"The USA is not currently in danger of being invaded and does not currently need a $1 trillion fighter jet. "
Especially when the $1 trillion fighter jet started out as the cheaper, less capable, issue-em-in-bulk, pan-forces one-size-fits-all alternative to the Halo product - the F22
It's turned into a camel and it should go the same way as the F-111B (the last major attempt to produce an all-forces aircraft)
Actually it reminds me of telco days when some bright spark came up with the idea of a single configurable interface card to simplify stock holdings - we went from having to keep a few spares of 10 lines of $10 cards which seldom-if-ever failed, to 1 line of $500 all-singing-all-dancing electronic cards which were remarkabaly susceptable to ESD had to be carefully configured before being deployed and was easily installed in the wrong position (they were all the same colour and ID code, so we had to add our own labels, etc)
After a few years the decision was made to mostly go back to the passive cards. Even if you didn't have exactly the right one onhand it was just a matter of changing padding resistors, at a few cents a pop (the PCBs were all the same, it was just relay/attentuator values which varied.) and we managed to bring it down to 4 variants by simply restandardising various legacy equipment line levels to 1 level - 0bm out and -12dBm in. (the variants were all about how the signalling was fed to relays and as we were 99% standardised already, that meant that 1 line of cards would handle almost everything and fitting a jumper to that would handle the other cases.)
Then there was the radio tone-signalling system which was based on a Z80 (in 1989!) and occupied 4 slots of a 10U frame and took so long to propagate singalling that it was useless for multi-station relay setups - which it was intended for in the first place. An alternative design appeared within 3 months (knocked up by a tech) which worked faster, used 1% of the componentry and was the size of a standard linecard, but "not invented here" meant that the telco persisted with the older design through 5 years, an add-on coprocessor and recall/resdeign of all boards (they never solved the problems and finally dumped it when trunked landmobile took off in the 1990s)
It's been estimated that you'd need to upgrade the bandwidth of the _entire_ global satellite fleet (not just the inmarsats) by a factor or 10 or so to cope with this requirement. You're not just looking at oceanic coverage - there are vast swathes of land where there is no radar or data coverage.
The USA had AWACS over the Black Sea with enough visibilty over the area in question, so they should be able to replay a lot of data to work out who pressed the launch button - but given the amount of backpedelling the rebels and russians are doing it's pretty clear who's responsible.
As for MAS, it's sheer bad luck this time. The last one is arguably down to poor maintenance practices(*) but this time around the aircraft simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (it was far from being the only transcontinental civilian airliner over Ukraine that day)
(*) MAS has depressingly frequent history of major inflight and maintenance shop safety incidents in the last 5 years, mostly stemming from dispirited staff being sloppy - the airline was in deep financial trouble even before MH370 went off the radar and had massive layoffs a couple of years ago as part of a government bailout.
"A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers.
That leaves the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content.
Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers."
"The other issue is that it works fairly well right now, it's just stupidity like this that we have to overcome. And it should be easy to overcome this using law, public pressure, or both."
The problem - specifically in the USA - is that competing ISPs (and CLECs) have been systematically legaislated out of existance in most areas.
The pretence has always been that it's in exchange for increased network invesntment that went along with allowing Baby Bells to merge (for "efficiency" reasons), but those promises have _always_ been reneged on after a short period.
Americans should be looking at how much of their taxes are wasted on corruption and refusing to pay.
"And a government's responsibility is to take action against a company which is committing wholesale fraud against its customers by selling them Internet Service which promises bandwidth speeds which they are then purposefully not providing in order to shake down their customers and companies trying to provide services to those customers more money."
In the USA, that's regulated at state level by public utility commissions which have shown themselves to be throughly bought and paid for by the telcos.
Those pesky responsibilities were done away with when AT&T was broken up and then PUCs allowed the pieces to reassemble without such onorous restrictions.
_EXTENT_ of ice is not the same as _VOLUME_ of ice.
As landbased ice moves into the sea faster, the icecaps get thinner, but the (insubstantially thin by comprison(*)) "skirt" of sea ice spreads out further because it's being pushed out faster (it's still melting in the same amount of time once in the water, there's just more ice getting into the water in the first place - and to add to the fun, faster flow results in larger icebergs (they come from glaciers) which take a bit longer to melt, and are drifting further towards the equator before completely melting - increasing hazards to shipping.
The volume of ice in the water is FAR less than the volume of ice being lost above sea level off the land - and as with ice in a glass, once it's in the water it's already raised the water level whether it melts or not.
Changes in volume of sea ice only matter if they are changes in the volume of sea ice which formed IN THE SEA - and that particular number is going down, not up, once the entire antarctic coastline is taken into account.
(*) Land ice is thousands of feet deep in antarctica. There are 4000 foot high mountain peaks covered by another 4000 feet of ice plains in many areas. Seasonal sea ice seldom exceeds 6 feet thick and even the ice shelves are only a few hundred feet at the absolute deepest for the most part (these are mostly glacier tongues anyway. Some go a lot deeper but only in spaces a few miles wide, which is inconsequential compared to thousands of miles of coastline. These deep ones are the ones which produce megabergs, once enough water gets under them to snap off the tongue.)
Yup. Part of my work is supporting scientitsts engaged in running research which would help validate/disprove AGW calculations.
It requires serious number crunching and analysis of the albdeo of every square km of satellite ground imagery gathered over the last 40 years(*) - and has trouble getting tens of thousands of euro for the required computing and storage kit, without even funding the programmers needed (funding for them has had to be obtained elsewhere). Meantime various interests are throwing tens of millions at full-on denial.
If there's a slightest possibility that research will confirm AGW, funding effecttively ceases to exist.
(*) Measuring the planet's surface reflectivity (albedo) allows calculation of how much of the sun's heat is bounced straight back into space. What's left is emitted more slowly and the rate is controlled by atmospheric greenhouse gas levels (which have been accurately tracked over the last 50 years). Combine this with solar output levels (also tracked accurately for decades) and you can see which theories coincide with reality.
Ground-based temperature measurements are quite unreliable, as they have been heavily distorted by the biggest changes having been at airfields which were originally rural paddocks and are now large paved areas close to large cities (urban heat island effect) and there quite simply haven't been enough weather stations worldwide to gather undistorted readings (the vast majority of the planet's land area has no measurement history at all!). That's on top of the issue that "weather is not climate" and "local short/medium/long term climatic changes or cycles are not the same as global trends"
There are virtually no CLECs left in the USA anymore, thanks to the Borg all but completely reassembling itself over the last 30 years without the "universal service" shackles (even GTE is gone)
Thanks to the interconnectedness of the world, I pay nothing extra to make calls from my house in europe to most of the planet's population. Those call centres and robodiallers could be anywhere - and the principals behind them are probably sitting well out of reach of US extradition treaties.
"can't the telephone companies just police their own customers, and weed out illegitimate phone companies who allow such customers and refuse to forward their calls.. how hard can it be?"
Not very.
It's trivial to set your caller-ID to anything you want on ISDN lines. British Telecom added filters about 7 years ago which only allow callerIDs that are in the ranges allocated to the ISDN connection.
As with spam, filtering OUTBOUND is far more effective than filtering inbound (think of it as fitting chimney scrubbers vs handing out dust masks)
Banks providing "canary" credit card numbers to customers for use when they suspect attempted scamming would kill a lot of the activity. Think of it as a form of duress code.
If the scammers know that numbers they're given might well result in them being red-flagged and traced quickly, they might give up.
"Surely the network level is where robocallers stand out most dramatically, unless the caller has spoofing good enough to disguise the origin and frequency of their calls from the telco carrying them"
Unfortunately, the ANI spoofing IS good enough to defraud the telcos. The entire global phone routing system works not much differently than BGP4, but with far lower levels of protection (on the basis that access to the networks is by "trusted" entities.)
This means that a good chunk of this stuff is done via corrupt companies injecting bogus routing information into the global system and then placing calls using them as ANI origin(*) - and whilst the activity is known about (2 cases I was peripherally involved in tracking down used unallocated Chilean and Niuean numbering ranges), not enough is being done to prevent it.
(*) ANI is different to CLI. Telcos use it for billing purposes and it's not made available to endusers.
There were propsals put forward for taxiing to be performed by ground-based tugs. The problem with that is most aircraft aren't strong enough to handle it. It would save quite a bit of fuel if done.
Not just Korean pilots. It's happened in china and a few other SE asian countries with militaristic histories. You simply don't correct your seniors, no matter what they're doing wrong - doing so it highly offensive and is likely to result in strips being torn off you, no matter how much in the right you are - and noone will back you up on it.
"Cause: cultural" is chillingly accurate.
It's also why Fukishima was as bad as it was. The only saving grace there was an engineer said "fuck it" and stopped doing what management told him to - things would have been a LOT worse had he not done so.
Connectors are amongst the least reliable parts of any electrical system.
Paradoxically it's the least used ones which give the most trouble as most designs don't provide enough contact pressure to overcome oxide growth (and there's also tin pest to contend with), and most designers don't know enough to use the right designs.
"Photosynthesis has a comparatively low efficiency"
Mainly because green plants evolved to use the sunlight frequencies that blue-green and red algaes weren't already absorbing.
It's theoretically possible to improve photosynthesis efficiency by rejigging chlorophyll to absorb other wavelengths than red and blue - but apart from the spectrre of genetic engineering on a massive scale, would you like your healthy farm fields to be nearly black, instead of a verdant green?
"The problem is that you don't need "large" cisterns to do pumped storage, you need fucking huge cisterns"
I'll see your "fucking huge" cisterns and raise them to "oceanic" size.
To give the OP a sense of scale, the existing pumped water storage systems operating in the UK use conveniently existing mountains and can contribute 5-10% of peak loads for less than an hour. They also happen to be around 30% efficient and are only viable because they can use extremely cheap offpeak nuclear generated power to fill the upper reservoirs in the first place.
It would be more cost effective to build more nuke plants but the nimbys and Richard Milhouse Nixon have made sure that's not a viable option.
It'd be much easier to put that effort into MSR nuke development than dicking around with time-shifting cyclic energy sources (they're extremely throttleable on the kinds of timescales normally associated with OGT generation plants)
Especially when you look at the overall energy and CO2 budgets vs output for windmills and solar PV, vs the same for a decent nuke plant.
The amount of CO2 generated simply making the concrete for a 2MW turbine's base might just be paid off during the turbine's economic life. Whilst solar PV has improved a lot over the last 30 years, that's made the payback period 10 years intead of 20, but the panels need to be replaced after about a decade.
Granted, both cases are better than burning coal in terms of overall greenhouse gas production, but there are better ways of matching supply/demand.
Nuclear reactors are highly throttleable (even the old school boiling water plants can adjust on 5 minute leadtime), but they're run at full power 24*7 because the fuel is so cheap it makes economic sense to get whatever you price you can get for the energy on the open market.
If energy really gets that cheap overnight it may well become economic to start using it to produce synthetic hydrocarbons to put in fuel tanks, instead of screwing up the food supply to produce ethanol with less energy output than the amount of oil used to farm the crops in the first place (using stubble as your biofuel feed is also stupid. That stuff is ploughed back in to keep the topsoil viable. Removing it is no different to stripmining the countryside)
Slashdot Mirror
"We plan to buy roughly 2,400 of them, plus our allies are buying a whole bunch"
Yeah right.
Congress has been squeezing those numbers at every pass. It's simply too expensive to field in those numbetrs. Something has to give.
"The USA is not currently in danger of being invaded and does not currently need a $1 trillion fighter jet. "
Especially when the $1 trillion fighter jet started out as the cheaper, less capable, issue-em-in-bulk, pan-forces one-size-fits-all alternative to the Halo product - the F22
It's turned into a camel and it should go the same way as the F-111B (the last major attempt to produce an all-forces aircraft)
Actually it reminds me of telco days when some bright spark came up with the idea of a single configurable interface card to simplify stock holdings - we went from having to keep a few spares of 10 lines of $10 cards which seldom-if-ever failed, to 1 line of $500 all-singing-all-dancing electronic cards which were remarkabaly susceptable to ESD had to be carefully configured before being deployed and was easily installed in the wrong position (they were all the same colour and ID code, so we had to add our own labels, etc)
After a few years the decision was made to mostly go back to the passive cards. Even if you didn't have exactly the right one onhand it was just a matter of changing padding resistors, at a few cents a pop (the PCBs were all the same, it was just relay/attentuator values which varied.) and we managed to bring it down to 4 variants by simply restandardising various legacy equipment line levels to 1 level - 0bm out and -12dBm in. (the variants were all about how the signalling was fed to relays and as we were 99% standardised already, that meant that 1 line of cards would handle almost everything and fitting a jumper to that would handle the other cases.)
Then there was the radio tone-signalling system which was based on a Z80 (in 1989!) and occupied 4 slots of a 10U frame and took so long to propagate singalling that it was useless for multi-station relay setups - which it was intended for in the first place. An alternative design appeared within 3 months (knocked up by a tech) which worked faster, used 1% of the componentry and was the size of a standard linecard, but "not invented here" meant that the telco persisted with the older design through 5 years, an add-on coprocessor and recall/resdeign of all boards (they never solved the problems and finally dumped it when trunked landmobile took off in the 1990s)
"A lot of ISPs, especially in Asian countries, have started implementing NAT level IP which means no UPnP and not even manual port forwarding."
Have started? Try "have been doing it for 15 years"
And yes, it blows goats, especially when the fucktards who "admin" the ISP also block all ICMP.
+1
It's been estimated that you'd need to upgrade the bandwidth of the _entire_ global satellite fleet (not just the inmarsats) by a factor or 10 or so to cope with this requirement. You're not just looking at oceanic coverage - there are vast swathes of land where there is no radar or data coverage.
The USA had AWACS over the Black Sea with enough visibilty over the area in question, so they should be able to replay a lot of data to work out who pressed the launch button - but given the amount of backpedelling the rebels and russians are doing it's pretty clear who's responsible.
As for MAS, it's sheer bad luck this time. The last one is arguably down to poor maintenance practices(*) but this time around the aircraft simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (it was far from being the only transcontinental civilian airliner over Ukraine that day)
(*) MAS has depressingly frequent history of major inflight and maintenance shop safety incidents in the last 5 years, mostly stemming from dispirited staff being sloppy - the airline was in deep financial trouble even before MH370 went off the radar and had massive layoffs a couple of years ago as part of a government bailout.
http://blog.level3.com/global-...
"A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers.
That leaves the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content.
Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers."
"Costs should be driven by the sender of data and not the recipient."
Or should it be driven by the initiator of the request for the data?
"The other issue is that it works fairly well right now, it's just stupidity like this that we have to overcome. And it should be easy to overcome this using law, public pressure, or both."
The problem - specifically in the USA - is that competing ISPs (and CLECs) have been systematically legaislated out of existance in most areas.
The pretence has always been that it's in exchange for increased network invesntment that went along with allowing Baby Bells to merge (for "efficiency" reasons), but those promises have _always_ been reneged on after a short period.
Americans should be looking at how much of their taxes are wasted on corruption and refusing to pay.
"And a government's responsibility is to take action against a company which is committing wholesale fraud against its customers by selling them Internet Service which promises bandwidth speeds which they are then purposefully not providing in order to shake down their customers and companies trying to provide services to those customers more money."
In the USA, that's regulated at state level by public utility commissions which have shown themselves to be throughly bought and paid for by the telcos.
Those pesky responsibilities were done away with when AT&T was broken up and then PUCs allowed the pieces to reassemble without such onorous restrictions.
I can see the article just fine in europe.
Given most ISPs use some form of http traffic proxy, it becomes trivial to redirect embarrassing pages to a 404.
_EXTENT_ of ice is not the same as _VOLUME_ of ice.
As landbased ice moves into the sea faster, the icecaps get thinner, but the (insubstantially thin by comprison(*)) "skirt" of sea ice spreads out further because it's being pushed out faster (it's still melting in the same amount of time once in the water, there's just more ice getting into the water in the first place - and to add to the fun, faster flow results in larger icebergs (they come from glaciers) which take a bit longer to melt, and are drifting further towards the equator before completely melting - increasing hazards to shipping.
The volume of ice in the water is FAR less than the volume of ice being lost above sea level off the land - and as with ice in a glass, once it's in the water it's already raised the water level whether it melts or not.
Changes in volume of sea ice only matter if they are changes in the volume of sea ice which formed IN THE SEA - and that particular number is going down, not up, once the entire antarctic coastline is taken into account.
(*) Land ice is thousands of feet deep in antarctica. There are 4000 foot high mountain peaks covered by another 4000 feet of ice plains in many areas. Seasonal sea ice seldom exceeds 6 feet thick and even the ice shelves are only a few hundred feet at the absolute deepest for the most part (these are mostly glacier tongues anyway. Some go a lot deeper but only in spaces a few miles wide, which is inconsequential compared to thousands of miles of coastline. These deep ones are the ones which produce megabergs, once enough water gets under them to snap off the tongue.)
Yup. Part of my work is supporting scientitsts engaged in running research which would help validate/disprove AGW calculations.
It requires serious number crunching and analysis of the albdeo of every square km of satellite ground imagery gathered over the last 40 years(*) - and has trouble getting tens of thousands of euro for the required computing and storage kit, without even funding the programmers needed (funding for them has had to be obtained elsewhere). Meantime various interests are throwing tens of millions at full-on denial.
If there's a slightest possibility that research will confirm AGW, funding effecttively ceases to exist.
(*) Measuring the planet's surface reflectivity (albedo) allows calculation of how much of the sun's heat is bounced straight back into space. What's left is emitted more slowly and the rate is controlled by atmospheric greenhouse gas levels (which have been accurately tracked over the last 50 years). Combine this with solar output levels (also tracked accurately for decades) and you can see which theories coincide with reality.
Ground-based temperature measurements are quite unreliable, as they have been heavily distorted by the biggest changes having been at airfields which were originally rural paddocks and are now large paved areas close to large cities (urban heat island effect) and there quite simply haven't been enough weather stations worldwide to gather undistorted readings (the vast majority of the planet's land area has no measurement history at all!). That's on top of the issue that "weather is not climate" and "local short/medium/long term climatic changes or cycles are not the same as global trends"
There are virtually no CLECs left in the USA anymore, thanks to the Borg all but completely reassembling itself over the last 30 years without the "universal service" shackles (even GTE is gone)
Thanks to the interconnectedness of the world, I pay nothing extra to make calls from my house in europe to most of the planet's population. Those call centres and robodiallers could be anywhere - and the principals behind them are probably sitting well out of reach of US extradition treaties.
"Was any of the scammers sent to prison? I mean, I'd recommend impalement"
Preferably vertically, on a pole outside of the snoking ruins of the call centre they use.
Several countries do _exactly_ this. Hitting the canary traps results in fairly intense attention.
I have to say, I am surprised that enterprising DAs in the USA haven't setup a few dozen lines for exactly this purpose.
"can't the telephone companies just police their own customers, and weed out illegitimate phone companies who allow such customers and refuse to forward their calls.. how hard can it be?"
Not very.
It's trivial to set your caller-ID to anything you want on ISDN lines. British Telecom added filters about 7 years ago which only allow callerIDs that are in the ranges allocated to the ISDN connection.
As with spam, filtering OUTBOUND is far more effective than filtering inbound (think of it as fitting chimney scrubbers vs handing out dust masks)
Banks providing "canary" credit card numbers to customers for use when they suspect attempted scamming would kill a lot of the activity. Think of it as a form of duress code.
If the scammers know that numbers they're given might well result in them being red-flagged and traced quickly, they might give up.
"Surely the network level is where robocallers stand out most dramatically, unless the caller has spoofing good enough to disguise the origin and frequency of their calls from the telco carrying them"
Unfortunately, the ANI spoofing IS good enough to defraud the telcos. The entire global phone routing system works not much differently than BGP4, but with far lower levels of protection (on the basis that access to the networks is by "trusted" entities.)
This means that a good chunk of this stuff is done via corrupt companies injecting bogus routing information into the global system and then placing calls using them as ANI origin(*) - and whilst the activity is known about (2 cases I was peripherally involved in tracking down used unallocated Chilean and Niuean numbering ranges), not enough is being done to prevent it.
(*) ANI is different to CLI. Telcos use it for billing purposes and it's not made available to endusers.
Would be nice, except the main reason for this proposal is weight reduction. Windows weigh a LOT more than a metal skin.
Of course if they could be made out of transparent aluminum, maybe a humpback while could pilot 'em.
There were propsals put forward for taxiing to be performed by ground-based tugs. The problem with that is most aircraft aren't strong enough to handle it. It would save quite a bit of fuel if done.
Not just Korean pilots. It's happened in china and a few other SE asian countries with militaristic histories. You simply don't correct your seniors, no matter what they're doing wrong - doing so it highly offensive and is likely to result in strips being torn off you, no matter how much in the right you are - and noone will back you up on it.
"Cause: cultural" is chillingly accurate.
It's also why Fukishima was as bad as it was. The only saving grace there was an engineer said "fuck it" and stopped doing what management told him to - things would have been a LOT worse had he not done so.
Connectors are amongst the least reliable parts of any electrical system.
Paradoxically it's the least used ones which give the most trouble as most designs don't provide enough contact pressure to overcome oxide growth (and there's also tin pest to contend with), and most designers don't know enough to use the right designs.
"Photosynthesis has a comparatively low efficiency"
Mainly because green plants evolved to use the sunlight frequencies that blue-green and red algaes weren't already absorbing.
It's theoretically possible to improve photosynthesis efficiency by rejigging chlorophyll to absorb other wavelengths than red and blue - but apart from the spectrre of genetic engineering on a massive scale, would you like your healthy farm fields to be nearly black, instead of a verdant green?
"The problem is that you don't need "large" cisterns to do pumped storage, you need fucking huge cisterns"
I'll see your "fucking huge" cisterns and raise them to "oceanic" size.
To give the OP a sense of scale, the existing pumped water storage systems operating in the UK use conveniently existing mountains and can contribute 5-10% of peak loads for less than an hour. They also happen to be around 30% efficient and are only viable because they can use extremely cheap offpeak nuclear generated power to fill the upper reservoirs in the first place.
It would be more cost effective to build more nuke plants but the nimbys and Richard Milhouse Nixon have made sure that's not a viable option.
It'd be much easier to put that effort into MSR nuke development than dicking around with time-shifting cyclic energy sources (they're extremely throttleable on the kinds of timescales normally associated with OGT generation plants)
Especially when you look at the overall energy and CO2 budgets vs output for windmills and solar PV, vs the same for a decent nuke plant.
The amount of CO2 generated simply making the concrete for a 2MW turbine's base might just be paid off during the turbine's economic life. Whilst solar PV has improved a lot over the last 30 years, that's made the payback period 10 years intead of 20, but the panels need to be replaced after about a decade.
Granted, both cases are better than burning coal in terms of overall greenhouse gas production, but there are better ways of matching supply/demand.
Nuclear reactors are highly throttleable (even the old school boiling water plants can adjust on 5 minute leadtime), but they're run at full power 24*7 because the fuel is so cheap it makes economic sense to get whatever you price you can get for the energy on the open market.
If energy really gets that cheap overnight it may well become economic to start using it to produce synthetic hydrocarbons to put in fuel tanks, instead of screwing up the food supply to produce ethanol with less energy output than the amount of oil used to farm the crops in the first place (using stubble as your biofuel feed is also stupid. That stuff is ploughed back in to keep the topsoil viable. Removing it is no different to stripmining the countryside)