Re: Shirley
you mean Gary Numan?
And "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts" was Eno and David Byrne.
So confusing. At least the pic of Bowie as Tesla (in The Prestige) is right.
Posts by Frumious Bandersnatch
2662 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Nov 2007
Page:
The Bong Diaries, Pt.94: Bowie, Martha... and where's my knighthood?
Optimus Prime goes under the hammer
Australia considers mass herpes release for population control
Wednesday 13th January 2016 15:03 GMT
Re: Close your eyes and make a wish
If you're trying to clear a small island of large animals, you can shoot them, basically unforseen horrific consequence-free.
I'm not sure about that. I know you're talking about a very narrow case, but common sense dictates that there will be two immediate knock-ons:
* species that were in direct competition for similar foodstuffs or territory will expand to fill the vacated niche(s)
* prey species will also undergo population growth if their primary predator is removed
You can also get various symbiotic relationships where something depends, directly or indirectly, on the presence or activities of some high-level predator.
Saying that eliminating one large animal species is "consequence-free" is very short-sighted and not at all right, IMO.
Stephen Hawking reckons he's cracked the black hole paradox
Wednesday 13th January 2016 17:09 GMT
Re: Other ways to preserve information
I'm giving you a thumbs up, AustinTX. Not because I think you're right, but because I don't believe you should be penalised for showing some imagination. It would have been nice if your downvoters explained the flaw in your reasoning (something to do with future light cones, I'd guess) but they've decided to ridicule you instead.
Personally, I don't know enough about physics to know which theories about information loss in black holes make sense and which don't, but it still doesn't stop me thinking about it. I don't think that white holes can work (we've never seen them), but what about the idea of black holes being a source of dark energy/dark matter? I think you'd need a few things:
* for the event horizon (or internal structure close to it) not to be smooth, but to encode information about things that have fallen in
* for that state to be updated over the life of the black hole
* for there to be some correlation between the Hawking radiation that's emitted and the things that fell into the hole in the first place
I don't understand how gravity works, so I don't know if information could be preserved using it alone. It probably wouldn't work because various conservation laws would be broken.
So my thinking, which is probably just as invalid as yours, is along the lines of:
* information encoded near the event horizon acts like a diffraction grating
* information spread out holographically across a large expanse of normal space/time
* spacetime around event horizon probably has to have a fractal structure
* underlying field equations have to go from using complex numbers to quaternions
* non-commutativity of quaternions never becomes an issue for normal matter in normal space, but adds a "twist" near singularity
* virtual particles travelling through "q-space" show up as dark energy/dark matter
* "twists" between normal matter/energy and dark matter/energy only happen near singularities
My idea is that as paired particles are created near the event horizon, one of them travels through normal Euclidean space, while the other goes through this "q-space". To preserve various censorship principles, anything travelling through the q-space would have to teleport to a point so far away, in space and time, that it shouldn't be possible to correlate inputs to outputs without taking infinite time. Eventually, though, all virtual particles will meet up with their twins again. It's just that they have to take different routes, through q-space and/or dark energy matter forms in the interim.
With all we don't know about the Universe, from dark matter to inflation, maybe someone more clever than me could come up with the maths to unify everything in a quaternion basis...
(downvotes expected :)
BBC risks wrath of android rights activists with Robot Wars reboot
Wednesday 13th January 2016 14:27 GMT
apex predators
Not sure how "fresh" they could make this given that, apart from minor tweaks, the top predator slots have all been established at this stage. So despite some technological advances (or at least more people coming at this via Arduino and Pi rather than RC), the metagame is still going to be like it was before: wedge vs spinning disk vs puncturing/smashing/crushing.
Maybe one thing that could be done would be to have "power-ups" like in Wipeout. The first to roll over a lit power-up tile would get some sort of bonus weapon like:
* releasing a bowling ball
* giving partial control over a house bot
* pistons or conveyor belts
* temporarily jamming another player's controller
* raising sunken bollards
* activating ramps or platforms
* etc
Basically if evolution of the bots has slowed/stopped then maybe evolving the arena is the way to go.
Another way to go might be to vary the games so that it's not all about destroying the other bots. You could have rounds based on stuff like a slalom course, circuit racing, robot football and maybe some autonomous challenges (no RC). Take out the destructive element, though, and it's less Robot Wars and more something like Scrapheap Challenge or The Great Egg Race. Hardly likely to appeal to purists.
200 experts line up to tell governments to get stuffed over encryption
David Bowie: Musician, actor... tech admirer
Monday 11th January 2016 16:58 GMT
Re: Moo, moo, electric moo...
But it's saddening that in this world where so much is ripped off, processed and repeated ad nauseum that another original is now lost to us.
Sounds kind of like Bowie's music, apart from the "repeated ad nauseam" part. Before the downvotes, I mean that in the sense that "good artists copy, great artists steal". Bowie was famous for "stealing" all kinds of musical influences (and non-musical, like Brian Gysin's "cut-up" technique) and making something unique and new out of it.
A case in point: it only struck me only a few months ago that Bowie had actually done a drum n' bass (-inspired) album: Earthling. In retrospect it should have been obvious, but despite many listenings I'd never pigeon-holed it into any particular style or genre---it was just pure Bowie.
Definitely a great artist, with an amazing legacy. RIP.
T-Mobile US boss John Legere calls bulls*** on video throttling claims
Friday 8th January 2016 16:24 GMT
Re: When Unlimited != Unlimited
Before someone insults me ...
Not at all. Gets up my nose, too. Phrasal verbs need to be verb + space + preposition, not these franken-verbs. I will not "setup" your computer or tell you how to "login" (or any of numerous other abominations that "computer" folk seem to think are OK).
Did North Korea really just detonate a hydrogen bomb? Probably not
Thursday 7th January 2016 15:30 GMT
Time to dust off
the classic "Protect and Survive" booklet?
Thursday 7th January 2016 01:48 GMT 
unbombified?
Let's say that you don't actually want to make a self-contained bomb, but do want the right type of explosion. Wouldn't it be easier to rig up some cannons (or rail-guns, but ignore that) containing non-critical fissile material, point them all at a target (which may include a second-stage mechanism intended to achieve fusion) and then synchronise all the shells to fire at once. It should produce the same effects as an equivalent bomb (and will probably be easier to rig than precisely-shaped charges) but probably a lot easier to set up.
Of course, the easier way to fake this would be to set up your lab near a fault line, then wait for an earthquake of sufficient magnitude and claim that you caused it, after the fact.
What does that icon do again? --->
AMD to nibble the ankles of Nvidia this summer with 14nm FinFET GPUs
Periodic table enjoys elemental engorgement
2016 in mobile: Visit a components mall in China... 30 min later, you're a manufacturer
Beyond iTunes: XML boffins target sheet music
The Infamous Eight: 2015's memes, themes and big pieces
Wednesday 30th December 2015 16:55 GMT
"146-character-driven culture"?
What's that number? SMS allows 140 bytes, which can pack in 160 7-bit ASCII values and Twitter kept the same 140-character limit, after a fashion (apparently it uses UTF-8 and counts characters rather than bytes).
Software bug sets free thousands of US prisoners too early
Feds widen probe into lottery IT boss who rooted game for profit
Secret shaggers, rejoice! Now you can blame that Hyatt credit card bill on hackers
Thursday 24th December 2015 05:59 GMT
Quantum of Solace
Thanks, El Reg. Explaining right now to the missus how the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics works. Specifically, how virtual particles (ie, receipts that purport to show a parallel me booked for a liaison in a certain hotel) can spontaneously (and with no intent on my part) be created and impinge in our classical universe.
Fingers crossed ...
Death Stars are a waste of time – here's the best way to take over the galaxy
Facebook hammers another nail into Flash's coffin
EU reforms could pave way for smells and noises to be trade-mark protected – expert
How to build a real lightsabre
Wednesday 16th December 2015 22:15 GMT
Best Star Wars parody, IMO, is from Crayon Shin Chan. Here is the Lightsabre battle clip.
("to be a man you must have honour---honour, and a peeenis")
Lettuce-nibbling veggies menace Mother Earth
Tuesday 15th December 2015 17:15 GMT
straw man (literally)
Without seeing the actual paper, with formulas and such, it's impossible to refute the article. I think that I can make some educated guesses, though.
There's a lot of pseudo-science and wishful thinking around so-called "organic" farming, but one thing that does seem to be backed up by actual science is the idea of "Biointensive" farming. One of the major planks of that is the ratios of different crops, eg:
- 60% carbon crops (produce a lot of biomass for composting, as well as some calorific value; eg, wheat, corn, grains)
- 30% calorie crops (eg, potatoes)
- 10% vitamin/mineral crops (eg, tomatoes, lettuce, Brassicas)
If this works (and let's say for the sake of argument that it does) then there are two things that immediately come to mind.
First, lettuce and such things aren't a good thing to be focusing on in a comparison. They essentially don't provide any calories, and so are a very inefficient use of land. We still need them, but they shouldn't be seen as the major part of a diet.
Second, all that livestock needs to be fed. It may be that animals are better at converting raw materials into meat. If that were the case then it might be more efficient to feed the crops to livestock and thus convert them into meat for us to eat. I'm not sure that that case can be made, though: I'm pretty sure that eating corn-fed pig is less efficient overall than eating the corn yourself. The other thing about passing crops through animals with the intention of eating them is that various livestock can eat things that are either indigestible(1) or unpalatable to us (or just unfashionable; it can be a cultural thing where we consider certain perfectly good foods as being only fit for animals, eg brown rice in Japan, maize and other "fodder" crops). If you look at the sorts of things that pigs or geese will eat, it strikes me that this (eg, geese converting slugs, among other things, into meat and eggs) is a more convincing argument for being a carnivore than any argument about how efficiently animals can convert the same raw food stuffs into meat.
Where I'm going with this, I strongly suspect that the comparison the paper makes is between an inefficient human diet based mainly on low-calorie, high-effort stuff like lettuces and a much more efficient one used for raising animals. In fact, I'm nearly willing to bet that the kind of integrated farming system that the paper has in mind for raising livestock is probably going to follow the ratios I mentioned above. So I suspect that it's really an apples/oranges comparison: basically assuming that humans and pigs have different dietary needs (which we don't, really) then using a really bad food production model for our diets and a really good one for the livestock.
So basically, if we had access to the paper and could do a proper apples-to-apples comparison, we'd probably find that it supports the ideas of a vegetarian diet (and probably biointensive farming) rather than the opposite.
PS 1: I'm deliberately glossing over livestock that eats only grasses since we're mainly talking about pigs; sometimes land is only fit for grazing, though
PS 2: I'm not a veggie or a hippy
Gamer ransomware grows up, now infecting UK, Euro businesses
Microsoft to OneDrive users: We're sorry, click the magic link to keep your free storage
National Crime Agency: Your kid could be a nasty interwebs hacker
IBM dispels the doubts and bags quantum computing funding deal
Bitcoin inventor Satoshi 'outed' as Aussie, then raided by cops – but not over BTC
Donald Trump wants Bill Gates to 'close the Internet', Jeff Bezos to pay tax
Tuesday 8th December 2015 14:39 GMT
Re: Duh
Oddly enough, I already know that:
a) Al Gore didn't invent the Internet,
b) he didn't claim to, and
c) manbearpig is the single largest threat that this, or any, country faces
I'm just pointing out that asking Bill Gates to do something about this is as farcical as asking Al Gore or Stephen Hawking (and all the other elders of the Internet that live in Big Ben).
/like-"goldy"-and-"bronzy"-only-it's-made-out-of-iron
IBM kills Hack A Hair Dryer women-in-tech vid after backlash
Tuesday 8th December 2015 01:35 GMT
Re: Shocking!
Actually, it's even easier. If it's a question of "how many?" then the correct qualifier is "fewer" (eg, "how many out of ten?" -> "fewer than 1 in ten"), while if it's a question of "how much?", then use "less" (eg, "less than 5l", "less than 5%", "less than ideal", "less than full employment", etc.).
Monday 7th December 2015 21:36 GMT
Re: Shocking!
Does it really still use 'fewer'?
Yes, it does.
In "Fewer than three in ten science and engineering jobs", "fewer than" is essentially qualifying "three jobs". Jobs come in unit quanta (are countable things) so you use "fewer" instead of "less". To show this, and that it's not qualifying the fraction, you can rephrase as: "fewer than three science and engineering jobs in ten". The meaning of the re-ordered sentence is exactly the same.
If we were qualifying an actual fraction or percentage (or weight, volume and so on) like "three tenths" or "30%", you would use less than: "Of all science and engineering jobs, less than 30% are filled ..." or "less than 30% of all jobs ..."
Obama calls out encryption in terror strategy speech
Monday 7th December 2015 20:28 GMT
Consider for a moment how very easy it was for me to get a whole bunch of Atheists really, really upset in this thread. Why? Because I had the temerity to tell them what Atheism is, when they had their own interpretations of what Atheism is that did not match what I was saying.
If you're not an atheist, Trevor, then going around to actual atheists and telling them what they really believe is sure to get up their noses.
Here's the first thing that google turns up when I enter "atheism as a belief" (with my emphasis added):
Atheism is usually defined incorrectly as a belief system. Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods. Older dictionaries define atheism as "a belief that there is no God."
I am an atheist and I agree with that definition. I do not have a belief that there is no God, much less a belief system. Arguing that an atheist believes in no-God is as irrelevant as a goldfish espousing a belief in the water he's living in. It is a supremely unrewarding line of thinking and thus we can, and do, safely discard it.
PS, as someone else mentioned, there's a difference between a-theist and anti-theist. The hint is there in the prefix; a- means "without"; whereas anti- means "against". I am without the baggage of belief in a god (ie, I call myself an athiest), and also without the baggage of having to believe that there is none (I am not an anti-theist).
Work on world's largest star-gazing 'scope stopped after religious protests
Infosec bods rate app languages; find Java 'king', put PHP in bin
Friday 4th December 2015 21:41 GMT
Re: PHP et al
Can you elaborate?
Quick answer: https://xkcd.com/327/
Slightly longer answer: in the first example, the programmer creates the query string as the concatenation (or interpolation) of the query (s)he intended to do, plus user data. There's nothing stopping the user from supplying data that turns the query from being "intended_statement" to "intended_statement; malicious_statement". This is called an SQL injection attack, by the way.
By using prepare, there are checks to ensure that user data can't morph the intended statement into some other arbitrary SQL command. Most easily done by escaping any metacharacters like ', ", ; and so on.
How Bobby Tables would work in real life... First, the code would have to select the student name and store it in a variable. Then, there would be some other query that's intended to, eg, show some details of that student. It could look like:
select * from Students where name = '$name'
Without input sanitisation, this becomes:
select * from Students where name = '$name' ; DROP TABLE Students; -- '
(-- introduces a comment in SQL, so the parser won't complain about the extra trailing apostrophe)
Free HTTPS certs for all – Let's Encrypt opens doors to world+dog
Thursday 3rd December 2015 23:03 GMT
Re: Windoze
@Sgt_Oddball:
I suggested a live CD so that you don't have to install anything. Maybe some packages need to be downloaded (into RAM), so it might take longer, but I'm sure it's all in the READMEs.
As for doing it on a server: don't! Stick a USB key into your laptop or whatever spare PC is to hand, boot from it, do the stuff needed to generate the cert and then copy it onto the secure server. It's not like you're going to be running this stuff (or any other configuration experiments) on a live production server, is it?
Thursday 3rd December 2015 20:07 GMT
Re: Windoze
Those of us required to use Windoze appear to be out of luck
Cygwin might work, I guess, but easiest is probably to download a small live Linux distro and run the script in there. I don't suppose the script will produce configs for IIS or whatever you're running though. Still, you should be able to manually install the cert.
Anyway, some sort of live Linux distro (like Knoppix, especially) is a good tool to have handy even in an all-Windows shop. Using it to reset a forgotten admin password or removing a corrupt page file are a couple of applications that come to mind.
BOFH: How long does it take to complete Friday's lager-related tasks?
German ex-pat jailed for smearing own pat all over Cork apartment
What the world needs now is Pi, sweet $5 Raspberry Pi Zero
Thai women drugged punters 'with Xanax-spiked nipples' – cops
This storage startup dedupes what to do what? How?
Tuesday 24th November 2015 20:32 GMT
Well then, you're going to have to start doing your own research. This is the last time I'm going to spoon-feed you.
I have presented my research.
For a given hash & block size, there are a finite number of blocks that will cause collisions in a given hash. By removing some of that finite set, we have fewer potentials for collision. It is that simple
Yes, but your argument was about git, not fixed-sized block. I have pointed out that we are not dealing with finite sets there. Thus, your counting argument is fallacious.
It is clear that collisions are a problem in the general case
And equally clearly (actually, more so), I gave you the equation for quantifying the collision rate and outlined a simple proof that the error rate can be made arbitrarily small for practical input parameters.
I don't know why you have such a problem with understanding this.
I also don't know what is your hang-up with this "but in the general case" line of argument. We agree on the pigeonhole principle (hash collisions must exist) and I think we can both agree that the analysis of the birthday paradox is apropros. That is the general case and I'm confident that I've analysed it correctly and that it vindicates my argument. Of course, I left some small amount of work for you to do to verify that what I said is correct, but that's simple high-school maths.
If you do decide to argue further, please make it clear whether you're arguing about git or block-level hashing. And don't try to bring a fallacious argument from one (ie, git) across to bolster your argument (such that it is) in the other. Thank you.
Tuesday 24th November 2015 19:48 GMT
OK, so I'm going back on my promise to not write any more, but ...
1. Does git's normal input type lead to fewer collisions?
Your line of reasoning about the structure of git's input leading to fewer collisions is pure conjecture. There is no "ipso facto" about your conclusions. You say that subspacing the input space discards potential collisions, but you neglect to consider that it also removes many non-colliding inputs, too. For your argument to work you'd have to explain why subspacing preferentially removes more colliding inputs, proportionately speaking.
In fact, the input to hash algorithms are (in the class of) infinite strings, so the normal rules of logic when dealing with finite numbers simply don't apply. Half of an infinite space is still an infinite space. In those terms, it's hard to see how your counting argument can hold any water on this point.
2. Is assuming hashes are collision-free a "reasonable" assumption in a block-centric app?
I believe that it is, but you have to plug the block size and digest size into the formulas for the birthday paradox so that you get an acceptable collision rate for a given capacity/occupancy (ie, how many blocks you intend to store).
A simple analysis should be able to convince you that doubling the number of possible hash buckets (ie, adding one more bit to the digest) will more than halve the collision rate for practical occupancy levels (which is a minuscule fraction of the hash space). This takes it out of the realm of being a question of pure mathematics and turns it into an applied maths/engineering question. And that's why I'm saying that it's an entirely reasonable assumption to make if you pick the right hash size for the problem at hand.
The actual formula to determine the probability that there is no collision, with a hash of h bits and an occupancy level o is:
(2 h Po) / 2 ho.
where xPy is the Permutation function.
I submit, without proof, that as h increases (with o fixed), the P term will increase faster than twice the rate of increase in the other term, assuming that o is sufficiently small. (in fact, it should increase much faster). Thus we can make the collision probability (1 minus the above) arbitrarily small by making a linear increase in the number of hash bits.
Basing the assumption that a well-chosen digest algorithm will be (practically speaking) collision-free on the above is, I am sure, completely justified.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
