Posts by Charles 9

You can extend this idea even further and ask yourself why pharmaceuticals never put serious work into full cures and permanent vaccines. An economist can easily answer the question: there's no long-term return on a one-and-done. That's why it's always treatment regimens and short-term vaccines where there's always a need for a return trip, guaranteeing one of those economic paradises: a captive market which guarantees repeat business. The only way to break this cycle is to seek an entity that isn't in it for money. About the only type of entity with both enough power and an ability to detach from a money motive is a state.

Re: In the last few years

I suppose this is why no country has gone the extra step to require express, explicit, and direct consent (IOW, full opt-in) in order to obtain any PID or share it anywhere outside the direct context of the site. Also why no country expressly bans requesting such PID as a requirement for the use of a site barring direct commerce (exchanging actual money for goods/services).

The service providers can simply go, "Sod this" and take their ball and go home, blocking all access to that part of the world.

Re: "Fake tape detectors..."

I can understand insertions and distortions, but you're saying these forensics can also detect cuts to existing material (in your case, cutting out the "our opponents would say"), even though nothing was added that was different from the original source material with all its background characteristics?

Re: Right upto the point where the Netflix exec demonstrated on camera

"They aren't using DPI, they would just use ports to identify types of traffic, so an unencrypted proxy wouldn't change anything. A proxy running on the same port Netflix sends video on would be interesting."

And if the ports are randomized? Or routed through nonstandard ports? Or wrapped in more traditional traffic like HTTP?

Re: Where's Worstall?

"But you must concede, both are on a rather different order of magnitude than things like aluminium or land."

A different order of magnitude, yes...lower. Especially time. "Your days are numbered" comes to mind. No matter how much we want to fight it, our time comes eventually, so every living thing as far as we know has a time limit. Meanwhile, how much energy can one human or one community amass in any given time period and put to practical use?

Re: The Russians are still the best evidence...

"It was a tit for tat agreement - the Russians kept schtum about the hoax Moon landings in return for the Americans not revealing that Sputnik was in fact a balloon."

But that would imply the Russkies threw the Space Race at a time when a lot of national pride was on the line in the middle of the Cold War (not to mention less than a decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis). IOW, the Soviets were competing with the Americans. If the landing was fake all the Russians had to do to deflate the Americans was to film themselves first. Why throw the race if the solution was so simple? If they pulled it off, Sputnik could be safely ignored or simply blown off as American lies.

Re: Class Action?

But then who foots the bill? The legislature is unlikely to set aside the budget; there are bigger fish to fry.

Re: Constitution

"What the UK needs more and more as time goes by is a written binding constitution with rules written into it that make changes that affect citizens rights via Parliamentary Sovereingty or any other means difficult to make without going to the people via referendum."

That'll never work. In the end, ANY form of agreement is ONLY as binding as the parties are willing to go along with it. Once one side decides it's not worth their time, it becomes merely ink on a page. This is especially true when one of the parties is a sovereign state because one fundamental thing everyone overlooks is the very definition of "sovereign".

Re: sorry...

"Simply statistics. If a company has 1000 people and 1 gets ill, if you are the ill one you are going to have sufficient problems that might make it impossible to work. I know someone who recently died from diabetes complications - a terrible way to go I can assure you all- but their employer did not eject them. This is why healtcare should be universal - we can quibble about the implementation but not the need."

But now take it to a more perverted end. The overall costs involved might make it cheaper to train a replacement for you from scratch. As far as the employer (and perhaps his/her investors) are concerned, let Darwin sort you out.

Re: It's all down to the stupid....

And the boss couldn't threaten to dismiss them?

Or perhaps electrode helmets like in other VR sci-fis. I frankly don't know if we can sufficiently fool the brain without doing something too radical. Seeing as how the brain has to many sensory inputs to draw from: namely the entire nervous system which includes all the tactile neurons associated with out skin. Without full five-sense illusion, the potential always exists for Simulation Sickness.

Re: Why cut it live?

"However, it's far easier to just hook in where the cable lands."

Perhaps, but also recall that some of the argument is that the cable may land in "enemy territory" where tapping on land isn't politically possible or safe.

Re: SSD

"One issue is when new technology comes out, like faster SAS speeds or an entire replacement. Then you just cannot swap drives out but a full-on migration."

But you can still perform it gradually. The big part is replacing the controller tech with one that can bridge the gap, say one with the new tech built in and the old stuff supported with a module. Then you can change out to the new drives as you swap out the old ones. Once the last old drive is gone, the module can go as well.

Re: Game of Thrones

Unfortunately, that's part of the power of copyright. If HBO feels Foxtel's deal rakes in more money than any potential loss of customers due to the bundling, that's for them to decide and no one else. The only way you can counter is to offer a sweeter deal, but you can still be outbid.

Re: I'd still say it's MIMO

I thought the key element to MIMO is the fact it uses multiple antennae in order to take advantage of interferometry to improve signal clarity. IOW, this can't be MIMO as most would understand the concept.

Re: What?

About the dendrites? Yes, that's supposedly the bug-a-boo about both recharging techs. I recall that it's a disturbing tendency with alkaline batteries which is why the idea has since dropped (you don't get enough recharges out of it to be worth it). And dendrites have been fingered in more than a few spontaneous Lithium combustions. I recall the research shows that improper charging is a big factor in that, which means this research could help to minimize the phenomenon.

Re: Bytes?

GZIPped 7-bit ASCII if the article is accurate. Deflation works very well on simple HTML.

Re: Human flea instead?

"...then the opposing force turns on a wide-band high-power RF jammer, giggling all the way, and the drones are left to fend for themselves (if they have any onboard intelligence at all)."

And then the OpFor finds themselves minus a few members because the drones were preprogrammed to ID enemy targets so needs no outside input to carry out its mission. With gyroscopic accelerometers and a prior fix, it may even be able to find its way out of the battlezone without satellite guidance. This is not as crazy as you think and represents the current cutting edge of drone design.

PS. Going to the "short burst" design, I would think this would actually be more practical. Not so much to provide a continuous thrust but perhaps a quick burst of speed if and when necessary, say a jumpstart to get up to running speed (which is tougher to do when you're fully loaded), as someone said, a quick heave to get over a wall or perhaps something to get across the kill zone more quickly and with a greater chance of escaping unscathed. The unit would also have a longer work life that way.

Re: Why?

"If WiFi calling is really just VoIP and uses the same setup as VoLTE, then roaming between the two seamlessly would work."

It doesn't quite work that way. It's more like a modified SIP as it's currently set up. It's a more or less proprietary implementation so as the article notes it needs a T-Mobile-specific firmware for it to work.

Re: Creation and Duplication

Now, for professional textbooks and such with intricate and exacting layouts (picture and diagrams have to exist in a certain arrangement, etc), particularly in colour, yes there's an art in itself to the layout which would require the work of a skilled professional. Plus there's the research and verification of the source material by experts in the related field. Given all that and relatively low print runs, professional books will always be expensive simply for all that: never mind the ink, presses, and paper.

What about for a simple novel with few if any illustartions (all B&W) and no complicated layouts (say the illustrations are all full-page and all the text follows a fixed layout? Does it really, really cost that much to that such simple typesetting?

Re: Meh

Even if it appears to come from a colleague? That's the point behind spear phishing.

Re: Take my money! Oh, you're too busy... @h4rm0ny

I may be wrong, but I believe the actual phones are kept in the back (every store I've been to the high-ticket items are kept under some kind of lock and key). You use the app to present to the desk, and they fetch it for you, then you leave with it. The desk would be able to verify the receipt is used once and once only.

Re: Lowest-cost archive medium

Anyone interested in the consumer market has to get used to the idea that price matters. It's not so much "We don't want to pay for it" as "We can't pay for it." For the consumer, "You Get What You Pay For" only goes so far, especially with limited budgets and competing interests. That's why there's the concept of the "comfort zone" beyond which any attempt to woo the customer will fail to attract all but hardcore adherents. The demand curve for the consumer is necessarily low and shallow. If the tech is such that even the lowest end is too expensive, that means supply and demand can't meet, leaving an untapped market.

Re: OnePlus One

"Is it common to require headphones for FM radio? Anyway, with that caveat, it seems to be standard on Lumias."

It's pretty standard fare for any tiny FM radio to use the headphone wires as an antenna. It's down to physics. To pick up a good FM radio signal, you need an antenna of a decent length. Cell phones are simply too small to provide that length. Back before cell phones, portable radios needed an extendable antenna for the same reason.

Re: Slippery Slope to Much Higher Prices

How, when ABSOLUTELY NONE of the candidates who would actually do something about this are even on the ballot. Heck, many ballots are unchallenged.

Re: Identical twins are not identical

"Favourite fact regarding foetal alcohol syndrome: identical twins can be born with one suffering FAS and the other not. You'd have thought one womb would be as close to an identical environment as possible, but no..."

IINM FAS is epigenetic and so can be a crapshoot. Fingerprints are epigenetic, too, that's why fingerprints differ even among identical twins. There's a hypothesis that it's the same way with sexual orientation. Thus why some identical twins diverge in spite of identical genes and upbringing.

Re: Show me the hardware.

"Excuse my ignorance. Everybody keeps saying, referring to "FTTN" things like "it'll have to be ripped out to do FTTP". I would presume that the same fiber would have to get to the same node, irrespective of FFTN or FTTP."

The problem is that FTTP requires a completely different topology from FTTN, meaning most FTTN equipment can't be used in FTTP. If you use FTTP now, then in five or ten years time when more bandwidth is needed, it's MUCH easier (and less expensive) to build on an existing setup than it is tearing up the FTTN setup to replace it with a FTTP one. IOW, FTTP has a higher up-front cost but is more future-resistant.