Would love a standard for speed limit data

Whilst doing this I wish the wonks would come up with a standard for defining road speed limits and the areas they apply to.

The gentle 'bong' sound from my TomTom is a VERY useful adjunct to eyballing speed restriction signs.

A UK (or EU) standard for publishing that data with a statutory requirement to publish it (and a get-out for an offending driver if its not up to date or is incorrect) would be a much greater contribution to observing speed limits than any number of speed cameras.

I think I'd work hard to keep that information up to date.

Emacs

There was time, long long ago, when the joke acronym for EMACS - Eight Megabytes and Constantly Swapping was very funny, because 8 megabytes was incomprehensibly huge.

How times have changed.

@CaptainHook

Be careful about believing everything they tell you on the course.

Get a hive full of Fen Bastards (the affectionate name for the local wild black beasts we have out in six-toe territory) and they'll fly at ridiculously low temperatures. A bright frosty day has mine out and not just for a poo, they came back with snowdrop pollen on their legs whilst the snow isn't even melting on the ground.

Admittedly, I've never seen them trying it in fog. Maybe it's time for a pissing contest "My bees will fly at lower temperatures than yours" etc. :)

DIY vs call a plumber

Declaring an interest in this, since it's what my company does for a living, I'd say you need to be near-crackers to do this yourself.

It's not just about virtualising stuff, it's about knowing in advance what works and what shouldn't be virtualised. There are some applications that cry out for their very own fat client PC (badly behaved memory and cpu hogs) which, if they are mission-critical for the user, are going to be very bad news.

Also, a good design would split off the users who need full virtualisation from the (probable) majority who will be entirely happy with something like Terminal Services, a very much lower cost option.

I'm highly sceptical of involving just 'consultants' who don't know what they are talking about, but when you can find real subject expertise out there, it's foolish not to draw on it.

And there are plenty of solutions which don't involve replacing all the desktop real estate at once. Consider gutting your existing desktops and turning them into thin clients if the exorbitant price of bespoke thin client devices looks too high. You get the management cost benefits if not quite the power saving.

This isn't rocket science - but it's a specialist area and what's the point of discovering all the 'well known' problems for yourself?

Anybody got a sextant?

And (for ships at least) an accurate watch, a sextant and knowledge of how to use it will get your position to within about a mile. Unless it's cloudy, oops.

I doubt if any aircraft still carry them or have anyone who knows how to use them.

Ebay usually carries a few - I've tried a plastic Ebbco for £20 which isn't much less accurate than a Freiberger I picked up for about £350. The latter is a fabulous piece of optics and engineering but overkill for a casual sailor.

Fnarr Fnarr

Perhaps he should be 'interred' for his own protection - geddit?

@john murgatroyd

I'm told that the scratters from our local estates sometimes gather cigarette ends from outside local pubs, where the now-banned smokers stand, and drop them at burglary sites to pollute the DNA evidence. The funny bit is that most of the local pubs where they collect those from are pretty exclusively patronised by crooks and drug -dealers anyhow.

@Fred 1

The Really Big Hard On Collider? I want to know where that's located please. Sounds much better than the puny efforts of Paris and her mates

@Red Bren

I second the call for a brown (funny name that) paper envelope icon. There's way too much casual corruption in our system these days. I don't think there is a lot of overt corruption, but the 'we have always done it this way' gradual creep of institutionalized corruption.

Like MP's expenses as a classic example.

The Payroll Vote (look it up).

Our political system is corrupt top to bottom but it just doesn't realise it. Intellectually and morally corrupt, not so much direct bribery.

Why keep the DNA?

What's wrong with collecting and filing the DNA profiles on all unsolved crimes, then when poor Joe Public is arrested and swabbed

- check to see if he's one of the wanted ones

- if not, delete the sample

Since by all accounts the great majority of crimes are committed by a small number of diehards this would quickly sieve most of them out AND act as a big deterrent to someone guilty but as-yet -unpunished to not do anything that might lead to arrest

Since I care, frankly, much more about preventing future crimes than those already commited (you can't uncommit them and punishing people seems an expensive waste of time) doesn't this actually achieve what we want?

Maybe I've missed something ... sure someone will enlighten me

Pun alert

Was he interred in the lagoon?

Traditional hackers' diet

I've long supported the tradition of beer and curry myself, with devices named tiger, landlord, cobra, balti, korma, roti ... it's enough for a modest network as long as you don't fall into the trap of naming the currently-hottest one vindaloo or phal only to be embarrassed a few years later when you realise it's now as comparatively spicy as a raita.

Responsibility of politicians

Here if ever the case was the need for legislation (and an outside body controlling it) which places a duty on ministers not to indulge in contracts which, in the view of the courts, contains clauses tantamount to poison pills. If a minister willingly signs a contract which unreasonably constrains a later change of government, they should be legally responsible for that with severe criminal penalties.

Job done.

Funniest thing I heard today

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. Good f***ing riddance.

MPs in the dark ages

I don't believe all this cock about having to be in Westminster. Yes, in the 18th century there was little choice - but there is increasingly little need for a physical presence in a place like the houses of parliament nowadays.

One of the businesses I'm involved in no longer has any office at all - all staff work from home and with a mixture of VoIP, Skype, instant messenger, email, phone and shared online documents we communicate much more effectively than some companies where everyone commutes into central offices. A member of staff moved to Dubai and the only difference was that he got his salary tax free rather than taxed and the company stopped having to pay National Insurance for him. Apart from that there was zero noticeable change on the work he did or the way he worked.

If the MPs got their act together a similar thing could replace a large amount of the 'we have to be there' cobblers they seem to believe. It's time for them to change working practices rather than sticking to their outmoded antiquated working methods.

@Jolyon Ralph

That'll be a swarm - how bees reproduce. The colony grows in spring, produces a new queen or three and a goodly chunk of the existing bees plus a queen go and look for a new place to colonise while those that remain in the original hive reproduce like fury to make up the numbers again.

It's a strange time of year. I lifted the lids on my hives yesterday and instead of the early-season numbers I expected they were bursting at the seams replete with swathes of honey. Mind you, the rape is already in full blossom locally so it's probably all rape honey that will set solid now the weather has turned cold. Time to split them and double the numbers before the beggars swarm.

What would really help ...

.. would be some proper scientific action.

The amount spent on the National Bee Unit can't be judged in context unless we actually know what happens if we lose the bee population. Ok, I'll be sad if my colonies die but it's not the end of the world for me. However, if that badly affects the overall food chain that is REALLY SERIOUS. And all I have ever seen is speculation as to what it would mean in practice. How much of our food is critically dependent on bee pollination and would anything else fill the gap?

Alongside that it would seem a useful precaution to siphon off a gnat's cock width of the ridiculous billions being pissed away on ID cards and Connecting for Health and invest in some serious work to try to breed Varroa-resistant strains (ideally) or failing that, a miticide that actually works. And whilst on the case for that, try to find out whether we really do have other problems affecting the bee population since as far as I can tell all we really have is a lot of anecdote and confusion at present.

There's a limit to what amateur bee keepers can do no matter how motivated they are. Protecting the security of the food chain however - now it seems to me that's one of the reasons you might want a government.

Feed of Diana's death

Shock, horror - OMG - an unencrypted feed! Who would have thought that they would ever exist?

Apart from EVERY F*CKER who had a steerable dish in the nineties. There were hundreds of clear feeds used for TV news gathering, even whole columns dedicated to spotting them in the satellite magazines of the day. On a poor day for official programmes, it was often more fun to point the dish at, say 1 degree west, and watch the UK-US news feeds then see them pop up edited on the news later.

Now things have gone digital they are more likely to be encrypted but when Diana went titsup that was probably the exception rather than the norm.

Give us a break.

Us power

I thought the US power supply was typically two-phase 110volt. Low power circuits run on 110 volts off one phase, high-powered heating and cooking equipment uses both phases for 220v.

In that case, no transformer is needed, though a 220v spur would be needed off the distribution board into the garage or wherever.

@chrisc

If the rogue 'secure' site serves up a certificate for www.bankofamerica.com that certificate still isn't going to be signed by a trusted Certificate Authority so the punter will get a warning pop-up. Some will probably click through so the goal will have been partially achieved.

To overcome savvy users you would need to get a rogue certificate signed by the CA. That's not going to be easy for an obvious name like bankofamerica.

However, given that you can get a server certificate for peanuts nowadays just by waving a credit card and if you go for a domain name like bnakofamerica.com (i.e. a typo) or, as Alliance and Leicester seem to do, direct to an unrelated domain name (mybusinessbank.co.uk) then it will be a lot easier to have a domain with matching and signed certificate. It takes an alert user to spot that one.

Lots of scope for tricking the punter here! This looks like a pretty nasty vulnerability.

@Jacqui

"only .uk domains require manual intervetion ot a $35 charge per NS change"

Eh? Last time I did a nameserver change it was free. Admittedly years ago I signed up as a reseller for Nominet, but all I have to do is send a pgp-signed request and it's entirely automatic.

Who is charging you that much to make such a simple change?

@Charlie

"Given the use of anti terror law to freeze Icelandic bank assets there is no doubt that this mega database will eventually be put to use against benefit fraud and parking fines"

Charlie mate - that's why they are doing it in the first place. It's nothing to do with terrorism it's to do with tax collection, benefit fraud, money laundering (in distant 3rd place) and then anything else they can do to stop us doing what they don't like.

Warning label

That warning label is hilarious! Please please please start selling some of those with sticky backs on peel-off rolls!

@SkySkoll

PAN PAN is the approved way of writing the Urgency call. If you take a look at the Civil Aviation Authority (that's the UK one) document CAP 413, "Radiotelephony Manual" chapter 8 states:

1.2.2 The pilot should make the appropriate emergency call as follows:

a) Distress 'MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY'

b) Urgency 'PAN PAN , PAN PAN, PAN PAN'

Yes, it's based on the French (apparently) but not spelled that way in the official blurb.

Techno gibberish

Out of interest - in what way is email connected to running websites? Mail servers are typically in no way related to web serving and are usually in entirely different locations on completely different networks.

This sounds (on the face of it) like complete and utter bollocks being spouted by a clueless numpty.

@AC - Why?

People should ask for the circuit diagrams too. It's not good enough to calibrate these things on standardised samples and then argue that that 'proves' they are accurate. For all we know the software has arithmetic overflow or underflow when converting the a/d converter values into parts per thousand, it may have provable race conditions, dependencies on date/time or any one of dozens of typical software-only faults. Similar voltage-level dependencies could easily exist in the analogue circuitry - only a detailed design review by honest third parties can give good assurances to the contrary.

The fact that they won't hand the code over strongly suggest that it's never been quality audited or properly reviewed and may well indeed have dozens of stupid bugs in it.

I don't want to see drunken drivers get off, but neither should they be subject to randomness in their convictions.

Why aren't there consulting software engineers?

If you go into the civil engineering profession, there are consulting engineers who you can hire to keep your contractors honest. They'll watch the contractors like hawks to make sure they aren't cutting corners or stitching you up in other ways.

Software development is still in the dark ages on this - surely a large project like connecting for health should have a whole bunch of auditors and inspectors whose only job is to check that the contractors are doing what they were contracted to do?

Why doesn't the software industry yet have that kind of specialist at work?

True, it's only short range

As this web page convincingly points out, it's very limiting at these higher frequencies:

http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2001/08/20/1/?nc=1

I mean, earth-moon-earth using the moon as a passive reflector - how pathetic! No wonder they stuck to such a low frequency as 24GHz.

What the fkuc?

Alumini - is this a new term referring to those who encase themselves in tinfoil or are wearers of hats thereof?

But I know not of this DMBS of which you speak. May we be illuminated?

And if a closed-source developer made this kind of boo-boo

... how long would it be before we ever found out? And how many insecure keys would the world have by then?

Low turnouts

In my business, if I don't deliver what the customers want, I starve or go bankrupt. I can't moan or berate my customers for being disinterested in my products.

It seems to me that politicians are in a uniquely privileged position and I'm unimpressed (I don't know an obscenity strong enough to really substitute for my diplomatic wording here) by their complaints about low turnout.

I have a solution: we know the going rate for the job of MP, Minister and so on. That rate should be paid to the incumbent pro-rata to the amount of the electorate that ACTUALLY VOTED for the lying cheating bastard. No, not the percentage that voted, the percentage of the registered electorate that actually voted for that person. So, if the PM's salary is a notional 150,000 or whatever and 40% of a 30% turnout voted for him, he gets 12% of the rate.

That's fair don't you think?

It's wind power (and no, not from the cows)

Watching the BBC report on 't telly last night, the spokesman said he was the prof in charge of the pilot and that the hydrogen was made by cracking water using wind-generated electricity.

Nowt about cow-pats.

Gobsmacked

I can't believe this is true. Although my period as a member of IST/41 (the BSI panel that is reviewing the fast-track document) was short, there was an air of intellectual honesty that gave me some modest pride being a part of it.

I really find it incomprehensible that the BSI panel might have changed its recommendation. The draft standard is truly, truly, appalling.

I will be fascinated to see if the rumor of a 5-1 change of mind is really true. If so, there will be a lot of explaining to do.

And I'd point out to anyone reading this that the panel is only advisory. If you feel that they have made a mistake, give the BSI a call on +44 (0)20 8996 9001 or email them at cservices@bsi-global.com

The ICT/-/1 (that's really its name) committee that actually decides the UK vote is only advised by IST/41, it doesn't have to abide by what they say. The BSI is supposed to work on consensus. If enough people call or contact it to tell it that it's made a mistake, it is supposed to do something about it.

If you care, get off your backside and tell them. I have already. Their vote is due in on the 29th. You have essentially one day only to influence them.