there's one of those warehouses being built in Nottingham. The foundations are about as far as it's got so far, but the ad board claims it will be one of the largest and most secure data centres in the Midlands.
Oh, you bet your arse it won't be a privately-run centre. You bet your arse "secure" will mean "armed".
State-provided computer equipment for students comes preloaded with keylogging and stealth cam software that calls home whenever the computer finds an active internet connection. I can certainly vouch for this, as I have remotely disabled such software many, many times. The last one I did was so loaded it barely did anything useful, and certainly not at the speed expected from a dual core machine - I ended up giving instructions over the phone for wiping the thing and installing OpenSuSE 11.4 (12.1 failed miserably, fuck all worked).
that's the point - if you're not in front of the zombie box, soaking up TOWIE/BGT/Eastenders/whateverothershiteisonthesedays, then it is assumed that you're up to no good. Ergo, you be fucked.
This was the subject of (possibly local) urban mythology several years ago, when desktop flat panels hit mainstream. It went a little like this: that the cameras were actually integrated, pixel for pixel, into the screen itself, rather like an insect compound eye. It's not too much of a stretch. <anecdote>one time I was scanning documents and forgot to load a sheet - I also forgot to close the lid. What I ended up with was a very high resolution, perfect image of the area of the textured ceiling and striplight directly above the scanner bed.</anecdote>
you're not going to isolate something which has the RADAR profile of a sparrow from a cloud of other things that have much larger RADAR profiles - such as clouds. Which, incidentally, are likely to have much larger electronic profiles, too. And infrared. IF it were possible to hit something that small with little to no collateral damage, then the police wouldn't be using microdrones to overfly scenes for risk of them being shot down by a kid with a.22 - those drones top at 1500 feet. Well within range of a powerful springer or PCP.
anything with a rocket motor on the tail is gonna be overkill for a small aircraft that travels around 90kt at best. The chances of something travelling at over 1200kt hitting it or even detonating close enough (assuming non-nuclear) to cause any damage is somewhere between slim and none.
For such small targets something like the Phalanx system is a: cheaper than a missile, b: more likely to hit the target since the launcher is sitting on the deck of a ship, and c: less likely to cause significant collateral damage.
The Europeans (particularly the UK, Holland and Norway) have been making life difficult for offshore operations since 1966. Refer to the ongoing saga of Radio Caroline.
I've been doodling for years, designs of a solar powered small aircraft that could potentially stay aloft forever - given enough storage density (ie lithium ion battery or something even denser), and efficient enough PV arrays, motors, fans and wings it's doable with a small payload which itself could also be powered off the same system. Back when I started these doodles NiMH was just coming into mainstream, but that was still too heavy (didn't stop laptop makers using NiMH for internal power sources, though), it was the one point of frustration that stopped me from prototyping anything. That and the very inefficient glass plated PV cells, whereas now we have formable film PV which can be used as a single layer skin for wing surfaces. OK, it's not very strong, but does it have to be? We're not sending these things into combat, we just want them to stay aloft.
As a demonstration of how light an aircraft can be; back in school I built a dumb glider from some styrofoam laminate I found in a storage bin. This had an eight foot wingspan, was six feet long and used spars made from the same material to reinforce the full fuselage - just to make sure it kept its shape under its own weight and that it didn't detach itself from the wing. In all it weighed less than six pounds (with a small weight in the nose) and when ideal conditions presented (zero wind, slightly overcast), it went for a test flight.
From a two handed running launch the thing flew just shy of 120m and made a soft belly landing.
Pretty good for an unpowered, hand-launched school project. Wonder what it would have done with a propulsion pack that these days would easily weigh about as much as the nose weight?
The Tunnel boring project was named Eden in its concept phase through planning, the TBMs used in the probe tunnels were identical. Both built by the same company and both designed to chew chalk. When the tunnels met, one TBM was directed downwards and buried, the other was sent off to become one of four TBMs chewing through the Alps for the GBT. About the only thing that needed to be replaced was the cutting head since it was going from chewing chalk to chewing basalt and granite.
the Crossrail project is talking about a 73-mile East-West network made up of three lines*, which at 100m/week in the tunnel sections will take about three years to dig. What complicates matters is the fact that the Crossrail coachwork will be full height and riding on standard gauge rails - which will make it completely incompatible with the London Underground network, also means that the rails that will need laying will be brand new, on virgin bed - while avoiding breaching existing tunnels! Most of the route will actually be overground, btw - the longest continuous tunnel section will be between Paddington and Canary Wharf.
*Maidenhead and Heathrow to Shenfield and Abbey Wood, with the split beneath Spitalfields just after Whitechapel.
it's not unique at all - the design of the TBMs is identical to those used in the Eden (Channel Tunnel) Project, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, others at Orlovski, Niagara, Yucca... only difference being the number of tunnels excavated, the number of TBMs used in each project, and the type of rock chewed through.
...all you have to do is approach the right kind of company, and impress the fuck out of them - BEFORE you ask for a job. You might even find (as I did) the company *offering* you a job.
Problem is even if a decision comes from the ECHR the UK courts have said that they'll treat them as advisories and nothing more, to be discarded when it suits (have a look through decisions made in the Family Division of the High Court, particularly at Hague cases. Wall LJ himself went public stating that he spoke for the vast majority of judges in saying that ECHR had no jurisdiction in British courts and that their decisions would be summarily ignored).
Slashdot Mirror
at last! The long-awaited Nietsche reference! :D
there's one of those warehouses being built in Nottingham. The foundations are about as far as it's got so far, but the ad board claims it will be one of the largest and most secure data centres in the Midlands.
Oh, you bet your arse it won't be a privately-run centre. You bet your arse "secure" will mean "armed".
State-provided computer equipment for students comes preloaded with keylogging and stealth cam software that calls home whenever the computer finds an active internet connection. I can certainly vouch for this, as I have remotely disabled such software many, many times. The last one I did was so loaded it barely did anything useful, and certainly not at the speed expected from a dual core machine - I ended up giving instructions over the phone for wiping the thing and installing OpenSuSE 11.4 (12.1 failed miserably, fuck all worked).
Without probable cause they have no right to search your car.
Period.
So ask them what cause they have to search. Record their answer.
don't Samsung make most LCD panels in existence these days?
fix: menu->power settings->disable motion detection.
fix: play some KLF. RIAA can't fuckin' touch you for that one!
that's the point - if you're not in front of the zombie box, soaking up TOWIE/BGT/Eastenders/whateverothershiteisonthesedays, then it is assumed that you're up to no good. Ergo, you be fucked.
they already did. Going tooled up for a kidnapping, are you?
This was the subject of (possibly local) urban mythology several years ago, when desktop flat panels hit mainstream. It went a little like this: that the cameras were actually integrated, pixel for pixel, into the screen itself, rather like an insect compound eye. It's not too much of a stretch. <anecdote>one time I was scanning documents and forgot to load a sheet - I also forgot to close the lid. What I ended up with was a very high resolution, perfect image of the area of the textured ceiling and striplight directly above the scanner bed.</anecdote>
I have one of those! Fires 6mm BBs, it's a 1/18 scale model of a Leopard 2 MBT with full range turret control and 2sec reload.
or some unwashed native with a Stinger?
you're not going to isolate something which has the RADAR profile of a sparrow from a cloud of other things that have much larger RADAR profiles - such as clouds. Which, incidentally, are likely to have much larger electronic profiles, too. And infrared. IF it were possible to hit something that small with little to no collateral damage, then the police wouldn't be using microdrones to overfly scenes for risk of them being shot down by a kid with a .22 - those drones top at 1500 feet. Well within range of a powerful springer or PCP.
anything with a rocket motor on the tail is gonna be overkill for a small aircraft that travels around 90kt at best. The chances of something travelling at over 1200kt hitting it or even detonating close enough (assuming non-nuclear) to cause any damage is somewhere between slim and none.
For such small targets something like the Phalanx system is a: cheaper than a missile, b: more likely to hit the target since the launcher is sitting on the deck of a ship, and c: less likely to cause significant collateral damage.
The Europeans (particularly the UK, Holland and Norway) have been making life difficult for offshore operations since 1966. Refer to the ongoing saga of Radio Caroline.
I've been doodling for years, designs of a solar powered small aircraft that could potentially stay aloft forever - given enough storage density (ie lithium ion battery or something even denser), and efficient enough PV arrays, motors, fans and wings it's doable with a small payload which itself could also be powered off the same system. Back when I started these doodles NiMH was just coming into mainstream, but that was still too heavy (didn't stop laptop makers using NiMH for internal power sources, though), it was the one point of frustration that stopped me from prototyping anything. That and the very inefficient glass plated PV cells, whereas now we have formable film PV which can be used as a single layer skin for wing surfaces. OK, it's not very strong, but does it have to be? We're not sending these things into combat, we just want them to stay aloft.
As a demonstration of how light an aircraft can be; back in school I built a dumb glider from some styrofoam laminate I found in a storage bin. This had an eight foot wingspan, was six feet long and used spars made from the same material to reinforce the full fuselage - just to make sure it kept its shape under its own weight and that it didn't detach itself from the wing. In all it weighed less than six pounds (with a small weight in the nose) and when ideal conditions presented (zero wind, slightly overcast), it went for a test flight.
From a two handed running launch the thing flew just shy of 120m and made a soft belly landing.
Pretty good for an unpowered, hand-launched school project. Wonder what it would have done with a propulsion pack that these days would easily weigh about as much as the nose weight?
...but a giant floating corncob.
um... no. And, no. Oh, and no.
The Tunnel boring project was named Eden in its concept phase through planning, the TBMs used in the probe tunnels were identical. Both built by the same company and both designed to chew chalk. When the tunnels met, one TBM was directed downwards and buried, the other was sent off to become one of four TBMs chewing through the Alps for the GBT. About the only thing that needed to be replaced was the cutting head since it was going from chewing chalk to chewing basalt and granite.
the Crossrail project is talking about a 73-mile East-West network made up of three lines*, which at 100m/week in the tunnel sections will take about three years to dig. What complicates matters is the fact that the Crossrail coachwork will be full height and riding on standard gauge rails - which will make it completely incompatible with the London Underground network, also means that the rails that will need laying will be brand new, on virgin bed - while avoiding breaching existing tunnels! Most of the route will actually be overground, btw - the longest continuous tunnel section will be between Paddington and Canary Wharf.
*Maidenhead and Heathrow to Shenfield and Abbey Wood, with the split beneath Spitalfields just after Whitechapel.
it's not unique at all - the design of the TBMs is identical to those used in the Eden (Channel Tunnel) Project, the Gotthard Base Tunnel, others at Orlovski, Niagara, Yucca... only difference being the number of tunnels excavated, the number of TBMs used in each project, and the type of rock chewed through.
ISTR reading about this somewhere three weeks ago, it was old news then...
...all you have to do is approach the right kind of company, and impress the fuck out of them - BEFORE you ask for a job. You might even find (as I did) the company *offering* you a job.
Looks like this.
...Night At The Museum jokes....
Problem is even if a decision comes from the ECHR the UK courts have said that they'll treat them as advisories and nothing more, to be discarded when it suits (have a look through decisions made in the Family Division of the High Court, particularly at Hague cases. Wall LJ himself went public stating that he spoke for the vast majority of judges in saying that ECHR had no jurisdiction in British courts and that their decisions would be summarily ignored).
ECHR has no teeth in the British legal system.