* Posts by PyLETS

682 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Jul 2011

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Met issues mug-shot gallery mobe app to finger wanted crooks

PyLETS
Big Brother

Highest density of CCTVs in the world

We're all carrying these things now within our mobile phones. A fixed webcam pointing out of the bedroom of someone living around the corner from me nailed a woman who'd put a cat in a wheelie bin a year or so ago. I don't mind this tech being used to catch petty thieves and cat abusers and more serious crims, but we probably will need better data protection law and enforcement to prevent misuse of all the data we're all collecting. Big brother icon, because we can't any longer seperate our own behaviour and capabilities from the actions of the nebulous "them" for whom "we" all have to take a degree of responsibility.

Oracle v Google could clear way for copyright on languages, APIs

PyLETS
Boffin

Re: New form of IP protection required

Java isn't a program. It's a language. Various Java compilers, VMs and libraries are copyrighted.

It's as bad an idea for a language to be protected by IP as it would be for all roads to become toll roads. You'd have to pay to get outside your front door or gate, which would prevent you offering your services and goods within a competitive marketplace. We'd all be poorer that way so we don't do it that way.

Roads and languages are public property for good reasons.

PyLETS
Linux

Re: Computer languages and software interfaces may fall under copyright protection

If the law allows copyrighting a language, it enables a private tax to be levied on all programs and expressions using that language. That's a massive restraint on trade.

A narrower attempt at copyrighting was defeated in the automobile compatible parts market. There is only one way an exhaust pipe can sensibly route under a vehicle, based on the design of the underside of that vehicle. Giving control over the sale of compatible parts to the original manufacturer was considered an unreasonable restraint on competition in that space.

Copyrighting an API would lead to a similar constraint on competition and without competition we all become poorer.

PyLETS
WTF?

Re: The great land grab of the 21st century

Some property has to be public. Not having to pay to go out into the street outside your dwelling, because it is a public road and isn't a toll road, is a requirement in order to have markets in things other than road provision.

Some property has to be private. Nobody likes sharing toothbrushes.

Where your preferred society chooses to create the dividing line will determine how much rent seeking activity is permitted, and how much competition you will get.

Generally, with some notable exceptions, monopolies are considered a bad thing and copyright is a monopoly. That's OK to the extent granting this monopoly causes work to be done that otherwise wouldn't be done, but if copyright goes further than that, such law can't enable as much value to be created as it could otherwise.

Another example of where reasonable social policy encourages an artificial monopoly is that a package below a certain price can be posted to any UK address for the same price. Both the postal package delivery monopoly below a defined price and the policy to have a public road monopoly encourages communications without which open competitive markets could not exist.

Minister blows away plans for more turbines

PyLETS
Boffin

Workable form of mass electricity storage

It's called pumped storage. Originally designed for the ad break when everyone wants to boil the kettle at once: http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm . OK, to cover UK requirements in a 1000 mile wide winter calm for 5 days you'd need to have equivalent of 7 lakes of about 1km cubed with average drop between reservoirs about 1km. We haven't got enough of that kind of terrain in the UK. They have more in west Ireland and in Norway, where they are considering using salt water and the ocean as the lower reservoir, and that's partly why they are planning better undersea grid interconnectors between UK, Iceland, Norway and Ireland.. Another reason is this enables UK wind electricity when plentiful to be exported.

Some of the reservoirs we do have could also be dual purposed - that's called uprated hydro, where you have enough flow into the dam and can vary the electric output from it more.

PyLETS
Boffin

Industrial scale development

When you have sufficient economies of scale an industrial-scale wind industry doesn't need such large subsidies and that's clearly a measure of success. There's never been a time when nuclear hasn't been subsidised, which had all its research costs paid for by the cold war arms race. Ask Fukushima refugees who haven't been and will never be adequately compensated who subsidises nuclear power now: the nuke industry expects limited liability to be subsidised by the taxpayer. Fossil fuels are subsidised by costs of extreme weather - that's your and my house insurance going up. The question is which kind of energy is subsidised the most.

Himalayan glaciers actually gaining ice, space scans show

PyLETS
WTF?

Re: AGW->more moisture in the air->more snow->more glacier

Indeed having a warmer moister world will lead to more high altitude ice. It also means low altitude ice melts and flows faster. The global sea level depends upon the amount of ice held and stability of ice sheets in the Western Antarctic as the rest of world ice doesn't add up to much in comparison. It's also possible that AGW threatens reductions of sea level, with massive costs dredging in order to keep existing ports operational. For most places in the short-medium term whether sea levels rise or fall will probably be dominated by local plate tectonic movements, determining whether land locally is rising or falling.

BYOD sync 'n share

PyLETS
Boffin

@Andy The Hat

"Why shouldn't any virtual host provider be subject to the same incompetent, iron fist approach?"

The difference, I guess is that cloud data storage services are managed and deduped by the hosting provider, whereas a virtual host is typically managed by the customer, with storage guaranteed to be provisioned and allocated exclusively per customer. There's also a problem with deduping in that the organisation which manages a very large collection of data for many users should know that the same large files are shared by and between multiple users, and could arguably be claimed to know what these files are.

I fully agree with you about the "incompetent, iron fist approach" used to shutdown MegaUpload, but the fact this can happen makes any similar cloud storage service subject to another potential failure mode from the POV of an analyst or consultant looking at the reliability of a cloud data storage service for legitimate organisational data backup purposes.

PyLETS
Boffin

OK for sharing, no good for secure backups

Look at what happened to MegaUpload and users who depended upon that cloud service for backups. And the difference between that and Dropbox is that the US Justice Dept. haven't shut Dropbox down yet ?

Maybe DB are squeaky clean from a copyright POV, in which case the other risk for any legal service which you don't pay for is it going bankrupt. Look what happened to GeoCities. Valued at billions when sold in financially frenzied times, switched off as worthless 10 years later.

Prefer to keep my data on a virtual hosted server I pay for, where I get to choose the programs which run on that, whose hosting company is financially viable and where my and my users legitimate privacy rights aren't for sale to highest bidder.

Lesser-spotted Raspberry Pi FINALLY dished up

PyLETS
Linux

Re: A rubber-keyed speccy?

I waited a year or 2 until I could afford a 64K RAM Einstein which ran CP/M, and had a built in monitor and decent keyboard and it could drive a dot matrix printer. This was mainly used for wordprocessing, games and running a small payroll business. I wrote a few minor Basic programs on it also.

PyLETS
Linux

Learning about computing

This has more to do with software being open than hardware nowadays, but having hardware cheap enough to experiment with and which doesn't disrupt your main work/office PC is nice.

Fate of punters' Megaupload files to be thrashed out in court

PyLETS
Trollface

Nowhere is out of US jurisdiction

When they can't extradite someone they'll use unmanned drones to take them out.

The US is the world's policeman. Hadn't you heard ?

PyLETS
Big Brother

good and bad clouds

As to the use of clouds to provide reliable backups, many old TV programmes which the official archivists thought were lost for ever, have been recovered for posterity due to their availability on Bittorrent - because some fan had the foresight to do some home recording and shared it with the world regardless of copyright law. The state can't shut Bittorrent down any more than it can shut down the English language, because neither require any centrally provided facilities.

Doesn't stop the secret police overhearing your conversation in a forbidden language and you being taken away in the middle of the night never to be seen again, as occurs in some places, or bribed politicians passing bad laws trying to intimidate Bittorrent users. When such measures become repressive in practice, what occurs is that sharing is more likely to occur based upon encryption and webs of trust based on prior relationship, as opposed to sharing using publicly visible network addresses.

PyLETS
Flame

difference between civil and criminal cases

"The MPAA instigated this; it's their responsibility to make good on any harm done to legitimate users caught in this somewhat indiscriminate action."

Unfortunately, lobbying for the state to become involved in criminal enforcement in a particular case doesn't make the lobbyist liable if the criminal action is wrongfully entered into resulting in massive liability claims from injured third parties. In this case injured parties will sue the state and demand compensation and US taxpayers will become liable if they succeed. The MPAA simply gets a free ride at public expense. It's called externalities - making Joe Public pick up the tab related to your way of doing business.

That's why big content is so keen to make copyright enforcement a criminal as opposed to a civil law matter, and why anyone who gives a toss about the taxpayer's interest should generally resist such intentions. The exception is if it can be conclusively proven that loss of taxes from genuinely lost sales would be sufficient to pay for enforcement costs. In this case the US authorities appear to have acted very rashly, due to the high probability of expensive and lengthy and unsuccessful proceedings, with anything involving extradition is likely to be massively costly, and massive damages caused to innocent 3rd parties.

Having local trading standards officers check car boot sales for illegally copied DVDs and obtaining criminal arrests in that context is relatively cheap in comparison and probably cost justifiable based on lost taxation. The problem here is that this sets a dangerous precedent for state involvement - and a little money offered in respect of campaign funding to a politician can leverage a large tax spend when it is Joe Public footing the bill.

Google boss points to low-end tablet for fight with Amazon

PyLETS
WTF?

Google don't need high margins

Shipping hundreds of millions of devices each of which expands their search and related revenue, they can afford to shift hardware at margins of pennies per unit and it still improves profitability of their core business. People who thought Android was commercial suicide said the same thing and were equally wrong. Similar model to ARM - get others to do the manufacturing and marketing, sell enough devices and you only need pennies per unit. As to networks subsidising the cost that's just an up-front credit driven sale, and plenty of people like me prefer to buy mobiles outright on PAYG and then switch these onto contracts because they prefer to own their own hardware.

MIT's mind-reading Mosh pits itself against SSH daemons

PyLETS
Boffin

Re: er, great, I guess

For someone who has tried to do command line stuff to a home or hosted server from a mobile phone or netbook while on a train or in a carpark using 3G data it seems to me a bit of both, and a mismatch between the 2. It's useful to know what you have typed more rapidly on a crummy soft mobe keyboard before you press the enter key, but really there should be no need to have to wait for remote echo until you get to the enter key stage most of the time. To be really useful, this one would need to know when you are using an unbuffered input application over SSH, e.g. using Mutt or Vim, where single keystrokes have effects on the remote application without need for the enter key, as opposed to when you are using buffered input applications (e.g. typing bash commands), and can delay obtaining remote feedback until the command is entered.

Student's Linux daemon 0-day triggers InfoSec Institute outcry

PyLETS
WTF?

If you have local access ...

You own any machine you can short the bios power supply on to reset bios password, to make it boot from your own media or failing that, change the hard disk on anyway.

Amount of ice in Bering Sea reaches all-time record

PyLETS
FAIL

Re: I love satire - an alternate reading

My thoughts exactly. You can expect more mobile ice to flow downstream when a frozen river thaws in spring, and this transition can be locally catastrophic. Sounds like a temporary local drain blockage, soon overwhelmed by the weight of what follows behind.

TITANIC 'UNLIKELY' TO SINK AGAIN, says prof - apparently

PyLETS
WTF?

What has news to do with science ?

'Even so, this is surely proof-if-it-were-needed that at times it's the (pre-planned) "news" agenda driving the science, not the science driving the news.'

Hardly. More to do with it being a slow news day, and some incautious academic being diverted from more important work by a journalist short of material phoning him up and engaging him or her in a light hearted, distracting and somewhat speculative conversation.

'Don't break the internet': How an idiot's slogan stole your privacy...

PyLETS
Big Brother

privacy and property

Privacy won't be respected by creating new property rights, and doesn't need this. If you want privacy more than business as usual, make it an offence to traffick in human data collected after a given date without provable confirmed opt-in consent of those it describes for each use and transfer.

Slavery was not abolished by creating a property right but by destroying an existing one.

Publisher hails CS Lewis 'space trilogy' e-book debut

PyLETS
Thumb Up

Read 'Voyage to Venus'

Also when about 11 or 12 and probably too young fully to appreciate it. I recall some interest in it's allegories, but don't remember it very much. Have to read it again. CSL's more overtly theological works mark him out as one of the most honest and perceptive thinkers of the 20th Century, and his children's literature helped create the whole fantasy genre.

Nuke plant owners to pay out up to £1bn per balls-up

PyLETS
Boffin

renewables already self hosting

"until renewables become self-hosting (i.e. when the amount of energy generated each year by renewables exceeds the amount of energy consumed each year in building new renewables-based generation capacity)."

For total renewables, including hydro, solar, wind and geothermal and biomass, there almost certainly has never been a time when manufacture of new capacity in all these areas has absorbed more energy than being produced by all of them. The world's first electricity power station at Cragside in Northumbria was hydro powered. Historically steam engines originally required water wheel (hydro) power to manufacture the parts before steam energy became self-hosting, in the sense of steam power being used to manufacture steam engines.

The wind industry are also claiming their own industry to be self hosting as well, in more recent and narrow terms, in relation to energy needed to manufacture and payback time:

http://www.bwea.com/ref/faq.html#payback states:

"The average wind farm in the UK will pay back the energy used in its manufacture within six to eight months, this compares favourably with coal or nuclear power stations, which take about six months."

PyLETS
Boffin

@h4rm0ny - show us the evidence

'(N.b. "Elsewhere" does not include wind farms. Even fewer people want to live near those than want to live near nuclear power stations.)'

This assertion would be capable of being proved one way or the other by unbiassed research. Anecdotal evidence and some of my own observations suggest the opposite: No noticeable impact on housing prices near windfarms in mid Wales but houses near Dungeness very cheap compared to other relatively isolated coastal hamlets in rest of same region.

PyLETS
Megaphone

@Nathan Hobbs

" but to make things fair, anyone who raises objections to having a nuclear power plant built near their house has to have their electricity disconnected."

Much as I might personally enjoy doing the same to some yokels who live near a very windy ridge close to Evesham with their flashy 4X4 vehicles and stupid anti windfarm protest signs outside their houses, you can't really make private views on a public policy capable of legitimate democratic protest and expression and then discriminate on this basis in terms of who benefits.

PyLETS
Flame

Re: Level playing field?

You level the playing field in respect of fossil fuel stations to some extent by introducing carbon taxes. This is also, like limited liability nuclear operator insurance, is still a blunt instrument. For example while a carbon tax would reflect that gas is cheaper than coal in terms of C02/GWh, it doesn't account for a coal industry which rips the tops off mountains dumping these elsewhere and puts many tonnes of mercury vapour into the air every year.

UK net super-snooping clashes with Euro privacy law - expert

PyLETS
Big Brother

RIPA and a chance to change it ?

Given the facts that:

a. spies will continue to spy because that's their job,

b. this job isn't going to go away anytime soon, and

c. if they are paid by our taxes for tracking organised crime, terror suspects and paedos, they are likely to want to do be able to do this job without risking criminal prosecution.

It follows that we can't avoid the need for legislation which makes it equally as easy and as difficult to get the same level of communications data from those who use Skype as from those who use BT. The same applies to other messaging technologies. How easy and difficult, and what data is now up for debate, but not whether legitimate surveillance should occur or be regulated by law, or the principle that the level of state access to messaging data should be technology neutral, recognising that practical and cost issues will introduce different procedures, feasibilities and delays.

When the RIPA was passed, the Labour administration was in control freakish 9/11 mood and there there was little or no debate over it. This whole steaming pile was rammed down our throats and Labour MPs were too lily livered to contest the worst parts of it. Some of the worst parts of it were reserved for 'introduction at a later time if needed' to come into force by executive order, and the time of these orders inevitably came and went, but with no justification of increased threat level provided, with no limited duration, and with few people noticing these uncivil denials of liberty coming into effect.

Given the nature of coalition politics this will now have to be extensively debated and discussed before a parliamentary majority can be obtained. So instead of running around shouting that the sky is going to fall down, it makes more sense to see this as an opportunity to get rid of some of the worst aspects which should never have got into the RIPA in the first place, in particular the requirement to handover cryptography keys or decrypt data on request by plod.

PyLETS
Big Brother

This is all optional

Anyone wanting to make their phone calls, emails and web browsing habits invisible to the authorities can do all of this by using a VPN end point server located in a country whose privacy laws and enforcement they have more respect for. There are good and bad reasons for this, e.g. a foreign business may legitimately be concerned about leakage of trade secrets to competitors who bribe local police and pay local PIs. In the case of criminal reasons, this is a bit like the way leaving fingerprints at the scene of a crime is optional.

Those looking for lesser levels of protection can use private systems for most of this instead of publicly provided ones. Private systems, such as my email server (mine is currently located in the UK, but would be easy to move) are not affected by this legislation. I've never had police asking for real time access to my mail logs and it would cost them a fortune to get this data securely from anyone other than the very biggest fish in this ocean. All others data requests will involve delays in obtaining warranted access through the relevant system operators.

Virgin Media's latest throttling rules

PyLETS
Linux

Re: A few things on this

"5) Add to that the fact they block non-Windows/OS X users from their services (and that includes Android!) despite VMedia selling Android phones, being an Ubuntu mirror AND shipping set top boxes that run a Linux. MORONS! They are no offering executable downloads (or something like that) they have no reason to block based on OS."

They don't block on OS grounds.

I'm a Virgin Media customer and have been for 10 years, with Linux on all my computers apart from a virtual machine on one of these Linux hosts running XP. There simply isn't any problem using any of Virgin Media's services with Linux of which I'm aware. On my side of their router it's all standard Ethernet or WiFi and TCP/IP which all works with any modern OS. The configuration interfaces on their routers are plain HTTP/HTML - any OS and web browser will do. Hell, their router even switches native IPV6 on the LAN side as well as IPV4, though it doesn't route it, but even that works through their router in tunneling mode using protocol 41, ( see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6#Tunneling ) something you can't say about many ISPs IPV4 only kit. Other OS's which family and friends have used on occasions successfully behind their router include Android, various versions of Windows (95, 98, 2000, XP, Vista, Windows 7) NetBSD and various Mac/OS X versions.

Are you an ECO POET? Climate science needs YOU

PyLETS
Boffin

zeitgeist

There once was a hack called Andrew,

who bit off far more than could chew,

when he cried "A Conspiracy"

it was clearly derisory.

At East Anglia they thought him quite rude.

Munich's mayor claims €4m savings from Linux switch

PyLETS
Linux

forking and choice isn't a bug

It's a feature, get used to it. Forks tend to rejoin anyway once developers figure what their and the other fork got right and wrong. Much better to have these kind of choices than to have to stick with a 10 year old XP because the Vista fork comes out buggy to the point of unusability and then takes several years to be patched into a barely usable state to the extent the vendor charges you again for it having rebranded it as Windows 7. Infections targetting vulnerabilities also don't propagate though a diverse ecosystem nearly as widely or as fast as they can do through a monoculture, as the history of Windows worms testifies.

Sarkozy hails 'success' of Hadopi's pirate cops

PyLETS
Big Brother

Even if this kind of intimidation works

These kind of bullying tactics have to be reducing public support for ever longer copyright terms and ever more draconian enforcement, which ultimately requires elected politicians to continue to comply with the demands of their big media masters. When the interests of big media were the only message people ever heard about this big media got whatever they wanted. After PIPA/SOPA was defeated by a concerted online campaign when millions of people phoned representatives to complain, nothing in this space will ever be so certain again.

Devs spanked for touching vulnerable open-source packages

PyLETS
Boffin

modular applications and long term support distros both needed

If you want to run a somewhat outdated version of Tomcat/Apache/Sendmail or whatever, you're better off getting this with a supported stable version of Debian or RedHat, or maybe Ubuntu LTS than original developer sources, given that the upstream developers tend not to be interested in backporting security fixes nearly as much as the downstream enterprise stable distributors are.

That's what stable distributions are for. It's also why large statically compiled applications are evil compared to those using dynamic libraries, and I'm not just talking about wastage of memory and diskspace here. However, there are still times when maintaining a stable service requires that you plan your migration off an old platform - when it's no longer security supported.

Nokia invents teeny throbbing tattoos to make your skin crawl

PyLETS
Devil

Tattooing

Didn't this practice originate with marking slaves as the property of their owner ?

Brings on a whole new set of technological possibilities for controlling those in bondage ...

Report: Feeble spam filters catch less junk mail

PyLETS
Boffin

Drop in volumes, same amount in inbox

The amount rejected by my server has dropped about 90% in the last 2 years. About the same amount is caught after acceptance by my homebrew filters. I guess spammers are realising that if their client or hired bot gets 10,000 rejects messages referring them to the Spamhaus DNSBL, there's no point wasting time trying to send further spam using a bot whose IP is blacklisted to email servers which are not going to stop using a particular blacklist, when the bot could be put to work mining Bitcoins or providing an anonymity VPN relay to some phisher or other crook.

The spam I continue getting is coming increasingly from legitimate hosts, e.g. burning through accounts created for them by people working at a dollar a day.

Earth once had hazy methane atmosphere like ice-moon Titan

PyLETS
Mushroom

Explosive transition

That's the transition from a methane rich atmosphere to an oxygen rich one. In the middle of this change, the atmosphere becomes explosive, and all it needs is a lightning strike for one massive explosion.

Latest Linux kernel 3.3 comes with added Android

PyLETS
Linux

good for developers of both forks

They always knew that maintaining this fork would be time consuming and expensive, as useful and relevant work done in one fork would have to be ported to the other. There were quality issues preventing Android code getting into the mainstream, and probably adaptability issues preventing the mainstream being able to integrate Android both of which had to be fixed to the satisfaction of all.

In practice it's through temporary forking like this one that major advances otherwise disruptive of production code become possible. That's how the kernel development model generally works, its just that the Android fork probably had to be more disruptive than most other developments. I'm very much looking forward to the improvements in the Android development environment which this will undoubtedly make possible.

Atmospheric CO2 set to soar - OECD

PyLETS
Mushroom

@Ken Hagan

"It is local politics that is keeping them offline, just as it is politics rather than evidence that keeps the exclusion zone around Fukishima so large."

No, it's radioactive caesium contamination, combined with democratically accountable representatives making hard choices, advised by unelected public servants who know what the internationally accepted safe limits are and don't want to exceed these either for genuine concern over victims health, and/or due to concern about future litigation by anyone who goes back and gets cancer for whatever reason and sues for negligence based on provable violation of international safety standards.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_effects_from_Fukushima_Daiichi_nuclear_disaster states: 'As of February 2012, the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is still leaking radiation and areas surrounding it could remain uninhabitable for decades due to high radiation. It could take “more than 20 years before residents could safely return to areas with current radiation readings of 200 millisieverts (mSv) per year, and a decade for areas at 100 millisieverts per year” '

50mSv /year is the maximum allowed for US nuclear workers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_%28radiation%29

http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Factsheets/English/radlife.html#dose states: "On average, our radiation exposure due to all natural sources amounts to about 2.4 mSv a year" and this same article (tag harmful) states: "With all the knowledge so far collected on effects of radiation, there is still no definite conclusion as to whether exposure due to natural background carries a health risk, even though it has been demonstrated for exposure at a level a few times higher."

PyLETS
Mushroom

Re: The solution isn't nuclear alone.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Japan : "Japan's efforts to regain public support for restarting the reactors has made little headway, with 49 out of the nation's 54 reactors offline as of January 2012" . Perhaps I should moderate my assertion to "the Japanese had to shut down 90% of their nuclear capacity".

Please try to imagine where they would have been if they had become as reliant upon nuclear as the French are.

PyLETS

Atmospheric C02 not directly proportional to emissions

Much of this comes down in rainfall and ends up in the oceans. Which become more acidic. We don't know the full effects of this on marine life, but we do know that the photosynthesis occurring within the oceans (plankton) isn't far behind what occurs on land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxygen_cycle in terms of amount of oxygen released.

PyLETS
Stop

The solution isn't nuclear alone.

Thorium is another promise which hasn't delivered yet. Doesn't mean it won't or we shouldn't research it in the hope it will, but we can't put all our eggs in the basket tempted by another as yet undelivered promise - similar scenario with wave power. If the objective is genuinely to reduce C02 to the greatest extent possible, it seems pretty daft to imagine nuclear and renewables to be in competition here as both need development, in the sense neither has the optimal capacity, cost profile, reliability or output characteristics on their own to be expanded to meet the entire requirement and both need careful planning and engineering to obtain safer and more reliable power.

Both nuclear and renewables will perform much better as part of a mixed low carbon supply system in the short to medium term and we are all dead in the longer term. Nuclear becomes more expensive per GwH if expanded too rapidly as this requires more host communities to risk being the next Fukushima. Less of a problem with existing nuclear host communities who need the jobs and who already understand the relatively low risks, but politically a very tall order elsewhere.

Renewables will provide best cost effectiveness in the most optimal sites - once renewables expand to more than 30% of total energy requirements siting also gets more expensive and storage costs start to put total price/GwH delivered up.

Also when the Japanese had to shut down their nuclear capacity, they were very glad they had other sources of electric supply. Much better to have your eggs in more than one basket.

Everything Everywhere grabs UK 4G wheel, rivals thrown off bus

PyLETS
Stop

400-790THz

Nah, this band would create too much interference if used for mobile applications. I've seen some experimental work being done within this band for point to point links, and while it works here for some applications, it has problems with rainfall and fog limiting range see http://ronja.twibright.com/ . For communications this band tends to work best contained within optic fibre waveguides.

Cambridge student wins 'Hack Idol'

PyLETS
Boffin

Re: Next challenge: a more holistic view

You're not the only one noticing this problem.

In a sense, there's no such thing as security, because this is unattainable. There is such a thing as risk management. Preventing the threat from developing in the first place is helped greatly by identifying and then knowing your users. The first part (authentication) is hard, the second part (reputation) even more so, but these both have to be parts of the security theory which I teach my students, in addition to the technical attacks and defences which without authentication and reputation would, as you say, narrow the subject at hand.

The true, tragic cost of British wind power

PyLETS
WTF?

Re: Going it alone?

Of course the calculations which assume the UK grid not to be interconnected to neighbouring grids using DC links are nonsense. But we can't expect anti-renewable propagandists not to select the least favourable calculations. In a scenario where fortress Britain had to abandon all electricity trade with neighbours these calculation might make sense, but if that's what they're genuinely worried about they should state this. Also the variability of wind electric output is a very minor problem and carries relatively small cost with wind electricity penetration at less than 20% of the overall grid requirement than it would become if wind ever gets to more than 50%.

As to reducing renewable subsidies, this does make sense in order to make the expansion of wind and solar as part of the overall grid supply mix to occur more sustainably. With mass production having brought costs down, a more mature renewable energy supply industry doesn't need such large subsidies. Wind, solar and nuclear would also all need less in the way of subsidies to compete against fossil fuels if the latter were not subsidised by increases in our extreme weather insurance, cost of uninsured climate losses, the need to spend massively on improved flood defences etc, all of which are subsidies to fossil fuel use which does not pay for these externalities without across the board carbon taxes. If opposition to carbon taxes are genuinely concerned about granny freezing in a cold house, then maybe fossil subsidies otherwise correctable with across the board carbon taxes could instead be more precisely targetted to vulnerable people who need help with their heating bills, allowing the energy market to compete on fair terms and prices to find more natural levels of supply from diverse sources.

That doesn't take away the need for public policy to invest in diversification away from fossil fuels based on risk of political instability in oil supply regions and climate change, risks which markets focussed on short term supply demand balancing considerations will tend to ignore. Also the decision to invest in new nuclear plant is highly political, likely to be limited to existing nuclear plant host communities which want these jobs, given the reminder that Fukushima recently gave us about worst case scenario risks.

Punters are the real losers in BT, TalkTalk copyright court blow

PyLETS
Big Brother

Unicorns exist

Perhaps this belief is similar to the idea that people will readily vote for politicians who will allow their snail mail to be steamed open by arrangement between third parties and the post office in order to threaten them for having allegedly copyright infringing photocopies sent (DEA) ?

Or that people will vote for someone who denies their entire household access to the local post office, and the red box at the end of the street and will block snail mail deliveries based on copyright infringement allegations against any unspecified member of their household and the threats and intimidation described above being ignored (DEA)?

Or maybe the idea that people would vote for someone who would have someone held incommunicado who tells them where a photocopier is located where the guards don't check what you are photocopying. ( SOPA/PIPA, and which, my Romanian friend tells me, was the method of distributing Samizdat under the Soviet/Causescu system .)

This to me seems the equivalent of unicorn belief: translating all of these repressive legislative proposals described above to their Internet equivalent contexts, and imagining that people will put up with this kind of thing for very long, in a world where politicians need the support they trade for the legislation big media wants less and less as each year passes.

This is (c) jake.

PyLETS
Pirate

@ I ain't Spartacus

The points you make are made very reasonably. As to life of copyright, most professionals don't get paid for what we did last year, let alone what we did 30 years ago, so I don't feel obliged to pay Bob Marley's grandchildren's pensions simply because I like Bob Marley's music. It would be better for them if they have to work for a living, as applies to older artists if they have not saved any of the money earned while successful as youths. The monopoly of copyright is an artificial privilege granted by the state which comes with costs and obligations for the rest of us, so it should not be accepted as a natural human right.

As I see it the term of copyright should be set to compromise the increase in artists' incentive (which make longer terms more desirable than shorter ones) against the lower transaction costs for new artistic works referential of older works (which make shorter terms desirable). Having shorter terms is of particular importance for the feasibility of cultural heritage, historical preservation and reinterpretation work, a field of artisitic creation in its own right, regardless of the fact that this needs to reference and reuse older work. Having overlong copyright devours our future understanding of recent history, to the extent that the cost of researching and obtaining rights to works long out of publication exceeds the commercial benefit in doing so.

My own take on where these compromises might sensibly lead is that copyright terms should be different for different creative industries, probably no longer than 10 - 14 years for non-recreational software, 20 years for music, photos and literature and 30 for movies and computer games. Movies and software games are likely to need longer terms to be viable, due to the greater costs involved in their creation. But there need to be limits. For the exceptional movie which can still be watched with great interest 30 years after its first public showing this will be described as a "classic", surely a greater accolade to its creators than residual revenue cut off by democratic law through this work entering the public domain at that point. Interestingly, this reasoning awards the shortest duration here for the art I am myself most skilled in. The reason for having a much shorter copyright for business software is because this obsoletes sooner making it unsaleable, and if kept in copyright longer than it is marketable this hinders efforts at digital preservation, both of the software and systems on which this software runs, and in respect of the data formatted by such software which itself is likely to have cultural and historical importance at some point in the future.

Personally I think the need to reward artists will in future be ensured to the extent required by expanding the new commerce in art which becomes possible based on the acceptance of legitimacy of non commercial copying - in the sense that networking services, blank media and consumer electronics and computing equipment sold for the purpose of using this content can then attract appropriate sales commissions, in the same way that we now pay for the music heard in a shopping mall, on the radio or in a restaurant. We are not charged for the music at the entrance to the commercial place where the music is paid, we pay for the music as part of the cost of what we may buy there.

After the failure of PIPA and SOPA to obtain congressional support due to the recent concerted and organised Internet community backlash, I think we're very likely to see further strengthening of opposition to the privacy intrusions and gaggings which extreme copyright enforcement against non-commercial use requires.

PyLETS
Pirate

Straw man

A straw man argument is one which misrepresents opposition to an extreme position by excluding the middle ground. The middle ground here is to seek a more balanced form of copyright which does its job, of incentivising new work to the limited extent this is needed, but which does no more.

So I'm all in favour of limited and balanced IP rights, such as were described in the US constitution, when terms of 14 - 30 years were thought appropriate, and when the idea of suppressing non-commercial copying in order to maximise the business interests of commercial publishers would have been considered abhorrent. Literature and sheet music were then commonly copied non-commercially using pen and paper.

Copyright law exists to incentivise creativity and need not be legislated for more than this modest need, either by :

a. denying privacy of communications in respect of non-profit making infringement (e.g. HADOPI, DEA) or

b. through suppression of the freedom of expression of programming thought and related speech claimed to threaten copyright enforcement (e.g. the conference paper which resulted in Dimitry Sklyarov's arrest under the DMCA and Sony's litigous bullying of George Hotz ) or

c. through suppression of the freedom of speech in saying where allegedly infringing non-commercial content is located (SOPA, PIPA) or

d. by extending copyright further into the future than needed to do its job, making creation of new works referential of old works more difficult and expensive, thus defeating the original purpose of copyright.

Copyright advocacy makes a bad name for itself through the absolutism of media interests willing to trample upon any other established human rights in pursuit of copyright revenue maximisation. These are the absolutists, not those of us who in awareness and consideration of rights other than copyright are challenging these excesses and are proposing a more balanced and defensible position.

PyLETS
Pirate

few ideas are original and excessive rights are immoral

Most ideas and creativity builds on what went before. Open source just reflects the reality of the need to cut transaction costs in software. In academia referencing is about being honest with your sources. Life plus seventy years is making my partner's life hell, she's attempting to put together historical tours, and the time/effort/cost in researching when unknown photographers of old postcards died or clearing rights (which can still be charged for whether or not these exist due to information asymmetry) can become a significant cost.

That's bad enough, but occasionally you encounter a real horror story, where significant cultural content is forced out of circulation: In the case of "Eyes on the Prize" this programme content was culturally so important that enough money was raised to clear the rights, but most such works will effectively become unreusable for the maximum conceivable rights duration without similar fundraising and campaigning: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2005/01/16/eyes_on_the_prize_off_the_shelf/ .

Overlong copyright is clearly immoral when it defeats the reason why legislators created a copyright monopoly in the first place, i.e. for the promotion of the arts.

US shuts down Canadian gambling site with Verisign's help

PyLETS
Boffin

don't mess with the root or we will rebase it

"Nominet's glue records are handled courtesy of organisations within US jurisdiction so "

It wouldn't just be bad politics for US courts to attempt this kind of insanity, it would result in all non US TLD and root server operators choosing to use a new root zone provider forthwith, e.g. one coming under international law such as the ITU. That's if the latter can ever streamline their bureacracy and procedures enough to be credible within this space, but hey, this kind of idiocy is giving them an incentive to do so. It's not as if ICANN, a private company based in California are credible as a diplomatic entity in connection with relationships between sovereign nation states. ICANN don't own this space, they hold an increasingly questionable tenure on it.

Hacking scandal: James Murdoch quits UK newspaper biz

PyLETS
Flame

Excuses

Now that it's no longer his ongoing operational and damage limitation responsibility, this presumably makes it easier for him to refuse a voluntary request to be available for further statements, questioning and cross examination at Levenson or spin off enquiries. Bit difficult to answer how your organisation was spending vast sums on bribes and payments for criminal actvity when the budget holders and more senior execs claim not to have known how the money was being spent.

Tory minister: Let's exploit our rich resource of mud, er, wind

PyLETS
WTF?

spot price falling

"The more wind power is deployed the more the spot price will fall "

It's called economies of scale. Wasn't the complaint that wind was too expensive and small scale ? You can't please some people.

"when the wind is blowing and rise when it isn't."

Which puts a premium on storage, making it economic to upgrade hydro and dual purpose paired water supply dams, and ship electricity from the west of Ireland, where they plan to combine the 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_Ireland

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