" 7.6 billion individual files."
Why?
Seriously WTF is holding the location of a car for at *least* 6 years going to achieve?
Posts by John Smith 19
16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
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Number-plate spycams riddled with flaws, top cop admits
China could penetrate US with new huge missile
Saturday 25th August 2012 07:20 GMT 
Re: Hey, waitaminnit... why do the Chinese need a missile...
IIRC back in the 80's the Japanense (remember when the US was scared of them?) delayed buying up the weekly portion of the US National Debt (the Treasury Bill auction IIRC) as Ronnie and the boys rhetoric was getting a bit strident.
Chilled them right out.
Of course that was when people were a bit worried that the US debt was over *one* tera dollars.
Saturday 25th August 2012 06:59 GMT
Look up "Anti-Ballistic-Missile" for the history of this subject.
ABM systems are as ineffective now against saturation attack (IE all out war) as they were in the early 1960's, when they were first proposed.
And no when you declare several thousand miles of Pacific a no fly zone people tend to suspect something is being tested.
Disable Java NOW, users told, as 0-day exploit hits web
UK kids' charity lobbies hard for 'opt-in' web smut access
New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000AD
Monday 27th August 2012 09:37 GMT
Re: Forsmark 1 (Sweden) in 2006 got close to doing a Fukushima
"My point is you don't need a natural disaster for a melt down, just an unlucky series of events. Murphy's law and all that."
True. Hopefully newer designs will recognize the importance of designing systems that work right by *physics* rather than by active subsystems (generators and pumps).
And "secrecy" may have been a poor choice of word. Perhaps "transparency" over the event would be a better way to say it. This sense that the nuclear power industry tends to down play problems is one that simply does not exist (AFAIK) with *any* other form of power generation.
So what *could* have been a disaster proved to be their finest hour. Demonstrating the importance of skills and training in an emergency.
Thursday 23rd August 2012 13:51 GMT
Re: Forsmark 1 (Sweden) in 2006 got close to doing a Fukushima
"In addition 12 different core safety systems were knocked out. "
But the reactors did *not* meltdown.
And (it would appear) they were not able to keep it secret.
The Swedish nuclear regulator should come down *hard* on them but the takeaway from this is
12 safety systems fail, but enough left working to *prevent* serious accident.
I salute the operations team.
Thursday 23rd August 2012 13:46 GMT
Re: Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors
The government problem. LFTR's are *unproven* reactor tech.
The corporate problem. LFTR's *eliminate* the need for fuel elements. Nuclear reactors are like disposable razors. Companies make their money on the *heads*, not the razors. Reactor companies make their money on the fuel elements, which are incompatible between designs.
LFTR's were developed to meet a *need* (specifically the US nuclear powered bomber programme) not to make money for Westinghouse or GE.
You'll need to demonstrate a design and then change their *business* model to get corporate support.
Neil Armstrong dies aged 82
Monday 27th August 2012 08:49 GMT
Re: If
"America went to the moon by sending 0.5% of its national budget at a time when it was spending 7% of it's national making Vietnam looking like the moon. "
Incorrect. In the 1960's NASA took 5.5% of the US GDP to get to the Moon in less than 8 years.
*today* NASA receives <0.5% of the US GDP. Things were different back then.
The roughly 9 fold difference in funding *might* explain NASA's rather slow progress through the Constellation programme.
It would be a nice gesture if the first lander from *any* nation to return to the moon was called "Armstrong" in recognition of his achievement but I doubt it will happen.
Ice core shows Antarctic Peninsula warming is nothing unusual
Thursday 23rd August 2012 12:47 GMT 
Interesting results but remember it's *one* data point
Next move. take some more (quite a few more for preference) cores across the continent (or at least around the periphery).
Otherwise we're looking at the *one* trees tree rings that "proves" global warming.
It certainly suggests that while it's not *frequent* (IE every few decades) it's not unprecedented and most of the precedents were set when human kind was living in caves or mud huts.
Thumbs up for new *raw* data and the hope they establish a few more *real* data points in the debate.
Boffins confirm sunspot-weather link
Friday 24th August 2012 12:57 GMT
A few points
There statistical tests on the data indicate the timing between sunspot minima & the freezes is *statistically* significant. IE the *level* of sunspot activity is implicated in the freezing events.
A mechanism is described that links that activity to the activity on a *regional* basis (solar UV level -> North Atlantic Oscillation -> lower Central Europe temperatures)
The mechanism *also* accounts for why some areas (Iceland) have become *periodically* warmer at the same time.
Note the Rhine has not frozen *since* 1963 (close to half a century) and as others have pointed out being a big fast flowing river it takes a degree of sub cooling before it ices over. This indicates the *trend* in average temperature is upward. However like the improved flow on the Thames when one of the bridges was removed eliminated the Thames freezes there are a number of possible explanations.
I would suggest the "does not disprove AGW" line seems to have become endemic in this area as a disclaimer to protect the authors both from being used as ammunition by disbelievers and believers alike.
BTW It's interesting that the UV forcing of the NA Oscillation by differing solar activity levels seems accepted by climate researches but their influence on cosmic ray seeding of still seems controversial.
Not quite a thumbs up as it's data study, not a field data collection, but it adds credence that their should be a "solar activity profile" knob to be twiddled on climate models.
D-Wave goes public with 81-qubit protein modeling
Wednesday 22nd August 2012 09:26 GMT
Note their goal is to demonstrate the *tech*, not actually solve a problem.
Their key points seem to be.
a) It's *programmable* (like a real computer), provided you can figure out how to describe the problem in "qubit" terms. Learning to think *in* those terms is likely to be easier for the yoof (if this takes off and does not become yet-another-technology-of-the-future, always was and always will be).
b) They have fabricated a chip (8 elements, each element of what seem to be 4 input qubits and 4 output qubits) full of quibits, which *mostly* work
c) You could have an *array* of such chips. It's *scalable*.
d) They are superconductive. Page 13 onward of the supplementary material describes it. It appears to operates at 20mK !. The process uses 4 Niobium layers and TiPt for resistors. Lines & spaces are 0.25 micrometres and the SQUID junctions are 0.6 micrometres (so a fair bit of room for reduction). This seems the closest anyone has got to actually *selling* a superconducting computer.
They claim it searches s solution space of 2^81 entries (which is pretty clever) partly by cycling the temperature.
Sadly a really hot cup of tea will result in a massive out of range error :(.
BTW A lot of AI seems to have been done on protein structure analysis (you've got X-ray images). This seems to have helped knock down initial analysis from *years* to hours. I don't quite see why heuristics cannot be used to constrain the search space and carve it up into multiple (but much *smaller*) search spaces to deliver a confirmation.
Boffins zapped '2,000 bugs' from Curiosity's 2 MILLION lines of code
Thursday 23rd August 2012 19:06 GMT
Re: Why C
May I draw your attention to "Structured programming" by Linger, Mills & Witt.
It describes the underlying tools used by the teams that built the the software for the Shuttle (and whose work *defined* what the term CMM5 means).
AFAIK most of their key innovations were in *procedure* rather than actual software tools, although their change management system could give cradle-to-grave histories on every line of code in the source (not sure if this is SOP for *all* modern CMS's these days).
*sticking* to the process when deadlines loom is another matter.
I'd also recommend Harlan Mills "Software Productivity" for a very neat way to establish how many bugs are *likely* to be left in a program. Implementing it however may be quite tricky (but I bet it would make a hell of a product).
Wednesday 22nd August 2012 20:06 GMT
Re: Why C
You *might* like to check the MISRA coding rules.
They were developed for *automotive* applications like engine management units brake and gear change systems.
IE *lots* of meatsack testing it and if it fails someone *will* end up going "squish".
Dynamic memory allocation is *explicitly* ruled out as "unsafe" (at any speed).
Councils launch eight spying ops on Brits A DAY using RIPA
Wednesday 22nd August 2012 21:48 GMT
Re: Meh
"The fact that the council even consider prosecuting innocent residents for the council's failings is exactly why they shouldn't have such powers."
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.
To a bureaucracy *no one* is innocent. It's *their* fault for failing to drop off their rubbish when the bins are empty.
NASA gets funding for Mars InSight mission in 2016
Tuesday 21st August 2012 07:46 GMT
Impressively deep and *fast*
16 feet is a *long* way into the surface of *any* planet that probes have visited. By space mission standards Sept 2016 is a quick programme.
Exciting but always remember that NASA is funded on a *yearly* basis (like councils in the UK).
Thumbs up for a clever piece of work.
McIntyre: Climate policy crippled by pointless feel-good gestures
Monday 20th August 2012 10:32 GMT
I think you'll find that Tony Blair was adamant that the Carbon reduction target was for *all* UK energy use, not just electricity generation.
He wanted a really *big* line in the sand.
The fact that he was leaving office, would have *no* involvement in making it happen and it would stuff Gordon Brown's entire time in office (however long that would be) were not his problem.
Stick it on the list with ID cards and the Data Communications Act V 1.0.
Monday 20th August 2012 10:32 GMT
Re: Doomed? pah
"Sadly said community goes powerless for 30% of the year unless you build a dirty great big gas power station to back it up."
It's worse than that. 30% is the design *target* that offshore wind turbines are expected to cover. It's 70% *not* covered by the turbines.
1 seems to be sort of happening.
You might try to get UK water companies (well the UK arms of the French and German multinational groups that actually own *most* of the UK water industry) to try to stop wasting as much water per household as they supply to the household (IE 50% lost in leaks).
I think that would require OFWAT to grow a pair and the *poor* water companies might not make so much profit.
Cosmonauts step out for six-hour space walk around ISS
Processor pioneer Victor Poor dies of cancer at 79
Tuesday 21st August 2012 08:00 GMT
So did Intel do a Microsoft and just *buy* in the design?
The Reg article could be read that way but the NY Times suggests his company put up the money.
*If* so that would make *both* of the key major forces in the computer world are simply the result of *buying* their innovation in and recognizing they were on to a good thing when they saw it.
Which would explain quite a lot about Intel & MS's relationship over the years.
He sounds like a true innovator and I wonder where will the *next* generation of such people come from.
Hypersonic Waverider scramjet in epic wipeout
Friday 17th August 2012 10:06 GMT
Re: Weapon or Pure Research
"The XB-70 looks almost identical to the Concorde with the exception of the twin tail fins and canards. "
No it does not. Concorde's wing is *very* subtle. It allowed the designers to *avoid* both canards (which the Tu144 ended up needing) *and the rotating wing tips (the *biggest* swing wings ever built at the time). It's called compression lift on the XB70.
"Unfortunately, their missiles were eventually able to reach greater heights than 74,000 ft, the top ceiling of the XB-70 and at greater speeds."
*partly* true. ICBM's are faster and were expected to survive expected improvements in air defense (I doubt *anyone* thought they'd still be unstoppable 6 decades after they went into service). The XB70's radar cross section due to its stainless steel honeycomb construction and 3 sided metal reflector wing layout is also *huge*.
".. test scramjet (Self Contained Ram Jet) engines that used very toxic oxidizers to allow the XB-70 to reach low earth orbit with conventional JP4 fuel. "
That's Supersonic Combustion Ram Jet to most people. Engines that use toxic *oxidizers* are usually called *rockets*. Boranes were viewed as an exciting new *fuel* and IIRC the US Navy spent several 100 $m on Project Zip. It's *very* toxic, gums the turbines and is highly eroding as it's high melting point combustion products solidify quickly, effectively shot blasting the insides of the engine. I think they also make quite a good WMD in a pinch.
" they would spend billions to "catch up" and we did not have to go to war to do it."
This was primarily the Strategic Defense Initiative of the 80's.
But other than that your post is more or less correct.
Deadly domino effect of extinction proved by boffins
Friday 17th August 2012 09:36 GMT
Look at what was actually being *tested*.
""Our experiment provides the first *proof* of something that biologists have argued for a long time: predators can have indirect effects on each other (*not* the things they prey on), to the extent that when one species is lost, the loss of these indirect effects can lead to further extinctions,""
IOW something that was *believed* to happen, has now been *proved* to happen (at least in some simplified ecosystems).
It could just as easily have been proved *not* to happen, which would have also been interesting.
Thumbs up for actually going out and finding out.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
