Posts by R Soul

Re: "make sure every journalist and network is aware by shouting it from the rooftops. "

journalists still report on things not sanctioned by their woke billionaire owners

Lord Rothermere? David Ellison? Rupert Murdoch? Jeff Bezos? Baron Lebedev?

Re: Compensation Get Out Clauses

I wouldn't worry about that. BT will make sure you get their promised 16 days of outages - and then some.

Rugby, being more central to the country

If wikipedia is to be believed (I know, I know), the most northerly point of the UK is at 60 degrees N in the Shetland Islands and the most southerly is at 49.5 degrees N in the Scilly Isles. The mid-point between them is around 55 degrees N. That's approximately the latitude of Glasgow or Edinburgh. These cities are some 500km or so north of the supposedly "more central" Rugby.

BTW, having another broadcast location would complicate the problems of compensating for propagation delay. Unless you're equidistant from all the transmitters.

Re: "the good sense to leave the US & Israel to slog it out"

And that's what makes the relationship special.

Why they keep this 'winning' approach to contracts is beyond my comprehension.

Simple. If Crapita ever lose money on a contract - a very if - they know they have HM taxpayer by the balls and a bale-out is guaranteed.

It's not as if those contracts could easily be taken away and handed over to another provider. Who at best will be just as bad as Crapita.

the Home Office

The problem here is that the Home Office arbitrarily decided that dual nationals cannot get an ETA on their "other" passport. This part seems to be a very new decision and I for one cannot understand why.

Simple, They are spiteful, malevolent arseholes who are devoid of any humanity and common sense.

These are the tossers behind 30-40 years of attempts to bring in ID cards remember. They're also keen on other forms of pervasive round-the-clock surveillance of everyone: DNA databases, CCTV, ANPR, etc.

"the only advantage being they’ve not had a whirl in power yet."

That can only be a disadvantage because they don't know how the machinery of government works or how to run things. Just look at how Farage's clueless dimwits are fucking up the councils they're running.

Re: Planning

"I worked at one place where the FD would scrutinise the phone bill and request an explanation of any premium rate calls made which probably wasted more time and money than the call had cost."

Indeed. However from the beancounter's PoV, costs were being controlled and KPIs were being met. That would have mattered much. much more than the costs to the business of enforcing all that finance theatre and the reduced expenses it supposedly delivered. The costs from a day's downtime of the IT systems would be someone else's problem. The FD "saved" the company a few pennies on the phone call to get field service to show up. And that was what was important.

The careers of a vast army of mediocre middle management depend on that sort of logic(?).

Re: Vultures

The Linux Foundation has paid Torvalds ~$1.5M every year since 2016. Nice work if you can get it.

Re: UK data protection continues

Literally, they refuse to tell you where your data is stored, or on what services, or in what countries, or what laws it's subject to.

Your contract with $vendor defines which jurisdiction applies - Ireland's most likely. Read the small print.

Re: The problem with politicians

No. They're backing Farage's ego-trip-of-the-week because they're utter morons.

Re: Does everything have to be "monetisable"?

This just in: just about every country in the world is living on tick. Film at on tonight's news at 11!

Re: Operating funds

It's a pity you don't understand how the RIRs manage IP addresses or fund themselves.

Re: Quote Mistake Unquote

"What should really worry people is that it doesn't have to be a mistake."

There are far bigger worries than that: jail time (or worse) because of a false positive, no punishment for the fuckwits responsible for the snoopercams, no redress for their victims, no controls or regulations on how snoopercams get(ab)used, lack of accountability, no enforcement or audit measures, linking the shop's snoopercams to "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" Starmercards, etc, etc.

This is pretty much the Post Office/Fushitsu Horizon scandal all over again. Though with fewer miscarriages of justice and ruined lives - at least for now.

Re: Honest question

No! systemd replaced the clusterfuck of sysvinit with an even bigger and uglier clusterfuck. FTFY.

Re: Not enough change

Yeah. But this is just a symptom of an even bigger failing. NASA management did a remarkably bad job of playing the remarkably bad hand they'd been dealt - pork barrel politics and lack of money mostly.

The space shuttle was fundamentally flawed from the outset and its design was riddled with ugly compromises. It should never have had solid rocket boosters. But NASA didn't have the time and resources to come up with a suitable liquid-fuelled rocket. So the choice was use dangerous SRBs* or have no manned launches for decades and that would have meant the end of NASA. 7 people needlessly died because too many wrong decisions has been taken years before that fateful Challenger launch.

NASA engineers knew their SRBs would have a catastrophic failure every 100 flights or so. They'd properly done the risk assessments and did the sums. And those grim calculations became reality. It was simply a question of when, not if, a shuttle would fail - and not necessarily because it happened to be cold on launch day. The O-rings were just one of many vulnerabilities waiting to happen.

The management chose to ignore those assessments for the reasons you explained. Instead they preferred the powerpoint bullshit about NASA processes and procedures eliminating the risk of failure. This was something Feynman unearthed when he asked various engineers and management what the estimated failure rates were for the systems they designed and got them to explain how they arrived at those numbers. His supplement to the Challenger report makes sobering reading. It's far more disturbing IMO than his stunt with icy water and a bit of O-ring rubber.

* Rocketry is dangerous enough. SRBs are even more dangerous because there's no element of control after they're lit. With liquid-fuelled rockets, it's possible to turn them off or manage the rate fuel gets burnt. Not that that would have made much difference when something goes bad at launch.

One hopes that the facial recognition systems will discard any reference to someone who is not of interest to the police

Think again. PC Plod retains every DNA sample they gather, just in case. Even if those samples came from people who hadn't committed a crime or were found not guilty in court. They'll do this for Snoopercam data.

Besides, everyone is of interest to the police these days.

Re: It's not an ID card

That could be true, though it's clearly not what Starmer and his goons have in mind.

Here's what our idiot Home Secretary said a couple of days ago: "...my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.".

Such a dystoptian future depends on every part of the state having the same access to the all-seeing, all-tracking Starmer/Blair/Blunkett database(s). Which will also be freely available to Musk, Palantir. Crapita and the rest.

I doubt he does either. Assuming of course the orange fuckwit is capable of thinking,

financially they just weren't viable

That wasn't true. BA's Concorde flights generated remarkable operating profits once they realised how much people were prepared to pay to fly on them. Air France never figured that out. So they were quite keen to stop flying Concordes and cut their losses.

The crash wasn't the last nail in the coffin. Though it did speed up the move into the departure lounge. Both airlines operated Concordes for a year or so once they returned to service after the crash.

Air France pulled the plug because Concorde made a big dent in their accounts which threatened the airline's privatisation. That left BA on the hook for all of the support costs from Airbus. BA couldn't/wouldn't pay these on their own. Then Airbus said they were withdrawing tech/engineering support and at that point it was game over.

Of course, the concept of financial viability here is theoretical because the French and UK taxpayers wrote off all the R&D and manufacturing costs. These never got charged to the airlines who flew Concorde.

Not quite. The current government knows the objective of Starmercards is to control us.* They believe intrusive and pervasive surveillance is in our best interests and they serve us by foisting this unwanted crap. They just can't come out and say that. Well not yet.

* Just after the Starmercard was announced and would only be used for checking new employees, various Starmer stooges started mumbling about using them for getting access to healthcare, welfare and so on. This was/is clearly part of the Home Office's Grand Design and would get rolled out as soon as enough people were forced to carry their Starmercard.

Re: Very easy to say...

This only became a concern for Badenough once she had to chase any passing bandwagon that might attract attention towards her party of numpties and worthless tossers.

US-ASCII

"US-ASCII isn't capable of transferring anything other than US English text without data loss."

Hmmm. US-ASCII includes the 'u' character. Which USians don't use when spelling words like colour, neighbour, favour, behaviour, etc

Re: Now, it has grown into a bloated mess millions of times bigger than the OS which inspired it.

Hmmmm. If someone put a TCP/IP stack and page-based virtual memory into V7 UNIX - BSD4.[234] comes close - it would kick the arse of any of today's monuments to bloatware^W^W^W Oses.

Re: try something old fashioned

IIUC airlines get charged by the airport for time spent at the gate. They're also under pressure to pull back so the gate can be freed up for an incoming flight.

everyone "over age" loses privacy.

No big deal. Anyone stupid enough to sign up for social-media-platform-du-jour has already surrendered their privacy.