* Posts by Christoph

3314 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Dec 2007

Will the looters 'loose' their benefits?

Christoph
FAIL

Hell with the law, let's go for revenge

The law is supposed to apply to everyone evenly, and you are supposed to be able to know what the laws and punishments are. There didn't use to be anything about adding extra punishments on after the offence was committed. There is no provision in law for this.

The standard punishments are laid down, and the magistrates and judges can vary them according to circumstances. So they will already have taken into account all the background to each individual case and set the penalty accordingly. Cutting the benefit is then an extra punishment *after* everything has been taken into account.

It punishes those who were out of work and rioted, but not those who had a job and still rioted.

It takes no account of individual circumstances, family members, etc.

It leaves people with no way to survive except to commit further crimes.

The comments I've seen don't have any reference to reform, rehabilitation, deterrence, or even punishment. They're all about REVENGE. Do we really want such a fundamental change to our legal system?

French mobile femtocells vulnerable to rogue base station hack

Christoph
Boffin

Grow your own

This seems to describe forcing corrupted images onto other people's kit. Wouldn't it be easier to just get your own kit (claiming legitimate use so it gets connected), make it available for the public, then bung the malware on it? That way you see everything in the message stream for every phone in the area.

Italian boffins to robo-grapple space junk

Christoph
Holmes

We already have a solution

Send up Small Clanger in the music boat to reel them in with a magnet on the end of a fishing line.

12% of UK don't carry cash

Christoph

We must use cards!

If you use cash, all the money goes to the retailer. Only if you use a card can the bankers get a cut of every single transaction you make. And if they don't get a cut of everything, how can they keep their bonuses up? Do you want them to have to scrape by on less than a million a year?

WON'T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE POOR STARVING BANKERS?

Boffins shine 800Mbps wireless network from flashlight

Christoph
Boffin

Blocking the beam

Should be possible to get round the problem of beam blocking, in a controlled environment.

For instance, from a central point in the ceiling, fire the beam high up, and have an angled mirror on the wall above and behind the computer. Plus maybe an audible alarm if the beam does still get blocked.

Acer turns to trains for imports

Christoph

Lossage?

How many of those containers are going to "fall off the back of the train"?

Truck nuts swing onto US freedom of speech agenda

Christoph
Alert

Do Not ,,,

,,, add these to the LOHAN project.

Just don't, OK?

News leech loses appeal on High Court copyright case

Christoph
Alert

Classic headlines

About the only good thing the late unlamented News of the Screws did was come up with the headline:

Nudist Welfare Man's Model Wife Fell For Chinese Hypnotist From The Co-op Bacon Factory

Fingerprint scans learn to spot chopped-off fingers

Christoph
Trollface

Tell Leicester about this

Leicester City Council should be putting this in all their buildings to defend against zombie attack.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-13713798

US Navy orders laser machine guns

Christoph
Boffin

"set a small boat on fire"

They can now set a boat on fire with a beam of light?

WOW!!!

It's only taken them about two thousand two hundred years to catch up with Archimedes.

Legal expert: Letters can be evidence, so can Facebook

Christoph
Stop

Read only

Once they have his passwords the evidence is invalid, since they can forge and alter what is on there. So it's not admissible any longer.

They should have read only access at most. Perhaps have defendant log in then page through what is there so they can see? Or have the web site supply the information? But NOT the passwords. That not only lets them forge messages in his name, it gives them access to the private information of friends of his on the site who have trusted him with access to their information. That cannot possibly be justified - those friends have nothing to do with the case.

Mega-colossal space raincloud found at moist black hole

Christoph
Boffin

That's a lot of nucleosynthesis

I hadn't realised there could be that much oxygen around that early - presumably it's from the really big first generation stars?

Chinese lecturer demands his students acquire iPads

Christoph
FAIL

Still in the dark ages

"females don light makeup"

Because as we know, women are only there to look pretty for the men - it's not as if they were real people, is it? Horrors, they might start expecting equal treatment!

Oy, China, how about doing *better* than the west for once and getting rid of the mediaeval garbage?

End of an era: Atlantis hits the tarmac

Christoph
Boffin

only the US bit

Russia has an ongoing manned space program using an extremely successful craft. China is on its way. Even Europe has vague plans. India might manage something.

Nepalese gov to nail Everest's bigness in row with China

Christoph
Joke

Simple solution

Hand someone a barometer and tell him to use it to find the height of the peak.

Bill seeks to decriminalise pianos in pubs and schools

Christoph
Flame

No, it was more barking than that

The licensing requirement is for live music. 'Justification' being they might get disorderly, there might be loud noise, and Think Of The Children. All of which was already covered by other laws.

But there was no license needed for recorded music, however loud. No licence needed for big screen football match viewing, however rowdy.

No licence needed for commercial events where you are entertaining the clients.

No licence needed for educational events.

So the only thing NuLab made illegal was music made for enjoyment. People having fun. Like they've been doing for many thousands of years, ever since music was invented, without needing a government licence to graciously grant them that as a special privilege.

Though this has of course happened once before in this country. And at least Bliar failed in his attempt to become Lord Protector.

First snap of giant asteroid Vesta from orbiting probe

Christoph
Alien

The Clangers might find them first

Maybe Small Clanger will come out in the music boat and reel in the Dawn probe with that fishing line and magnet.

DARPA project seeks immortality, suspended animation

Christoph
Black Helicopters

How long before they warehouse the 'terrorists'

First use will be a big storage facility at Guantanamo Bay, where they don't have to bother about any boring 'human rights' legislation.

Anyone vaguely suspicious gets warehoused there in cold storage 'just until we get the case sorted out'.

Nice and cheap, no worries about detainees demanding that you produce evidence against them. Hey, you can even promise to release anyone who protests against their detention!

Then you let them go a few decades down the line when all their family and friends are dead so they can't be in any nasty conspiracies.

English, Welsh cops get mobile fingerprint-check tech

Christoph
Black Helicopters

Let him prove it first

Why should I co-operate with someone who is impersonating a police officer? I require conclusive proof of his identity first. And not some easily forged 'warrant card' - if my identity documents are not good enough then neither are his.

Hey! My friend is sending spam

Christoph
Boffin

How do you warn them?

"the genuine account holder is asked to go through an account recovery process."

The problem is how to do that without sounding like a spammer yourself?

I get *lots* of messages saying my account has been compromised and I'll need to reset my password. Several a day. How are they going to 1> Avoid getting lost in that 2> Avoid the spammers promptly faking whatever it is that they do? This might turn out to be a gift to spammers once people know MS really does send out such messages

Online map suppressing crime reporting, says survey

Christoph
Facepalm

Did they really not know this would happen?

People don't report crime because having it on the crime map will affect their house price? What are these researchers checking next, popes or bears?

Data ownership becomes fuzzy in the cloud

Christoph
Boffin

Not just data

"Store your data in Canada, Latin America, anywhere you like, but not in the States.”

Host your site elsewhere too, or you might find it's been replaced with an official notice that you distribute child porn because someone else on the same server was naughty.

LG debuts eye-tracking no-specs 3D screen

Christoph
Boffin

TVs

"there's no reason why the technology can't be adapted to large TVs."

Other than the problem when more than one person is watching - that would need multiple trackers and barriers.

So, LOHAN: What's it to be?

Christoph

More like ...

Lots Of Headlines Acronyming Norks

Airport screener stuffs stolen iPad into (own) trousers

Christoph

What happened with the previous thefts?

What was the TSA reaction to his previous victims when they reported that their property had been stolen? Did they investigate in any way? Or did they just ignore it and tell the victims to get stuffed, even when the volume of complaints must have made it perfectly clear that something was wrong?

News of the World TO CLOSE

Christoph

Actually ...

They made an excuse and left.

Christoph
Pirate

Trying to save the sinking ship

They must have lost a *lot* of advertising from other Murdoch titles, and be hoping that throwing the News of the Screws to the wolves will reduce the damage to the rest.

Plus of course salvaging that BSkyB takeover.

Boffins triple battery life with metal foam

Christoph

Lithium is light

Lithium is atomic number 3 - it's really, really light.

Christoph
Mushroom

Bigger bang?

There's been lots of reports of lithium batteries going bang - these would presumably produce a 3 times bigger bang? Are they more likely or less likely to explode than the existing types?

Blow to the head makes people feel good about religion

Christoph

Or maybe it's more Monty Python

Remember the "Being hit over the head lessons"?

US Navy invents 'Zero-Power Autonomous' ocean probe

Christoph

How do they report back?

"naval antisubmarine operations" ... "frogman attacks"

Those need immediate reporting. If there's wires back to the surface to send data, they can be used for power as well. If there aren't, the data only gets back when it surfaces months later.

And of course it still needs some power to run the instruments, so just what is the advantage of these?

Vatican launches second website in just 2000 years

Christoph

Something suitable

Just hack in an appropriate motto for them, such as

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius

Kiwi gals swig shots of horse semen

Christoph
Joke

That's a great improvement

Better than a lot of pubs round here - they serve something more like horse piss.

Fridge-sized war raygun for US bombers gets $40m

Christoph
Boffin

Milliseconds should be enough

If it bounces back 90% and is rapidly wrecked by the remainder, the amount returned to the source should be adequate to wreck that. The gadget on the ground can be much more robust, have more thermal mass, etc. It's also very much simpler. If it can be wrecked in milliseconds, so can the source, which has lots of complex bits in it.

Obviously the camouflage will be designed to not interfere with the beam too much as it gets blasted - it might take a bit of testing to find the right material, but it's hardly impossible.

Christoph
Boffin

I see a market ...

... for a dummy tank that burns away in the laser beam to reveal a cube-corner mirror that bounces the beam back the way it came.

Plods roll out new Police National Database

Christoph
Thumb Down

What could possibly go wrong?

Lots of fine-sounding soundbites about how well protected it is, and how accurate the data is.

Now compare that with the actual evidence of how existing systems have "worked".

FBI fat-thumbs data centre raid

Christoph
FAIL

Machine gun your own goal

The NYT says "the F.B.I. was actively investigating the Lulz Security group".

So they are trying to stop the activities of a hacking group which is knocking innocent web sites off line.

And to do this, they ... err ... whoops!

Ten thousand OLEDs unite in live Earth replica

Christoph
Joke

Martians

"what our planet would look like to martians on the moon."

It's obstructing their view of Venus!

Does a flash motor make a man more desirable?

Christoph

What about a rea car?

What do they say about the driver of a solid, reliable, dependable Half-Timbered Morris?

DARPA issues call for notions on Starship-for-2111 plan

Christoph
Mushroom

If it's the usual US procedure ...

"can ultimately be expected to benefit the Department of Defense"

Travel to strange new star systems. Meet interesting new races. And bomb them.

Adobe patches critical bugs in Flash and Reader

Christoph
Alert

Problem reported with Reader update

This link says there may be problems printing from Chrome after updating Reader:

https://profiles.google.com/lauren4321/posts/C4dGijRdoiy

Commons hit by rash of laptop thefts

Christoph
WTF?

Security?

This is the place with the ultra-high security to keep terrorists out? And they can't even stop every passing tea-leaf wandering in to see what he can pick up?

European Council: Creating hacking tools should be criminal across EU

Christoph
FAIL

Don't ever report a security hole

"I've just found a security hole in your web site, here's the details so you can fix it at once."

"Right Sunshine, you're nicked!"

Patrick Byrne: 'See, I told you America's economy was busted'

Christoph
Pirate

Unfortunately...

A lot of people make a lot of money from the current system. They have "very close ties" to the people who make the laws that govern the system, which strangely enough tend to change in ways that make it easier for them to make money.

Little details like financial stability, or relevance to the real world, are somebody else's problem.

Inside the 'funky' history of Groupon's biggest shareholder

Christoph
Alert

Flawed financial model

This link goes somewhat further - it reckons the financial model is similar to a Ponzi scheme

http://j.mp/jIne7x

London Ambulance Service downed by upgrade cockup

Christoph
WTF?

There's nothing like proper testing before full deployment

. . . And this was nothing like proper testing before full deployment

Breaking wave 'big as the USA' spied on Sun's surface

Christoph

Which USA?

Is that all the states, the continental states, or the contiguous states?

RSA makes token offer to worried customers

Christoph
FAIL

Why was it accessible?

Why was this database of seed numbers (or something similar) on a machine that was connected to the net? Anything that critical should have an air gap.

Sandi Toksvig puts the 'n' into cuts - on the Beeb

Christoph

Pretty mild

She's been a guest panellist on "I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue", which has got away with *much* worse.

Antimatter hangs around at CERN

Christoph
Headmaster

Actually twice the mass

An antimatter bomb releases twice its mass as energy - it takes the same mass of normal matter with it.

The electrons and positrons (usually) convert to pairs of gamma rays. The protons and anti-protons (which are each made up of three quarks and a mess of virtual gluons) tend to be a lot messier and convert to various lighter particles plus energy, and those particles will then interact and/or annihilate with surrounding stuff until it eventually all ends up as energy in some form.

But the end result will be a Very Large Bang. Detailed observations are left as an exercise for the reader.