Posts by John Smith 19

Note the hstory of Mars probes has been hit and miss.

It's pretty challenging.

But there is room in their plan to compensate for this.

Still a long way to go.

I don't think the power consumption will go down on DAB unless an optical system works

No I've got no idea how to do that.

But that still leaves the problem that DAB stations are a)Few b)Far between c)S**t.

The next great fruity product?

The iRoach?

So kids sounds like perfect cover for anyone planning some mischief.

Not of course that I would advocate such behaviour, which would be illegal under assorted UK laws.

Ahh "Asset stripping." The 70's are back again?

Actually their tactics sound more like a "bleedout" where, essentially they run up plenty of credit, swap the goods around and the company crashes and burns.

Anyone who gets invited to "invest" in their business and can't figure out who the mug is whose going to be left holding the baby should realize that would be themselves.

Don't trust these f**kers.

Because as we all know Belgium Telecom is *full* of terrorists

Oh wait it was just one of the Telco's that GCHQ had not got round to accessing yet.

It seems there is no way to muzzle the data fetishists of GCHQ.

I will note that this is pretty poor security on both LinkedIn and Slashdot unless GCHQ had actually spoofed the page and it was not from them at all.

It really breaks down into 2 problems

1)Develop a one shot power system capable of generating the level of power needed to overcome the losses for the time required (In this field 1 milisecond is quite long)

2)Build the actual generator. We're in thyratron territory here, along with Blumein lines and other assorted jiggery pokery from the high power radar and particle accelerator (with a side order of ion thruster) crowd.

Most of which North Korea is not really well known for.

Logically you side step the inverse square law by focusing the output in a narrow cone.

Not easy to do when your power source is rapidly destroying your generator while it's working.

I'll not there things called thermal batteries that use the thermite effect to energize the reactants of a battery. They have long life (no self discharge modes as the ions and electrons don't move at room temperature) and have been quoted with power levels into the Kws (for a few seconds).

Yes you'd need to scale up the size and the duration would go down the pan but the generator part would still be intact when it was spent. Essentially you end up with a hot (possibly very hot) canister, rather than

a shrapnel cloud.

So let's get t his straight.

"Client" approaches lawyers claiming copyright infringement on properties they do not even own

Lawyers say "No problem" and proceed to hunt down (possible) down loaders.

Lawyers deliberately upload copies of material to encourage down loading.

How is this not a)Fraud (on the part of the shell companies) and b)Entrapment on the part of the lawyers.

And did I not read that the "clients" are proving elusive to the point that they appear to have been set up by the lawyers themselves?

This looks like grounds for criminal prosecution and disbarment of all concerned.

"Red Dog Front End"

Somehow I always recall the phrase from the film "Ransom," of a "Lying assed dog."

Funny how memory works?

Yay. VoWiFi

Or just woeful I keep wanting to think of it.

Mind you I also think of MS flagship database product as "Squeal Server"

"Dark Mall"

A lesser known Sith lord?

Neat approach

Leverages what hardware they have to deliver the mission.

Lets hope the rest of the burns work as well.

Wot? No longer able to bring out the Gimp?

Tragedy.

they *should* be fearful

For some of the operators a "State of fear" is exactly what they want.

Indeed, who *does* use TIFF as a common file format?

I thought it was an old AOL format?

I beleive the even years February edition of the IEEE Trans on Magnetics is good for this

It's the conference proceedings of a pulsed power conference.

Explosive generation is challenging.

The problem is twofold. a)Generate b)Direct the result.

Viable? Yes. Practical? maybe. Viable in a country of N. Korea's industrial base? Unconvincing.

If NSA's mission is to snoop on everyone then the man who collects most wins. IOW

With 26 logins Snowden is king spook!

Seriously. Are you f**king kidding me? 26 people gave up their log ins without question?

I know Snowden was a contractor and probably most of the people he worked with were also contractors but I find it impossible to believe they did not know who they were working for or the level of discretion was needed.

People you're not thinking *big* enough.

The Tesla "U" Class has arrived.

Long range, nippy acceleration and easy refueling.

3 of 30 would be bad. 3 of 300 000. But how many Tesla "S"s *are* out there?

But the question is this really systemic?

Can't see this happening in the UK..

High court judge calling out one of "The Usual Suspects (TM)" as a bunch of liars whose long game was to deliberately screw up the bid and then b**ch about it in court.

Now a few more cases like this......

@Pypes

"For software that costs ~ £5k / seat it has some serious shortcoming when it comes to actually spitting out useful G code."

I'm wondering if the "art" in it's name suggest it's more "artistic" and hence more for representation (More Autosketch than Autocad)?

But perhaps I can help with your G code

While AV companies reverse engineer malware....

Is it possible the malware writers are looking for malware as well?

So they can hijack it if it's better at being malicious than their code?

Possibly because it has a special "Official Govt Malware, please ignore" tag?

Surely not.

Stuxnet. The perfect weapon. And the Iranians will never be able to turn it against us.

That worked out real well too.

Both GCHQ and NSA are outgrowths of WWII agencies whose remit was "collect all."

Trouble is neither of them seems to have dialed it down since.

If they were honest they'd say "We couldn't spy on everyone 24/7/365 because the technology was not up to it not because we didn't want to. But now the tech is up to it, so we can."

Funny how spooks away play the "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" card is it not?

Politicians should all know the reply is "Give me 6 lines from an honest man, and I'll find something to hang him."

Note the "crime" in the latter case is simple. I don't like him.

And that's his only crime. The rest is simply finding a "legal" excuse to hang him.

CC Companies "Bottom line. This proves it's not our fault"

Which I think is the core requirement of such standards.

Google. We want to know who you are, where you are, what you're looking at

Always.

All your view habits belong to us.

The big one for the TLA's seems to be instructions to count bits in words.

Both the Transputer and (IIRC) ARM have this. Apparently it's a really useful tool for cryptography.

In fact so sensitive is the subject that at least one textbook (Combinatorial Algorithms:Theory & Practice) describes a fast non lookup (LUT's get expensive over maybe 8 bits, especially if you wanted to have lots of parallel processors. Not saying the NSA has a huge bank of FPGA's doing that of course) method only by example, rather than a detailed algorithm with illustrations, as they do with the simpler methods.

The radical shift in description suggested someone had whispered in their ears.

I'd be very surprised if Intel did not have spare capacity in their on chip microcode ROMs or PLA's for additional capability. When you've spent $3Bn on a line you'd want to keep it running. The easy way to do that is to add stuff into areas designed to be changed, rather than re jig the chip layout.

Hold up. The CIA actually provides a *list* of people they want information on.

That's called targeted surveillance.

Rather different to the "Cough up everything you have" of the NSA

Now how big that list is would be another issue.

This is *not* a trivial task and anyone who scoped it *properly* would know this.

Let's see.

Welfare State founded 1948.

Computerization started?? Say 50+ years. IBM & ICL mainframes (probably COBOL and proprietary add on stuff). Porting to some other platforms?

BTW those 6 benefits are (IIRC) the headline list. In fact we're talking about maybe 200 benefits.

In 200 systems. With (potentially) 5 000 000 (for very common benefits paid to individuals) records

Hint. A smallish system can run 50 data files with 100s of indexes over them.

Bottom line. Any project manager who understands this and still does not want to bail out is a)Very stupid or b) Has a very big set on them.

Decisions decisions.

Short them or buy them?

A British "Ampliphi" ?

Well Beechams and Smith Kline were IIRC.

The problem is the modern UK VC view. Get something that does not quite suck and sell it off to someone who wants to be a global player.

And repeat.

It take vision to want be be more than a research team and confidence that you can be more, in fact be a global player.

Maybe one that even invests in US teams but banks their IP results int he UK.

I get the impression Govt projects *never* plan for change

So everything get re-written with some assumption that X would never change turns out to be so much BS.

Taxes. Never going to change pretty much every thing about them (what, what is applied to what, how the "what" is calculated).

I'll note that while the UK does not have FAR I'm quite sure they have some equivalent pile of BS to work through, most of which to the average SME look like stereo instructions.

Maybe people will have a better idea of what they want before they start ordering it be built ASAP.

I've had a sh**ty day and I can hope tomorrow might be a better one.

May be too late

Micro controllers in circuit breaker modules.

WTF thought that was a good idea.