Posts by Charles 9 16605 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
I still don't understand why they had enough time to turn the jet but not enough to radio a distress. Mostly this makes more sense, however, than anything else I've heard so far.
Pilots are taught there are three priorities when it comes to flying a plane:
1. Aviate (Keep the plane flying)
2. Navigate (Keep the plane on course)
3. Communicate (Keep tabs with others)
It's quite possible that an event that knocked out everyone aboard (similar to Helios Airways Flight 522--note everyone was knocked out before (3) occurred here, too) occurred at the (1) or (2) stage but before (3) could be conducted.
So if any one knows of a 4-port USB hub that sits on the back of a mains plug and can concurrently charge 4 iPad's etc. ....
Don't think you can do that just yet. Power limitations. 2A@5V = 10W of power, and that's pretty much the standard for charging tablets and high-end phones (including those from Apple). Multiply that by 4 and you're likely getting into power ranges better suited for bulky dedicated bricks rather than svelte inline adapters. I'm suspecting 15W is about as much as they dare for an inline: enough for a 2A and a 1A port.
1. Not all mobile phones recognise them - I have particular problems with Samsung, but the Nokia sometimes objects - never had a problem with the HTC & Hudl.
I see that once in a while with my S4. I've come to realize it stops recognizing a charger if it's underpowered: that is, it doesn't feed it enough juice to outpace its drain.
The "cheapest" multi-port USB-A-Female charger which can charge anything I throw it at is the Cambironix Series8 - Which is a 350$ piece of kit.
No bloody wonder. 8 ports able to deliver a full 12W per port (2.4A@5V)...thing's built like a brick (as it should given its total power draw of ~100W) and full of air vents (to draw away the heat losses from all that power conversion).
So the PS4 would output 3D in side-by-side mode and the Morpheus automatically accommodates this. I wonder if this means you could use the same device attached to any HDMI 3D output that can do side-by-side mode (given the specs, I wonder if the Morpheus attaches to an HDMI port)?
Perhaps not a game-changer, but it could be a way to get in on the ground floor and make 3D acceptance at least a little easier.
They're working on those points.
a) The benchmark to compare this against will be the Occulus Rift.
b) Dual-1080p tech is already at the consumer level. Now, whether this is at 30 or 60fps, we don't know, but 60 is within the realm of possibility and feasability.
c) That's due to "simulation sickness", the perception of motion when you're not moving. Basically, airsickness in reverse. That's probably why such a big emphasis on head tracking. This will make the motions more natural and less nauseating.
Trojans are one problem, the other being their reluctance to allow third parties to redistribute their blobs, which of course is their way of controlling their blobs.
That's because those blobs represent trade secrets if not patents. The blobs represent a guard against industrial espionage by a rival firm, so there's a money angle for them meaning they won't give them up. Firm like this, if forced to open up, would probably pack up and go home instead, leaving no one to offer innovations.
Basically, you wanna ban trade secrets. Never gonna happen since trade secrets are one of the valid business differentiators still legal under law. It's what allows for nVidia and AMD to keep trying to one-up each other. As long as there is a need to protect trade secrets or patents (and I mean honest hardware-based patents), then there will always be a need for obfuscated, proprietary hardware to guard against industrial espionage if nothing else.
As for flashcards and wrong size reporting - if you find a way to tell the firmware of a hard disk to mark its allocated contents as bad blocks, you will find that that content is no longer touched, and that includes any wipe or delete routines. Worth thinking about..
Is this true even on the low level?
He meant it was accidentally detonated. The AN was held in the ship in a fertilizer form (normally considered denatured), but the fire in the ship (exacerbated by fuel oil and some ammunition on board) combined with the confines of the ship destabilized the fertilizer, resulting in a spontaneous detonation.
Ammonium Nitrate was known to be dangerous for decades. That's why it's normally mixed or denatured to keep it from becoming explosive. The Texas City explosion occurred due to fire helping to destabilizie the product. The men behind Oklahoma City found a way to renature the fertilizer to make it a useful part of homemade ANFO (not an easy thing to do). The military don't use the stuff themselves mainly because they have something better in RDX.
And the big problem with North America and to a lesser extent continental Europe has simply been geography. To maintain high-speed rates from coast to coast in the US requires high-speed links all the way down, which means running them across vast rural areas, big rivers, and one or two significant mountain ranges. I recall Europe can have foibles of its own if data links have to cross places like the Alps. The obvious question: who foots the bill when the customer is price-sensitive?
Don't blame Gabe for the lack of PR. Blame Epic Games. The issue is not the Engine, as the Unreal Engine has been pretty portable for years (consider that UE-powered games have been on the PS3, which uses OpenGL). It's just that few companies actually bothered to port UE-powered games to Linux. Perhaps one could put pressure on them.
We already have heat pipes that give us 250x (ie. 25000%) the conduction of copper. That is 200 times as good as this graphene/copper sandwich.
So why aren't they actually being used if they're so good? Probably because they're too novel and expensive. The one thing we don't know about is how much this new process costs. I mean, 250x improvement doesn't mean much if it costs 300x as much, but if a 25% improvement only raises the cost by 10%, most would consider that a practical ROI.
PS. I have a thing about these research article. I see so many research articles and not to many "going to market" articles about new tech. I feel the research articles could stand some control so that we mostly see things that actually have a reasonable chance of actually going to market. Otherwise, we're just being teased.
And while Google's own Maps app tends to prefer a mobile connection (you can try to cache a path ahead of time), there are at least alternatives out there that offer offline downloading and (if you wish) only use the mobile connection to get traffic data, which isn't nearly as demanding on mobile data allowances.
Thing was, he came upon his deafness later in his life, meaning he still had plenty of experience and exposure to music, thus he was still able to compose. The same would not be expected of someone born deaf and never having gained aural experience.
Most consider 256-320kbps encodings to be near the point of "perceptual transparency" (IOW, the average person can't distinguish between this and a lossless encoding). provided the source (GIGO) and encoder (algorithmic tweaks for performance or architecture reasons can alter the end result, thus the qualification) are also of good quality. Perhaps a well-trained ear can still pick out the artifacts, but it's normally tricky in a blind sound test.
Choppiness is usually the result of bad processing. As for audio quality, it depends on the source (GIGO). Me, I have a decent ear and can distinguish the artifacts from low bitrates so I stick to straight rips at the spec limit of 320kbps. It may be lossy, but it's close enough for my ears, and I can still pack a nice collection into a few GB. Anyone asks, I just say I lack the ear for better and go my way.
I would ordinarily say if you limit your use of public WiFi points to basic web surfing (news sites and the like), there would be little to worry about, but then you hear those stories about hotspots being hijacked and any new connections being probed by malcontents for direct penetration points (since by logging in you obtain an IP hackers can use to probe your device directly---part of the spec).
As for a VPN connection, I'm seeing more home-grade routers support the ability... EXCEPT...they only work in Bridge Mode (TAP). Wouldn't you know it? Most smartphones and the only ONLY accept VPNs in Tunnel Mode (TUN). Make routers take Tunnels or smartphones accept bridges and perhaps more people will be inclined to use them by default.
Even if the skirt were ankle-length, it still wouldn't be long enough to cover up the infamous "shoe camera" (and note they said the perv took movies, which means the shutter wouldn't sound), as a show can still slip under the skirt from behind where she wouldn't notice. Any lower than that and the skirt risks scraping the ground and potentially getting caught on ground obstacles.
Simple answer: When there's no skirt up which to look.
A woman in swimwear is basically self-exposed at or near the limit of decency. No one taking pictures of her in a public environment can be accused of voyeurism.
Pants and shorts of a decent length don't provide sufficient opportunity to look up them, rendering the matter for them moot.
It's only with skirts and the like where we run into the thorny issue of an expectation of privacy concerning body parts covered by said garment. It's an edge case in this case and needs to be addressed by a specific law (which is what the court is telling the legislature to do).
The point is that the peeping tom had the right because it wasn't abridged by any law (that was the finding of the court--that he can't be charged with a crime because, as the law stands it's not a crime).
Note that the court's ruling is very specific and with a narrow justification. In essence, in addition to telling the state why the peep can't be convicted but also how to prevent a repeat performance ("You want to make the practice illegal, pass a law saying so.").
Yeah yeah, the old libertarian offshore city idea. Here's the rub. How does the chocolate factory get to their new offshore city without attracting the fed's attention ON THE WAY? IOW, moor offshore and the US can just consider the installation an international location and impose taxes, tariffs, customs dues, etc. on anything heading to or coming from there. And given that a lot of Google's customers are in the US, it would be kinda hard to avoid the port of entry.
I suppose it depends on what is meant by a probate. If you mean a full hearing and so on, not really. Wills are meant to minimize the need for such hearings. In one case, I was designated executor in a will. I took the will to the City Hall where the deceased last lived (where it goes depends on the location, but it's most often the lowest judicial authority for your area--the one that handles all the local affairs). Your basic municipal hall should contain a probate office or the like. Armed with the will and proof of ID, one should be able to submit the will to the office, have it probated by a clerk (the will now becomes their property and is now legally binding--but it now acts in lieu of a probate ruling). They then issue you a document officially declaring you executor of the estate, giving you the authority to attend to estate matters in the deceased's name.
Perhaps what Apple's waiting for now is Declaration of Executor (which would be issued to the two of them once the will is actually executed by the local authorities IIRC). Armed with the declaration, they would OFFICIALLY be the executors of the estate (perhaps that was what was meant by a "court order" even though a judge need not get involved in your typical probate with a will).
I think Apple's big enough to fight back with those fateful four words, "They were never SOLD." Unless a court of some significance declares T&C's of the likes of Apple's to be unenforceable (Note: a similar T&C term exists for Valve's Steam system, so they'd be interested, too), then NOTHING sold via these stores is transferable from person to person: not even by inheritance (as I recall, lotteries do the same thing for their annuities, which is why many big winners prefer lump sums).
Well, it's not like the tech has been classified. Because goals were attached to the funding, they have to make regular reports on the progress of the thing. As for whether or not the tech makes it to commercial applications, I think the rub will be the eventual power/size ratio of the finished product should it succeed. Even the Navy would have a minimum goal profile (likely stated in a nutshell as no bigger than their existing fission tech).
I think the BIG big thing Greenpeace has against fusion is that it won't advance their "renewables" agenda. In their mind, if it doesn't come directly form the sun, the wind, or the sea, it's taboo and must be avoided.
As for not being capable of supporting civilisation as it is now, some extreme environmentalists look at that and say, "Good!" because they feel the world is overpopulated and beyond the viability limit. IOW, they figure a human population reduction of say...75%...would be good for the planet in general.
Key word ALMOST. Sometimes, they ARE the exclusive source, leaving you, like I said in a Hobson's choice (as in Take It or Leave It). Or ALL the alternatives are similarly blockaded (I've seen that happen). It provokes some thinking on whether or not it's REALLY worth it.
This is only going to get worse as more and more sites adopt ad-detection-detection and raise clickwalls and other blockades to stop them. I think if it developed into a tech war, the server has the ultimate advantage since they can just require subscription which opens the legal door for data mining.
> True. Although if you encrypt securely with a decent key higher up the stack all the radio/WiFi sees is encrypted traffic.
Not unless the plods have other parts of the system borked like the OS core, the CPU, or a hardware security chip: areas where the key HAS to be readable in order to be useable. Meaning even if you encrypt before the modem/radio chip, they'll still know how to decrypt it.
> No, there are no better alternatives. But that was my point Android is no better or worse starting place than any other mobile OS. At the moment its security credentials (like most other OS) are lacking.
Meaning, all other things being equal, the price tag wins. Meaning AOSP (price tag $0) wins. Yes, it needs serious security hardening, but as you've said yourself you need to do that ANYWAY, so don't handicap yourself by paying for an OS license on top of that.
And now to address each point:
1) Most Andorid handsets come bundled with (closed source) vendor bloatware. Some of which can be disabled some of which cannot. Possibly not the fault of the OS, but thats the way it is.
These are vendors interested in data mining. This one is figuring on the opposite, so bloatware should be reduced to just Silent Circle and a few essentials.
2) Android is not really open source. The source code/apis for dual SIM functionality has never been released.
Got any better alternatives besides the Android Open-Source Project? Ubuntu's too new, QNX has to be licensed to use, and Blackberry's in limbo. Besides, do any of them support dual SIMs? The main reason it's not community-supported goes to your next point below.
3) Modem/radio part of the firmware tends to be vendor specific. Lots of scope for NSA abuse there. (Maybe not part of the Android OS but you won't get far without it)
If you can't trust the radio or modem chip, you're basically screwed since these chips are usually patent-encumbered meaning an open version of such won't exist. And if it's not the NSA poking backdoors in the hardware, it's their Russian or Chinese counterparts. Why not just X-ray each lot that comes in to make sure their pattern matches a known-good spec?
(Going back to dual SIMs, there's more than one way to make it work. Dual SIM controllers are as closed as radio and modem chips. THAT'S why they're not community-supported.)
4) Even in a stripped down Android with no Gapps (including Cyanogenmod) it reaches out to Google servers. Specifically clients3.l.google.com (check getDefaultUrl() in the ConnectivityService). This at the moment is fairly harmless, but could be exploited in the future and there may be others.
Is this true even of non-Google Android devices like the Amazon Kindles and B&N Nooks? Besides, something like that should be easy to edit in the source. It's just that many open-source distros don't bother.
5) Apps can and do request lots of permissions. These cannot be turned off. You either install the app or you do not. Is it the OS role to police the apps? Maybe not, but it could be improved. Like disabling perm by perm after installation.
Not even with App Ops or a similar security program? And there are versions that work with the latest Android 4.4.2 KitKat.
What you describe is similar to the Freenet system which uses hashes and generated keys as resource locators. The main problem with your idea (and with Freenet) is routing. Part of the reason IP works as it does is it allows switches and other routing hardware to map out where certain packets have to go. It's actually very important because it conserved bandwidth which can add up as you go up the backhaul. Without that routing information, you end up having to poll the whole network to try to find the destination, and it's never going to be as snappy as the open Internet because efficiency leaves traces that plods can sniff out. IOW, INefficiency is pretty much required to improve security, creating a tug of war between the two since both have practical implications.
Honest question here. Aren't SOME things regulated by law, such as fiduciary duty? Isn't that why such things as insider trading are legal no-no's?
What I'm getting at is that Ichan seems to be alleging either failure of fiduciary duty (selling at an avoidable loss) or insider trading, either of which IS a legal matter. Ichan may be a jerk, but even jerks have a point sometimes, so has anyone taken a serious look at his allegation. If so, why doesn't it have merit?
The real goal is to make the connection look like an innocuous connection like a web session. Trouble is, innocuous sessions are typically wide-open and easy to inspect. Trying to do anything outside that purview, such as using exotic flags, is going to trip flags.
Frankly, given the current state of the Internet, I don't think it's possible to "hide in plain sight" and get a detailed message anything past a knowledgeable and savvy power who outlaws all encryption as a matter of course and can routinely sniff connections. The reason being just about anything you try will either (a) leave telltale clues when you try to parse it as it appears, or (b) is vulnerable to mangling such that the end product retains purpose as it appears but ruins stego (ex. whitespace-washing text, resizing images, resampling/recoding audio, etc.). You could probably get away with pre-arranged signal images and the like, but anything spontaneous or detailed would probably require another approach (if any is possible).
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