Posts by Nigel 11

Re: How about

the cost of acquiring another room proved prohibitive...

Do you have a loft? If you do, think vertically.

Re: Blind-sided?

"why they do not automate trains"

Like BART (San Francisco) or the DLR (London), and several others?

The attitude of various unions ("over our dead bodies") has a lot to do with it.

Also, outside of a completely walled-in urban transit system, the possibility of unsignalled objects on the line is very real. It's only recently that robotic vision has reached the point where it can apply the brakes in such circumstances (landslides, fallen trees, cars barrier-dodging level crossings, kids playing silly games ....) and it is still(?) beyond the wit of robot to get out of the cab to investigate the object that it has stopped for which turns out to be a large empty cardboard box blown on the wind, or to not stop at all for what is clearly a wind-inflated carrier bag snagged on trackside shrubbery.

Back to self-drive cars I wonder when they'll start testing them on one-track wiggly deeply potholed rural roads where there are riders on horses to be aware of.

I mean, for a new router, you have to have default admin/password to allow the user to get going...

Rubbish. You install a random default password and print that on a label stuck to the bottom of the router (personally I think the top would be better, and also a duplicate label stuck to the setup guide).

Asus, according to the company website, was named after the greek Mythological Pegasus creature, but dropped the "peg" to show up more prominently in the alphabetical listings.

I think I still prefer the version I have heard, that it once was "asUS" with creative typography to try to hoodwink USA customers into thinking it was a US product. Not quite as blatant as "made in Usa", Usa being a town in Japan which changed its name for commercial advantage.

Re: Free Markets

Given time Asus will go out of business and the problem will be solved free market style

I can't help thinking that "free market" is about as far removed from this case as one could imagine. Could it have happened to Netgear (who have also shipped some incredibly insecure crap)? Hint. Netgear is a US company. Asus is not.

Personally I think there s no hope until routers go fully open and run Linux (for example, OpenWRT) so that security updates happen in a timely manner and keeping one's router up to date does not depend on any hardware manufacturer continuing to actively support hardware which it no longer sells and which it would much rather you replaced with newer hardware. Sadly, at present I do not think there is a single router on the market with an ADSL port that has an open source driver available.

Re: Nice looking phone.

If I need a new phone next week it will be a Google Nexus. I am completely fed up with apps that I don't want and cannot get rid of, and of depending on a vendor who no longer makes my particular model of phone for its security updates. They have no incentive to produce updates in a timely manner, if at all. Worse, they have a positive incentive not to. Make the phone as obsolete as possible as soon as possible so the muggles buy another new one. Glueing the battery into the phone and hoping(*) it fails a few months after the warranty runs out is another form of the same.

Some time in the hopefully near future I may switch to a phone that runs Cyanogen or some other truly open OS so I'm not dependant on any single company for updates. Then I might even be able to keep the exact same familiar UI after my obsolete phone finally breaks.

Sorry, Xiaomi. It looks very pretty but I suspect you want me to throw it away as soon as the warranty has run out. Once bitten and all that ....

(*) or engineering it to fail? How can we tell?

Re: Almost

Seriously, it would have been interesting to know how it was almost exploited.

All you really need to know is here

Re: OmegaIsNull

The programmer has chosen to redefine the concept of null to also include non null variables with no value yet assigned, or with a value of a single space.

Under the (unlikely) assumption that the code does precisely what is required, then its worst feature by far is its name. Call it OmegaIsNullish or OmegaIsEmpty or even YukkyTest. Badly chosen names are one of my pet hates, especially when they've found their way into widely-used libraries or systems from where it's impossible ever to evict them. "select" to wait for IO completion, I ask you!

Also, comments matter as much as code. Again if the comment said "is Nullish (null or empty string or space)" ...

But I actually think this is a prize specimen from a person who can't code. There are people who are tone deaf, people who are number blind, and people who can't code. They imitate the forms like any good cargo cultist does, and simply cannot understand that they should find a different employment before somebody fires them (or murders them).

Re: Is there anyone on board that can fly a plane?

ISTR reading that if you have landed a big jet a good few times in a flight sim you are likely to be able to land one for real (wiith assistance from the control tower) if it ever becomes necessary. There are cases of non-pilots being talked down successfully even without any sim experience.

However, I am surprised that they don't give cabin staff a few hours in the real flight training simulator and a refresher every couple of years. Or do they (and impose secrecy for PR reasons)?

Re: Darwin is calling

one could read the text and think that one could be infected just by receiving/opening an mms.

Is that "completely impossible" or "not yet"?

I'm sticking to using my desktop along with a completely non-networked code-generating gizmo that my bank sent me. Also to shopping only with credit cards, where the legal onus is on the credit provider to prove that it was I who spent the money, in a court of law if I insist that I did not.

Re: Putix?

The Russian government is doing this so it can spy on itself ...

This is Russia you are talking about. The country which historically has been more institutionally paranoid than any other, not always without justification.

But yes, their primary motivation will be to stop Redmond and the USA government from spying on the Russian government. It's obviously become too hard for them to work out what Windows is up to, for them to continue using it as a channel for dis-informing Washington.

Re: How many events ?

Thanks for that link. Five percent of the mass of the system converted to gravitational radiation in the last five minutes. Detectable ... up to 500 |million lightyears away. Wow. Seriously wow.

Re: How many events ?

If there are two black holes gradually(?) orbiting in towards each other then both detectors will be picking up a synchronized sinusoidal perturbation with a phase shift between them introduced by the speed of gravity (assumed to be the same as the speed of light) and the motion of the Earth. Further, since the orbiting black holes are losing energy by gravitational radiation, the period of the gravity wave and its intensity will both gradually be increasing, on top of the modulations caused by the motions of the Earth.

Surely it's too much to hope for that they have observed the actual merger event? Really good test of GR and black hole theory, if they have.

Re: a geodesic past the media

It's not something they actually want to keep secret. They just don't want to be misreported, so they talk only to other scientists who hopefully know better than to get themselves misquoted by the popular media. Witness the gradual popular-media "discovery" of the Higgs boson. First "hints of", then "possible", "probable",... which actually mapped reasonably well onto the number of sigmas' worth of data they'd acquired.

This rumour sounds like the news might be more instantly definite but I'm happy to wait until Thursday.

Re: Is it a test?

I assume something like two black holes merging or a black hole swallowing a neutron star is going to leave some obvious evidence in the gamma or Xray spectrum

I'm not sure you can count on that. This is two black holes. The two black holes will have been orbiting each other for a long, long time, gradually approaching each other as they lose energy by gravitational radiation. I think that they may have hoovered up almost all matter surrounding them a long time ago. Since both objects are already black holes, even the actual merger event won't emit anything except gravitational radiation (on the basic principle that nothing can get out of an event horizon).

It's a totally different story if there's a neutron star being torn apart by a black hole. That's the sort of event that you want to observe from a very, very long way away. E = mc^2 and something approaching a sun's worth of mass would be converted into energy and emitted as concentrated beams up the axis of rotation over a rather short span of time. The ultimate death ray.

Re: Whats the bet

The first use of this proposed law, will be by a legislator whose work email, address and phone number is published by some random activist calling for everyone to demand an explanation from the relevant congress-critter.

I'm not an USAian nor a lawyer, but one might hope this would be thrown out as unconstitutional.

What I'd hope is targetted, is the sort of cyber-harassment that has in the past driven some people to commit suicide. Is the word "repeated" really not in this legislation somewhere? Is there really no intention to distinguish between a one-off disclosure and repeated disclosures after a doxxer/stalker has been told to stop?

This case asks whether or not you can link to something that wasn't published, or was published without the permission of the copyright holder.

Especially if you persist, after the copyright holder has made you aware beyond any reasonable doubt that the material is being made available without its consent.

Methinks there's an analogy to be made with stalking. A stalker doesn't directly break the law, but his (or her) actions which would be legal if randomly distributed across the population become illegal when persistently targeted at a single individual after being told to stop.

Stalking is intended to terrorize, and is therefore illegal. Publishing repeatedly updated links to copyright-violating servers elsewhere is intended to assist others to commit a form of theft. Legal? Seems a sensible thing for a court to consider. I hope that they get it right and restrict their judgement to this specific case rather than wreaking wider havoc with the internet.

Re: a week and 2 engineers

Do we now have an explanation of the bag with 59 sachets of salt and one crisp?

(I've twice found a solid chocolate Kit-kat. I don't regard that as any cause for complaint).

Re: Big Blue

And Vernor Vinge comprehensively outclassed the Berserkers with the Blight. That truly is a nightmare vision (and A Fire upon the Deep is a truly great book).

Machines do not "make decisions" and are not likely to do so in the foreseeable future. They just follow a pre-programmed algorithm - albeit one that may be pretty complex.

Which differs from a human brain taking a decision how precisely?

A machine makes a decision when it operates with internally generated code or huge internally generated continuously modified weighting tables on equally huge internally generated tables of data, heuristically pruned to fit in available memory. It becomes impossible for a human to understand why any particular instance arrives at a particular point A or not-A. Potentially this, even if we can dump a Terabyte of internal state at the precise moment that the decision was taken.

When you are running and are tripped by something you didn't see, you'll try to regain your balance. Can you tell us the details of your last success, or what you would do next time to avoid your fall, or even whether falling was avoidable? Yet clearly we do learn to run. Young kids fall over a lot more than adults. And if/when we advance from building intrinsically stable wheeled and tracked vehicles to bipedal "mechas", I have little doubt that the same will be true of their control systems.

Does the machine choose the greater good - or avoid a direct action that would deliberately kill the man on the spur?

A dilemma which the logic in self-driving cars will have to incorporate, unless we choose to refuse to incorporate any concept of "the greater good" which is itself a decision. Will it be explicit (programmer playing god, here's the algorithm which decides whether you live or die)? Or implicit (the AI has programmed goals and code that evolves in time as it processes more events, and we really don't know in advance what it will do faced with a choice between two different crashes).

I once found myself in a meta- version of this dilemma. Thanks to my own inattention, I was hurtling towards a give-way sign much too fast to stop and realized I might have to decide between a collision with another vehicle or going off-road into trees. I never got to take the decision, because the fates or whatever decreed that there was no other vehicle crossing my path.

Re: "what it is that makes us human when computers and machines can educate themselves"

There was a computer program that "discovered" prime numbers all by itself.

It was not really AI. It was a goal-seeking algorithm that could apply the rules of symbolic algrebra. It had the axioms of arithmetic hard-coded, and its goal was to prove hypotheses with high values of interestingness, where interestingness was a heuristic based on the relation of a hypothesis to other hypotheses and theorems and their interestingnesses (ie, if we can prove this, then we get that and that and that ... )

ISTR it got as far as inventing and trying to prove Goldbach's conjecture (every even number greater than two can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers). It failed to prove it, which is not very surprising ... the best human mathematicians of the last 250 years or so haven't been able to prove it either!

There's also the proof of the four-colour theorem which is too complex for any human unassisted by a computer to comprehend. So it it proved, and if so what is it proved by?

Re: This is like BIOS flashing by Unix commands

So that you can 'safely' run rm -rf /

rm --one-file-system -rf / # safe, for certain values of safe ...

this will remove all files in your root filesystem, which is probably your operating system installation, hopefully not your /home files, and certainly not anything in sysfs.

Personaly I think --one-file-system should be the default, especially if you are running as root, with a --really-do-recurse-into-all-filesystems option for the suicidally inclined.