* Posts by Voland's right hand

5759 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2011

Now VW air-pollution cheatware 'found in Audis and Porsches'

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Re: Pumping excess air into exhaust and petrol catalytic converters

You'd need the turbocharger to supply 40 times the amount of air, use just a little of it for burn and then exhaust all of it. Basically, I've just described a turbofan engine.

There is no way in hell you can comply with the noise portion of the regs at that point. 40:1 is an abominable bypass ratio too. The highest bypass turbofans do ~ 12:1. In either case, you can move the car on airflow alone - at that rate using any form of conventional transmission to spin the wheels becomes an auxiliary drive.

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Re: Is anybody surprised by now?

I call BULSHIT on the next person to claim that this is just "a few rogue software engineers, management did not know, ya?"

A few rogue software engineers? In completely different engines in different parts of the company? Both budget and luxury sector? Yeah, bollocks...

Chinese fire up world's 'most powerful' drone brain

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Happy

Re: I think it is time to start mounting erlicones on the house corners

Thanks for the correction. I meant the particular Oerlikon goods which supposedly neutral Switherland shipped to all warring parties in WW2. Namely this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oerlikon_20_mm_cannon. While it is not the best in class today (that title goes to the Soviet/Russian ZPU), you can pretend that it is an antique garden ornament commemorating Swiss neutrality in WW2.

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I think it is time to start mounting erlicones on the house corners

That has enough grunt to run most algos for abominably precise targeting and "under radar" flight which used to be a privilege of the likes of Raytheon or Almaz systems. Anything you can think of - terrain guidance by profile matching (cruise missiles), last stage guidance by visual, IR, UV or radar sig. You name it.

All you need is to mount it on one of these https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=potAETW-VG8 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa-TSNeTK-A instead of a puny electric quadcopter along with a laser altimeter and a few cameras for the terminal guidance. A few kg of high explosive optional.

Skype founders planning non-drone robodelivery fleet. Repeat, not drones

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It is still a drone

Who said that "drone" == flying. A rolling drone is still a drone (a remotely controlled robot).

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Mushroom

Re: Yeah, that'll work.

Depends what you are delivering. If it is 10kg of TNT that will be more than enough.

Boffins solve bacon crisis with newly-patented plant

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Re: I've been drying seaweed in my smokehouse for decades.

I am surprised they managed to patent it. This has been around for ages.

Oh, they did it in the USA. I am no longer surprised.

Wikipedia cracks the five-million article barrier, in English

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Persoonia terminalis

It sounded very Australian.

With this name, I was expecting yet another specie of the indigenous flora/fauna which eats people for breakfast as proper for the "Last Continent".

Utterly disappointed that it does not.

UK watchdog offers 'safe harbor' advice on US data transfers

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Re: Consent?

slightly cheaper IT back-end supply.

Not even the case in most cases. In most cases it is simply a matter of extracting more money out of its victims, err... customers.

Northrop wins $55bn contract for next-gen bomber – as America says bye-bye to B-52

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Re: Why not give the money to NASA

which would presumably allow a country to place a large mass in orbit and simply nudge it down onto the heads of whomever that country happened to be having an argument with at the time.

A set of smaller masses which resist ablation and can reach earth surface. No explosive necessary. Several hundred ceramic slabs hitting the ground at a few hundred m/sec can deliver a combined energy of a decent size nuke.

Bacon can kill: Official

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Re: To which I say....

Saying "Processed meat" causes cancer* is about as specific as saying "ceiling insulation" causes cancer.

+1.

I am not surprised that nitrites, other preservatives and anti-oxidants are carcinogenic on their own or as a combination with meat.

If meat + salt +/- pepper, thyme and savory , namely Parma, Serrano, File Elena or any of the other similar "dry cured" _REAL_ processed meat from the northern rim of the Mediterranean region (not synthetic pseudobacon or pseudoham) is carcinogenic I would like tho understand what and how.

Snowden, Schrems, safe harbor ... it's time to rethink privacy policies, says FTC commish

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Re: you've got to be kidding

And she is advocating that as a virtue. Very interesting considering that this was one of the reasons for the ECJ to invalidate the Safe Harbor.

Bacon as deadly as cigarettes and asbestos

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Call it correctly

The Daily (People's) Beobachter.

Hackers hit NATO, White House – then aimed at MH17 air disaster probe

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Re: ISIS? Like F**k!

Putin has spent 90% of his time blowing 7 kinds of excrement out of the moderate rebel forces.

True. However at 130+ sorties per day versus under 10 (over Syrian territory, I am subtracting Iraq ones here) by the allies this still makes up for more "ISIS Bashing" than any that the allies have delivered so far.

As far as "moderate", I wouldn't call Al Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula moderate. At all. Several of the other "moderates" are also religious driven and they consider the Alavite sect to which Bashar belongs the mother of all Islamic apostasies. They also intend to do to it what is done to an apostasy by "moderate" Arabian peninsula Islamists (like for example Saudi Arabia).

IMHO Putin's count of "moderate syrian opposition" being equal to about 5 people is about right. The rest (with the exemption of Kurds) are all shades of the same. By the way - he has not hit the Kurds even once which is exactly what is pissing off the Turks in this case as they are very "moderate" towards both Kurds and Alavites. In the "Armenian/1915" Turkish definition of the word "moderate".

There are no rights in this conflict. However from the choice of wrongs US and UK are supporting in that conflict, we have chosen the "wrongest".

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Re: That's not nice, but...

Gosh, who'd have thought a member of Putin's paid trol

Read the damn report. The missile attacked the target directly and exploded ahead of the cockpit.

The newer Buks in the Russian arsenal do not attack the target directly because they are specifically designed to attack targets with reduced radar and IR profile from below and looking at the aircraft "head-on"/"from the sides". They do this by going up to a predetermined coordinates calculated by the launch complex and looking at the predicted target area from _ABOVE_. I actually have seen the math for this when it first came out circa 1979 before it became classified and I personally know who derived the formulate to compute the coordinates to which the missile goes before enabling the seeker head.

There is a simple rationale behind this design - most radar sig reduction tech sucks from that point of view. So if it was a newer one it would have hit most likely in the middle of the plane from above, not ahead of the cockpit.

Based on this report and based on data published so far the "Russian supplied buk" as repeatedly claimed by Eu and USA officials does not match. That is not surprising either - the rebels pinched an unknown number of Bucks from Ukrainian military bases in the beginning of the war. That is a well known fact.

The question of why the plane was flying 20km off-corridor exactly where the rebels took down a couple of Su-25s a few days earlier is also unanswered in the report.

As far as who shot it down, it is most likely the rebels. With a Ukrainian Buk they pinched. Now why did they shoot it down - it is a different story. One we may never know. It would have taken something else besides the aircraft being 20km off-corridor in the middle of the conflict zone for them to pull the trigger. What - it will take finding who and bringing him to justice to know (if he has not been terminated long ago).

Crash this beauty? James Bond's concept DB10 Aston debuts in Spectre

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Re: I got 900,000 problems

Spoilsport.

You need to go back to the business school and the "product placement" class.

To put it bluntly, sure they have charged them _THAT_ much. Now, how much did Aston Martin pay for the product placement. I bet multiple times that.

Experts ponder improbable size of Cleopatra's asp

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Re: Scientists - Dry bites

Also it does not need to be adult a baby snake is born fully venomed and are said to be more dangerous as they have less control over there bites

Same control, but in the Cobra case considerably more aggressive. Most cobra bite incidents in India are from juvenile cobra, not adult.

Also, the most "allegoric" part of history is the snake species and name. It was written a century later by a person who would not be able to tell the difference between a cobra, a sidewinder and a lebetine viper as he lived in an area where none of these are present (Rome). In addition to that Egypt in those days traded with a various states (now well forgotten) which were between Sahara and the jungle (Kush, Aksum, etc). So if she wanted to commit suicide she could have gotten her hands on the "Guaranteed Death of Sub-Saharan Norht Africa" - the Gaboon viper. That kills. Period. Regardless of the size and age of the specimen. It is also docile enough to be carried around in a fruit basket.

Hackers pop grease monkeys' laptops to disable Audi airbags

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Seriously?

If you have access to the device which talks to the OBD2 you can do nearly anything. I would hardly call this an attack. It is like physical access - once you are plugged in, it is game over.

This attack would have been really interesting if it was successfully exploiting Android Torque or one of the fleet tracking apps. The "Phantom Menace" in the form of a white van with remotely controller breaks...

As far as the state of mechanics laptops, they are nearly all guaranteed to have updates disabled and are quite likely to be Windows XP so they can run obscure software from 10 years ago which has had no updates or Win 7, 8 or 10 version because the company has gone out of business or just because it does not give a damn. So there is little kudos for exploiting them. It is trivial.

BYOD battery bloodbath? Facebook 'fesses up to crook code

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So does the most recent Android one

The up-to-date Android f*book bundled in most manufacturer loads will run non-stop sucking 100% CPU and leaking memory if you do not have a f***book account and if you are not using it. At least on Xperia SP, M and E3 (non-operator factory load). I had to disable it on all phones in the household.

German football hero battles Nazi doppelgänger

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Missed one

They should compare Leonardo Di Caprio with Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (aka Lenin).

There is a reason too. It is called "Contracted Genetics at an Early Age".

Of course you can text and call while driving – it's perfectly safe

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Best security for the connected car - the unconnected car

I am preparing for several years of massive clusterf*** until the dust settles and the car manufacturers come to grip with the idea of security and attack from the media unit and the "connected" part. This adds to the perfect storm of emission scandals, new mandatory fuel economy specs and generation change in the hybrid/electrical and fuel economy tech.

As a result I decided that it is the right time for my primitive and unconnected vehicles to get an overhaul, full underbody restoration and a blanket gadget uplift to quell any peasant uprisings in the rear seats (including internet on the go of a TP-link 3020 running OpenWRT). Yeah, sure, the car looks dated outside and the wife is grumbling from time to time about that. So what? I can now observe the clusterf*** from the side lines.

Once the IoT and emission dust has settled in ~ 4 years time I will be looking for a new vehicle. Prior to that, err... no... thanks. Pass the popcorn please.

OMG Captain Skywalker, here comes AMD's new Merlin Falcon doing Warp 9 to the Tardis

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That would make for an excellent house server

Add a couple of drives in RAID1 config and a boot flash and here is my dream house server upgrade. Pity it is least likely to be available for that particular purpose (at this rate it will probably end up being ARM if the SATA SOCs become more popular).

Booking.com smacked by EU competition bods. Yeah, yeah, yeah

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Re: The trouble is...

They may be in that infinitesimal quantum of time when it is offered on their site.

I could not book via booking.com any of the usual sites I stop over the summer for next summer. I went direct and all of them had availability so I booked direct. I bet they will offer the remnants on booking.com ~ a couple of months before actual dates, but not prior to that.

Based on the market behavior, the 10% they used to charge were pallatable to everyone. The new commission from this year of 15% - not so much. So effectively, they shot themselves in the foot.

Bosch, you suck! Dyson says VW pal cheated in vacuum cleaner tests

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Re: Actually its a GOOD test.

[*] citation needed. While the Bosch top execs have showed up at some events around the Tory party conference, a cursory web search finds no traces of support or sponsorship.

Alternatively, use sarcasm tags for the humor deprived among us.

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How often does one run a vacuum on a "clean" floor?

1. You do not have the vacuum sucking dirt all the time. You move it around, lift the hose off the floor, etc without shutting down. So doing this provides a significant power efficiency (and if done right, motor resource) saving.

2. Dyson should sue the Eu commission for formulating a vacuum cleaner energy efficiency test which does not have dirt involved, not the manufacturer.

3. As far as vacuuming a clean floor - if you have a borderline asthmatics or people with dust mite or household dust allergies in the house, the answer is every day. Granted - in my case it is a couple of Roombas (one per floor) doing it, not me.

In any case, the idea is not new. Roomba has been altering its behavior depending on the dirt sensor readings for the last 10 years.

UK MPs have right old whinge about ‘defunct’ Wilson Doctrine

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Re: Whining bastards !

You should not expect the "powers that be" to do anything about something that does not apply to them.

Example: libel law. It does not apply on to MPs within the Parliament's building. So rather unsurprisingly, they have not done anything about it for many years. Even the latest (rather feeble) attempt at reforming it is clearly nowhere near where it should be.

Now, imagine all the MPs, being subject to the same libel law as the commoner. Guess how long until it would be reformed in a way where it can no longer be used as a weapon to bankrupt someone you do not like by making him pay the court fees all the way to the top.

NASA deep space scope serves up EPIC Earth snapshots

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Re: They would say that..

This is obviously a flamebait, but I am going to bite:

couldn't be anything else, there isn't even a shadow on the earth from the moon.

You have to wait for the 8th of March next year my dear to see the shadow of the moon on the Earth surface. On the picture in question the moon is off the line between Sun-L1-Earth enough not to throw a shadow.

Do not fret, it will be there next year. At least that is what the solar eclipse calendar says. The same calendar says that there was no total solar eclipse in the equatorial lattitudes and the southern hemisphere (so you can see shadow from L1 with _THIS_ moon traversal) in 2015. The rather small partial in September 2015 is not likely to have been very visible as it was close to the polar regions during the early polar spring (so bad sun angle to observe from L1).

In fact it would have been fake if you _COULD_ see a shadow, because there was no instance so far when this particular sat could have taken the picture of the shadow

Elderly? Disabled? You clearly need a .38" Palm Pistol

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Re: Metrication

Actually aiming it would not be that easy - to stand a reasonable chance of delivering an effective shot the muzzle (if it can be said to have one) would need to be almost touching the target.

This is a point blank range weapon. It is useless at more than 5-10 m by design. At that range you might as well use a taser or something else which is guaranteed to incapacitate wherever it hits.

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It has another health application - breaking wrists

I have some serious doubts about the effect of this on the wrist of a person who is having trouble holding a normal gun. It does not take a lot to break a bone damaged by osteoporosis.

On top of that, if a person is having trouble to hold a normal gun firmly, the "grip advantage" they get with this one is not that much. 9mm+ in a handgun is a hell of a kickback, they are bound to let it lose and it to hit them, again, breaking something. If a person like that is to be trusted with a gun at all (queue jokes about dementia and a firefight in the nursing home), a "glove" modification of a standard handle is likely to be significantly more effective.

Zombie iOS APIs used to slurp private data

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Let's put this into perspective

So, we are supposed to listen to advertisers in general on how the world ends when they stop having access in any way they wish to our private data. Right?

Ireland moves to scrap 1 and 2 cent coins

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backdoor inflation

You will find that this means that all retailers will round the prices up instead of rounding transactions at the till.

The introduction of euro itself was an example of this - all prices were rounded up when being converted from Lira, Peso or whatever other currency the country was abandoning at the time.

BlackBerry opens its Priv kimono just a little wider

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Guess how many apps will work correctly

I've heard that is coming but why wasn't it there from the start?

Having your app "just work if approved" was a significant "bait" in attracting developers. As a result you are looking 5+ years of appalling coding practices to contend with. 99% of all apps have no error handling code for any ops that are subject to permissions. They will simply blow up straight away in the most ugly possible manner.

Pluto flashes its unusual pits

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Re: Pancake batter

I doubt that meteorite debris would be as regular sized as these pits.

In the mess hall of the Start Destroyer Vindicator, in a galaxy far, far away.

Appalling performance from the 1st, 3rd and 7th turrets gunnery squads. You are all assigned to garbage collector maintenance for the next week. You are lucky that Lord Vader wasn't around to witness the spread of your volleys, he is nowhere as forgiving as I am.

Stop grumbling and say thank you, I am doing you a favor. If that was a Mon Calamari cruiser and not a target practice range in some obscure system's Coupier belt we would all be dead by now.

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Shuddering

We shudder to think what the potential implications for humanity might be were Pluto weird in a bad way.

We can start with Lovecraft : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuggoth

Or we can go to something even weirder: "The Illegal Planet" - https://fantlab.ru/work58537

How Chairman Mao's secret military project led to a Nobel Prize

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Do not do as I do, do as I say

Contrary to popular assumptions that Maoist China was summarily against science and scientists

That was common across the "communist" block.

USSR was the same. While the left hand of KGB was persecuting geneticists and shipping them to Gulag, the right hand pulled Timofeev-Resovski out of the same GULAG, nursed him back to health from the verge of death, gave him his own classified research center to work on radiation genetics and kept it classified all the way until the day Lysenko was given the boot.

Shoebox-sized satellite enters orbit packing 3Mbps radio

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Lots of small, cheap, satellites that offer functionality comparable to bigger birds

Not quite.

Moving to a small satellite does not increase the potential density of satellites in geostationary orbit. So it all depends on what kind of comms satellites are we talking about.

Lower altitude "broadband swarm" - maybe. That idea has seen an on-off interest for the last 15 years. In reality, nobody has managed to make it work commercially for Joe Average user. Sure - it is used for ship, plane, etc telemetry, but that does not drive the bandwidth demand very much. The current Inmarsat deployment can service the demand and there are very few drivers to increase it.

Geostationary tv and comms - not really. If you have a single space in the lineup, you might as well put a 10+ years lifespan monster there to make the most of it.

India's mobile operators move to head off dropped-call refunds

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The old microwave trick

That was tried before (I think One2One or Orange early on). They stopped doing it after finding out that customers started putting the phone in a microwave and closing the door instead of hanging up.

Standards body wants standards for IoT. Vendors don't care

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IOT ignoring standards

I would have ignored them as well.

It is sufficient to attend one meeting of any of the following working groups to decide to ignore them from there onwards: Constrained Restful Environments, Ipv6 over Low Powered Networks, Routing over 6LoPan.

If you do not decide to ignore the standards after that there is something wrong with your head.

Euro privacy warriors: You've got until January to fix safe harbor mess – or we unleash hell

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Very astute observation

One all the cretins advocating for UK leaving Eu are missing. The moment UK leaves Eu, its legal system will be evaluated vs the Eu DPA requirements and it will be immediately prohibited as a place for Eu consumer data to travel with all the consequences for UK business.

It is quite funny - the requirements to the UK legal system will be higher if UK leaves Eu than if it stays.

Amazon Echo: We put Jeff Bezos' always-on microphone-speaker in a Reg family home

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Re: More customization desired in these voice powered assistants

What about the Orac version?

Damn, you got this one in before me.

So if the device needs "fixing", do I need to develop Avon like skills and carry a combined tester, pen-kit and screwdriver in the sole of my boot?

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Stays on the Kitchen Counter

I removed a RasPi from the kitchen a few months back. Despite being in a specially altered case and having all holes plugged and protected it was barely salvageable after one year of kitchen residence. All contacts were oxidized, etc.

That happened in a very clean and well maintained kitchen in a house where the only thing which is fried is chips and even that happens once in a blue moon, the extractor is working and has its filters replaced regularly.

Looking at the way this has been built I have my doubts about kitchen use. https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Amazon+Echo+Teardown/33953

There is no protection against spills, water, oil, etc vapor which is common in the kitchen can go through the side holes straight onto the motherboard.

I give it an under 15% chance of surviving on an average kitchen counter for a year.

Note - I would not use it for other reasons, but I would have expected el reg to at least do some research on its proposed use before writing articles.

Slacker vendors' one-fix-a-year effort leaves 88% of Androids vulnerable

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Thanks for not fixing them

Actually, at least sime of the vulnerabilities (Killing in the Name Of comes to mind) are also used for rooting phones. So if you want to tinker and try something different from the vendor bugware you should be thankful to the Android vendors not fixing them in time (or at all).

Radio wave gun zaps drones out of the sky – and it's perfectly legal*

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Re: Hmmm... I smell an Instructables...

The assorted electronics look like an old 2.4GHz access point (the white blob). You can get a better one from TpLink in these days - one that fits neatly in the overall weapon.

Example: http://imgur.com/a/c4WNF#PEc4q1x

Hmm... I have most of the bits for this (missing only the optical sight) in my loft including an antenna which is higher gain and more directional than what they have used. I may actually build this at some point.

I do not see how this will manage to jam a cellular connection though. That antenna looks 2.4GHz band. It will be of no use in the GSM/3G bands. Jamming the drones which use WiFi though should not be a problem.

No change in US law, no data transfer deals – German state DPA

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Re: I was wrong...

UK has to comply with ECJ rulings same as everyone else.

So while the UK DPA will drag its feet to the maximum extent possible, it will be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. With lawsuits if need be. The biggest result of Max Schrems vs the Irish Data Protection commissioner is that the interpretation of the law and the facts is now set. As long as a case appears in front of a court the court has bugger all freedom to rule anything different.

Shocker: Net anarchist builds sneaky 220v USB stick that fries laptops

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Re: Net anarchist?

Not necessarily. Inconspicuous reliable self-destruct for machines is something that is of interest for a lot of people. Anything from industrial secrets, to various hat colors, 3 letter agencies, you name it.

The fact that you and me do not need it, does not mean that this is not useful.

By the way - the choice of voltage is interesting. High minus is the only thing that really can blow up a motherboard via peripherals. High plus is nowhere near that effective.

FAA issues lithium battery warning

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Some devices have thermal protection on the device side

A lot of devices have done "cost savings" putting most of the protection circuitry on the device side. In addition to that, it is less likely to short circuit when inside the device (unless the device packs up).

So on the overall, a battery in the device is safer than a battery carried separately.

Dry those eyes, ad blockers are unlikely to kill the internet

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Re: People who use adblockers...

Bingo.

The register is an example of one of the worst offenders. If you do not use at least flashblock you get loadavg of 1.5+ by opening any page on the reg. There is always at least one ad that is looping some crap at full CPU throttle.

By the way - I do not mind seeing a few static ads here and then and I do not mind some level of tracking provided that it is strictly anonymized and restricted to a geography/legal domain which has appropriate legal safeguards on customer data.

I do mind, however, if the ads are getting in the way. I also mind the admen who are refusing to obey the law and issue nastygrams that the world is coming to an end for nearly anything that is restraining them starting from AdBlock and finishing with actually obeying the data protection and privacy laws.

Big biz bosses bellow at Euro politicians over safe harbor smackdown

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Qu'ell supris - World Federation of Advertisers

Waddaya want. The Nazgul are agitated.

SYNful Knock is no Stuxnet, says researcher

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Re: Nation state resources...

In this case, it is not SCADA systems, it is Cisco routers which you can get for ~ 200$ or thereabouts off eBay for the ISR family. So definitely no need for nation state resources.

LOHAN chews the fat with US TV station over Spaceport's FAA-ilure

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Re: South Africa?

+1.

You would have had one of the small island governments in the middle of nowhere agree 100 times to your launch requirements by now. It would have been a more pleasant place to launch too.

In fact you do not even need _THAT_ as the island you need solely for a place to land. You can launch outside territorial waters and fire that "illegal" rocket engine also outside territorial waters leaving only the landing to be the subject of the local air traffic regs.

Actually, you could (and should) have done that off the Canary islands in the first place instead of wasting your time on dealing with American Bureaucracy. Rent a boat in Tazacorte or Valverde, sail outside territorial waters, hit the launch button and send pics to the Spanish government idiot who told you to get an explosive factory license combined with a picture of the street sign saying "I am missing a screw". Fishing, whale watching and sunlounging optional.

If everything goes according to plan the aircraft should have enough "gliding range" to glide to an island 100km + away from the top of the trajectory so this idea is not as daft as it may seem. All you need is to plug the coordinates of the nearest targets into the auto-pilot after launch.