Posts by John H Woods

Re: Did you really need the political commentary?

sabroni: "I find it's valuable to read things written by people who's politics I disagree with"

+1. I greatly enjoy reading the output of AO, LP and TW on these pages, although I doubt we share much political common ground.

jai: "i guess, perhaps this does explain why we haven't been wiped out by an alien invasion force yet. maybe we're not alone in the universe, but there's just absolutely no way to get to the next door neighbours to say hi."

A similar argument applies to Time Travel - if it were possible, they'd already have visited.

Re: Moore's Law and the Fermi Paradox.

Apologies - I intended to be rude about the paper, which is worthless, rather than to yourself.

Firstly. I think it needs to be made clear that Arxiv.org does not have any automatic status. Things that appear here may be e-prints of articles that have appeared in reputable refereed journals, or they may be nothing more than blog posts. And some of those are distinctively cranky - you can easily find proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis or the Goldbach conjecture here.

Secondly, the paper takes an observation (that some trend is near-enough exponential) and applies it to another field as if it were a 'law' - Moore's Law is a misnomer in this regard. Of course, very many natural and artificial processes are logarithmic in nature. But there is no evidence of a mechanism that genetic complexity would increase in a strictly exponential manner. So the evidence is quite weak.

Thirdly the claim is a very strong one. It is one thing to do a little thought experiment and come up with an interesting conclusion (wow, if genetic complexity progression were strictly exponential, there isn't enough time for life to evolve). But the sensible conclusion is that genetic complexity is very unlikely to have progressed in this way - not that life must have come from outer space. They might as well have said that this gives them evidence that the earth is a lot older than they we thought!

Perhaps I was overly irritated because I miss being a scientist (unfortunately other life circumstances ejected me from a world I loved and always wanted to be a part of) and I now spend my time looking at very poor code developed by offshore coders and being told by my managers that it is now too late to do things properly. I can only offer this as an explanation rather than an excuse, but my rudeness was meant to be directed mainly towards the paper, somewhat towards the authors, and not at all towards you.

Re: Moral to attack a wearer ?

Whilst I'm unhappy with the idea of 24/7 surveillance, you can't just attack people who are making video-recordings in a public place. Are you going to ram me off the road because I have a dashboard camera?

Anyway, people who want to take hidden video have far better options than Google Glasses, as a quick search on your favourite search engine will confirm. And those wanting to use such facilities for perving would, I guess, prefer to record straight to SD card than risk storing evidence against themselves in the cloud!

Re: Android permissions design

I agree. Best way to control the 'make phone calls' permission might be to pop a user prompt before every short-code SMS or non geographic number unless a specific permission is given in advance.

I'm safe because I use PAYG - as soon as I top up 15 quid on Three I buy their 500min, 5000 text, AYCE data bundle, which uses the whole amount. The phone will then not make any calls to non-geo numbers, or send premium texts because "your account balance is too low" .

But the telcos could help here by letting you set contractual terms such as requiring additional confirmation to control cost incurred, number of premium SMS that can be sent or number of mins of premium calls that can be made per month.

Re: Job title

"E-mail, Internet and Electronic Information Officer."

at McDonalds?

Re: Lower number than in the article

"We get to about 5000 copies, which is important for the author, but so irrelevant that it isn't worth Amazon employing someone to add the extra lines of code in their database."

As someone who has been involved in i18n projects, I think it's very unlikely that the effort involved here is that considerable. Amazon only have to add a small premium to Welsh language books to cover it, so - whilst I agree that Welsh should not have any special subsidies, it isn't unreasonable for it to be a supported language.

As for those people who found Welsh language programmes on the telly annoying, a performance of La Traviata I once saw was utterly ruined for me by the near-stage-right presence of a signer, waving their arms and grimacing dramatically, presumably for the benefit of the small proportion of deaf people who (a) go to the opera and (b) are unable to read the surtitles. Now *that's* PC gone mad.

Re: How Did We Survive

Money? Ration coupons? You were lucky! My parents used to give me a club and a send me out to kill my own food wearing nothing but a bearskin.

You don't need to catch them ...

... just get close enough to fire a magnetic/adhesive GPS tracker onto the vehicle. Pretty hard to outrun the helicopter then ... even if you can beat it in a straight line.

Which reminds me - have you guys seen P.R.E.Y A.L.O.N.E - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccw4OepTDUY

In this amazing Irish short film, whose SFX were done on a farm of cheap PCs, there is a blistering chase of a car through the subway system by a couple of fighter jets - and a great twist in the tale ...

Re: FIX THE SCREEN!!! WUXGA FTW!

^^^ THIS ^^^

Re: to my mind the only thing julie burchill did right

The thing about Julie Burchill is that she doesn't seem to be all that knowledgeable either. Whereas Fry is affable, avuncular and slightly misinformed, she is a total bitch who thinks she is much cleverer than any available evidence would seem to support.

Re: We really are at the mercy of crappy programmers now...

Pete Spicer: "People don't care about security all the time it affects their convenience"

I sort-of understand how this happens in some applications, but this is a fracking Password Reset application. The PRIMARY function is security related - this is not adding <feature X> to an application.

This isn't just a (ludicrous) coding failure - this is a failure of testing, and indeed management. We are at the mercy of "crappy everyone" and the buck stops at management. They will blame the coder - not the people who hired him, the people who managed him, the people who reviewed his code, the people who tested his work and the people who signed it off for production. All of them have failed in their jobs as much as the coder, and it shows a total disregard for user security.

To then say "We take customer privacy very seriously" seems to me to almost be the equivalent of saying "we know X is very important but we have no idea how to do it"

Re: For 41p a day, I say, keep the tax.

You are right about Broadchurch. But I think one of the reason ITV has these premium shows (like Downton Abbey) is they have to compete with the BBC. I think if the TV licence goes, it won't just be the BBC channels that get worse.

Grandmaster skill not required...

... if a puzzle is to be easy enough for a reasonably competent chess player to solve, then an average PC running gnuchess will also be able to do it. Massive horsepower was only required to defeat grandmasters because their game is at a *much* higher level than that of even the most talented players in a normal chess club.

Re: Just say no.

" If anyone knows of a way of setting "No, %&^ off, just show me the &%$ing website like I asked you" to be the default response, please do let us know."

In the end I gave up and set my browser user agent to pretend to be a desktop.

Re: Training?

"Given that both he and the runner up weren't formally trained and yet still topped-out the competition it does seem to make the value of that aspect of the prize a bit suspect?"

Just reminds me of those super-hard (technical term) crosswords where the prize is ... a dictionary.

Re: Is distance charging really such a good idea?

"My University professor of high frequency electronics/ RF engineering would frequently tell us that even he would only use his mobile phone sparingly as the health concerns were unknown."

YMMV but I'd have paid rather more attention to what the BIOLOGISTS thought.

No real defence against live coercion ...

... except silent alarm signalling.

e.g. when you are enrolled, you are randomly assigned an orientation - fingers to 10 o'clock, 12 o'clock, 2 o'clock. Scan your hand at a different angle and it appears to work but raises a silent alarm elsewhere.

There was a UL that entering your PIN backwards at an ATM did this - retrieved your money but alerted the police. AFAIK it is just that, a UL, but the principle is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

Re: Wikipedia as a reference? ...

NOTHING is reliable. But when you say "most of the articles seem to consist of self-serving advertising very heavily monitored by a select group (or single issue obsessives) who vigorously expunge any unorthodox facts", can you give an example?

For instance, when one looks up scientific, mathematical and computational entries they appear largely correct. When one looks up more subjective stuff, like history, then obviously there are grounds for disagreement, and at the far end of the spectrum, regarding pop culture, biographies etc, it may well be inaccurate. But who cares? If you expect any source to tell you everything you know about material where there is room for interpretation, then you aren't really able to correctly use any reference material.

So until people can point out significant factual inaccuracies in articles like "Sulphur", "Service Oriented Architecture", "Pythagoras Theorem" etc. I am going to remain sceptical. Just because Wikipedia is more wide ranging than other encyclopaedias, and stretches into areas where much less accuracy is expected, does not mean it is worthless for core reference material.