* Posts by Voland's right hand

5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011

NASA funds sexy, stealthy, sideways supersonic flying wing

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Devil

Re: Red herring design

First of all, the idea is not as bonkers as it seems. Quite a good one actually.

1. It really needs to be efficient only in hypersonic mode. Subsonic is a matter of "getting there" and "getting back". Symmetric shapes are very reasonable in hypersonic flight.

2. Who said it has to be symmetric in the first place. It has 2 operating orientations, not 4. So it does _NOT_ need to be symmetric at all. It is not that difficult to do an asymmetric shape which flies well. Scaled composites ARES is a good example. It is as asymmetric as assymmetric gets and it flies very well :)

3. Subsonic efficiency especially at low speed can be improved considerably through wing mechanization - slats, etc. That is besides the fact it may not be necessary as the wing shape does not need to be symmetric in the first place.

4. Most of hypersonic lift in the more efficient designs is generated by deflecting sonic boom reflections from the engine intakes off the wings and the fuselage. So engines are probably in the wrong place - they need to be on top, not on bottom. However, for subsonic some of the problems may be solved by going Coanda like An-72. Dunno, without running tunnel tests hard to say.

5. Transition is the most difficult part here (not any symmetric/asymmetric arguments). Even if it is 100% done by the computer there will be loss of lift and loss of control during the process. To put it bluntly, to satisfy basic safety requirements the designers will have to design a shape which allows the aircraft to successfully enter and exit what is effectively a flat spin at will. AFAIK that is yet to be accomplished by any aircraft.

'iPhone 5' released by Chinese Apple copycat

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Devil

Re: Well..

This is released before Shiny No 5. If it's look-n-feel is identical to Shiny No 5 it will get interesting. It is released _BEFORE_ it so these guys can pretend that it was Apple who copied it... Where is the popcorn...

Leaked Genius Bar manual shows Apple's smooth seductions

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Devil

Re: Impervious

Some intrinsic... Some acquired...

If you grew up on the east side of the iron curtain during the days of the great gerontocracies you are probably immune to any sort of patronization (empathic or not).

Google gets hands on 'glove-cam' patent

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Devil

Re: And the purpose is...?

IIRC the power glove did not have a camera.

However, if memory serves me right, surgical gloves with a camera on them have been around for a long time. It is just one of the many forms of an endoscope. You do not wave these though - you generally stick 'em in places known as "where sun does not shine".

Open source author pulls code after GPL abuse

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Devil

He needs to read the GPL

There is no such thing as unauthorized fork under GPL. Any fork is authorized fair and square as long as the original copyright notices are retained and any derivative work is GPL too.

As a matter of fact he is violating the GPL too as there is no such thing as withdraw. Once it is out and once you have distributed it (which he has) you are obliged to supply the source for a reasonable time after that.

The only possibly "unauthorized" bit is the "commercial" distribution. However you are allowed to distribute commercially GPL software too. There is nothing wrong about that (once again, subject to notices, copyright, source, etc).

XBMC media player now running on Android, Nexus Q

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Devil

More like "I can has a fire extinguisher"

One of the reasons why I do not run XBMC as a media center is that it does not have proper idle handling. It just cycles through pretty UI pictures full blast when in idle. In fact on many platforms it will eat more CPU idle than playing. That may work fine on a console but stinks royally elsewhere.

Coming back to the idea of running it on a mobile device - if it has retained its original boneheaded design and lack of idle handling - no thanks. I do not want my android device to burn my knees or set the table on fire.

US deploys robot submarine armada against Iranian mines

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Devil

Re: Sea Fox Repurposed

And you think that the support team which has launched said fox will be twiddling their thumbs. On a second thought - yeah, why not, even more stupid things have happened in the military.

In any case, it should be possible to improve this thing so that more of it is reusable (detachable warhead, etc) if it has to be used en-mass. For a limited deployment 100k military list pricing is not that bad - f.e. a modern torpedo costs north of 10k.

Apple rejoins EPEAT green tech cert program

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Devil

Yep

Their silly rules are quite explicit in specifying that "joe average recyling plant worker" should be able to disassemble the kit for recycling. I do not quite see Apple current generation of kit complying to their "silly rules".

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Devil

Re: Our relationship with EPEAT has become stronger as a result of this experience...

Quote And crank the RDF generators up to 11!

Exactly.

Is it me being particularly thick on a Saturday morning or there is just no way for its gear to stay certified. Key requirement is ease of dissassembly for recycling purposes. Disassemble a new MacBook Pro or Macbook air anyone?

UK's web super-snoop powers could be extended to councils

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Devil

The problem is not with the councils having access

The problem is with the councils _ALLOWED_ to investigate in the first place.

It is _NONE_ of their f***ing business to investigate. It should be the police (or the taxman) doing it with them being allowed only to provide technical assistance when and where needed. Councils should be allowed to request a matter to be investigated and that is where their powers should end.

Unfortunately this is not the case - councils are allowed by UK law and precedent to pry into what is:

1. Various cases of fraud by misrepresentation - all the "who lives where and is entitled to what" cases.

2. Environmental issues of various sizes starting from minor misdemeanors like fly tipping to things that are criminal and have well defined crimes on the statute book.

3. Fraud of various shapes, colors and sizes related to the building trade and city planning.

4. Tax offenses of various shapes and sizes related to local taxation.

The pretext is that it will be "cheaper" than the police doing this. This pretext is false - each council uses hundreds of people across multiple departments where the police (and HMRC) would have used the part-time of less than 5-10 people to cover the same region. On top of that the councils _FAIL_ to bring most of the cases that should to be prosecuted to prosecution.

One you have fixed the underlying cause there will be no need for the council to look into anything. Until then, they will continue to ask.

LOHAN to brew thermite for hot ignition action

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Devil

Re: Thermite

Make sure you _DRY_ it very well if you use this approach of building a thermite head.

I am speaking this as a chemist and someone who can now turn the sausages on the BBQ without a fork - I had an unfortunate incident with humid thermite during my first year in a university. It was wet and went into an air-dust cloud which burned instantaneously. I got lucky - 3a degree burns across most of my palms and a few spots of 3b resulting in losing most of the heat and pain sensitivities in them forever.

So based on experience - make sure it is in correct proportions (a bit difficult using the wet dip method) and is dried properly. Otherwise... Things can get funny...

Google Nexus 7 Android tablet

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Devil

Who cares about the SD slot, can I have a car craddle please

7 inch is exactly 2DIN on a car.

If someone starts printing out simple "amplifier only" units that take this as a screen + controls were are going to see some very interesting jitters in the last place where the AV industry continues to charge insane amounts of money for an abysmal 10+ year old near-obsolete set of features.

China reveals new strategy of stockpiling rare earths

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Devil

Re: So what if they are stockpiling?

Quote: "The only way to remove the stranglehold on rare minerals that China has would be to open up the Australian mines to run at a loss..."

No. The existence of EXPORT quotas entitles everyone to IMPORT quotas as a retaliatory measure.

Europe's prang-phone-in-every-car to cost €5m per life saved

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Devil

Re: AirBag activation

1. Women + Fiat. Let me guess - a petite.

Fiat is notorious for not having their airbags activate if the "weight sensor" under the seat decides that you have a kid in it. There was at least one recall on the Stilo and a few on others for the same reason (the limit on the Stilo being set to values where it throws an airbag fault for any smaller size adult).

2. There are _LOTS_ of sensors in a car (including said sensors for weight which are regularly faulty in some Fiats) which override the airbag deployment - belts, door closure, etc. The fact that the car did not deploy the airbag does not mean it did not detect the crash so if the cellular notification takes input from the crash detector _PRIOR_ to any of the specific airbag overrides it may still be useful and reliable.

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Devil

Re: Normal prank in 10 years

Not if the unit is active only with the key in the ignition which is likely to be the case if the unit is integrated with the car stereo/dashboard.

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Devil

Re: Nanny state...

The emergency services are already called to more or less every knock where the airbag is activated (which is likely to be the trigger indicator to invoke this system in most vehicles).

So this is not much different.

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Devil

Wrong numbers

The 100£ assumes nothing is in the car, not even a factory fitted stereo. Sorry, that is utter b***s.

For an average low-end car with a stereo sans GPS and sans 3G with some sort of stereo the incremental should be under 50£. This is roughly what it will cost to replace the stereo controls with Android or some embedded clone of Windows, add a limited SIM and basic GPS and connect the "active" indicator from the airbags control unit to a GPIO pin.

This cost drops to zero going upmarket. The ~50 is for todays equivalent of Peugeout 106 (or whatever the cheap model of the sole manufacturer obstinate to install Eu recommended safety features without a regulatory mandate).

The moment you go up from there the incremental cost to the stereo drops rapidly to zero as it is likely to be Android driven anyway, have traffic updates anyway and as you go in the upper half of the market have GPS anyway. This directive will simply accelerate this a bit.

The math is also broken - while you may save only 2500 lives you are also likely to reduce dramatically various costs across the medical systems by having a trauma team in place and in time even for less critical injuries. So you also have benefit for lives "improved", not just those saved.

The only people who will be bummering here are the mobile operators which have to deal with a few tens of millions of SIMs (including roaming) in continental Europe. However, once again - this cost goes to zero upmarket because the units will be using a service anyway.

Did your iPhone 'just stop working' - or did you drop it in your BEER?

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Devil

Re: I'm pretty sure my Nokia 7650 already had something like this.

The earliest piece of tech I can think of to have it were ancient (pre-electronic days) disposable flash lamps. These had a calibrated quantity of Mg, in a mixture of gas with the electric contact serving just for ignition. The unpleasant thing about the setup was that moisture getting into the lamp gave it the tendency to explode instead of producing a nice well-behaved flash. This is why all of these had some _BOG_ standard coloured silicagel spot. If the spot was white the lamp was safe to use. If it was colored - chuck it away (unless you fancy an explosion).

Any _ANCIENT_ photography book contains reference to said device and it used to be in mass production up to a decade or so after WW2.

So some really old prior art here and plenty of newer one.

Ten... alien invasions

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Devil

Re: What... No Hitchhikers Series?

No "Species"

No "Stargate" (the series).

No ...

Very lame list...

'Young people don't want to become like us', say IT pros

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Devil

Re: You could say

Bingo David, I was going to say the same.

Work is _NOT_ life. Work is a source of income so you can _HAVE_ a life. Outside work you know. My wife has no clue what I do at work. Neither do my kids and that is exactly the way I want it. Neither do any of my friends who do not happen to be colleagues as well. No shop talk at the table, no shop talk in the bar.

That is probably one of the reasons why the IT profession on the continent is not so much of a a nerd central (especially in Eastern Europe).

They draw the work/life line in considerably more clear terms there. You do not need to explain to an Eastern European such basic concepts like "work != жизнь" for any values of жизнь, regardless of the amount of motivational posters, cosy happy color cushions, fruit bowl feeders in the kitchenette and socialist motivational slogans plastered on the office wall.

Microsoft: Don't overclock Windows 8 unless you like our new BSOD

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Devil

Re: So, to summarise...

No.

The summary is - always use CPU frequency scaling and have a cooling system which has feedback control of some sorts - either 4 pin fans or 3 pin fans with integrated thermal sensors and rev control. Make sure you do not have hot pockets, etc too.

This would explain the rather strange laptop stats. The average laptop cooling system sucks bricks sidewize through a thin straw compared to a desktop. However, all of it is controlled by the OS (via acpi or whatever other interface is available) and cranked up to match the heat output. In addition to that air is taken from outside and dumped to the outside. There is no internal recirculation.

Out of all "other" reasons this is the most likely reason for "white box sucketh" results too. Most whitebox manufacturers do not have the resources to spend on analyzing and fixing airflow in their systems so they end up with hotspots here and there. Otherwise the parts which they use are not that different from "big labels".

By the way - the summary is totally valid for Linux too. If you want it stable - ensure that your cooling system operates properly and is matched by appropriate controls in the OS - lmsensors, fan control or the odd script which starts limiting the CPU frequency if the temperature crosses a particular threshold.

Stratfor settles class-action over Anon megahack with freebies

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Devil

Re: $1.75m out of pocket

Claimants are Stratfor (ex)-customers which have been fed their "product" for a while at the prices usually paid for. You do not buy this kind of services one off - you buy them on a recurring basis. So, actually, it is pretty safe that they would have bought it - same as the month of service.

Second win for Apple as Galaxy Nexus sales banned in US

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Devil

Re: Don't think Samsung will be too upset...

Quote: "It invented by a small company who made multi-touch keyboards and trackpads before Apple bought them. "

That is where Apple got the tech, it is not where it got the IPR. Most of the IPR is from one well known place where a lot of stuff got invented and none of it got implemented. I am tempted to say why, but I will not.

Hint - look at the original assignees of the patents used by Apple to sue people over touchscreen stuff.

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Devil

Re: Don't think Samsung will be too upset...

Cars, HiFis and TVs _HAVE_ that ridiculous level of patent encumberance. A single modern car diesel engine has anywhere between a few hundred and a few thousand patents protecting it. It is rather unsurprising that there are a handful of sources for them nowdays. Even those have to cross-license a lot of IPR to be able to produce them.

The reason why you do not often hear about silly lawsuits is because all big players:

1. Always do FTO (freedom to operate) analysis before entering a market and quite often do fto just for new products. The standard IT industry practice of "ignore patents during development" is an absolute No-No there. You will get fired if you try to develop a new car without checking for IPR first. In IT you are likely to get fired if you do the opposite - actually check for IPR when developing.

2. Have portfolios in their main product areas sufficiently big for a mutual self-assured destruction.

3. There are very few patents by organizations which fail to monetize them so end up selling them to trolls. The up-front cost of R&D is very high so anything it produces is monetized. It is impossible for the car, Hi-Fi and TV industry to produce the car, TV, HiFi equivalents of the designs for the iPhonesque touchscreen UI, patent them and sit on that for 10 years doing totally nothing (no comment why).

Ten... Androids for under 200 quid

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Devil

Defy MINI retails at 79£ at the moment from amazon, not 150. This firmly puts it on top of the ranking based on its sheer value for the money.

By the way, it is not its screen which is unresponsive, it is the horrid keyboard app. Replace that with Go keyboard or something else which is more sane (and less cluttered) and you have a very nice phone.

I just got Junior one of these to replace the N95 which ended up under the council lawnmower mowing the school playground. IMHO it looks like it has a chance of surviving for the next few months :)

Price Waterhouse Cooper: Only mobile comms can SAVE HUMANITY

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Devil

Re: 2012 or 1912?

Actually, most fishing dingies (it will be wrong to call them boats) in the developing world have no radio whatsoever. In fact, they will never have any money to buy a proper ship radio rig until they are decimated by the natural transition to "big boat fishing".

A mobile phone for them is a lifeline in more than one sense of the word. I would not overestimate its "bargaining ability" though - most boats which are mobile phone dependent are 2-3 man rigs which can operate only within the range of one fishing port so there is very little space for bargaining there.

While his examples are outright bogus, there is indeed some growth induced by communications infrastructure.

I would put access to medical aid as one of the much more important factors here. When people live day-to-day between being eaten by a shark and a crocodile you cannot expect them to produce surplus and try to trade it. They have little need for that. It may rain. It may not. I may live. I may die. Whatevvvverrrr... Try to expect such a person to make more to get more. You will get a blank stare.

Breaking this fatalism by bringing medical aid (which depends on comms) and information is way more important than any "trading benefits".

Patent trolling cost the US $29bn in 2011

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Devil

Re: partially bollocks

They do not, but someone else did at some point earlier in time. Most trolls buy patents approaching end of life from big corporations who have failed to implement them and monetize them.

One particular two letter entity in the UK is a prime "troll feeder" example - it used to do lots of R&D so it has a substantial patent portfolio. However, it has failed miserably to build on any of it and its monetization is mostly limited to selling stale patents in their last 2 years of lifespan to trolls. Hint - it is the place Apple got a lot of its UI patents from. There are others.

In any case it is a temporary past-time. It _WILL_ go away.

The management consluttant driven "efficiency" and "though shall not build without a business case" drive in the type of big corporations which produce patents but fail to monetize them has killed off most of their R&D. The average "Troll Feeder" patent output is now a trickle of what it was 15+ years ago. In a few years time the trolls will no longer have troll fodder to eat.

Sony SmartWatch Android remote

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Devil

Re: So.... pebble watch was not a totally new idea?

Quote: I don't see the point of smart-watches: Meetings run by control freaks, meetings with customers, etc. If I was still in my previous job, this would have been in the post already.

As far as their previous purchase being laughably obsolete - well, LiveView version one was dead on arrival. Bad strap design, bad watch software execution - you name it. The "proper" bluetooth watch (the one I believe Sony designed jointly with Cittizen) was too skimpy on the featureset to justify its nearly 200£ price tag. So IMO they are obsoleting Alpha (not even Beta) products here so nothing wrong with that.

Microsoft's offices gutted in Athens arson attack

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Devil

Ladies and gentlemen...

Ladies and gentlemen, let me present you the Trojan Van.

Timeo Danaes driving a van with gas bottles...

Super Micro fattens up Xeon E5 nodes with FatTwins

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Devil

Re: Ooooooh

I do not work in a datacenter either (nowdays).

A variable RPM fan which is spinning only as fast as needed in a well designed case is likely to have half the failures (or even less) of something that is spun up to hypersonic speeds over its design period. Even if you have all of your nodes cranked 100% you still get uneven cooling within a rack, hot/cold parts of the datacenter, "capricious" racks and isles - you name it. So variable speed can take car of that and drop your failure rate (and increase MTBF) even in the fully loaded case. Doubly so if you have hot standby nodes and some form of routine duty cycle/replacement.

Similarly, I would rather have something where the designer has gone around the _WHOLE_ motherboard looking for hotspots doing the thermals instead of slapping the biggest fan possible and ignoring 70C+ in some nooks and crannies.

So yeah, viva la high-RPM victory (going hypersonic towards crash and burn is always fun).

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Devil

Re: Ooooooh

Only if you are deaf.

This is Supermicro, remember? Every rig of theirs I have used over the years had fixed revs fans at 6k+ using brute force instead of proper airflow design. If something gets hot - put another spot fan there. Credit where credit due - the approach is cheap, cheerful and works. It does however produce the sound of a Concorde on take off. I would be seriously surprised if this rig is any different.

You should crack the bubbly if it is at around ~70db. It will probably be more. I would not want to work in a datacenter full of these.

Hotelier faces FTC data breach lawsuit

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Devil

Re: Why were they storing credit card data?

Booking guarantee for pre-booking, card on check-in for expedited check-out, etc.

Standard practice in the hotel industry is to store the card at least for the duration of the stay. Now, did they go beyond that is something we do not know and the lawsuit will tell.

One more reason not to use them anyway (that is one hotel chain which I always filter out).

Russian K-force operatives cuff suspected Carberp trojan bank raider

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Devil

Re: Russia's MVD "K" Administration

Probably not - the suspect was charged under articles of the criminal code different from section 58.

He is also in one piece...

Oh, by the way, I know that Народный Комиссариат Внутренних Дел is spelled with N, not M :)

T-Platforms to roll out itsy-bitsy HPC cluster

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Devil

This looks messy

Did I read it wrong or there is no backplane?

You still have to wire the the nodes to the switch using external wiring on the back of the cluster. This is fugly and definitely under the usual high standard of T-platforms engineering.

UK regulators eye up Facebook's $1bn Instagram bid

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Devil

Let's put the art aside, shall we?

I am going to put the art argument aside as my 10 year old can do photography better than most adults (I have taken my time to teach him and try to refresh it from time to time too).

It is the predominant content and application which I have a problem with here.

Social. Picture. Mobile. Camera - for me this spells the words "Happy Slapping Riot Lolz, beat the N00B" in 32 point bold all caps.

I can see how this can be worth 1Bn in advertising revenue to someone who has no principles and does not care what it is used for as long as it brings impressions. Fits the ideas of F***book spot on.

Are you a hot BABE in heels and a short skirt? SCIENCE is for YOU

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Re: In real life ...

As another former Chemist - you _OBVIOUSLY_ did not graduate with Chemistry in Eastern Europe. I am not even going to mention Biology or Biotech.

Which leads to a thought - was it that difficult just to go to a Eastern European Biology dept cafeteria and take some interviews of how does Ms Plague, PhD look like. No need of stupid videos with idiotic sexist lipstick sterieotypes and even more idiotic "science" stereotypes.

LinkedIn faces class action suit over password leak

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Devil

Re: Definitions - are you sure?

"But if your salt is random..." - store your salt. This is what unix passwords do.

Open /etc/shadow and see for yourself

The password is stored as $SaltType$Salt$Hash (for GNU extensions). If there is no dollar signs you are dealing with the original 30+ year old format where the salt is the first two characters and the rest is DES crypted salt+password.

If I had to code a web app this day I would use these glibc functions (as readily available) but store the salt separately and rate limit the amount of queries to the salt. Ditto for passwords. You can do that on a database level or use an interim service which provides some form of auth token interface.

Anyone trying to dump the passwd+salt database would be flagged immediately as they will exceed the query rate limit.

For someone the size of LinkedIn not doing this shows a lack of incompetence which is not justified by their valuation :)

It is not that difficult.

The Hague says Apple infringed Samsung patent

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Devil

Re: Yeah but...

Why stop with the foot?

In any case, they have shot themselves there already. Litigation should be the last resort in an IPR dispute especially between opponents capable of mutual assured destruction.

EU boffins ponder robot copters that carry people but no pilots

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Devil

Self driving car is much harder.

1. Other people.

Google may succeed in California (not that a lot of the US is any different) - driving there is like driving in a place inhabited by sedate OAPs. Try driving in Italy or the Balkans. I would not dare thinking about a driverless car in India (let's assume we have to deal only with psychotic drivers, not with cows).

The autopilot is not the only automated system in a plane. Collision avoidance on larger aircraft has been standardized and automatic for a very long time now and it generally works. We hear about collisions only in small aircraft or cases where someone has decided to override or turn off the collision avoidance (as in the infamous crash over Germany under Swiss air control). So there is a considerable history of people trusting automatic systems even in "sh*t just hit the fan" moments.

2. Legacy.

There is a century worth of legacy - roads were made to be navigated by people. Here USA is particularly bad - difficult to read (machine and human) signs, non-pictographic road signage, plethora of wildly varying speed restrictions, etc.

GPS, omniscient maps, etc are all nice, but they get you to a point. Unless the signage system changes to something more machine readable (or is augmented by machine readable interfaces) there will be corner cases where the AI and sign recognition system will fail (especially in the USA).

So coming back to the PAV - it will be easier to make it driverless than the current cars. By far. Less work and less legacy to contain with.

Schneier spanks AV industry over Flame failures

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Devil

Re: Reactive broken model?

They can do very little as the model is determined by the OS.

They exists solely because of the vulnerabilities and problems in the typical install of the Microsoft OS family. If these are fixed once and for all most of the AV industry will be out of a job or so the theory goes.

In this day and age this means that the malware writers will move to F***book and other platforms that have "opportunities" for malware propagation and the AV will promptly follow.

Google to ICO: We had no idea Street View data slurp was happening

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Devil

Not just hotspots

Android (and iOS for that matter) use SSIDs to improve location fix from GPS in addition to old good cell site data.

In order to have a usable database for this you have to do some slurping first and not just open APs - you slurp all SSIDs and MACs as well to distinguish between hotspots and remote offices.

I suspect that they do not need to do that any more as the phones provide enough data to keep it up to date.

Asteroid zips past Earth

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Devil

Re: 4 days warning, and it's 500m across....

I had the same thought.

So much for all the effort into monitoring near earth object and so much for all the noise and panic around various 10-30m objects.

Apple adds gay and lesbian icons to iOS 6 messaging

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Joke

@TheOtherHobbes

Given the limited resolution, how could they look less shit?

And here is your real answer for the Retina Display.

WD beams in 802.11n Wi-Fi stations

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Devil

Re: So when the hard drive craps at 1yr 1day after purchase,,,

You will probably need to do that earlier because it will reboot if you connect an "unsupported" device to the wifi network.

If you try to file that as a bug WD staff will helpfully tell you in something that is supposed to be English zat zey support only Windoze and zat it is not zeir problem zat zeir device reboots the moment you connect any of the non-Windoze uPnP implementations to the network.

I have a full email trail for the above - that is not a joke. It was for their STB (WD Live) so there may be some element of YMMV.

In any case - caution is definitely advisable.

openSUSE 12.2 release delayed, team calls for a rethink

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Entertaining, Suse is where Debian was a couple of years back

Debian had a similar situation a couple of years back with the release of Lenny (if memory serves m right) being continuously postponed.

It took some "reigning in" of democracy to get past that one - sometimes you just need an authorita(rian | tive) release manager to get the job done :)

Asus Transformer Pad TF300

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Devil

I still do development so Android and Shiny Shiny does not do the job for me.

If it runs ubuntu or debian it will make my monthly gadget shopping list. I would love to drop my "airplane backpack weight" by 1kg and leave the (rather svelte) Lenovo I use today at home.

Volkswagen Up!

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Facepalm

Re: "Unique to a car in this class is the City Emergency Braking system"

So it is not a bad copy of a long list of better designed, better executed and more fun to drive cars by Daihatsu and Suzuki?

We have seen only some of them in Europe and even the ones we have seen have been crippled by Toyota (Daihatsu) and GM (Suzuki) marketing. In Japan they have had ~10+ models across all manufacturers in this class at any give time for the last 30+ years. Hyundai and Kia also do cars in that category (Amica, Atoz, i10, Picanto, etc). If you want to "drawn" in a sea of cars in that category you need to go to the far east.

In any case, VW is neither original, nor the best in class. Its only redeeming feature is that it is VW which for some strange reason makes some people have a hard on and give it unjustified 0.95 reviews.

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Shrunk my a***

You call that shrunk? My fleet of Sirion Mk3s (I got two - 2003 and 2004) is 3.68 m in length (only 18 cm longer) and they have nearly double the luggage space, 5 doors, can seat 4 adults properly or 3 adults and two kids. VW still has a lot to learn in terms of interal space optimization and design :)

You call that fun to drive? The Sirions can hit 0-60 in 8s and the 4x4 can go onto country roads with several inches of soft mud on them from a weekly bout of torrential rain (like the one we are having now in the UK or the one they had in Europe in mid may). Now that is what I call fun to drive :)

They also do 52mpg if driven sensibly (very difficult with a car that goes like the proverbial clappers and growls like an angry bullterrier about to break off its leash). So VW economy is also just barely on par with a 2003 car.

One word: Meah.... Not impressed, not impressed... At all..

Sole British 'naut Major Tim embarks on NASA deep space mission

Voland's right hand Silver badge
Devil

Re: One of a kind som other time

Sorry metric-imperial mis-hap, Conshelf 3 was at 100m (300 feet) which is still impressive even by today's standards.

Voland's right hand Silver badge
Devil

One of a kind som other time

Cousteau operated a whole list of habitats like that including a whole small "underwater city" in the Red Sea 40 or so years ago. So did US Navy, germans and a few others.

This NASA habitat is a small remnant of the glorious past compared to Sealab 2-3 (in size) or Conshelf 3 (in depth - 300m). It is a pity - we still know about the deep sea less than we know about the surface of the moon and we still do so little about it.