* Posts by Richard Gadsden

219 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2007

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Join the gov consultation on net porn ... and have your identity revealed

Richard Gadsden

Now doing it even worse

I'm seeing someone else's detailed responses if I'm logged in, but not when I'm logged out.

Looks like there's only one account on the system and we all share it!

iOS was SO much more valuable to Google than Android - until Maps

Richard Gadsden

Built-in apps

The other built-ins that aren't purely Apple are:

YouTube (Google, obv)

Weather (Yahoo)

Stocks (Yahoo)

YT is basically a client so they don't have to run Flash - now that YT is HTML5, they probably don't need a specific client for it.

Weather and Stocks seem to be things that are common for search engines - Yahoo, Bing and Google all have them, so Apple might switch those to a search engine provider.

Missed the Venus solar flyby? It's only 105 years to the next one

Richard Gadsden
Boffin

Re: Missed the Venus solar flyby?

Dear NASA. Your next Mars rover: please design the bloody thing so you can watch this, unlike the 2005 Mercury transit which you didn't have a good enough camera to see!

And yes, the transits of Deimos and Phobos are cool. But have you seen how rubbish the pictures are?

The "send a decent camera to Mars" campaign starts here.

Dot-word bidders in last-minute dash after ICANN reveals timetable

Richard Gadsden

Re: Order of application

That would mean an inevitable first-minute rush instead.

Which would result in badly-written applications to get a headstart on everyone else.

YouView reportedly set for 2500-home pre-Olympics trial

Richard Gadsden
Go

Subscription IPTV

Subscription IPTV hasn't exactly taken off in the UK so far.

If there's a standard target platform in YouView and each broadcaster can run their own packages, rather than being limited to whatever channels BT Vision or TalkTalk.TV choose to bundle, then it could take off, especially if most new TVs have YouView bundled and so do many new FreeView/FreeSat boxes (especially all the PVR ones)

I can get Eurosport player for £2.99 a month to watch the cycling (niche market, yeah, but there's lots of niche markets around the world; this is the Long Tail in TV).

I can run that from a computer to my TV, but that's still a hassle compared to getting it to run inside a YouView box, or even a YouView app running in a media centre like XBMC that has a proper 10-foot interface and works with a remote.

It also will completely unbundle Sky and Virgin. If you can get any channel on YouView direct from the broadcaster, rather than buying a package from Sky / Virgin, then why not do just that?

Sure, the Sky channels are still bundled with each other, but it opens up a route to market for all the other channels. If I'm a minority sport where there's TV already being made (i.e. popular somewhere outside the UK), then all I need to do is take an existing English-language feed from another broadcaster and drop it to YouView - the subscriptions are pure profit. Even if there isn't an English broadcast, paying two commentators and a producer won't cost that much to slap a commentary onto existing pictures.

What is SpaceX Dragon's secret cargo?

Richard Gadsden
Go

A playmonaut

What else?

Pints under attack as Lord Howe demands metric-only UK

Richard Gadsden
Pint

500ml servings of beer would make all the glasses oversized

Which would be nice, and CAMRA should be on-side - if every beer glass in the country was instantly oversized then we might get served the amount we paid for, but with a head on.

2,000 dot-word bids rocket ICANN onto $350m cash pile

Richard Gadsden

Re: facebook

It might just be www.facebook

Hanging's too good for 'em - so what do you suggest?

Richard Gadsden

Re: Punishment

Aloud.

Sony optical disk archive

Richard Gadsden
Meh

Would be nice if the disks *were* Blu-rays

If this is long-term archiving, then one of the big challenges is reading the archive in a few decades' time.

The most likely problem over the long-term is that the disks degrade, but let's be nice and assume they don't.

The number two problem is that you'd need to find a working Sony drive to read the disk cartridges.

But if the disks are actual Blu-Rays, then you'll be able to crack the cartridge open and drop the disks into a standard BD-ROM drive, which are being manufactured in the millions at the moment, and there's a pretty good shot at there still being a functional one in a few decades' time when you need it.

Of course, that also means that the format has to be such that you can stitch together the content of the drives without fancy Sony software/firmware that no longer exists in 2050, which seems unlikely to me, but you never know, Sony might actually be thinking about this sort of thing.

Ten... Bedroom Gadget Treats

Richard Gadsden
Unhappy

My favourite bedroom gadget isn't listed

http://www.resmed.com/uk/products/s9_escape/s9-escape.html

Amazon boss finds Apollo 11 engines on seabed

Richard Gadsden
Stop

Doesn't anyone read Ignition any more?

Hydrazine - actually unsymmetrical dimethyl hydrazine (UDMH) - is used as a rocket fuel for space-based firings (ie, not for lift-off) because it has a very low freezing point (-57C), is a liquid at normal earth temperatures and is hypergolic with both IFRNA and MON oxidizers.

If you haven't read it, Ignition is available on-line here: http://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf

If you know any chemistry (O-level would be enough) then this history of the chemistry of rocket fuel is a stunning piece of history.

Yes, Prime Minister to return after 24 years

Richard Gadsden
Stop

Re: PPE

The LSE doesn't have politics courses. It teaches Government.

Sugar content now to be measured in Cadbury Creme Eggs

Richard Gadsden

Re: Being pedantic....

330ml can and 500ml bottle, being what you get in metric countries.

Who killed ITV Digital? Rupert Murdoch - but not the way you think

Richard Gadsden
Devil

ESPN

The only people who ever could take Murdoch down are ESPN. After all, they're owned by Disney, and Disney are even harder-ball competitors than Murdoch has ever managed.

WTF... should I pay to download BBC shows?

Richard Gadsden
Stop

British people didn't really pay for everything

If you want to take the position that everyone British should be able to download anything that the BBC has ever broadcast in a DRM-free format for free, then that would be the end of the entire market for paying for music.

After all, every single that has ever been in the charts was broadcast in full on Radio 1. Add Radios 2 and 3 (and, in more recent years 1Xtra and 6Music) and there is relatively little music other than album tracks that hasn't been broadcast on the BBC.

How many films have been broadcast on the BBC at some point? Should the film-makers really lose any rights?

Do you really think that you should be able to get the whole of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from project Barcelona instead of buying the DVDs from Fox just because the BBC had secondary repeat rights five years ago?

In many cases the BBC will have to pay for the rights to redistribute other people's content. I think some people would like to pass a law that retroactively assigns all rights to the BBC of anything they've ever broadcast, but that's madness.

Now, if you want to limit it to TV drama created primarily to be broadcast on the BBC (in-house or by an independent production company, but not a co-production with a US channel like, say, Rome) then yeah, they probably should look at how much it would have cost to get unrestricted non-exclusive rights back when it was broadcast. Of course, if it was made in 1970-something, then I dread to think what the rights situation is.

Personally, I'd favour a mandatory licensing situation so actors, musicians, composers, etc get a standard rights fee if there wasn't a contract agreed at the time of production - rather than getting a situation where older TV cannot be released at all because some of the rights-holders cannot be traced, or the cost of paying the lawyers to negotiate a contract with the heirs of someone who had two lines thirty years ago is more than the total income to be gained from that episode of that TV series.

And yes, the BBC should charge at least cost (including rights-fees in cost) for rebroadcast beyond the week or two of the normal iPlayer.

Facebook: Your boss asks for your password, we'll sue him! Maybe

Richard Gadsden
Happy

I don't know my facebook password

It's an auto-generated password stored in an encrypted file on my laptop, and then "remembered" by the facebook app on my phone. I typed it precisely once - into the fb app on my phone when I logged in the first time. Other than that, I just copy/paste when I want to log in.

Since I wouldn't have my laptop (or the backups) with me in the interview, I couldn't give them the password. I take my security relatively seriously, and I would expect any job I apply for to take the same attitude

Barclaycard pay-by-bonk fraud risk exposes Amazon's security

Richard Gadsden

Amazon have never wanted CVV / CVV2

Amazon orders (as distinct from Marketplace orders) are only paid for when the goods dispatch.

Most retailers do this by pre-authorising the charge using CVV at the time of order and then charging at the time of dispatch, but Amazon have always run the much simpler system of storing the credit card details and only charging the account at dispatch.

That does mean that Amazon can't use CVV authorisation, because they aren't allowed to store the CVV information until they're ready to use it.

I suspect that Amazon eat their own chargebacks (and pay a lower handling fee to the CC companies) and have their own anti-fraud measures, rather than using CVV or 3-D Secure.

Brit pair deported from US for 'destroy America' tweet

Richard Gadsden

Robin Hood Airport, actually

Near Doncaster, I believe.

SOPA is dead. Are you happy now?

Richard Gadsden

Including from themselves?

There has to be somewhere that elected representatives get money from for their campaigns. If the only place is their own pocket, then you have just given rich people an advantage that no-one else can possibly overcome.

If you stop them putting money in themselves, and you stop them taking contributions from anyone else, then you have to have tax payer funding - or else there is nowhere they can raise money from, and so all campaigns have to be done for free, which means no on-line campaigning at all, as the campaign can't possibly use a computer that it doesn't own.

Richard Gadsden

@Titus

Copyright is a grant of monopoly by the government, not an intrinsic right. You only get copyright because you having copyright is useful - viz, by having copyright you get enough income from this film to give you the incentive to produce another one. If you start using copyright to stop people using something rather than to make money from people using something, then you having the copyright isn't useful - and you shouldn't have it any more.

"[I]f I produce something I set the price" - not true for copyright goods in general. You don't set the price that a radio station pays to play your song, that's standardised to be the same for all songs.

Streaming and downloading music and films is much more like a radio station or a TV station than it is like buying a physical copy

ICANN snubs critics, opens domain extension floodgates

Richard Gadsden
Coat

.spam?

Is there any reason I can't register .spam, which is only for spammers and sending spam. That way, anyone who doesn't want to be spammed can just block it.

It makes about as much sense as .xxx anyway.

Richard Gadsden

That's utterly brilliant

Here endeth the passing off argument.

Footie club sacks striker for homophobic tweet

Richard Gadsden

They're afraid

They're afraid that gay men would treat them the way they treat women.

Scammers punt bogus pink Facebook makeover

Richard Gadsden

Pink Facebook

OK, so why isn't there a userscript to implement pink facebook yet?

Jonathan Ive is knighted in New Year Honours list

Richard Gadsden
Go

Two Physics and one Chemistry Nobel Prize-winners, OTOH

got knighthoods. So, priorities, not entirely out of order.

Elon Musk's private Dragon ship to dock with ISS in Feb

Richard Gadsden
Stop

Get away from Hydrazine

Not for space-fired long-distance missions. UDMH/IRFNA really is the only sane option for a space-fired rocket. Hypergolic ignition means there are many fewer things to go wrong, and the fuels don't freeze until you get to insanely low temperatures.

SpaceX uses RP-1/LOX, ie plain old hydrocarbon fuels. Pretty sensible decision for a ground-launched/LEO system; you don't have to worry about the kerosene freezing even in LEO. The lower Isp is rather well-compensated for by kerosene being much easier to handle and denser - the larger LH2 fuel tank usually ends up adding enough weight to make the other advantages pretty marginal.

Now the Russian use of hydrazine as a ground-launch fuel, yeah, that's insane. But no Western rocket has used a hydrazine for ground-launch since the sixties.

2011's Best... E-book Readers

Richard Gadsden
FAIL

I like my eyes

I only get one set, so I look after them. Thanks, but no thanks.

It's time to end the Windows Wait

Richard Gadsden

Dell OptiPlex 790 or 990

Dell will happily sell you a top-end 790 or 990 with a 128GB SSD in. They'll charge you through the nose for the privilege, of course.

iPhone 4S: Our *hit list

Richard Gadsden

Active Playlists won't stay sorted

I've got a playlist of podcasts I haven't listened to. I can sort them by drag-and-drop in iTunes and they used to come up on iOS 4 in the order they were sorted in iTunes. They don't on iOS5 any more.

Annoying.

Telcos pave the way for iPhone 4S global roaming

Richard Gadsden

Annoying about no GSM-to-CDMA roaming

It would be really nice to be able to take a UK iPhone 4S and enable the CDMA secure element so it would roam onto a Sprint or Verizon network in the US.

It would have been really nice of Apple to include the ability to use a CSIM in the SIM slot. I appreciate that the US operators don't allow CSIMs, but China Telecom does, and there's no really good reason for the US operators not to allow it.

BlackBerry BBM, email downed in epic FAIL

Richard Gadsden

Timings

Last email here was synced to my BB at 14:37 BST, so not a total outage at 11am, then.

Premier League loses footie decoder case

Richard Gadsden

Oxfam

Second hand goods are different.

It's something called the First Sale Doctrine - once goods, even copyrighted goods, have been sold, the purchaser may resell without restriction from the supplier.

Wholesalers generally have goods on consignment or sale-or-return, and therefore have not completed the first sale by buying from the manufacturer.

This is why the grey market is grey - if they were buying at retail in another country (and thus assuming full risk if the goods do not sell in the EU) and then reselling in the EU - and paying import duties and VAT - then first sale doctrine kicks in, though they wouldn't be able to advertise the goods as "new".

Super Mario jumps on domain squatter

Richard Gadsden
Happy

Agreed

If they've just registered a domain similar to your trademark, and are not using it abusively, then the UDRP will make it quite hard to get the domain handed over. Plus, why especially do you care if they're not doing anything objectionable with the domain?

Once they start using it to annoy your business, then of course you get it seized.

If this is Nintendo's policy, then it's the one I would recommend.

Hackers break SSL encryption used by millions of sites

Richard Gadsden

Opera is a fix

It's only schannel on Windows XP that doesn't support TLS 1.1 / 1.2, not the entire OS.

If, like IE and Safari, you use the OS' native crypto library, then the problem arises that you only get TLS 1.0 . Microsoft could release an updated schannel for Windows XP that included support for TLS 1.1 / 1.2 (but they won't).

For the other browsers, Firefox and Chrome share a common open-source library (Network Security Services); that will need to be upgraded to incorporate support for TLS 1.2, or they will have to switch to a different library (NSS is developed by Mozilla, so Firefox won't switch, but Google could write their own crypto library in theory).

Opera uses their own library, and Opera on Windows XP does support TLS 1.1 / 1.2 - you just have to enable it as it's disabled by default.

Early Earth’s ‘golden shower’

Richard Gadsden

You can only radiodate radioactive isotopes

And if you want to date multi-billion-year-old isotopes, then you need multi-billion-year half-lives.

They mostly use Uranium/Lead or Thorium/Lead dating for things this old.

Radiodating measures the ratio of undecayed radioisotope to decay products, compares it to the half-life and then works out how long it's been. But this only works if the decay products are still stuck in the rock, ie there hasn't been a chemical process to separate them out.

Uranium that decayed before the rock was formed (ie in the asteroid) will have been separated out when it all melted when the asteroid hit earth. What you're measuring with radiodating is the length of time since the rock was formed.

[Radiocarbon is different because there is new C14 formed in the upper atmosphere - what you're measuring then is how long it's been since the carbon was attached using photosynthesis in a plant; in practise, that's effectively the length of time since the animal you're looking at died]

Google feeds patents to HTC for assault on Apple

Richard Gadsden
Boffin

You can't vote against anyone.

Really, the electoral system only lets you vote *for* people. You can't vote against someone, just for someone else.

And, no, that's not the same thing. For a start, you'd better make sure that the person you're voting for is *better* than the one you're not voting for, or else you're setting yourself up for even more disappointment.

Elections are not about an absolute standard, but a relative one - you vote for the best candidate (or least worst; comes to the same thing), you don't get to say "this one isn't good enough, let's have someone else" - because you can't vote for "someone else", you can only vote for the candidates on the ballot paper.

Take, as an example, the 1991 Louisiana Governor election. Edwin Edwards (the Democrat) was corrupt - he eventually went to prison in 2002. But the Republican was David Duke, Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. There's a reason that the campaign slogan was "Vote for the Crook. It's Important".

If you want a better candidate, then stand yourself, or find a friend or acquaintance that you think would do a better job and talk them into standing. It's not the fault of the bad candidates that there aren't better ones - it's the fault of the people who would be better ones for not standing.

Four illegal ways to sort out the Euro finance crisis

Richard Gadsden

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits.

<i>once countries are in the Eurozone they can't do alot of things normal countries can</i>

But the same is true, except more so, for states in the USA or regions within the UK or Germany.

You'll note that East Germany can't devalue relative to West Germany, for instance, nor set a different interest rate.

It's a classic functionalist tactic - create a situation where more integration (massive subsidies from rich countries to poor ones in this case) is the solution to a problem created by the previous bout of integration.

Functionalists see the job of the EU as solving economic problems, and, to them, this crisis just highlights how much the EU is needed.

Democracy? Gets in the way of the brilliance of the Enarques running everything.

The annoying thing is that when the federalists try to do things that shift power away from the Enarques to people who are actually democratically elected, like the constitution, they get rejected for being too centralising. All the centralising stuff in the constitution went through in Lisbon anyway - but the democratising stuff got thrown out. Greatest victory for the functionalists over the federalists since the Treaty of Rome, and the bloody Eurosceptics helped the functionalists.

Asteroid hunter achieves Vesta orbit

Richard Gadsden
Go

Smallest object we've ever got an orbit around

I believe that Vesta is the smallest (ie lightest) object any human-made spacecraft has ever orbited.

Hundreds of dot-brand domains predicted

Richard Gadsden
WTF?

Huh?

.com has how many million subdomains? Can you imagine the zone transfer of that zone?

Yet, it seems to manage just fine.

Sure, this will make the root bigger. But the root name servers are just about the most solid piece of infrastructure that the internet has. They'll cope.

Channel VAT loophole shrunk, not shut

Richard Gadsden

Why not just join the EU?

Britain could just announce that they're part of the UK for the purposes of being in the EU (like the French TOMs are) by use of the royal prerogative. Then they'd have to charge VAT at the UK rate anyway.

It's not as though the Channel Islands are democracies, so overriding the local government wouldn't be a problem. They could do the Isle of Man while they're at it - except that *is* a democracy (Tynwald, one of the oldest elected parliaments in the world).

Virgin Media, Readers - an apology

Richard Gadsden

OC-3

Live in the right place and you can get much more than a mere 100Mb.

I had my own OC-3 at one point in time. Uncontended, and with plenty of upstream.

Yeah, it's not generally available, but so f**kin what - go live on the right campus.

North Africa will need more revolution before it attracts IT tourists

Richard Gadsden

Re: comment without an IT angle

How do you manage a bureaucracy?

Keep the corruption down. If Microsoft can't bribe a bureaucrat to expedite their application beyond the normal 500-day wait, they'll bribe a politician to reduce the wait to two weeks, and everyone will benefit from that.

This is the basic difference between the First World bureaucracies and the Third World bureaucracies; it's much harder to get special favours through a bribe, and actually easier to get the whole system changed.

Brits unleash world's hottest chilli pepper

Richard Gadsden
Flame

Wimp

Try finding pure Resiniferatoxin - 1 biillion SHU.

FSA: Of course customers don't read contracts

Richard Gadsden

"Meeting of minds"

My view of the meeting of minds is that a contract should be a legal expression on a piece of paper of the results of a conversation and agreement between two human beings. If the transaction isn't complicated enough for that, then don't bother with a contract in the first place.

Think Aussie election rules are draconian? Look at the UK's

Richard Gadsden
Boffin

Returning Officers don't enforce these laws

Returning Officers, in spite of popular belief, don't actually enforce electoral law in the UK, and my experience is that a lot of them get quite a bit of it wrong.

The laws are on expenditure; any expenditure spent to promote one candidate must be authorised by the candidate or his agent (the agent is the legal head of the campaign team; sometimes they actually run the campaign, other times they're the legal compliance person). The main reason for this is that candidates are only allowed to spend a fairly modest limit on their campaigns - about £30,000 each.

Any spending to promote or denigrate a candidate, spent by someone who is not authorised by the campaign is called "third party" spending. This is allowed, but there's a limit of £500. If you run a blog that will cost more than £500 to run for 17 days and you use that blog exclusively to campaign in a single-constituency campaign, then you could get into trouble.

There is also a media exemption; established media outlets can endorse a candidate or a party without that being regarded as a political campaign. I suspect that most blogs that have any content other than party-political will be regarded as falling under the media exemption.

Imprint rules only apply to candidate-approved campaigning material, not third-party.

More details from the electoral commission at http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/party-finance/legislation/third-partiespermitted-participants/third-parties

Microsoft boots modders off Xbox Live

Richard Gadsden

PS3 Modders?

As far as I know, there's no modchip for the PS3, so there aren't any modders for Sony to kick off.

Dell Latitude 2100

Richard Gadsden
WTF?

Vostro next?

So, will there be a Dell Vostro netbook next from the small business team?

A lot of Vostros are very similar to Studio/Inspiron laptops, just more boring.

Toyota preps plug-in Prius for mass production

Richard Gadsden

Secure charging

Will the car be secure while charging? I don't want to have to open the bonnet to charge it, as that would mean I can only charge it in my garage.

Second question is when are car parks going to start providing power supplies to charge your car from (and will they charge a sensible amount for that electricity?).

Assuming all of that, then 18 miles would get me from home to the car park, and 18 more would get me back again. I'd only need to use fossil fuel if I did a longer journey, so I'd only go to the petrol station about twice a year instead of once a week. Saving: 50 times the price of a tank of petrol, or about £2,000 a year. Less the electricity, of course, and I have no idea how many kWh this will need.

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