Posts by John Smith 19

When I saw "fuel cells" I *hoped* someone might have gone with sugars.

Sugars are everywhere in nature, they don't need fermentation and there are plants specifically bred to optimize their production.

Maybe one day.

This is a tremendous step forward for "on demand" computing and storage, as IBM used to say

Provided of course you're happy with your business being that of the US Govt, also "on demand."

If you want to know how a data fetishist thinks...

Look no further.

Roll out the data sharing then (maybe) think about the privacy protection.

Cool!

Or rather not

Astonishing something so close should not have been detected till now.

I think that's a great counter to the "It's all been found/done" sense of ennui people sometimes get.

Great way to start the week.

US Company + THE PATRIOT Act + Federal Law Enforcement =

All your data belong to us.

And until that's repealed it always will.

American Official in American Court >> Local privacy law.

Your options are a)Live with it and exist that anything in your MS run email system is available to the USG or b)Keep your email system in house.

The choice is yours.

Is the *idea* of "outsourcing" the best scam MBA types ever thought up?

It must be in the top 10, right up there with the idea of "Collateralized Certificates of Deposit" where banks convinced suckers depositors that

9 parts s**t + 1 part Gold --> 10 parts Gold.

instead of 9 parts s**t.

I wonder if some (probably MBA) type will make their fortune by developing a proof that outsourcing can never deliver the scale of savings expected without grossly unrealistic starting assumptions (and what those assumptions are).

Probably not.

They'd be killed by all the other MBA types to protect the golden goose.

It's a classic string pattern matching problem

The trouble is that most algorithms that do that like big alphabets so a failure can skip the pattern string further along the main string.

But DNA is a 4 character alphabet unless you can assume that the pattern and main string will only align every 3 positions (IE a codon), giving you a 64 set alphabet. But I'm not sure if that assumption is always reliable as it's been a while since I read on this.

DNA is fascinating in that some amino acids have several codes. They are therefor "robust" in transcription errors (mutations), while others are fragile and any mistake knocks out a different amino acid.

The question is did this code assignment develop early and never change or has it also evolved? Likewise does the "fragility" of certain amino acids transcription have some sysetmatic effect on the compounds they form?

Sadly that's all above my pay grade.

Theoretically a hardware RNG is best.

It can be made truly random. ERNIE was (is?) the output signal from a noisy diode that's sampled into a bit stream.

But the question is do you trust it is truly random, given most are black boxes?

I seemed to recall TETRA is on a 30 year support contract.

So what happened to that?

£28m for early stage research.

£972m on processing the paperwork for the research bids.

Ever wondered why in the UK it's only the big firms that can afford someone to spend the time needed to fill one of these bids in?

Still astonishing how *slow* progress is in this field.

Viruses were imaged in the 1930's. "Engines of Creation" was written in 1986 and only now does some think this is good idea.

The very slow start of what might be the end of the beginning.

"there's no way to find out what kind of atmosphere Kepler-186f has"

Yet.

The appropriate example would be David Gerrolds series "The War Against the Chtorr."

Chlorophyll works for the wavelengths of our Sun.

There is no reason to doubt that a Chlorophyll like chemical would not evolve to harvest longer wavelength, lower energy photons.

You'd just better hope that the locals aren't eying us as we are eying them.

"Nice planet, bit of a vermin population (about 6 1/2 billion) but nothing that can't be taken care of."

Oh how handy. Remote backup.

That will save some NSA bandwidth.

All the data in one place.

Feature creep anyone?

Another good day for an out of control government bureaucracy

Another bad day for a law abiding society that cares about privacy and proportionate surveillance.

Creepy

If you're wondering do I mean Eric or Steve for legal reasons I'll let you decide.

The more I learn of OpenSSL the more I wonder about the the idea of

"Release a core set of functions, then role out more over time (or prioritize heavily used ones first)"

It seems if they had left the heartbeat message handling till later they might never have done it at all.

Hold up. I thought I read a story about the FBI *disbanding* it's face recogwork because..

It didn't work.

IIRC The programme had been running since about 1963 and never got > 50% accuracy.

So what's changed?

Either the FBI work was way behind the SoA or someone had convinced the FBI they can do better.

Much better.

Looking at some of the diagrams it looks like

They make up graded alloy strips where one or more of the elements varies along the length.

The strip is then laid on top of what looks like a plate with holes in it. At this point I'd guess they put the whole lot in a furnace and connect it to a high pressure supply.

They then try to blow bubbles with the metal.

Biggest bubble seems to win.

BTW I suspect the problem with quantum chemical tests is 1 simulation will take hours and the effect is (I suspect) non linear, so extrapolation does not work.

Yes. I think Heatbleed will be the latest "guy who just left did it" excuse.

Even if it wasn't.

Data arithmetic is *tricky*

But the question has to be how long has this been going on?

This suggests a software upgrade gone titsup.

In the US his counterpart flat out lied to Congress with *no* comeback

So the bar for behaving like a right s**t is pretty high.

The chief spookocrat who was behind the Snoopers Charter had a degree in Theoretical Physics from Cambridge but I doubt this one will have even that level of technological awareness.

Process For Facial Recognition and store.