Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
That would be the glass in the fibre glass of FR4 boards.
Note however that cheap and nasty PCB are made of paper and a bunch of nasty organics.
Of course if you could recover those metals (economically) that would be even better.
But thumbs up for doing something about this problem.
"This is good news, IMO. Keep up the fine work folks. It's nice to know that at least a few people have a clue on national security."
Funny how those who support mass surveillance and the elimination of all online privacy do so from the anonymity of the AC?
Do you get the idea of irony?
"Who defines what 'dangerous' is? "
And that is the point.
As a citizen of a representative democracy or "free" society going about their law abiding business I should have the right to expect the government to not spy on me because I have done nothing.
IE I have to have done something to warrant surveillance in the first place.
Understand this. The storage and processing so cheap that everyone can be watched basically because they can. No justification is needed and no actual evidence is needed either.
"Please don't let them look at specific other peoples data! (UK Judges, Journalists, MPs, CEOs)"
The point is that to NSA you are all equal
This information is not just analysed in real time.
It's archived for an unknown period (possibly indefinitely. We simply don't know).
It is simply wrong whoever they are spying on.
"Even with the primitive (by today's standards) phoneme programs and underpowered (by today's standards) computers available in 1980, saying "I'm going to kill President Reagan" would have had your conversation flagged-and-tagged and a live operator at TRW monitoring your call within 20 seconds - and even with the primitive (by today's standards) tracking technology available in 1980, if you were located anywhere in the US a swarm of heavily-armed alphabet soup agents would have been speeding your way within a maximum of 8 minutes."
Funny how Bryant has these gaps in his knowledge, isn't it?
And they always seem to be in ways that make things more reassuring to people who are ignorant of surveillance systems.
"If you read the slideset published by the Grauniad, you'll see that that's one of the things that they specifically look for."
Not when >50% of all traffic goes encrypted.
This sort of mss spying on the basis of "saving" peoples security will have consequences for both the spies and the spied on.
"Yes security and signals intelligence agencies do spy on everyone, but you're just of no importance."
True.
So why bother in the first place? MI5 in the UK stated they had 2000 jihadist "suspects" that might do something at sometime in the future. That's 0.003% of a population of 66 million.
Because this collecting of data is a waste of money on an epic scale. The idea that "Everyone is a criminal and we should start the paperwork now" is simply the product of a diseased bureaucratic mindset.
"But it could be worse that 9/11 or 7/7 in the UK" SFW? Everyone who lives wakes up every morning running the risk they could suffer a brain aneurism and be dead or a vegetable in 5 seconds.
But who lives their life in such acute fear of everything? Except perhaps the data fetishists whose irrational desire for more data on more people "just in case" has no boundary.
Matt's knowledge of the Itanium architecture might be encyclopedic but his support for state surveillance of everybody is quite autistic and his understanding of words like "privacy" and "freedom" non existent.
"I find he willingness of some to surrender all their freedom to unaccountable agencies with unknown agendas quite startling. "
Except in fact "they" were not asked if they wanted to surrender their privacy, ostensibly to "protect" their freedom.
The right to privacy as recognized in the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was simply taken.
"Unless you are gay in which case you can be fired legally without reason in many of the states in the USA. Or if you are Jewish in many other countries."
Or if you are a teenager sending a nude (or semi nude) selfie of yourself to your BF/GF.
That's mfg, possession and distribution of CP.
"The executive branch has been able to do what it wants since WW2 and its about time inept Congress and SCOTUS grow a pair and do their damn jobs."
You would not say that if you'd tried to get a sensible space policy through the Legislature.
They seem quite adept at stopping that.
"They believe that we citizens no longer deserve any rights, protection or privacy. Only SOME citizens know otherwise. That makes us the enemy, and "Enemy of the State" might as well be a documentary since the alphabet agencies are all in direct violation of the Constitution and Posse Comitatus."
Short version. Citizens are the enemy.
Insofar as they stop the heads of those agencies doing what they want, when they want to do it.
"The NSA has wanted around this for years, as being a cumbersome and occasionally controlling process."
And with the passing of THE PATRIOT Act they got their wish.
a)A court with highly secret procedures and processes b)Primarily listens to only the government PoV and c)Issues warrants of such broadness that 1 warrant can basically cover "The rest of the world."
So Mr AC, either you're behind the times or your ignorance is deliberate.
"The only way to get rid of this is to take the governments out and elect new ones that will scrap this totally outrageous level of surveillance. Anyone who don't commit in writing their intentions to stop this insanity is against the People and should NOT be elected.This is f****** insane"
Not a government issue.
As Bismark observed "Governments come and governments go but the bureaucracy goes on forever"
Those civil servants will survive "regime change."
And their thirst for data is insatiable
"... indeed, quite a sucessful way of generating scientific output is to trawl through old journals, and re-attempt what failed back then, but with today's technology. (not saying that's what happened here, mind you)."
Actually the device worked fine for spying on the American embassy in Moscow.
What they have done is shifted from audio --> radio to radio --> light, which is a nice piece of lateral thinking.
The clever physics bit is working the maths to realize that this gives much better receiver performance than a straight electrical receiver element.
"A brilliant mix of existing tech and ideas for what is essentially a digital radiowave microphone with the diaphragm acting as a platter upon which a laser tone arm reads the peaks and troughs."
Correct.
First seen here
in the 1940s
Perhaps the NKVD should get a co-development credit?
but using lasers to detect radio waves by the physical motion induced in a passive receiver.
That is neat.
It seems they recommended petroleum ether for the best quality extraction.
Which I gather makes Butane look safe by comparison.
If you had a low BP organic fluid to get rid of you could a)Bubble gas thorough the mix to improve the evaporation or you could lower the BP further with say a water pump.
Naked flames are probably best avoided as well.
Remember kids the real danger of Marijuanna is not that it cold lead to harder drugs.
It could lead to carpentry.
That level of flexibility is very impressive.
The usual issues with this stuff are twofold.
Vacuum deposition tends to push up the costs and historically organic FETS (especially the oxide layers) have been very sensitive to atmospheric Oxygen and water vapor.
Interesting start but this is V 0.1 tech.
"Those who actually need to know this info. will be able to obtain it. T"
They did not "obtain" it.
It was given to them. They did nothing with it.
"There is no doubt that a number of white hats by day are black hats at night. "
And you know this because you've been reading their emails perhaps?
Always good to hear the voice of reason from the Fort Meade sub basements. I feel so much safer now.
"I remember many years ago reading how a car manufacturer, upon discovering a potentially fatal flaw in a component, simply calculated the cost of law suits, dead bodies and bad press expected over the life of the vehicles with the flaw versus the cost of a recall, and concluded it was cheaper to let a few customers expire than fix it."
I'm sure this could be several incidents but the one that comes to mind was the Ford Pinto. The fix cost $55 a car and the bean counters looked at likely frequency and set let them burn.
They did.
Until a child of about 11 or 12 survived the fuel tank explosion and the 3rd degree burns. The jury awarded punitive damages for knowing it could happen and playing roulette with their customers lives and bodies.
"Any responsible person, academic or otherwise, would simply have gone to VW and perhaps other car manufacturers and told them there is a very significant issue which they need to deal with, helped them, etc, all quietly and responsibly."
I would presume so to.
And they "quietly and responsibly" got a gag order for him.
Large bureaucracy behavior 1)Deny there is a problem 2)Attempt to suppress all knowledge of problem. 3)Admit there is a slight problem but it's a)very difficult to exploit and b) is an inconvenicnec 4)Issue an upgrade 5)State that "Our processes worked as planned and our customers are fully protected"
Then do it all over again when the next hole is found.
Fail for your failure to understand large corporations and their love of security by obscurity (which this is an example of).
Yes it might be wounded.
But once an organization grows beyond a certain size as long as it retains a small core of staff who know WTF they are doing it can persist almost indefinitely despite the rampant stupidity of even Board level management.
Like "Boris the Blade" in the film "Snatch" they just won't lay down and die.
Would a MS free world be a better place? Depends if they shredded all the file format details as a final "F**k you" to their customers I think.
"What a f**king waste of time."
Turning events that may have trumatized them for a lifetime into a cheap soundbite saying "vote for me."
The abuse of children is vile. Exploiting it further by photographing it is worse still.
But exploiting that to a) Improve your election chances by playing the TOTC card yet again b)Improve the states stranglehold on information slurping brings me close to vomiting.
I'll take a wild guess and say not too many.
Yes it sounds like the plot of a Bond film (and actually was) but that does not mean that more discrete use would not be possible.
The 21st century equivalent of "wreckers" shutting down light houses in order to lure ships onto hazards and salvage the cargoes (and/or any valuables from anyone who didn't make, and sometimes anyone who did)?
"The author of El Reg's article is pointing out how this person seized on a paper done on what is essentially beta software as part of its testing to claim that climate modeling is wrong. Song-"
Exactly
Having read the previous comments the software needs work to reduce this to acceptable levels, because as posters have implied eliminating it is impossible.
The real takeway from the article was the website that reported the work is exceptionally biased and should probably be avoided.
Shocking but true.
When you put the same numbers through the same system on differenct machines it should give same answers.
In this case it does not.
And the answers appear to be as widely spread as the system as the outputs you would expect with the when the range of input parameters is used. Which is clearly wrong.
Bottom line. The website listed will seize on very flimsy evidence to bolster their agenda. It is little better than FUD for climate change denial and as IT insiders most of you would know this.
Not to say concerns don't exist about the models. They do seem over systematically over sensitive to CO2 levels, but that's another story.
"Chazmon touched a interesting question up there. I always wondered, how the life support works on habitats, isolated for longer terms, like space stations and nuclear submarines. I mean,"
Submarines typically have a very large power source they can use to desalinate see water, electrolyze it and extract water that way, so O2 and water not big problems on big boats, more trouble on diesel electrics.
Space is more trouble. Despite decades of saying they want to go to the universe NASA still does not have a full closed cycle life support. system. The biggies are urine and sweat. IIRC urine recylc is getting better but the adsorb CO2 onto molecular sieve compounds then expose them to vacuum to boil off. This is in fact an improvement on the old one use filter cartridges.
BTW NASA standard consumables for a 'naut is 5Kg/person/day. maybe 3.5Kg of that is water. So water re-cycyling would (for long missions) save serious amounts of up-mass.
Short answer for space "badly."
"They do not hire according to skills and talent, and they do not fire a person for being an idiot. "
I think that's what's called a mature bureaucracy.
"(Try this concept: You need to test individual bits in a field. You start your pattern with 0x01. At Microsoft, the next step is to SHIFT RIGHT.)"
Now WTF's that about, unless that's the MSB?
I guess for a certain kind of person MS is a business opportunity, more than a career opportunity.
Once those who worked there have a rather different view.
"I work for a rather large company. Tens of thousands of users. "
"Would there be massive retraining costs if we moved to a different desktop OS? Not really. Because 80 to 90% of everything our CSRs already do is through the browser. "
Which suggests a) What runs on their desktop is pretty much irrelevant b)If central IT configures it well enough they might not even realize they are not Windows boxes at all.
Seriously. How much of a home installation is just cruft in a corporate environment?
"The thing I would do at the helm of Microsoft is split it into three or four separate companies with separate stocks and unleash them to fight tooth and claw like the old Microsoft. Move Steve Ballmer to one, bring back Gates to helm another for a while and promote from within for the other one or two."
Never going to happen.
I'd suggest you look up the terms "effective monopoly" and "vendor lock in"
Microsoft already knows what happens when it has to compete on anything close to a level playing field.
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