Posts by Ru

Reflection is pretty pointless.

Here's an experiment. Have someone point their card headlights on full beam at you at nighttime, somewhere reasonably dark. You probably won't be able to see very much.

Now, take a small mirror, and reflect the light back at them. It wil. be annoying, but hardly blinding

Sure, a suitably big parabolic might be able to collect, reflect and focus enough of the beam to distress people on the boat, but:

- That's a big, fragile thing to carry on a speedboat

- That's a non-trivial and non-cheap bit of optics to manufacture

- That's a tricky thing to aim and focus from a little boat in open water.

- Good luck aiming at something that is dazzling you with a vomit ray

And that's even before you consider it has a fixed focal length... too close or too far away and it won't be much good...

So, no. You can't defend yourself this way.

Bloody hell...

Google being less evil than Apple?

I never thought I'd see the day.

Now, who's gonna be first with the shareholder lawsuit, to ensure than moral and political objections remain secondary to shareholder value?

Re: Still perpetuating the myth of American superiority

It isn't about superiority, though there's little enough to show for UK defense research spending these days. It is about cost.

The US government blow horrifying amounts of money on their military, and like all good capitalists are willing to let other people benefit from their experience and economies of scale, for the right price.

When it comes to a choice between adequate US equipment at a reasonable price, compared to UK or EU equipment of dubious worth and alarming expense, I know where I'd rather my tax pennies went.

Surely the thing you should really be worried about

is the terrifying horde of lightening-gun wielding giraffe-women as pictured in the advert. She can't possibly be all human.

Um, why not use a wrapper of some kind?

There are some well known devices by well established companies that are intended to prevent chemical or biological interaction between certain fluids that may be contained within them, and the mucosal environment in which they are intended to be used. They may not be sufficient on their own, but they do represent an excellent approach to use when storing volatile compounds in the various orifices god in his wisdom has provided your body with.

I do of course expect all the output of companies like durex to be reclassified as munitions immediately, and the TSA to outlaw the posession of flexible impermeable membranes.

Space will not freeze you.

Ever heard of a vacuum flask? Hint: it prevents heat loss by surrounding a container with a partial vacuum. Shaded from the sun in space, you can still quite easily overheat and cook yourself to death if you don't have adequate heat dissipation. In the sunlight, you can roast quite easily.

Sure, over a long enough timespan a body in space not actively generating or absorbing heat will cool to a few degrees kelvin, but that isn't going to happen on a typical shuttle flight because it would require there to be no power and everyone to be dead.

So, repeat after me. Space is not cold. At least, not in any way that you understand.

Bit of a contradiction in there

Firstly, the government says that it is not the intention of the databases to gather data about everyone and everything and keep it forever.

Then they say that erasing data after 6 years is quite impractical.

Neat trick that: "We don't really want to keep information about you forever, but uh, actually we can't delete it. Sorry."

Labour are pretty keen on the whole 'it is not the intention...' thing.

Remember Elite/Frontier?

Name generators FTW.

Hah, PSK

Should have rung warning bells in itself. My sympathy is minimal.

@DT, RE: Cheese eating what now?

The traditional Brit response to Gaelic bravery was swording, burning, shooting and taxation. The Gallic types put and end to that sort of behaviour quite a few hundred years ago.

RE: kinetic energy weapons (ie guns) will become obsolete overnight

Hardly. They've proven to be a robust, reliable, highly effective, easy to manufacture and easy to maintain device. They're going nowhere any time soon.

What is far more at risk are missiles, light artillery and aircraft; things which are most vulnerable to laser devices. Tanks and even battleships could easily see a resurgence with laser-oriented warfare; but the guy on the ground won't be able to hoof around the power supplies and precision sensor and targetting systems necessary to take advantage of lasers, at least to the point where they'd be more useful than conventional firearms.

"thick aluminium mirrors and smoke machines"

Won't do anything against battlefield laser weaponry. A focussed laser beam is going to incinerate any target so fast that it doesn't really matter what it is made of. Thick, low-density ablative armour might help. Smoke screens must be deployed before any lasers hit you... forget about popping countermeasures as soon as the beam lights you up; it will be too late. A big cloud of smoke and dust may be safe against laser fire, but it is now a highly visible and partially blinded target for perfectly adequate conventional weaponry.

@MinionZero, RE: "Dear armchair pundit"

The projects are on the back burner due to lack of funding. Funding is provided by the state. It is controlled by politicians. Funding was cut because the devices in question, non-lethal, pain-inducing, etc, sounded an awful lot like torture devices. No-one was keen to fund that sort of project after unfortunate little incidents like Abu Ghraib.

The decision was, as always, a totally self-serving choice by politicians keen to keep their positions... it's what they do. I'm not quite sure what your objection to my observation was.

So, I say again. The only insurmountable obstacles any weapons project faces are political ones. This means such devices can, and will be developed and used, so long as they don't fall afoul of the diplomatic or political or military snafu du jour. They exist, they work, and they will only get better.

Did you somehow read that as me suggesting that politicians were somehow humanitarian or pacifistic?

... the mind boggles.

Could be worse...

Could have been purchased by EA.

@Kev K, Re: *nix last one was 8 years :P

Please show the advisory that was announced for this flaw eight years ago.

Oh, wait.

Re: "what our American cousins like to refer to as "Payback"

This is hardly payback... in return for being nibbled on a bit, the fungus gets to be widely spread, and well protected from other insects which might overgraze it. Its future is pretty much assured.

You can see a not dissimilar relationship in the supermarket. Most successful bird species on earth? Avis Domestica. Though individuals get eaten fairly often, the species is incredibly widespread and its continued survival into the future is pretty much guaranteed, so long as it major predator continues to thrive, and they remain tasty and nutritious.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand... there's lots of similar parasitic fungi. Here's a delightful photo of one eating a fly: http://www.flickr.com/photos/chrismorgan/3556399015/ It spreads in a similar fashion, by making the fly cling to a stem and spread its wings to act as a spore disseminator.

Gaming is irrelevant

Hard-core PC gaming is dying. All that sort of stuff will move to consoles in due course. What's left will not require serious hardware to run, and will be quite happy on a moderately powered machine.

This isn't about E-Bombs!

To all of you crying out about the lack of effectiveness of theoretical EMP devices, read the article. This is about the use of nukes in a high altitude blast. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime#The_explosion_itself to see what happened the first time this was tried.

But it is a stupid stupid threat in this case. If we end up in a nuclear war, everything is going to be screwed regardless. EMP resilience of electronic devices is more or less an irrelevancy at that point.

Re: what programming languages, if any are taught in ICT?

Hahahahahaha.

ICT is the new touchtyping.

Anything that requires serious thought, skill or the like is quite absent from the ICT curriculum, which concerns itself with teaching people how to use Microsoft Office. There may be a module on Excel which touches upon macro programming in VBA, but it is likely to be of the copy'n'paste variety rather than actually coding up anything from scratch.

A-Level computer science has a fair bit of coding in it, but it just isn't very popular. Lots of ICT stuff at this level too, teaching stuff that R-ing the FM would also teach you.

@James O'Brien RE:"when I go into downtown Syracuse..."

You pay for the Spanish police to protect you in the US? Really? That's a curiously roundabout way of doing things. Or is there a Syracuse in western Spain that I'm not familiar with?

Read first, regurgitate bile and outrage afterwards.

Re: "Will you wait until SP1, which 99% said yes"

No. From recollection, XPSP1 and Vista SP1 were both awful. I've a sneaking suspicion that 2000SP1 wasn't that hot either.

I'll be waiting for SP2. There's no rush.

RE: "they aren't going to enjoy the extra acceleration"

Uh, correct me if I'm making a silly assumption here, but the prospect of a bit of lung-collapsing, eye-popping accelleration followed by rescue and rapid medical attention seems preferable to roasty death.

"It never has the WiFi, printer or USB coffee warmer drivers I need to get my work done"

If Mac users can control the urge to whine about the slightly slimmer range of hardware available to them as compared to windows users, I'd like to think that linux users could too. If you're not prepared to check hardware compatibility, then don't try linux.

I'm sure there will be cries of 'OMG elitist!' and similar OS-nerd bashing comments from non-linux users. But you know what? Windows isn't that hot either. If I want to reinstall XP on my current desktop, I need to slipstream in some extra drive controller drivers into an XP install CD. Either that, or go out and buy some stoneage floppy disk drive and spend a few hours rooting around on the net for the correct drivers I need. Or use whatever latest abortion of an OS microsoft wish me to buy.

Since you mention it, WiFi support isn't awesome. I much prefer, say OpenBSD for that sort of thing (shame about the lack of update support in the rest of the OS). Still, it isn't much worse than, say, Vista.

But printer drivers; outside of the realm of serious office printers, I've found linux printer support to be far better than windows. Just look at the steaming piles of crapplets printer vendors expect you to install alongside drivers. Thanks, HP, et al.

Faceless drivers...

...are very conveniently interchangable. Whoever said that The Stig had to be just one guy?

Subsonic rounds not much threat *to aircraft*

I doubt you'll be using your trusty sidearm to go picking off little UAVs a few hundred yards away, which is why they aren't much threat.

This is a system to primarily designed to protect the UAV, not the meatbags on the ground.

Aforementioned meatbags also have rather more to worry about from snipers and the like than from someone packing a pistol... and as any fule kno, freedom fighters use AKs, which this system would detect. No-one liberates their people from the oppressors using Uzis.

Who cares about OSX?

This whole thing is about microsoft and its dominant market position. Apple's market share is simply far too small to be relevant in this situation. On the offchance that apple somehow gain 80% of the PC OS market, I'm sure they can be expected to get a slap from the EC too.

As for being ashamed of the EC, I remain pleasantly surprised that for all their incompetence, wastefulness and bureaucracy (traits they share with any other governing body) the desires of big business do not take precedence over everything else. The same cannot be said for the US.

Re: "Olympics is in danger of becoming Terrorfest 2012"

Is it? Is it really?

Who are these barbarian hordes poised to destroy civilisation as we know it? They don't exist. I guess 'handful of dangerous, incompetent basket cases more a threat to themselves than to others, business as usual' isn't attention grabbing, vote-winning, budget-expanding, paper-selling stuff though.

Increased surveillance of this type wouldn't help even if we were up to our ears in al quaeda sleeper cells. Colossal data mining exercises to try and find one guy muttering about high test peroxide in a billion call logs are a massive longshot, at best. At worst, it is an enormous diversion of manpower and resources from the sort of actual intelligence work that has a chance of uncovering plots before they can bear fruit. All I can see you'd gain from a warehouse full of audio recordings is a forensic trail so you can find out who dunnit after the fact, much like the customary sequence of CCTV recordings leading up to a murder or bombing or whatever, at which point it is a bit late, given the recent trend in *suicide* bombing.

Audit and oppression will not keep me safe. Heightened security that wasn't transparently stupid is something I might support... this ain't it.

Re: MacOSX is still based on OpenBSD

Nope... FreeBSD 5.2.something, I do believe. Not the finest version of FreeBSD ever released, as it marked a major change from the way things were done in 4.x.

But even were it the most secure operating system in the world, lousy application software is still going to allow user-level exploits, and OSX is certainly not the most secure. Apple have a positive attitude to security only where it regards people trying to use their products in ways Apple does not want them to: jailbreak for example. Everywhere else they seem to be slow and uncommunicative at best; lazy and incompetent at worst. Even if they threw everything away and made a whole new hardware and OS platform running OpenBSD on Sparc or SELinux on Power6 or whatever, they'd only be buying themselves a limited period of security before their terrible attitude catches up with them and suddenly they're a popular, non-obscure platform full of gaping holes, again.

Unless there's a bit of a sea-change in their corporate culture, we're going to end up in the bizarre situation where Microsoft is releasing more polished, more stable and significantly more secure products than a competitor.

Re: Kettle, it's Mr. Pot on line 2

Yay, lots of commentary from the 'hypocrisy is worse than anything else in the world' school of self-righteousness.

Were you tricked in to reading the article, possibly? Maybe some enterprising reg hack has filled your PC with malware to force you to visit the page? No? Wonderful as it is for those who make a living by criminal deception to have defenders, I disagree that somehow a wreath-selling florist is on a par with trojan pushers.

Anyway, on the hypocrisy note; I'm a noscript/adblock user, so my web experience is minimally commercial. Having read your points of view, I guess I can now read prurient and exploitative articles and feel a warm cosy glow from the knowledge that I'm sticking it to all those cold, cruel, moneygrabbing capitalists.

"intent to profit"

This is clearly a totally frivolous basis for a lawsuit. Twitter has absolutely no capacity for profit, intentional or otherwise.

50% less mutual

was my favourite phrase. I shall be sure to use it more often in future.

This isn't even MAD

North Korea isn't exactly an industrial juggernaut. The nuclear arsenal of the United States is formidable to say the least... signficiantly bigger than the Chinese one, for example. I don't really believe that the north koreans are willing to trade the destruction of a few cities in Japan or the US for the possibilitiy of being reduced to a smouldering ruin in a return strike.

A few ICBMs is a deterrent, not a threat. It could only be used in desparation, as it would result in the end of the NK state.

"developers waited years to exploit XMLHttpRequest"

I rather suspect this has something to do with the way that every single browser seems to interpret "standards" differently. Using javascript or CSS to do anything complex has always been a nightmare... you could either go for the broadest market (ie, IE) and have a lousy platform (because activeX is better, naturally), support a less widely used browser (or browsers) and alienate many potential viewers, or do something else like use a vast, bloated and slow javascript library. Or avoid the whole thing altogether and use flash.

HTML5 isn't going to fix the fact that programming for the web is a particularly painful task, and probably always will be.

"selling goods put on the market outside of the EEA and not intended for import"

I love this sort of thing. "We're huge and rich and we want to stay this way by charging you more than other people elsewhere in the world for the same product". The sooner this sort of government-sanctioned corporate theft is stopped, the better it will be for the rest of us.

Meh, DNSSEC

There are all sorts of reasons why DNSSEC hasn't caught on, despite having been standardised some time ago. I'm more in favour of DJB's dnscurve stuff... http://dnscurve.org/dnssec.html

This just so happens to be the one situation in which DNSSEC would have actually been particularly useful, as only the domain keyholders would have been able to modify the records. On the other hand, once your server has been compromised you have all sorts of problems to worry about, and it sounds like the same old sloppy implementatoin error that has screwed up sites of all kinds for years, and probably will continue to do so even with the proliferation of more secure protocols.

@Tim, Re: For the average PC

These are big, expensive, multi-socket processors. They are most definitely not aimed at the average PC, and I rather suspect they are not aimed at runnig a single multithreaded task. This sort of box would be ideally suited to be a virtual server host, for example. There isn't really a situation where you can have too many cores and too much IO bandwidth for that sort of system.

That said, software bloats to consume available resources. I have no doubt that in the near future we'll see desktop applications which take full advantage of a 64bit operating system's vast address space, and require half a dozen cores with a gig or two of ram apiece in order to run smoothly. I expect they'll do useful things like let you write documents and add up columns of figures.

Resiliency?

The ARPANET wasn't designed to be resilient to having multiple connections severed in what looks suspiciously like a well planned and organised attack, not merely vandalism. It was intended to allow communications to be routed over a less than reliable network, and able to survive the drop-out of a node or two.

There really isn't an awful lot that can be done in this situation... adding further connectivity in the form of microwave transmitters (expensive, much slower than fibre) or satellite uplink (exceedingly expensive, really, really slow) probably doesn't make economic sense, or it would have been done already. It will presumably require legislation or subsidy to encourage the installation of such things.

Mesh communication technologies already exist in the form of trunked packet radio systems like TETRA in Europe (though I don't know what US emergency service or military use). They're complex, resulting in bigger, heavier and more expensive handsets than the mobiles we're all used to... emergency service radios also use higher power transmit levels, so battery life is much lower than a GSM phone, and scaremongering cancer stories will be an order of magnitude more irritating. Given that the consumer will not like any of these flaws, and 99.97% of the time they will not use or notice the benefits, who is going to buy?

Trying to extend this to produce community- or county- or nation-wide mesh data networks seems to be doomed to failure. Too complex, too slow, too uninteresting to anyone who isn't a network or radio nerd. Once again, nothing short of subsidy or legislation is going to help here.

Having said all that, Iridium satphone contracts for emergency services wouldn't go amiss.