Posts by Graham Bartlett

Re: "He was found not guilty, therefore he is innocent"

"The fact that this has had so much publicity in the press etc means that you have to assume that these 'grey areas' are less grey now and were in fact consensual."

Or you assume that the women involved have a correctly low opinion of the legal process. Most rapes do not result in a conviction, even those that make it to court. And the standard method of defence lawyers is to stomp through their private life with hobnail boots to make them feel as shitty as possible. Many rape victims who go to court say they feel like they've been raped twice, once by the rapist and again by the court. And it's most likely that they'll be doing this for nothing, because the rapist is most likely to be found "not guilty".

Added to that, if they're interested in BDSM but had their consent violated, they may not want to be outed as interested in BDSM. It's illegal to be sacked because of what you do in private, but that hasn't stopped numerous employers, and if you run your own business or do anything else relying on your public image then you're basically dead meat. Many people who are outed are ostracised by family and friends. The family courts shouldn't care either, but if you're in a divorce case then you can forget having access to your children. If you're gay then all this is explicitly illegal under anti-discrimination legislation. But if you like to be tied up and have your bum smacked then it's totally legal to discriminate based on that sexual preference. You would then have to go to court to explicitly show how your sexual preference does *not* affect your ability to do your job or look after your children - as quite a few people have had to, over the last few years.

Re: Fucking moron

""There is a distinct difference between spur of the moment and Darwin award."

Indeed, however that difference is often chance."

Only because whatever fucking stupid thing they've done turns out not to kill them. In general it's safe to say that the more egregiously fucking stupid it is, the lower the odds on survival. The fact of its innate and undeniable fucking stupidity, and the fact of that person's innate and undeniable fucking stupidity in doing whatever it was on the spur of the moment, are unchanged.

I'd also note that Ben Nevis typically takes around 8 hours, and you'll be seriously cold a long way before the top. It might be spur of the moment at the start, but there's a shitload of opportunity along the way to realise "this was a fucking stupid idea".

Surely that's a TURDIS?

Pratchett was there too

"Why was it cheap?" "Because it's deaf."

Re: Win-win.

Why? It doesn't exempt you from the requirement to have nothing covering your face, which rules out burqas and the like. A turban or hijab still gives a perfectly good view of someone's face.

Same as the rule about sunglasses - you could have chronic light-sensitivity which needs you to cover your eyes at all times, but you'd still have to have your passport photo taken with eyes open and shades off.

Re: Ludicrous lawsuit. No tangible injury.

You clearly don't understand the situation. Of course emissions are different on an actual road. The situation for VW is that the testers could run *THE SAME SCENARIO* on a rolling road with slightly different entry conditions, and get radically different results. In other words, the ECU was specifically looking for conditions which matched the start of a test cycle and modifying its behaviour *only* during the test cycle. And that's called a defeat device.

VW didn't object to the standards. It simply didn't try to meet them, instead relying on faking its tests.

I don't believe people directly suffered from this, either. The regs those engines *did* meet are still pretty damn clean. However then you're in the situation of arguing that laws aren't valid unless you can show the crime directly hurt someone, and that's a very slippery slope. (You certainly can prove indirect hurt to the employees of other manufacturers who weren't competing on an equal basis.)

As far as penalties go, this is an enormous multinational corporation. The only penalty possible is financial, and the only way to make corporations follow the law is to make the penalty hurt. The Ford Pinto situation of a manufacturer coldly deciding that it was cheaper to pay compensation for deaths/injuries than to fix the problem was the classic case which no-one wants repeating.

Re: Demos

On planets where normal sale-of-goods laws apply. If you buy a tin of beans from Tesco today for 30p, and then tomorrow you find they've got a special offer and the same beans are 20p, you don't get to take them back and re-buy them at the lower price. If you bought them, then you bought them.

If there was something fundamentally wrong with it, then of course you could return it for a refund. But if you're just trying it on, expect people to tell you fo f*ck off and stop being a dipsh*t.

Re: Wind-up doll

Actually was Nigeria. And even got a picture of her passport - she was South African. For this woman, it seemed a lot more of her own free will, otherwise I wouldn't have been doing the wind-up.

Re: Short on the key metrics.

Judging by most cider drinkers I've seen, the ability to spell your own name.

Re: Perhaps time for a change of format?

Bayko with a Y. My gran had a load of it. It was actually quite neat if you didn't mind that all you could make with it were 1930s-style semis. And later on when I started with Warhammer models, it was quite neat for my standard-bearers that I had a stock of thin tempered-steel rods, when all the other guys were using cocktail sticks which snapped on a regular basis.

Re: The more of this I read @IAproveofitspendingonspecificprojects

You'd be truly amazed how easy it is to run an engine. Remember that back in the early days of cars, there were no carburettors or anything that sophisticated - all they did was blow air over the surface of a puddle of fuel, and hope evaporation picked up enough. And it worked.

As for points, old cars used whole lot more juice on the spark than they ideally needed. The result was spark plugs and points wearing away as the zaps vaporised small bits of metal each time. Spark plugs were a 5000-mile/6-month service item on my old Montego. These days spark plugs are a 10-year-service item, and that's more because they simply don't know how long they'll keep running so they take a guess.

If you want fuel economy *and* performance *and* the car to run at altitude, that's where it gets tricky.

Re: Moth balls

The answer is definitely moth balls. Remove them early enough and it can't breed.

Re: Anyone else like the old way better?

Thanks for the link to a website which tried to force a spyware download on me, dickhead. And an opinion based on cars that started down the production line in 1997, meaning design started about 1994. Way to go for up-to-date information.

But I'll still answer your fact-free opinion, because I started working on car engine controllers in 1999 and spent roughly 10 years on and off since then on that, and I particularly spent a lot of time on diagnostics. So unless you've worked through a diagnostics manual with the service team lead for a manufacturer, and been out testing your fail-safe strategies on a real vehicle on a test track, then I probably do know more than you. Let me count the ways that things have improved...

You don't have to change sparkplugs any more. When I started driving, sparkplugs were an every-year service item. Now they're usually a 100,000-mile service item. Entirely down to replacing the points with electronics. Oh, and the points, and the vacuum-advance carburettor, and the carburettor generally, and spark-plug leads on most modern cars with coil-over plugs - all gone, and all their failure modes with them. My Renault Laguna starts in the morning, every time, no questions. My old Austin Montego was not so user-friendly. And the Laguna will happily get 45mph at 80mph, where I'd be lucky to get 30mph from the Montego at that speed. My Laguna is only an 2005 plate, incidentally - hardly state of the art.

Temperature sensors, and speed sensors on various bits of the drivetrain. Time was that these went wrong on a regular basis, and if you were lucky then you could limp the car to a garage, and if you weren't then it was a tow-truck job. Now that all these sensors are available, the engine controller can cross-check them to see whether any look dodgy, and do something sensible if there's a problem.

Theft of cars, there's another improvement. These days that's seriously rare and mostly confined to old cars from pre-immobiliser days. If you want to steal a modern car, you either need the key or you need some wireless immobiliser cracking kit which is well beyond your basic brick-through-the-side-window brigade. Theft from cars is right up - all those people leaving satnavs in the glove box - but theft *of* cars is very low.

Ditto radios. No-one much buys aftermarket radios any more, because they're all built in. Which means no-one is going to break into your car for the radio any more, because they have sod all resale value.

And that's before we start talking about all the features - ABS, airbags, traction control and the like - which have saved the lives of more people than you'll meet in your life, and which are only possible because of electronics.

Visible improvements? Well, these days your car generally "just works". Perhaps it's not "visible" to you, but that's only because you aren't correctly remembering what old cars were like. Yes, there are still design faults in cars, because cars are designed by humans and cockups happen, and manufacturers won't fix them unless they have to. Congratulations for spotting that. So I'll just say "Ford Pinto" and let you fsck off quietly with your little Beemer bug.

In the same way as every kid who's just got their license drives like they did when their instructor/parent was in the car with them. They'll swear blind that they will, and then they'll swear blind afterwards that they stuck to the speed limit. And anyone who believes them is an idiot.

And the "abstinence-only" stuff just makes it worse, because then you're handing the keys to someone who hasn't even been taught basic safety. Like car crashes, ignorance is more likely to get you into an accident than to keep you out of one.

Re: The other thing to remember

That's the problem at the moment. The stuff is still out there, but not in enough concentration to make it worth mining, unless the price

Pig farming is a very bad analogy. Pigs reproduce. Minerals do not.

Where we actually are is berry-picking in Autumn. All the ones near the path get picked first. Then you go looking under the thorny bits for any more around there. Then if you're really keen, you might consider carrying a stepladder over to get the ones higher up. And inevitably there'll be some right up in a tree which are out of reach of anyone except birds.

When it comes to minerals, we've nailed all the easy ones round the paths. Some minerals are still at the "look under the thorny bits" category. Some have stepladders up already. And some (notably coal) have long precarious ladders up trees (which occasionally give way and kill people) to extract the hard-to-reach ones. When people will pay £100 per berry, it's worth the risk.

It will rarely be cost-effective to get 100% coverage. You probably won't send a helicopter drone around the top of every tree to individually pluck single berry, so some will still be left there.

But in common with berry-picking, once they're picked then THAT'S IT.

Re: ... IoT devices generally have no real world advantage over their dumb counterparts ...

Requires, no. Might be nice to have, perhaps.

Say I'm coming home early on a cold day, I turn the heating on when I leave work instead of coming back to a freezing house. I can see that being an advantage. Turning the kettle on at the same time might be overkill though, yes.

Re: Impossible Testing Scenario

As to "inherently unsafe", that depends on whether parameters do need testing in combination. Some will, some won't. No testing strategy, not even for safety critical software like medical equipment, requires testing of every possible combination of individual states. If you think that's a problem, you don't understand ALARP.

Good architecture should minimise linkages so that you *can* trace what can affect what. If you don't have good enough engineers to design a robust architecture, then you have bigger problems than just the testing.

Re: nonsense article and "common sense"

Common sense might tell you that a mechanical device spinning at umptytum RPM is less reliable than solid-state. If you're slinging that mechanical device around in your handbag, or clipping it on your arm to go for a jog, then sure.

But leave them both in an immobile PC, and bets are off. If you're not aware of manufacturers specifying expected write-cycle lifespans for flash, then you don't know about the main cause of failure of one of these. If in addition you are using the SSD as the main (or only) drive and you haven't got temporary files being put anywhere else, then you're not aware of the main reason you'll burn through those write-cycles. In short, if your only comparison is mechanical-vs-solid-state then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject.

Re: How to make ball lightning

Now explain the marks left.

Not that there's necessarily only one explanation. Yours is perfectly possible. The downside is that retina burn is something everyone has experienced, so we're all pretty familiar with it.

Re: Dalton's Bond...

Absolutely.

And prepared to kill anyone with anything. The wait-the-whole-film payoff with the cigarette lighter was rather nifty. Or in "Living Daylights", instead of continuing to beat up on the guy hanging off his leg on the plane, he just cut the laces on his boot. That's the kind of style that Bond hadn't had since Connery, and didn't get again until Craig. Moore and Brosnan were only placeholders.

ZZ Top in space

They were arrested for flying whilst blind. Probably because of their cheap sunglasses.

Re: One step closer

Do the sums for how big the turd would need to be to not be vaporised by the atmosphere. I don't think anyone's planning on putting herds of elephants into space any time soon.

(And for those on the "I had a curry last night , and boy did that burn up on re-entry" gag - tough titty, I got there first!)

Re: Earth is 9,000 years old...

Especially since there's all those people (including politicians) who think that "Born in the USA" is about how great America is, just because it's in a major key and has a sing-along chorus. Go figure.

Re: Shortage of kangeroos/ collies/ dolphins?

"Bloody arse bandit!" - Skipinder the Punjabi kangaroo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW96Z9AJf38

Re: Occam

+1 on that.

As a one-time Occam/Transputer coder though, the main issue isn't race conditions and livelocks - it's deadlocks. A waits on B, B waits on A, neither gives way. But finding the silver lining, it's totally possible to statically detect this at compilation and warn the coder about it. At least, it is if you use a language like Occam where you can easily see what's going on. By the time you've baked the parallelism into a ton of nasty interface code though, it's all pretty gnarly and you're basically on your own.

There's a better solution. If you live in California, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Washington or Texas (per Wikipedia), barratry is a misdemeanor punishable by prison time and/or fines. You don't even need to sue them yourself - it's a crime, so you call the police and hope for a DA who wants to get their name in the papers as "the man who arrested Microsoft".

Re: Duties and powers

Er, yes they can. Floods, storms and lightning strikes are pretty well outside the control of your insurance company, but you expect them to pay up when something happens.