British Proverb:

The person who says he can do it, and takes the money, usually then passes the project off to someone else who already knows it's absolutely impossible, and gets sacked for not delivering.

If you think you can do better, please do.

Most spam is handled fairly well these days. When our spam filter on the email falls over, email just traverses and I get complaints from users that they got a SINGLE spam. That tells me how well it operates day-to-day... they just don't see any.

It's annoying though... "can't we stop that", "but it was a RUDE spam!", "how did they get my address", etc. You can explain any number of times but the only way to shut them up is to turn off the spam filter and show them what's happening day in, day out, against our servers. Or my inbox - which has a lot of heavily-advertised email addresses.

Literally, we get dozens or hundreds of thousands of spam emails a day. The fact that people barely notice we have even one is testament to anti-spam. GMail, in this regard, are fabulous and I've worked in schools where the email basically IS GMail (Google Apps for Education, or Google Apps for Business). It's basically a free alternative to Exchange for many schools.

And, damn, does it filter a load of the junk, even if you don't put on the options to limit the domains, etc.

And if you operate a mail server you'll find out how hard it is to send email to GMail. My personal domain has SPF, DKIM, reverse DNS, etc. and still it's a faff where sometimes GMail thinks I'm spamming my own GMail account from my own domain-forwarding. To be honest, 99% of the time, it's right- spam slips through my email filters, gets forwarded to my GMail, and GMail still makes a fuss even though it's certified, secured, etc. as from my domain by that point.

It's hard to do better than GMail. Think you can do it? Go try. You'll struggle to do it for yourself, let alone for millions of people whose idea of spam varies wildly.

Same.

Some bloke in Ireland must have had a very awkward phone call from a local department store, and there's a guy with the same name who keeps trying to hire cars over there too.

He must think every car hire place is shit because I never confirm his bookings for him...

Last I heard, Bologna University (the world's oldest university) were having nothing to do with the guy and forcibly cancelled all his demonstrations that he'd planned on their site.

And, actually, the "reaction" was never the problem. It was some huge great big cable used to "start" the reactor that could never be conclusively proved wasn't continuing to supply power and was never allowed to be measured.

When there's that level of dodginess for several years consecutively with no rebuttal apart from "oh no, it's not!", you lose all credibility.

Sloppy procedure.

There is virtually nothing (not even Ebola) that can get through basic procedures, even with humans treating them. Even without full isolation, just making sure that direct bodily contact does not occur is enough to stop basically anything - hence why doctors wear rubber gloves even if they digging into your internals with blood everywhere.

Such a thing would be so unbelievably infectious that we'd all have it - planet-wide - within a couple of days. It's just not in the nature of such things to be that infectious. Ebola is actually no worse than AIDS, from what I can tell from a quick search. So long as there's no bodily fluid contact, you're fine.

To get to the point that a nurse is infected means that protocol wasn't followed. That it wasn't EVERY nurse and EVERY doctor that touched the patient is quite telling.

And, think about it... something THAT infectious, it wouldn't matter - you wouldn't GET to the hospital before you'd infected dozens of people.

Ebola is being blown out of proportion. Sure, it's serious. It's not to be fucked with. But it's just a disease.

I have friends who work on the frontline of medicine - checking samples that come in for everything from cancer to Ebola. Sure, they have precautions. There are grades of danger for particular samples, etc. There are "classes" of labs that handle the more dangerous stuff. But pretty much it's rubber gloves at the end of the day. The chemicals they use to break samples down and analyse them are actually ten times more dangerous than anything they have come in.

Just don't lick it, and you're fine.

Polygraphs are legally inadmissible in just about every first-world country. Except, strangely, the US. Honestly, it's at least fifty-years since most places realised it was a load of hokum.

It's bollocks. The fact that the FBI even *entertain* the idea shows that they are all about the *appearance* of security to the general populace - while being laughed at by those they are supposed to be detecting. You might as well tell me that their interview process involves reading your palm - it's really that ridiculous. That you don't see this is probably even sadder.

Honestly, America... polygraphs are voodoo. Like homeopathy, spiritualists and psychics, there is ZERO evidence that it means anything, no matter what expert claims to run it or what equipment they claim to use. You cannot detect lies. Not even with MRI's and all kinds of equipment scanning your head.

Hell, we can't even control a cursor on a screen accurately when we focus all our efforts on doing so and concentrate like mad. How the fuck are we supposed to detect the inclination of an internal thought by a bloke sitting across the room looking at how clenched your arse is?

Sorry, but anyone relying on this for scientific use where the answer matters should be using software that gives them the accuracy they want and - ultimately - are the only people who will realise whether the result is correct "enough" or not for their process.

Some idiot researcher who expects Excel or an FPU instruction to be accurate for sin to more than 10 decimal places is going to crop up SO MANY anomalies in their data that they'll stick out like a sore thumb.

Nobody serious would do this. Any serious calculation requires an error calculation to go with it. There's a reason that there are entire software suites and library for arbitrary precision arithmetic.

I'm a maths graduate. I'll tell you now that I wouldn't rely on a FPU instruction to be anywhere near accurate. If I was doing anything serious, I'd be plugging into Maple, Matlab, Mathematica and similar who DO NOT rely on hardware instructions. And just because two numbers "add up" on the computer, that's FAR from a formal proof or even a value you could pass to an engineer.

Nobody's doing that. That's why Intel have managed to "get away" with those instructions being like that for, what? Decades? If you want to rotate an object in 3D space for a game, you used to use the FPU. Now you use the GPU. And NEITHER are reliable except for where it really doesn't matter (i.e. whether you're at a bearing of 0.00001 degrees or 0.00002 degrees).

Fuck, within a handful of base processor floating point instructions you can lose all accuracy if you're not careful.

How much data is actually in that Word file you made? Probably a handful of Kb at most.

How many instructions do you need to call the libraries included in Windows to tell it what you need to do. 1.44 MILLION instructions is a lot. Especially if one-in-ten of them is probably a call to a system routine (draw this window, create this object, etc.).

A problem with modern programming is that 1.44Mb is "nothing". That 10Mb library? Nothing. Just suck it in and put it in the installer. Compared to the GIGABYTES of 3D models and textures, the 500Mb program executable and libraries is "nothing". And what does it actually do beyond what, say, Quake did? Quake 1 was about 500Kb in executable. Sure, the data is larger, there's a shader or two to load, the resolution is higher so the memory requirements and CPU/GPU use are much higher and there's a couple of libraries to suck in - but actual executable size is HUMUNGOUS nowadays compared to what's needed.

It's one of my bugbears. Executables should be tiny. Data shouldn't be in the executable, and generally isn't. Where the fuck most of that code comes from, I can only imagine - there's no way that a modern game has ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more code written for it than Quake did (with all it's moddability, AI, QuakeC scripting inside it, etc.)

"The trains were fully automated, controlled by computer, and had no driver; a Passenger Service Agent (PSA) on each train, originally referred to as a "Train Captain", was responsible for patrolling the train, checking tickets, making announcements and controlling the doors."

This I have no objection to, but it is essentially the job-preservation demand of a union. They are not a driver. They can be replaced in a day. However, currently drivers are claiming to be irreplaceable and, when they strike, the capacity of the network is decimated.

Hence, "driverless" may be better than "unmanned". But one man on a train of several hundred people isn't going to add much "safety" at all in an emergency. Especially if there are three carriages full of people - getting them off safely cannot be the domain of one man.

But if you want a guy to stamp tickets and press the emergency-stop button - no problem at all. Because his pay will reflect that and he's easily replaced if he decides not to come into work.

(P.S. Walkways? Though I admit my knowledge may be outdated as I don't use DLR, I have vivid memories of there being sections with no space at all to walk: http://www.london-traveltips.c... - Where?)

And the solution is not one man trying to evacuate people down the line (it's an emergency, right? So if you shut down the line enough for help other than the lone driver we have at the moment to walk down the line, then everyone could walk back to the station safely anyway!)

And escape walkway or not - what the hell does that matter? It means you can't walk down the SIDE of the train. Only through it and out onto the tracks. If you're out of the train, the danger is the same. In fact, I'd say it's safer NOT to have a narrow walkway that you want to push 200 people down, but to just power down the line and have them walk out of the tunnel.

Why does this need a driver? And to me, the solution is not to pay several hundred men £30k each to push a lever for 10 years, but to widen the tunnel slightly.

The DLR is actually AIRBORNE at some points (no escape at all) and was unmanned. The "must be manned" is the union line to preserve jobs, not anything to do with safety.

Actually, the real news is that it's "inspired by Tube driver strikes".

The London Underground staff go on strike so often, this is basically a (well-deserved) warning shot. If the drivers being paid more than teachers, nurses and doctors to push a lever forward for 8 hours a day (probably only 300 days a year, though, once you take into account strikes, holidays, etc.) want to disrupt the entire London Tube network and bring London to a standstill every time they negotiate their above-inflation pensions and pay-rises, this is the only sensible and logical result.

No drivers. No strikes. And if the station staff go on strike - well, we've almost eliminated them too and they are much more easily replaced. Funny how the unions are whining about "unattended" stations now, isn't it...

London has been held hostage by the railway unions for decades. The only spark of hope was the DLR (which is a driverless train line) but even there they were forced to put "safety officers" on the trains because of union representation. Now it seems that the joyride is ending and we might get a decent subway system not subject to the whims of a union leader (strange how this all changed once Bob Crow was out of the picture...).

I counted up one year. There were something like 30 days of strikes in one year, all backed by the same union - drivers, then station staff, then railway maintenance staff, etc. but all the same union.

I just want a transport system that works. I don't really care how we get there and there are more than enough jobs to go around when you have 8 million people going back and forth every day. But I abandoned public transport when, if it wasn't the strikes, it was the cancellations, delays, or total shutdowns for maintenance, then the ticket prices went through the roof to pay a Tube driver who requires 1 year's training more than I was being paid in a good job, after 15 year's experience and needing a degree.

News summaries for this year regarding transport are: Problem, problem, problem. Bob Crow gone. Station staff gone except for skeleton staff, automated ticket systems instead. Drivers gone, driverless trains instead. Weekend openings (after DECADES of weekend shutdowns "for maintenance", because nobody in London wants to go anywhere on a weekend, do they?).

All of a sudden, we have a system that stands a chance of working. All I need now is for them to install the barriers to stop over-crowding meaning you can fall onto the tracks (and shut down the whole Tube network for another day) and we might have something approaching what every other country in the world has had for decades.

If your port 80 is being throttled, it's being throttled. That's going to affect a random website as much as your VPS.

All we avoid is ISP's "unthrottling" select websites to give you a false impression that throttling isn't enabled. That's exactly what a VPS download will discover - the real download speed of your connection to a random website.

Rent or trial a VPS. You can get them for literally a few pounds/dollars per month.

Put a large file on Apache on it.

Download the file from several places.

Rename the file on the server to check it's not cached.

The "upper limit" on this is then the VPS, which generally are connected direct to 100mbps lines in a datacenter somewhere. If you think it's limited by the VPS, get another from another provider. Or load up iptraf or some packet capture and see how it did.

Speedtest websites are indicative only, and are cheated on by some places. Your own website can't be cheated on - you will see the request coming in and can watch the outgoing traffic to see where the bottleneck lies.

Yes, it's not new and I imagine it still suffers from the same problems it always has (multiple frames required in order to identify which LED it actually is, sync issues requiring extra cabling, etc.).