Posts by Alan Brown

Or more politely: Bork Bork

Here's a clip of Dido in the kitchen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvDvTnTGjgQ (complete with the end results of all their efforts in spin at 2:54)

Re: MBA "Qualification"

"my boss has okayed the request of C-bods for me to do important work by Tuesday while I was away, completely "forgetting" that my team of 2 part-timers and my lowliness have several "high priority" projects of about 2-4 man*month (each)"

I guess being signed off for 3 months medical stress leave wouldn't go down well then.

Re: Duty of Care?

"Now unfortunately breaking the Sale of Goods Act doesn't get the (ir)responsible senior management locked up (after due process, obviously). That needs something else."

"Operating recklessly" should do the trick and fits the bill.

Imagine comrade Dido finding herself banned from being on any boards for the next decade.

Re: Does there need to be an obligation to "encrypt" ?

"PCI-DSS only covers credit cards"

There are similar rules in the banking sector covering direct debits. I suspect TT's financial side are going to find their nuts gently roasting in a fire before christmas.

Re: TalkTalk "Doing a Ratner"

"Personally I've always suspected that any company that spams as aggressively as TalkTalk is highly dubious."

Virgin are still dumping stuff in my mailbox despite being served with legal notice to cease and desist. Make of that what you will.

"The Titanic actually carried an excess lifeboat capacity than required by the UK Board of Trade when she sailed in 1912"

The irony there is that as originally designed the Titanic/Olympic had enough lifeboats for everyone, but they were deleted because they "spoiled the lines of the ship" and because it was felt that many lifeboats would make the upper-deck passengers uneasy.

TalkTalk has never had enough security in place or planned. Even a cursory glance at the issues of outsourcing and the vulnerabilities it exposes the company to (lowly paid workers being paid off by gangs to leak data, etc) shows that they're not paying attention to anything except pennies coming in the door.

Security has _always_ been regarded as a cost centre until it's too late. "No return on investment" rules supreme and there's no such thing in business as "Cost Of Not Investing"

"Surely the data protection act must have something they can pin on them here"

There is. Losing personal data exposes them to _private_ legal action - and the court of appeal has upheld that claims can be for distress as well as actual monetary losses.

If 40,000 people all sue for £500 each, it'll make the ICO fine look like peanuts, just in the legal bills TT will run up, let alone the actual settlements.

Re: Could be solved quite easily.

"How do you deal with international robocallers who basically operate outside of the law?"

Follow the money: You go after the people who hired the robocallers, who are invariably _inside_ the country.

The TCPA makes them all jointly and fully liable for this reason. You can also order them to hand over details of who they paid, etc (also invariably inside the country) so that you can go after them too.

The best part is that this is all in local (to you) small claims court, with fixed fees (which are added to the judgement), mandatory tripling for wilful violations (robocalls and breaching DNC lists) and the charges are PER CALL, which means if they call you 5 times, that's 5 lots of $500 statutory damages, tripled if wilful.

There's a cottage industry around collecting TCPA damages and a lot of knowledge/assistance on the net about how to do it. If you're an american you'd be silly to pass up collecting $1500 (or $3000 if you can find both parties, or more if there's a liability chain) per call for 5 mins work filling in paperwork and a filing fee.

"The response is always the same ... sue 'em yourself."

You should, no matter what the FCC (or FTC, or state AG) do.

You have the right to - and the death of 1 million papercuts is a greater threat than anything the FCC or other law enfircement authority can bring to bear. This is why "reputable" outfits stopped that kind of telemarketing when the TCPA was passed 25 years ago.

Remember, the TCPA makes the caller _and_ the outfit hiring them jointly and severally liable and you have the right to file in local small claims even if Joe's widget company is across the country and hired Achmed's telemarketers in Bangalore. The fun part is that once you have the judgement against Joe (even by default) you can apply to get it enforced and this all adds to _his_ fees, not yours. If Joe has any sense he'll disclose who he paid, how much he paid and where he paid it to, so you can go after Achmed's US sockpuppets, else he can face contempt of court action.

Joe's defense of "I got cold called and offered this fantastic marketing service" is _not_ a defence, as there is specific wording preventing ignorance of the marketer's activities being used this way.

Robocalling (with a robot voice) or calling a number on a do-not-call list is an automatic wilful violation (ie. $1500 strike _each_ against Joe and Achmed) - and on top of that many states run their own prosecutions of do-not-call violators. (The FCC charges $11,000 per call when they weigh in, several states go for $50,000per violation(call) and they get aggressively pursued through state AGs and state courts, not as a civil agency seeking a settlement without admission of wrongdoing.)

The single biggest problem with TCPA actions is hostile small claims courts judges refusing the cases or finding for the defendant (usually on the basis that finding for the plaintiff would be "harmful for local business"). In _every single case_ where that got appealed and kicked up the food chain, the judges higher up the chain have ruled that this itself is illegal and had extremely harsh words for the "judges" in question, forcing them to take the case back and deal with it as the law requires.

"The Gov/FCC should make that illegal."

It IS illegal. Criminally so.

Re: I agree with all of the posts so far (which is a first)

" Notwithstanding that, I can put my hand on every lightswitch in the dark, should I need to see."

Neon switches make finding them much easier in the dark too :)

Re: cart before horse

"Along with all the neighbours' PLT as well, of course, or at least those who are on the same phase."

A clamp-on RF choke on each of the incoming power wires works nicely and it's cheap.

Re: cart before horse

The "seldom used" part is easy - leave the things switched on permanently and control them via the app.

If you must have physical switches, then just have wall-mounted control modules and permanently link out the switch in the wallbox. (X10 has been doing that for 30 years)

The dead loss in this instance is that LED bulbs are really only for replacing lamps in traditional fittings which can't be (economically) replaced. Bear in mind that the shape and connector are for a device which traditionally required replacment every 1000 operating hours, or 1500 switch-on cycles (The light bulb cartel really did exist, look it up)

At $75 apiece you may as well have a permanently fitted device with a much nicer form factor than that of a light bulb (and a lot more light output, plus more room for the whizzy bits). These are a solution looking for the wrong problem.

Re: Don't cause drops But...

"There's much higher churn in the BB industry than there used to be."

Not amongst BB providers with satisfied customers there isn't.

ICO paper tiger

Not many people realise that the data protection laws leave the way open for those who have been compromised to sue in a private capacity, in addition to the ICO's (feeble) powers.

I am surprised that class-action suits haven't been floated already.

Relative sizes of quakes

The San Andreas can't provide much more than 7 because it moves too freely - and as has been pointed out, californians are pretty much prepared.

Cascadia on the other hand could easily be bigger than 8.5 when it goes, with the accompanying tsunami taking out most of the coastline between California and Vancouver Island. Populations in the pacific northwest are woefully unprepared.

New Madrid's last triple shudder were 8.1-8.3 apiece - powerful enough for the rollers to set church bells ringing in Boston. It's a long way from the centre of North America to the coast. It's about due to pop again and has the potential to destroy the USA as an economic power.

Re: Please can we keep the accolades coming...

"It is not at all clear that Japan would not have surrendered due to blockade efficiency and Russia being free to enter the war in the East"

It wasn't clear at the time (witness what happened at Okinawa) and the top military brass were so fanatical that they still opposed the surrender even after the Emperor told them to give in (fanatical to the point of planning a coup). The Allies fully expected to lose a million men trying to take the mainland in house-to-house fighting.

20/20 hindsight from 70 years on is an inexact science. Trying to see through the fog of war is a hell of a lot harder still.

In any case, if those bombs hadn't been dropped in WW2, someone, somewhere would have dropped one on a large city. Just be thankful that fewer people died in Nagasaki and Hiroshima than in the Tokyo firestorms and that none have been used in anger ever since.

(FWIW, 1980s Hiroshima and Nagasaki cancer rates were 0.25% above background normal. The abhorrence of how the bombs affected the population is justifiable, but it's clear that much of the long-term risks are statistically negligable and we really have to get past the knee-jerk "all nuclear stuff baaaaaad" mantra which is keeping us burning coal/oil when we should be using them as industrial raw materials or fertilizer.)

Re: When...

Microsoft claim that their EU office365 servers are resident in Ireland and insulated against US gov attempts to access (hence the current NY state case) however when pushed, they admitted that anyone stateside invoking the PATRIOT act would rip right through any protection supposedly offered.

Re: Diesel != Fossil Oil

"it happily runs on converted vegetable oil."

It's an even bigger WIN if you modify the engine system slightly (fuel line heaters) so that it runs on unmodified vegetable fuel:

No noxious byproducts from the conversion

You don't lose 50% of the available energy in the oil to the conversion process.

Re: Itain't necessarily so!

"the problem here is the high cost of the gas turbine engines, which are uneconomic for passenger cars."

The engines themselves aren't expensive over their lifespan - until you cook one through bad starting procedure or poor maintenance. Automotive use demands extreme tolerance to operator abuse.

Turbines aren't as efficient as piston engines in most cases (especially turboshafts(*)) but they pack a lot of HP in a very small, lightweight space. That's great for aircraft and not such a big deal for cars.

(*) Power generation turboshafts make up the efficiency loss by putting a steam boiler plant on the end, driven by the hot exhaust. It's kind of hard to do that in a car.

Re: We all have opinions, finding the facts is the hard part

"They're still working on the 'hyper efficient' 6 ¾ L motors."

Chrysler and others were getting 35-45mpg out of 4 litre engines 40 years ago, along with low end torque when you mashed the pedal.

Emissions controls killed that.

ULEZ and black cabs

Black cabs normally have several engine swaps over their lifespan. There's nothing stopping a hybrid drivetrain or Euro6 one being fitted under the bonnet - there's certainly enough space for just about anything there.

Re: Fact-Checking Needed

"most are at their highest torque/power at the top end as well"

This is always the case in petrol engines, hence why race engines have tiny cylinders and stupidly high max rpms. (Back in the 1950s Ducati was making V8 500cc motorbikes and in the 1960s Honda had 4 cylinder 50cc ones. I'd love to have either as a collectors' item.)

Internal friction losses go up with the cube+ of piston velocity, just as rolling air friction does. There's always a tradeoff.

Re: diesel powered large aircraft

"But the engines were complex. Eg Napier Nomad"

There's quite a difference between a light aircraft engine (70-300hp) and something like a Nomad (1100-3200hp). The research in the 50s was aimed at getting as much horsepower on the wing as with as low weight as possible because this was a fundamental limiter on the size/lifting power of aircraft.

The main reason for wanting light aircraft diesels is fuel commonality (they can burn kerosene). There are a significant number of automotive-derived gasoline engines around already and the prime advantage of those is much longer maintainence periods.

As for leaded aircraft fuel: This is because of the age of designs, as I mentioned in a previous post (and the age of the aircraft. Many light aircraft are 50+ years old with 50+ year old engines). Moving avgas to unleaded would result in receeding valves as it did with car engines until they were retrofitted with hardened valve seats. This has been done in most cases anyway (anything rated for Mogas is done already) but the aviation sector is notoriously conservative in this arena.

If you have a _really_ old engine such as a Moth, they run better on white spirit than avgas, but that's technically illegal in most countries. (The lower your fuel octane the more energy it contains but the less you can extract due to compression ratios)

"They might as well just ban non electric cars"

Long-term it's likely to happen in cities - if automated cars don't make the "need" to have your own one obselete in the mean time.

Helloooo Johnnycab.

Re: VW's billions...

NOX isn't exclusively a diesel issue, see my earlier comment.

The _only_ reason gasoline engines have low NOX emission levels is that lean burn technology was essentially banned 20 years ago in the USA. That ban means that petrol engines get 20% worse fuel economy than they are able to if NOX wasn't an issue.

(Lean burn was banned by US federal legislation mandating that stoiciometric fuel ratios are used at all times in spark-ignition engines. 3-way catalytic converters need this to work effectively but it's just as feasible to put adblue on petrol engines and change the type of cat in use.)

Re: "...the reason there are very few diesel aeroplanes, because..."

You can happily run an unmodified diesel engine on Jet fuel (I've done it, and US military hummers run on it almost exclusively) and you can happily put diesel in a gas turbine engine (Have done that too - one of the classic bodges is a mix of diesel and petrol in turbine helicopters if you're really in a pinch)

Most light aero engines are still using 1930s engine technology because it's difficult to homologate newer ones. This is why they have to be torn down at such ridiculously short intervals.

JET-A hasn't been on the market for a long time, but if you can find it, I'm sure your diesel won't mind it.