the prosecution's case null and void.
"only people who have had an account with Equifax (signed up for free credit report etc."
Or one of Equifax's myriad sock puppet companies.
In this instance, "customers" have an "account" with Equifax whether they know it or not. I DPA section 11'd them (and a few other companies) a few years back after I discovered they were selling marketing data containing my details. They made it clear they whilst they'd tag my account to not sell anything they would be keeping the data on file.
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely".
A more accurate version would be that power attracts the corruptible. There's a reason that psychopaths tend to cluster to these kinds of positions.
Whilst it's no secret that the EPO had flaws ("unfireable civil servants", etc), what's happened in terms of reforms and this "the courts have no jurisdiction here" stance is a lot worse.
"we started to see large UK public sector bodies reject things such as Mother's Maiden Name when configuring security questions."
Of course if a company asks for this online and you put in "FuckOffCuntFace", it's going to make for some interesting times if you phone up and they decide to bring up the answer to that question.
"if they're anything like as useless as our HR department."
You misunderstand the purpose of a HR department.
It is not there for staff protection or assistance, it is there to protect the COMPANY from the staff. Being useless and difficult to deal with is not an accident.
Any statements to the contrary are pure bunkum.
"it is still possible to obtain a Birth Certificate for anyone with minimal effort"
Freely available to anyone who asks and pays the fee.
"and then use this to request a UK passport "
The method used should have been sealed in the 1960s. After all it's the registrar of Births _DEATHS_ and marriages, so it's not as if the relevant disqualification document is filed in another government department.
(FWIW, many countries _do_ tag records with a death date specifically to ensure that ID documents in the name of dead children can't be obtained. The UK seems to think this is too hard despite it being a known vulnerablity long before Frederick Forsythe wrote about it.)
"us poor bastards who never wanted anything to do with them and did not consent to them collecting as much data as they could on us , are ok, presumably."
I DPA section 11'd them a few years back. Their response made it clear that whilst they were complying with the law (removing all marketing data and ensuring information was not sold on), they would NOT remove any of the other data held.
Quite frankly, feeding Equifax management into a woodchipper feet first would be too kind.
"...me and the wife managed (~2005) to order a birth cert for my brother in law and then a passport for him with minimal hassle."
Isn't it amazing how a document which is _explicitly_ "Not an identification document and must not be used as one" is a core requirement for obtaining what _ARE_ identification documents?
"Hard drives sitting in a datacenter are very well protected against shocks"
Not as well as you might think. In dense storage arrays there's a major problem isolating against vibration caused by both head movement in adjacent drives and chassis fans (not to mention loud noises such as people shouting at drives - the average datacentre has a SPL in the region of 90-95dBa)
"platters with finer surface smoothness tolerance"
HDD platters are already amongst the lowest tolerances in production anywhere. The R&D for them costs so much that there's only one maker of the things left. Ditto on drive heads - which is why Seagate and WD both went to shingling more or less simultaneously as the R&D costs could only be justified that way (the differences between them are assembly and secret sauce)
The far more telling thing about HDD technology is that WD and Seagate both disbanded their research units years ago and the the only part left is the arm that's trying to make HAMR work - which is an engineering problem now, not a R&D one. There's no new technology coming down the line.
Trying to justify this on the basis that enterprise will buy it is a non-starter. They're already more expensive than normal drives and SSD has mostly eaten the "low latency" end of the market. If it costs twice as much as existing enterprise drives then buyers will say "fuck it" and move to SSD instead.
AC suggested patent trolling. It's either that or someone's April 1 release got out early.
Invar belts used to be used in HDDs back in the days of stepper motors.
Going back even further, linear motors and rigid slides were common in larger format drives.
Neither of them achieved the necessary levels of accuracy, especially when the compelling requirement is for a smaller head with a smaller spot size and SSDs have already surpassed HDD capacity and beat the snot out of them on price/performance whilst simultaneously closing on raw price/capacity.
I was going to say much the same thing, but the belts were steel, the actuator was a stepper motor and it was a 20MB drive.
The current head setup more or less _is_ a linear motor. Pivoting on a fixed point rather than in a slide is mechanically simple, far lower friction than a slide and precision than a slide. That patent reads like a leap back to the 1970s.
Disk heads don't so much use aerodynamics as hydrodynamics to achieve a fluid bearing and diskmakers have been saying for a while that the problem isn't ride height, but spot size, which is why they went to shingling and then HAMR (both of which have undesireable secondary characteristics.)
My overwhelming reaction was to wonder if April 1 came around early.
"viewing at a cinema where the audio was so pumped up"
I've walked out of several screenings because of this and demanded a refund.
The culprit is invariably multiplex managers who fuck with the audio settings(*) after the engineers have perfectly set it up, thinking that more bass sounds great (yeah, up to the point that the speakers lose cohesion)
(*) Usually by pushing everything to 11
This is one of the reasons(**) I don't bother with movie screenings much.
(**) One of the others is people who won't stop jabbering on their phone throughout the movie. I fully support any designer who proposes turning theatres into a faraday cage AND running a jammer inside it.
"Thats what the best SciFi does"
Indeed. Good science fiction uses technology not as an end in itself but to raise "what if?" questions about the societies that result as well as even deeper questions about human nature.
I've referred to it as "speculative fiction" on more than one occasion.
"Pan Am was very much a startup when it talked Boeing into building the original 314 Clippers,"
It was a different era then, particularly in regard to attitudes to market dominance.
Pan Am might never have existed if the Boeing group wasn't forcibly broken up under antitrust laws some years earlier (It became Boeing Airplane company, United Airlines and United Aircraft Corporation) in the wake of the Air Mail scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Mail_scandal
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Aircraft_and_Transport_Corporation makes interesting reading and shows that Boeing's current antics(*) aren't anything new.
At some point the pendulum is going to swing back and perhaps another Pan Am will spring up.
(*) managing to get a 220% import duty applied to aircraft in a market segment it doesn't even manufacture for.
IIRC at the moment the Pan Am logo is owned by a railway logistics outfit.
Looks..... Yup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Systems
"It formerly held a now-defunct airline division." - gotta love the revisionism there. No mention of the original which collapsed in 1991 and got hoovered up.
Yup, there's speed tape, duct tape, book tape, carpet tape and 101 other kinds of meshed tapes all with their own adhesives and material properties.
Don't get them mixed up. (example: real duct tape, used to hold ducts together, doesn't lose its stick over time and start leaking air, on the other hand you don't want "sticks like shit to a blanket" long term adhesion in parcel tape, nor should you use parcel tape on stuff that's going into long term storage.)
"and removed all manner of foreign objects from assorted hardware. "
As an electronics apprentice long before I got into IT, I can assure everyone that the stories about what 3 year olds will post into video recorder tape slots are _all_ true.... :)
"These days, they have wax pens which melt and ball up at different temperatures - they merely mark the tyre and watch the wax."
I suspect that they'd use IR thermometers these days or FLIR cameras.
Anyway, tyres on train wheels are a bad idea. Ask Deutsche Bahn about how that large ICE crash at Eschede in 1998 got started.
"What caused this problem was cheap, unfit for purpose labels bought to cut costs."
The interesting part is that when it comes to tape labels, the sticky ones are only available from 2 makers in 3 types, none of them are shiny and they're all marked as OK for laser or inkjet use (inkjets get better results)
You can use only sticky labels on LTO/SDLT/SAIT. Older ones could use paper/card inserts - which resulted in a lot of outfits making their own on too flimsy paper and having trouble cutting them out properly
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