Posts by Voland's right hand

Re: @Voland

Do you still think that submitting to the ECHR is just like signing an international treaty?

ECHR scope, authority and submission to it are a part of an international treaty.

It is a treaty Britain invented (Winston Churchill, 1943), drafted (post-war 1949-1950, too lazy to dig out the actual names of foreign office and law dignitaries which did it), signed as a founding country (1950) and has kept signing every amendment (14 protocols or thereabouts) ever since.

If anyone needs meds this is the anti-ECHR brigade. Whatever is given to people having constant delusions and living in la-la land.

Re: His (her) Master's Voice

There is a word for this kind of behaviour by a women, Whore

Why only in women? The moment you apply this term to politicians it transcends sexual orientation.

As my dad used to say. Son, never mistake a v**ina for a c*nt. The former is an essential part of anatomy in half of the human population. The latter is a type of character, usually male and most often found in politicians and celebrities.

Re: Anonymous = failure

Since being founded. The more paranoiac part of me still thinks that Anonymous in its current form is failed black op. Someone _WANTED_ to associate the symbolism in V for Vendetta with negative in the public eye. They have mostly succeeded too.

You are mistaking the contest (which is pocket change) with overall access to EBU material. EBU material != contest.

Romania has failed to pay for their EBU dues and content they got (and used) from the EBU.

As far as putting Simon and the Eurovision contest crew and participants on the same boat without water, food and oars and letting them sail into the sunset - I am with you. That would be a splendid use of UK viewers money. Can we have the producers of Big Brother on the same boat too? They can produce the resulting real time feed from the boat as their final farewell programme. It will be fitting (especially when they start eating each other).

Come on, it is a USB stick, not an Opel/Vauxhall radio for which you have lost the PIN :)

He is an Australian resident for tax purposes (and actually on the way to naturalize as a cittizen). The amount he earns puts him into a bracket with a max 45% and effective 30-45% rate. Adding the health insurance levy and other taxes you probably get close to 50% - the maximum possible effective tax rate for an Australian resident. I doubt it is above 50% though.

Re: The soundtrack of my youth

You missed Keith Emerson. This year too.

What a lucky man... He was...

Re: master suites

Any site which has a master key gets whatever it deserves.

Like it or not:

1. The master key concept is known in the security industry as a backdoor

2. The master key can be reverse engineered from any lock/cylinder which matches it.

It walk like a backdoor, it quacks like a backdoor it is a backdoor. Unlocked one.

Re: Wonder how much

From the context, it would appear that this was around 25 years

If the grants have not been repaid, 87£ with 25 years of compound interest assuming an average 5% rate are 294 million. 5% is actually significantly less than Intel bond rates over some of this period so its a fair deal

So if the grant has not been repaid - well, they should pay up. Same as for any other grant.

Re: ... will help send large amounts of cargo, habitats and propellant to Mars...

Poo ionizes nicely. Perfect propellant :)

Re: omitted

That is not the trick.

The trick is to put some sprinklers in the "free range" portion. The chickins do not like rain, so while "legally" free range, they stay inside and fatten up (or egg lay at caged hen rate).

So on paper (and on your app), you can have a chickin per whatever number of square meters you want. In reality, they are all sitting inside the shed at near-caged-hen density.

Re: .... and 29 of his former colleagues have also been punished.

Should that be "relatives". Reading between the lines this sounds like "business as usual" - nepotism off the scale and then some.

He himself, wife, brother in law all working in a classified crypto lab. Who else? Mother? father? nephew? cousin? Cousin's wife? Cousin's cat? Cousin's hamster?

You are not the only one

A lot of us who wear beards today have grown up in the days when orthodontist interventions had a much lower success rate, varicella vaccine was unheard of and some of us have even been around smallpox before it was eradicated.

We carry beards to conceal one or more of the above and that has nothing to do with misogynism.

Re: Mature markets and good enough for home use

This has been the case for 3+ years now. A 3 year old laptop with a mobile 1.7 GHz AMD A4 from those days is perfectly fit for purpose for most of us. Ditto for desktops - My 4.1 GHz A8 is perfectly fit for purpose 3 years after buying it. If we will start looking at "replacement candidates" the number is now at 5+ years (early E series CPUs and Atom). That is several times longer than the replacement cycle on which the PC industry has grown up (2-3 years average)

It hit AMD earlier as it is limited to CPUs and GPUs so it is more vulnerable to the computer replacement cycle.

The effect on Intel was delayed by Intel doing flash, networking and other odds and sods which were not affected as badly as the CPUs. That cushion has been exhausted as well as the sub-250G flash drive prices have tanked. As a result Intel will have to adjust to the "no-more-growth" paradigm.

Re: within the grasp of powerful crime gangs and government agents

When you work for a crime gang or a pervasively corrupt government you tend to know you're not the good guy

With all due respect, the definition of good when getting into 3 letter territory gets very fuzzy in most countries. Even countries which start from the "moral high ground" quickly descend into financing "freedom fighters" which take whole schools hostage and execute primary school kids.

In fact, compared to some of the more reprehensible acts of KGB, GRU, CIA and friends, the mob looks like a catholic nun convent.

Yeah. I suspect they will more than make the difference on the winner not being one of the usual suspects.

Re: rant

Have you read the code?

I have actually. I was blamed to be one of the registered DC persons a while back when I was still doing sysadmin for a living.

That is exactly why I am saying that the law should grow some teeth - that would help not just with the drones, but with "one nation under CCTV" too so we do not have crazy excesses like the Ring of Steel around Royston.

Energy is not (very) relevant here

A phone in a landfill (or any piece of modern consumer electronics) in contact with water and acids from all the organic matter which is rotting along it will start leaking a coctail of toxic stuff.

1. Lead - this is actually the most harmless part. It is also not leached at a high rate because it is mostly in the display glass - it will take decades for it to leak from there.

2. Rare earths

3. Tantalum from the capacitors

4. Organometalics from the display

5. ...

It has to be processed and scrapped correctly for environmental reasons. Getting anything back is an added bonus.

Re: Oh, GOP establishment....

Because I live in a different continent.

And how exactly it will help you if you have said idiot in control of Minuteman missiles?

Re: Read it till this point

Wow! Who knew?

Lots of people. The "is this face pretty, trustworthy, etc" is something that has been researched very heavily and some of it using proper scientific methods and large data samples. Similarly, what makes a fully or semi-artificial (made from multiple real elements) face for an avatar believable or not. Absolute "perfection" as symmetry, etc is perceived as "creepy" by 80%+ of the population.

All of this is actually very well known - lots of (fairly) scientific papers on the subject. Some of it in use in 3 letters too by the way - at least some of this has been financed by them in the past as they sometimes need this (or at least used to) for agent selection.

Clearly, whoever wrote the AI which looked for "symmetry first" has failed to do the most basic research in his field.

Re: "Math cannot frustrate court orders"

Congress shall make no laws that conflict with those of mathematics or nature

laws of mathematics == laws of nature. However, I see your point, when explaining things like this to liberal arts you have to use small words and things like 2+2.

Re: Piracy Ok Too?

Paying for movies and music isn't how many live their lives either.

Paying for movies and music isn't how 22 year olds live their lives either. That generation simply is not willing to pay. They have accepted as a norm not to own anything and to have their dirty underwear exposed to all and sundry. They however expect everything for "free" in return.

Re: Astounding !

Especially when you consider that in the UK, many people living just a few miles from major towns would kill for that kind of broadband speed.

Well, this one is obvious - the connection to ExoMars was not supplied by the GPO. Or whatever it is called today.

Re: fire hazard

Utter bollocks.

This is all I can say when hearing this from an official a country where 95% of the residential housing is wooden (actually nowdays OSB3) panels assembled on a wooden frame. It may be violating other reqs (such as minimal size, space and amenities), but fire hazard? Give me a break.

You do not need to

You need wallets. And election season.

Feinstein represents silly valley if memory serves me right. If she continues down this road her chances of being re-elected are highly correlated with Lucipher working for the Mountainview county council as a snow plough driver.

Was the evidence like this?

http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news2/Arnold-s-T-800-Terminator-Runs-Linux-Kernel-4-1-We-re-All-Doomed-473236-2.jpg

Voted yes for exact same reason

First, while the ECU does not have a precise RTC, it has one in order to timestamp logs. It would record the crash and you can interrogate it. All you need is to compare its time to the phone time and you will get the crash time exactly down to fractions of a second. In addition to that, depending on what apps you are running the crash may also be recorded on the phone accelerometer. So the argument about "inexact time of the crash" is illiterate, at best.

Second, from a legal perspective, this should not need any new law. Existing law in most jurisdictions allows the police full and unfettered access to the car, inhabitants and cargo to investigate a crash.

Third, there is a long standing precedent basis which curtails the right not to self-incriminate yourself in such circumstances. For example, you are automatically guilty if you refuse to submit yourself to an alcohol or drug test in the aftermath of a crash. Same for speed cameras and "identifying driver", etc. The moment you get in a vehicle you wave half of your rights not to self-incriminate in pretty much any legislation worldwide.

So on the balance of things, it is better if:

1. The police does it systematically

2. The evidence obtainable through this is strictly limited by a law so the police cannot use it for fishing expeditions looking for other stuff.

If these are not in place they will do it anyway, but without any controls to limit what can they obtain and what can they use the info for.

Re: Call centers?

sarcasm tags

maybe not.

Re: I thought nukes were not a solution ?

Venturing a guess - using a penetrator, instead of a proximity or surface burst. This is feasible for "leaving" rocks - for "incoming" rocks the delta-v for a penetrator to be feasible is off the scale.

If you use a penetrator, the adjacent rock is instantly vaporized providing the necessary impactor so that the energy is not wasted.

There are some tech issues with that though:

1. You need to get the speed just right. So you need a lot of more fuel to drop the delta-v down so that the nuke does not disintegrate on impact.

2. In an ideal world, you will also need a pilot probe(s) to impact the asteroid before the nuke so that you identify it correctly as rock, ice, whatever and get the delta-v down to the correct value for the penetrator reaching optimal depth

3. For a half a ton to a ton worth of nuke (assuming a 10Mt warhead) you now need several tons of armor to form the penetrator and ensure that the nuke arrives to the spec-ed depth intact. That, once again, means a boatload of fuel.

4. It definitely works only on "leaving" rocks as suggested by these guys. An incoming rock has delta-v in the 10s of km/s. We do not possess the technology to reach it in time, drop the speed to a point where the penetrator will not disintegrate and perform an attack run.

Re: Not so stupid

What they missed is that banks and similar outfits in addition to PIR, active IR (your fav stupid spy flick laser sensor) also employ ultrasound ones (similar to the ones used by car alarms). In fact, these are cheaper when covering large spaces like open plan offices.

While it is theoretically (and sometimes practically) possible to cheat any one of these sensors on its own, it is practically impossible to do this when they are used at the same time. A perfect PIR defence will trigger active IR or ultrasound or vice versa.

Re: Corporate Mailboxes

Those are used for something else - source address and target info collection for a spear-phish.