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* Posts by Nigel 11

3191 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009

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Gulf spill to annihilate all earthlings, says seer

Nigel 11
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Boffin

Aim ... fire ... sigh, this is too easy, why do I bother ....

>It's worth pointing out that there are no "disks" or "subsea safety structure" 1,000 feet below the sea floor ... all that is there is well bore. The conclusion is that the well pipes below the sea floor are broken and leaking.

I saw that claim on another forum and it was immediately shot down. The disc is part of a safety valve or flapper valve. It'[s a standard fixture. Here's a cut-away drawing of one, courtesy of Schlumberger.

http://www.glossary.oilfield.slb.com/DisplayImage.cfm?ID=525

Other fallacies:

It's not impossible to bottom-kill a well even if the pipework far above IS totally compromised. The requirement is to pump in dense mud at at least as great a rate as the emerging oil. Once the space above is full of mud, the flow will stop, because the pressure exerted by the column of mud will exceed the upwards pressure of the oil. Simple applied physics.

As many have pointed out above, really big trouble would be signed by the ocean floor subsiding, not bulging upwards as this crackpot claims.

In the depths of geological time, earthquake faulting must have breached big high-pressure oilfields to the surface on many occasions. Life carried on. Compared to a supervolcano, this would be a complete non-event (and supervolcanoes happen every few tens of thousands of years).

As for methane, it forms stable hydrates with cold (4C) water under mile-deep pressure, and an oil spill won't change that.Indeed, the problem with BP's first attempt to cap the well was that the methane coming up with the oil DID rapidly form hydrates, which blocked the "dome". A methane catastrophe would require something to raise the ocean-deep temperature. Warm water (>4C) is less dense, so it rises, so ocean-floor hydreates won't thaw en masse until the whole ocean warms up. Not even a volcano could cause such a catastrophe (luckily, because ocean-deep volcanic eruptions aren't exactly uncommon).

Where we do have cause to worry is methane hydrates in permafrost (ie, on land). That methane is released if global warming causes the permafrost to thaw (no high pressure here to keep it stable). Methane causes global warming. A vicious circle of warming arises. If you want to worry about something, at least choose something plausible, rather than total nuttery.

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Nigel 11
Black Helicopters

Other explanations

Aym works for Exxon

Aym went short BP stock at 330p

Aym knows the truth about CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN

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Life on Earth gets wiped out every 27 million years, say boffins

Nigel 11
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Poles flip far too often

THe Earth's magnetic poles flip a lot more frequently than every 27My. Every few tens of thousands of years, if I remember right. Same sort of frequency as supervolcanoes. There's a fossil magnetic record in the form of the direction of magnetisation of the ocean floor, which is spreading at cm/year (10s of km per My) outwards from its molten source at the mid-ocean ridges.

During a flip the atmosphere would continue to provide protection from radiation. There isn't a major radiation problem at the poles, is there? Just pretty auroras in the sky. What will be lost during a flip, is the protection of the Earth's atmosphere *from* solar radiation. For geological values of "short" and "long", there's a short-term issue with global warming, and a long-term issue of the Earth's atmosphere being stripped off by the solar wind. "Long" hasn't happened yet - we still have an atmosphere. But one day, the earth's core will freeze and our atmoshere will go the way of Mars's. That's if the sun doesn't go red giant first, which it probably will.

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Nigel 11
Boffin

Use Fourier Analysis!

Take the power spectrum of the sequence. If there's really a 27-My periodicity, there will be a spike at that frequency in the spectrum. If there isn't, thre won't be. If it's not an exact 27My cycle the peak will be broadened and not as high, but still above background noise. If it's wishful thinking, there will be no noticeable peak.

I have to express doubt as to how accurately they can date extinction events hundreds of My past. It would oh so easy to allow belief in an extinction cycle to "close up" the error bars. 270My +/- 8My, rather than 270My +/- 14My, say. (The latter could not significantly support the theory, because the deviation covers an entire cycle).

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Drive suppliers hit capacity increase difficulties

Nigel 11
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Boffin

A while yet

It'll be a while yet before Terabytes of SSD will be price-competitive with magnetic storage, even if Moore's law stays on track for it to happen eventually. There are physical reasons to suspect it can't ever happen, but those only apply to extrapolation of current SSD technology, and I wouldn't be very surprised if someone didn't find a better way over the next decade or two.

By which time, magnetic storage will be up into the tens or hundreds of Tb, using the technologies described in the article, that are already working in the lab.

What will we be storing on it? There's always the mousetrap risk (build a better mousetrap, and the world does NOT beat a path to your door! )

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Reverse engineer extracts Skype crypto secret recipe

Nigel 11

How come?

"If armor is the only thing that matters, how come you don't see more solidiers going round with day-glo neon uniforms and a badge that says "aim here suckers, you can't hurt us because we're wearing armour"?"

Because they haven't invented the SFnal heavy grade nuke-proof force field yet, and because of the laws of physics. An infantryman's armour will increase his survival chances if a bullet hits his torso. A tank will resist some impacts of some less-good armour-piercing shells. Neither are invulnerable, so they'd prefer not to be targeted in the first place.

IT geeks do, in effect, advertise in this way, whenever and wherever they use mathematically secured channels. Attacks, such as have succeeded, are on the joins in the armour (implementation bugs and interface or hardware flaws). The underlying maths is the equivalent of the force field, currently believed to be invulnerable. Please note, not yet provably so!

ObSF: "Antibodies", Charles Stross.

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Nigel 11
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Bad analogy

"If it turned out your front door lock insides were made of cheese, or could be opened by any employee of Locks'R'Us, would you want to know?"

You mean, you think they aren't, and they can't? Most people's front door locks are quite easily picked by someone with the knowledge and a bit of practice, and if their lock isn't trivially forceable, then their door or frame is.

Also if you fit the reinforced steel door and frame with the umpteen lever multipoint lock mechanism, methinks you'll just attract the attention of a different class of robber. The sort that breaks in through your wall! Back when computers were very expensive, that's exactly what happened to a server room I know of.

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Apple bars radiation nanny from App Store

Nigel 11
Boffin

Every mobile has this app already!

Well, every mobile I've ever seen has the app. It's the signal-strength indicator.

Phones transmit at a power as low as possible consistent with maintaining communication with the cell base-station. The signal-strength is logarithmic over a 1000:1 range. 4 bars (best) corresponds to 2 mW, one bar (worst) to 2 Watts. If there's any danger at all, it stands to reason that the 2W level is the most worrysome. Two bars is one-tenth the transmit strength of one bar.

If you are concerned about frying your brain, but not sufficiently so to refuse to use a mobile, just check the signal strength, and decline to call or answer if it's minimum. Simple!

Possible research: do a comparisoin of brain cancer incidence amongst country dwellers compared to city dwellers. The signal strengths needed out in the sticks are much higher than in cities. Is there a higher incidence? If not, then high transmit strength mobile usage is no more dangerous than low signal usage, and the most likely hypothesis is that both are harmless.

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FLYING CAR, full hover, fairly quiet, offered to US Marines

Nigel 11
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30 miles in the air on battery?

It said, 30 miles in the air on battery. If it can really do that, this is a serious breakthrough in aeronautics. Flying cars may never catch on because of pilot training and sky crowding issues, but the day of flying taxis for when you have to get somewhere really fast, has just got a lot closer.

If this hardware actually exists and is performing anywhere near as well as stated, the guys behind it are geniuses.

If it can take off on battery, then we even have a contender for zero CO2 air transport, when it's charged from appropriately generated electricity

Could the principles behind those fan things be used to create an efficient, very quiet, conventional take-off short-haul aircraft (battery powered or ottherwise)? There would surely be a market for such a craft.

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Exciting company seeks Linux engineer

Nigel 11
Alert

On the 0.1% chance it wasn't a typo ...

There is the interesting, or horrible, possibility that the client has installed their fibre optic cable plant using the pre-existing large-bore pipework. I imagine that rat/excrement proof fibre costs a bit more than the usual weatherproof sort, but the installation cost might be considerably lower.

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'Huge airships to carry freight starting 10 years from now'

Nigel 11
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Headwind trouble

The obvious problem is that an airship with a normal speed of 70mph flying into a headwind of 70mph (not uncommon) is going precisely nowhere, just burning fuel to stay put. And it's such a large object that there's no chance of speeding it up to 140mph relative, because drag scales as a high power of airspeed. At times it'll end up with negative groundspeed, i.e. going backwards.

The effect of weather on scheduling airships would be a logistical nightmare. Not even sailing ships are so unreliable. A sail-powered ship has a keel and water for it to press against. As a result, it can tack upwind.

The only use I can see for airships is delivering bulky cargo to remote places lacking in road or rail infrastructure.

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Garage card scammer jailed

Nigel 11
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They *did* steal someone's finger

It was reported here in "The Register" some years ago. A South African businessman with a fingerprint-coded Mercedes was car-jacked. Never, ever, am I going to secure anything of value with a bit of my anatomy.

Where's the three-fingered thumbs-down icon?

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Huge new airships for US Army: designed in Blighty

Nigel 11
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Boffin

Neutral-bouyancy fuel

The technologically elegant solution is fuel with the same density as air. Inflate a gasbag with methane, which is lighter than air. Burn a mixture of methane and liquid fuel such that the loss of bouyancy attributable to the methane you've burned always equals the loss of weight of the liquid fuel you've burned. Or use a mostly-ethane gas mix with the exact same density as air.

Back to inflammable gasbags, of course ... the Hindenburg casts a long shadow. But surely the lesser propensity for methane or ethane to leak and ignite coupled with modern polymers for leakproof bags ought to be safe enough for an unmanned platform?

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Dyson Air Multiplier desktop cooler

Nigel 11
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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

For me, that thing is plain ugly. I'll stick with my £10 made-in-China fan: neutral on the aesthetics, and (according to the review) quieter.

Beauty, is a 1920-ish Bakelite fan with shiny brass cage and blades that would cucumber-slice any finger poked into their path. Electrically it's decidedly dodgy - a flax-and-rubber flex that's now held together by the flax and definitely best not flexed. It still works, slightly more noisily than the made-in-China one, but it looks much better turned off!

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Speed cameras slide out of LibCon budget

Nigel 11
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Speed cameras can *cause* accidents

When they put speed cameras on busy dual carriageways with no reason other than to raise revenue, they *cause* accidents.

Some dozy driver following the car in front at (say) 50 in optimally spaced traffic, spots the camera, can't remember the limit, and applies his brakes so as to get down to the 40 or 30 that he thinks might apply. The people behind are caught out by someone suddenly slowing down for no reason. You get a cascade effect. On a good day the traffic just grinds to a standstill several hundred yards further back. On a bad day, the road is unexpectedly slippery, or several people wre driving just a little bit too close, and there's a pile-up. Probably not a serious one, just enough to damage some cars, to create a five-mile tailback, and to pump tonnes of extra CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. On a *really* bad day a tanker-load of some dangerous volatile chemical will end up breached . Hasn't hapened yet, but it's only a matter of time.

Someone should look at each and every speed camera from a safety perspective, and no-one who profits from the fines should be allowed any say in where the cameras are located. The right places are at well-known accident blackspots, on narrow residential road "rat-runs", and outside schools. And perhaps, occasionally, on busy roads - but concealed, set at least 10mph above the speed limit, and active only at times of high traffic density.

In the meantime, every speed camers should at least have the limit that it is enforcing painted on it!

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Native Oz ducks being raped to extinction

Nigel 11
Boffin

Surely they must be the same species?

If they naturally interbreed and produce fertile offspring, surely what one is looking at is two strains (or races) of the same species doing what comes naturally? (Of course, there were once people who thought that there was more than one human species, distinguished by skin colour ... 'nuff said).

Hybrids subjected to natural selection often end up with the strengths of both parent strains and few of the genetic screw-ups of either. This is evolution in action!

Loss of biodiversity? Scientifically, one would have to study whether any genes have been lost from the hybrid population, that were present in the parents. With large populations, this is unlikely.

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Canadians form adulterers' privacy campaign

Nigel 11
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Alert

No ...

They sue McDonalds for serving them with hot coffee.

And win.

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NASA: Civilization will end in 2013 (possibly)

Nigel 11
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Boffin

One other thing

The danger to satellites isn't the magnetic field, it's the high-energy charged particles whizzing through them. Lots of charged particles whizzing past Earth is of course an electric current, which is what creates the global magnetic field fluctuations that induce currents in terrestrial electricity grids ... I digress.

So satellites get killed by ionizing radiation, as would astronauts if they couldn't make a rapid return from orbit or shelter behind a foot ot two of something solid. Exit GPS, Inmarsat, 21st-century weather forecasting. Fortunately most modern telecomms is terrestrial fiber-optics. Here on Earth, the atmosphere stops the radiation, and we get to watch spectacular Auroral displays caused by the upper atmosphere getting ionized. And the power grid is down (temporarily, one would hope) so there's no man-made lighting to interfere with the display.

Echoes of Asimov's "Nightfall"?

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Nigel 11
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Boffin

Not EMP (as usually understood)

EMP normally refers to the effect of a megatonne sized nuclear explosion in the upper atmosphere above you (at least 50 miles up). Since there's little air there to make a fireball, a lot of the energy comes out an a near-instantaneous electromagnetic pulse that can induce damaging voltages in quite short (inch-scale) bits of wire. Exit most civilian electronics along with the power grid. The one thing that is sure to survive are the nuclear submarine fleets (half a mile of salt-water is really good screening), so expect things to get even worse thereafter.

A solar storm creates a very slowly changing magnetic field, but on a global scale. Small-scale wiring won't notice any significant effect. Anything involving hundreds of miles of wire will pick up a large induced DC (actually cycles-per-hour AC) current. Transformers designed for 50Hz or 60Hz can't handle DC. They overheat and catch fire, if someone or something doesn't disconnect them first. So the best case is a managed grid black-out for the hours-long duration of the storm, and <tin hat on> the worst case is that all the transformers explode and our civilisation collapses as surely as if we'd been nuked, except we get to starve, rather than being incinerated.

Why am I feeling so cheerful today?

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Nigel 11
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Boffin

Your disk/SSD is safe-ish

The biggest problem is large induded near-DC currents in long-distance AC transmission lines. Small-scale DC-isolated systems, such as the innards of your PC, are safe from anything that doesn't come in down the mains cable. (I'm assuming all datacomms is Ethernet or similar - HF transformer-coupled - or optical fibre).

What might come down your mains cable? The usual: surges, sags and spikes, if or when all hell breaks loose on the national grid. Buy a UPS if you are really worried. Otherwise rely on the way a switch-mode PSU works. It rectifies the mains to get HVDC, runs an oscillator off the HVDC, and feeds the result through a high-frequency transformer. Mains transients may well fry your PSU, but should not create dangerous voltages on the low-voltage regulated side even if the PSU smokes out. I've seen plenty of PSUs taken down by a local power grid event (my local London Electricity sub-station once exploded) but I've never seen a disk die as a consequence.

The bigger question is how safe is society, if a significant fraction of the national power grid is damaged beyone rapid repair? Here lie the nightmare scenarios. No-one is quite sure what a repeat of that Victorian "perfect solar storm" might do do 20th-century power grids. (21st-century power grids using HVDC transmission, are probably more resilient).

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Samsung gears up to make half-terabyte flash drives

Nigel 11

Cheaper please, not bigger

What I really want is a fast smallish SSD at a low price. 16Gb would do, if it ran as fast as an Intel 64Gb SSD and cost a quarter as much.

Yes, I run LInux, so it'll all fit in 16Gb. But also think of the advantages of keeping your server's filestore metadata and tiny files in a fast SSD, with an ordinary HD for overspill storage of large files' data.

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Humanity evolved to cope with 30°C+ heat, says prof

Nigel 11
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Humidity is what's horrid

I've been in Arizona in summer (well above 40C at times) and it's quite OK once you get used to it, provided (big proviso) you have enough water at all times. Your sweat evaporates immediately and keeps you cool. You drink gallons and need to eat more salty snacks than usual to avoid cramps. Run out of water and you are in serious trouble.

People can work in steel-mills where I'm told it's even hotter than this.

I've also been in Philadelphia in a heatwave. Nowhere near Arizona hot, but very humid. Your clothes get soaked with sweat, stick to your skin, start dripping. There's so much water already in the air, that sweating doesn't solve the heat problem. Really, really horrid weather if you want to do anything outdoors. Go into an air-conditioned interior and you shiver until the sweat in your clothing has evaporated into the over-cool dehumidified air. Why do USAians set the indoor thermostat at 68F in Summer, rather than 75F?

So yes, I can believe that we are evolved for hot low-humidity surroundings. Only one question - where did prehistoric man in the Turkana find enough fresh water to survive and thrive?

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Apple lifted 'make web go away' button from open source

Nigel 11
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Dual-licensing

One other thing about the GPL. There's nothing in it to stop the owner of the copyright granting a non-exclusive non-GPL license to interested parties, in exchange for payment. Had this code been GPL'ed, its copyright owner might have been offered payment by Apple.

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Bank of America insider admits he stole sensitive customer data

Nigel 11
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Archaic systems?

Maybe.

More likely, the customer didn't twig when a known bank employee asked him for his whole password instead of the partial information that the computer was inviting him to ask for.

Or,

"Can I have letters 1,2 and 5 of your password?"

tap tap tap wait

"oops, my computer's just gone down. Sorry about this"

(make smalltalk for a minute or so)

"OK, we're back, I'll need to take you through security again"

...

"can I have letters 4,6 and 8 of your password"

"Yes, sir, that's fine, how can I help you? "

At this point the criminal employee has six letters of the password and can probably guess the rest nine times out of ten.

Sigh. Does crime really not pay?

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Owner of Russia's biggest breasts sues over airline buffeting

Nigel 11
Coat

€100,000?!

€100,000 for bruises? Pull the other one.

Did I really write that?

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Unarmed Royal Navy destroyers: French missiles blamed

Nigel 11
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Navies obsolete?

Perhaps the uncomfortable truth is that naval warfare is now obsolete, and that in any future war nothing will stay afloat for longer than the first skirmish. Maybe in an engagement their missiles and our missiles would pass in mid-air, delivering a pyrrhic victory to both sides simultaneously. The submarines would pick off any survivors. Non-nuclear MAD.

I remember a cold-war era documentary about the Nimitz (USA nuclear-powered aircraft carrier). The captain was asked about rumours that his ship was permanently on the USSR's nuclear strike target list, and whether he could do anything about that. He looked unfomfortable, flanelled a bit, and invited another question.

Today, it no longer requires nuclear-armed missiles? In which case we should build cheap(er) WW2-style destroyers to deal with pirates and tinpot dictators, and submarines and state-of-the-art shore-based anti-ship missile batteries for the future defense of the realm.

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Time to kill the zombie health records

Nigel 11
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Dear Graham

If you regard lying to insurance companies as acceptable, good luck to you if you ever need to claim in a big way. Because that's when they'll refuse to pay up until they have checked the veracity of your application form against your doctor's records. Read the fine print!

Frankly, if I needed medical insurance, the very last thing I'd do is lie to an insurer, because that way I'd have NO, repeat NO, cover if/when I most needed it. I'd much rather stay in a civilised country, such as the UK with the NHS, so insurers don't get to cherry-pick the healthiest for their own profits while leaving the least fortunate to die for lack of money to pay the huge premia necessary for profitability.

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Nigel 11

Some questions

I can see both sides of the argument on this one. I suffer from high blood pressure for which I take medication. Were I to arrive in a hospital unconscious and in need of emergency surgery, I would prefer the operating theatre staff to know about my medication. So having an SCR may help.

Also there's nothing in my medical history that I'd be worried about, should it fall into the hands of a data-thief. No grounds for blackmail, nor even embarassment.

What I don't get, is why an SCR cannot be deleted (or at least voided of content) at any time in the future, on request by the patient. If this were the case, my nagging doubts would be assuaged.

I was dead against ID cards because of the nature of the data that was going to be stored -- everything an ID thief could possibly want to know -- and because of the criminalisation of anyoune who failed to tell the state whenever anything that they wanted to know had changed. There are doubtless a few people who feel the same way about their medical history, because it begs questions about their lifestyle or suitability for employment or insureability. But for the rest of us ... am I being hopelessly naive? What should I be worrying about?

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Met lab claims 'biggest breakthrough since Watergate'

Nigel 11
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Black Helicopters

... or manipulated

Worse, you could take the ENF signal for any time in the past and superpose that onto a recording in order to give it a fake "provenance". As you said, play the original back through speakers from battery-operated kit, also record with battery-operated kit, and mix the fake ENF signal at a level that will drown out any faint interference that your (well-screened) recorder might be picking up.

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Should we be encrypting backups?

Nigel 11
Grenade

Another issue

Make sure you know what happens if a small (one-bit? one-block?) error develops in your [GTP]bytes of encrypted backup media. Do you lose one bit ot one block when you restore? Or does the whole darned thing become un-decypherable and therefore useless?

This backup has had its pin pulled and will self-destruct ten minutes before you need it. (Schrodinger's cat would be a better icon. Backups are simultaneously live and dead and you don't know which until you try to restore them)

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German bank robbers in Italian Job moment

Nigel 11
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Boffin

Sulphuric acid containment

Concentrated (not fuming) sulphuric acid will remain quite happily contained in a glass bottle for as long as the glass lasts. Plenty of other things it won't eat. The reaction with cellulose / paper is quite subdued. My chemistry teacher demonstrated the danger of conc sulphuric by pouring some onto a paper towel (in a glass basin). It gently dissolved into black slime, no SO2 or other fumes that I remember. I think it just extracts H2O from cellulose, leaving mostly carbon. (Cellulose, Sugar are carbo-hydrates, i.e. hydrated carbon).

He also showed that provided your skin is dry and you immediately wash off a splash of the acid with copious supplies of cold water, it won't harm you ... by demonstrating this using his own hand.

Fuming Sulphuric acid (H2S2O7) is rather more nightmarish.

(I refuse to bow to Yank spelling - the only word uk the English language that ends in -ize should be "americanize")

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Nigel 11
Boffin

Why no dye bomb?

I still don't understand why cash dispensers are the least bit attractive to thieves.

Surely they should be designed with a large dye-bomb inside, that goes off should a cable connecting the cash dispenser to the foundations of the building be cut. Banknotes saturated with dye are pretty much impossible to spend, so after word got out, thieves would leave all cash-dispensers alone.

In fact inside a cash-dispenser, it' would probably be safe to use concentrated sulphuric acid instead of dye, which would turn banknotes into acid-charcoal slurry.

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Amazon Kindle flunked by college students

Nigel 11
FAIL

Bright sunshine stops reader

E-book fails

1. Openness. I want to be sure I can always read my book, or lend it or sell it on to or give it to someone else.

2. Water (and salt and food and sand) tolerance of a paper book is superior to that of any electronic device I know.

3. Books don't have battery-life issues

4. Books reliably last decades (centuries if printed on acid-free paper).

5. Less hassles at airport security with a paper book, and no risk that it might be infected with a virus or hidden content or have its visible content altered.

6. You can still read a damaged paper book (and mend it with sticky tape).

7. Ipad or any other display I've seen is not comfortable to read in bright sun. E-paper (as in Kindle) an exception, but lacks colour and mouse-clickability.

Non-fails: I find a book created as, say, a pdf file with hyperlinked index is slightly better for non-linear access than a paper book (just as long as I have the appropriate means to read it to hand). Annotation *ought* to be a small matter of programming.

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School IT quango to be expelled

Nigel 11
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FAIL

Ever heard of a single system image?

We don't need WSUS or anything like it on LInux. It can run from a single system image. Linux can run either as a disk-less workstation with the one system image on a server, or with a hard disk acting as a cache of the server's master.

Either way, update the master, and the workstations look after themselves.

You can't do this with MS Windoze, because every instance of Windoze insists of writing to itself and making itself different to any other instance. This makes it somewhat harder to make unauthorized copies: a benefit to Microsoft, a large dis-benefit to end-users.

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Wobbly drive array problems? This'll stiffen your rack

Nigel 11
Unhappy

Rubber grommets better than tonnes of iron?

Some quiet PC enclosures have vibration isolation - rubber grommets or springs - on the disk mounts, to prevent the noise of the disk drive coupling into the case and causing acoustic annoyance. Such isolation must also work in the other direction, and attenuate any forced vibration of the disk drive by the chassis. Some benchmarking please. Are quiet PCs also faster PCs?

Anyway, if drives being vibrated by their chassis is a problem, it's surely a much better solution to float each drive on vibration-deadening rubber mounts, than spending a fortune on heavyweight ironmongery.

The thing that I know does cause systems to slow down is being too warm (or cold). A drive outside its manufacturer's recommended operating temperature range may have a shortened life expectancy, but definitely suffers degraded seek times while it is operating outside spec.

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Consumers still want it hard

Nigel 11

Can I yet buy a CD jukebox?

With cheap Terabyte disks, it ought to be possible to buy a box into which I can read all my CDs to save shelf space, and then play them back in their original high fidelity.

UNCOMPRESSED!

I know of several that would convert my hi-fi CDs to lower-fi MP3 files. No thanks. Lossless compression or no encoding are the only two options acceptable to me.

In passing, controlling such a device and the PVR/TV/DVD stack, would be good reasons for purchasing a tablet computer. If they made these AV universally network-able and controllable with a web browser, that is.

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Mobile phone users have fewer brain tumours

Nigel 11
Boffin

Study problems

If you ask a bunch of people who have developed brain cancer about their mobile phone usage over the previous several years, they will of course tend to over-estimate. The control group, without brain cancer, may well under-estimate. The resulting bias could easily invalidate the study to the extent that it looks as if mobiles protect one against brain cancer!

Then there's the issue of dosage. Depending on *where* you use your mobile, it may be transmitting at two watts (one bar reception) or two milliwatts (four bars). It's pretty obvious to me that if there is a risk, it will be to the folks who make heavy use of their mobiles in places with bad reception. Are they able to allow for that in these studies? I doubt it.

I suspect that the mobile companies actually have the data to do a definitive study. Their location data may well even allow for reasonably accurate estimation of transmission power for each call. But put together commercial self-interest and data privacy laws, and will they hand over their data? Barring specific legislation, not a chance.

Finally, the obvious. There's no epidemic of brain cancer out there. The risk, if non-zero, is small. If you are paranoid, look at your signal-strength indicator and don't make or take calls when it's poor. Otherwise, just watch out for buses -- probably a greater risk than mobiles if you are talking on your mobile while you cross the road!

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Reg reader applauds World's Crappiest phish

Nigel 11
Black Helicopters

Hidden in plain sight?

There is always the possibility that it is not what it at first sight appears, that it is in fact a steganographically concealed or prearranged signal to agent(s) unknown. The fact that it has been sent to untold millions of others is of course cover for the agents.

So it could be quite clever, not at all stupidous.

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Seagate preps three terabyte whopper

Nigel 11
Coat

Able was I ...

Windows XP can now share an epitaph with Napoleon Bonaparte

Able was I ere I saw ELBA

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ConLibs to outlaw kiddyprinting without permission

Nigel 11
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Black Helicopters

Silione not epoxy

Silicone bathtub sealant, £3-ish for a tube at any DIY store.

If you just have an image of a fingerprint you'll also need an appropriate means to transfer it onto celluloid (or other transparent substrate) by photography or computer printer, and a PCB kit (contact-print the picture onto the photo-resist coated PCB then etch it with ferric chloride). A PCB kit is a few quid at any amateur electronics outlet.

No, I've never tried. It's so bloody obvious it'll work I don't need to.

This is one of numerous reasons I oppose a national fingerprint database. The criminals will steal fingerprints out of it, make silicone copies, leave random dabs around all over crime scenes. Do you have an alibi? After enough random innocents have been incarcerated then (mostly) freed on appeal, fingerprint evidence will have been wholly discredited in criminal proceedings. Exactly what the bad guys want. They're probably funding the lobbying for compulsory ID.

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Intel: best days are ahead for servers

Nigel 11
Boffin

"Some people don't want servers, even if they need them".

Or, they've worked out that "entry-level server" means sluggish PC packed with industry-incompatible hardware that's supposed to be more reliable, but which in practice is guaranteed to break down a few days after the warranty runs out, and which then cannot be repaired for less han the cost of a new entry-level server, and a ten-day wait for the spare part. Oh yes, and an extra £500 up front for the privilege. And extra-noisy fans.

Better to buy a good industry-standard desktop system with twin RAID-1-able disks and call it your server. With the cash you've saved you could buy another one and keep it a cupboard as your cold fail-over. Or just grab a spare part out of the office junior's desktop should you ever need it .

They'd like you to think that what you've just read is highly technical content. (The scary thing is that for so many people, it is).

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Competitors vie to provide earthquake-proof radios

Nigel 11
FAIL

Internet II?

> The six were then tasked with creating a dynamic database to coordinate the spectrum uses of at least 20 separate emergency service groups in an apocalyptic urban setting. The database was required to sense users, and deduce transmitter locations as well the as signalling systems used, identifying available frequencies for allocation to new arrivals and working out the potential for interference based on both the frequencies and the manner in which they are used.

Tell them that all they have is a hammer, and the problem has to look like a nail.

Wasn't the original design brief for the internet that it survive a nuclear war? Pretty much the same scenario.

I'd envisage a decentralized and self-organising cellular network. Plane-loads of solar-powered base stations, every one programmed to establish communications with its neighbours, create their own network maps, and to service any compatible handsets that arrive. You could have the network up and running within a few hours, parachuting the base stations from planes (or helicopters). Local hotspots without enough bandwidth? Same as mobiles - parachute in more base-stations, the cells automagically get smaller.

Hard to do if access permissions and communications privacy are issues, but in this disaster-response scenario they aren't. (And I thought that the military had already got something like this *with* security, for battlefield and/or post-EMP communications).

Of course, someone has to do the design work now, and stockpile the things in advance. Which they haven't done. Perhaps the problem will look like a nail after all.

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Norks 'have answer to humanity's greatest problem'

Nigel 11
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Unhappy

Go in and take it?

Yes and no.

With a physical resource, such as an oilfileld, to go in and take it means war, conquering the territory. With pure know-how, at most all you need is one successful spy, or one defector. Often simply knowing that something really *can* be done is a large percentage of what you need to duplicate it.

One should ponder for how long the USA was able to keep the USSR from acquiring A- and H-bombs and the associated technologies. Not very long at all, even back in the stone age of surveillance technology.

I really do hope that the Norks *have* somehow got fusion power working. Realistically, it's far more likely that Fulham will win the Europa cup. (This is posted the morning after they didn't).

BTW Anyone care to ponder whether an NK-type regime could survive inventing a limitless source of cheap/free non-explosive energy? I expect that if they tried to uilize it, they'd inevitably sow the seeds of their own rapid demise. The Spanish once found a a near-infinite source of money (gold, South America). This did not advance their empire. It doomed it.

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Biometric passport 2.0 scrapped alongside ID cards, NIR

Nigel 11
Boffin

Cheap and simple

Store all data printed on the passport in digital form within the passport. Store a crypto-checksum of that digital data in a passport verification database. Passports can then be verified. To the extent that a passport-forger has not obtained write access to the master checksum database, no faked passport will pass verification. What more is needed?

Since there's no personal information stored in the verification database there are no security issues. The verification database can be made public- just a list of passport numbers and their checksums, not even our names need be in it.

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Acer Easystore H340 2TB Nas box

Nigel 11
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Absurd

How can losing all your data when a disk crashes be an improvement over RAID for a home user? (As opposed to a business user? You mean, home users WANT to risk all their data on a single drive? )

On Linux, I avoid RAID hardware and use software RAID (for 2- or 4-disk servers, simple mirrored disks rather than RAID-5). Why on earth can't WHS do anything like this? (Answer: perhaps because if it weren't a useless toy, it would eat into sales of expensive "proper" windows servers?).

Anyway, if it doesn't have redundancy to protect your data from one failed disk, it's less use than a chocolate teapot.

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Sony Bravia KDL-EX703 32in Freeview HD TV

Nigel 11
Thumb Down

15 watts on standby?!

What on earth does it do with FIFTEEN WATTS while standing by? My old 1980s Phillips TV stands by on just three watts (which I regard as three too many).

We really need some EU-wide legislation on standby power usage, to force manufacturers to get standby power usage down to milliwatt levels. Hint: disconnect the switch-mode PSU *completely* from the mains, and run standby functions off a rechargeable battery which recharges every time you turn the set on.

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Hawking: Aliens are out there, likely to be Bad News

Nigel 11
Unhappy

Another defense mechanism

No-one has mentioned H G Wells "The war of the Worlds". I suspect that should biological aliens arrive on another planet with biology, there are only three possible outcomes, none good:

1. Their microbes overcome our immune systems and reduce the Earth's biosphere to goo.

2. Our microbes overcome their immune systems and reduce the invaders to goo. Their home planet likewise, if any make it back home.

3. Both of the above, followed by a very long war (hundreds of millions of years, or billions) while two competing microbial biosystems evolove their way to victory or a peace treaty (symbiosis).

But of course, the real universe appears to have a speed-of-light limit. Perhaps we should be thankful for that. I suspect interstellar travel has to wait until biological life works out how to upload itself into robotic bodies. At that point they can go exploring, by slowing their clocks down enough to make interstellar journeys tolerably short in subjective time.

Post-biological life plausibly poses no threat to us, because it will prefer vacuum (almost all the universe) to nasty corrosive biospheres (a negligibly small part), and the tops of gravity wells to the bottoms. It might even be here already, if it's ethical enough to leave primitive bio-life alone and just watch our evolution quietly from the comfort of the asteroid belt!

The nasty alternative -- exponential growth, conversion of every solar system it reaches into smart matter, etc. -- can probably be ruled out in this galactic heighbourhood by astronomical observation. We'd have noticed mature stars surrounded by smart-matter dust clouds that should not be there, and most especially a patch of all-atypical stars characteristically different from the rest of the galaxy.

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Volcanic ash grounds dozens of UK flights

Nigel 11
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reference?

The reference is linked in my post - the wiki one about Laki.

It's an estimate of the number killed immediately by SO2 and HF inhalation. The following year was the "Year without a summer", and the widespread famine claimed many more. It's not certain that Laki was the sole cause thereof, but it can't have helped.

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Nigel 11
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Boffin

You can see it

... or I think you can. The blue sky outside my window is a very pale milky blue, not the usual sky blue. Something is scattering more light than usual. Sunset may be quite something, if the real (wet) clouds stay away.

It's a very thin cloud, but what it's made of is highly abrasive. You really don't want a jet engine chew on a hundred miles' worth of it.

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Nigel 11
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Wrong god.

Probably not Thor.

The Greeks had a god of volcanoes, Hephaestus by name.

There doesn't appear to be a god of volcahoes in the Norse pantheon, nor even a god of fire. Perhaps they sub-contracted the work (which might explain a lot). As might Loki's involvement.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_was_the_god_of_fire_in_Norse_mythology

(And/or read Gaiman's "American Gods")

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