Posts by DropBear 4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
"That ambitious privacy toolset aside, Chaum is also building into PrivaTegrity another feature that’s sure to be far more controversial: a carefully controlled backdoor that allows anyone doing something “generally recognized as evil” to have their anonymity and privacy stripped altogether."
Wish granted! ...well, for a certain amount of "affordable". It's certainly as safe as it gets though...
Same here, old dual-core low-res Android, no intention to ever upgrade unless it literally turns to dust or something. Although it would be exceedingly simple to get me to buy a new one - just make a new Android with a traditional, full-sized large slide-out QWERTY (and a battery of no less than 5000mAh while we're at it)...
"Howcome people/companies keep forgetting how to do things properly?"
Rest assured, they don't. At some point, I'm pretty sure some engineer asked "If the connection fails, should we assume a break-in or should we stay silent?" and got the response from higher-up "At every connection problem? What, are you crazy or something?!? Sure, as long as you're offering to handle all the angry customer calls yourself!"
Absolutely this. There were indeed several changes recently and I can't remember a single positive one. I also can't help but feel that you guys are seriously misjudging (and methodically abandoning) the strengths of your "brand" but hey - it's not my ship to wreck. I can get "grown up" and politically correct news coverage on whatever I want anywhere else on the net - that's not what I come here for. And if you're reporting on homeopathy, I fully expect you to mock it into oblivion and back, "science" or not. Oh, and the dockerdockerdockerflashdocker thing is dead on - do people really read all that stuff?
"Not even a typewriter is safe"
...and I was just about to point out that even "electric" typewriters like the Selectric (which only uses electricity to mechanically drive the machine, not to process data) can be safe - well, so much for that. Granted, they couldn't subvert what wasn't there so they had to build in a foreign piece of high technology to do the snooping, but yeah, point taken (whiffletrees are still rather cool mechanisms though). Thanks for the education and a thoroughly fascinating read for a Sunday afternoon...
And you don't seem to grasp that there's no such thing as "complete security" - it's turtles all the way down. It's why any discussion on security is only meaningful against a defined threat model, the only point of which is to say "limit abilities of the attacker to this or that level, and concern yourself not with anything more elaborate". Her concern for airgapped things is of course not irrelevant in a general sense but it does indeed not apply to 99.999% of those who might ever read this, and it is correct to point that out.
"It should be generating future UK electrical, electronic, and computer careers - but is it?"
There seems to be an expectation along the lines that if electronics / IT are a hundred times easier to get into then a while back, we should see a hundred times more people getting into them, which is just plain stupid. Sure, the stuff becomes _accessible_ to more people should they want to pursue the matter, but the point it they mostly don't care much for it - those who did were never really scared off by the "obstacles": for decades now, neither IT nor electronics has really been all that unreachable for anyone with actual interest in either. The top of the bell curve did what it took to get where they wanted to be - widening the limits only brings in the diminishing few who honestly couldn't pass the financial barrier before (it the barrier was intellectual, lowering it will bring little success to the newly admitted ones) and those who fancy seeing what all this "Arduino thing" is about but have a very marginal interest (if any) in the field - and a carrier requires much more than a passing interest...
"Since SMS can only be used for non time critical trivia"
I beg to disagree - what you're talking about is called "email", although ever since it tends to pop up instantly on your Android phone as soon as you receive it, even that is closer to SMS now.
I use SMS whenever I only have a single question or piece of information I urgently want to pass on (or if the person I called isn't picking up and there's something I want them to know as soon as they get their hands on the phone again or get back under coverage). I'm fine with a reply within 24 hours to an email, but I expect an immediate reply to an SMS, and since I never send one without delivery confirmation (it's just a persistent setting) I'll know within seconds if the other party doesn't receive it immediately, and I can take alternative action. Oh, and as a bonus - it even works in wine cellars that don't quite get a 3G signal (so no data) but have 2G still working...
...how exactly does one reconcile "a secure local network" with "punching holes in the firewall", for fuck's sake? If it's a local setup phase ONLY that travels unencrypted over a hopefully secure local wifi that's still bad enough, granted, but maintaining an unsecure connection that LEAVES the local wifi is an entire different ballgame. So which is, because it's not even that one of you is talking bullshit, it's that the two things are incompatible - it's either one or the other!
"Harks back to the days of the old Speccy where you'd wait 20 mins to play a game!"
Does that include 3 failed "tape loading error" attempts because you're using a crappy tape player, or is this some yet undiscovered relativistic time dilation effect? I remember having 60 minute tapes with at least 8-10 games if not more, so I really don't know what you'd be loading for 20 minutes...
"Once the spacecraft exhausts the small supply of conventional rocket propellant it squirts through thrusters to control its orientation in the zero-gravity, frictionless conditions of spaceflight, it will no longer be able to point its solar arrays at the sun"
No gyros then I suppose? While you can't really change your trajectory in space with nothing but electricity at your disposal, you certainly can change your attitude...
"The problem is getting the coders to switch"
Yeah, here's the funny thing - the way I'm reading this, it's a bog-bog-bog standard CPU that uses photons as I/O only. It still might make a difference small or huge, but it ISN'T processing anything with light - only interfacing with it...
"a strong message that this should not and will not be tolerated"
Funny, no matter how many times I look at that line it reads "please fuck us sideways as many times as possible and definitely do make sure we never, ever, EVER see a goddamn dime from you". No problem there mates, happy to oblige...
I'd love to have something to watch during the holiday season, but OTT doesn't seem to like Eastern Europe and in my experience all the regular cable channels revert to brain-dead mode between Christmas and New Year's Eve - it's either day-long reality show re-run marathons or 20-year old stuff everyone saw at least a 101 times (Home Alone MDCLXII and E.T. used to do the rounds every. single. year. a while back, but I think we're safe now...)
"Even the modern equivalent of the pawnbroker is selling them at no more than £1"
...and now you know why the content industry is so keen to switch to non-transferable no-second-sale "you're just licensing the right to consume this shit" digital distribution models.
"But, wouldn't Laurel & Hardy have not worked better as a reference?"
They might have, but as it happens they weren't the reference - those two peasants of Kurosawa were. See bottom of the page 47 of this sample from "The Secret History Of Star Wars". Actually, read the rest of the sample too, it's quite entertaining - but I warn you, the more you read of it the more likely you are to end up looking like this every time someone talks of Lucas's "genius" --->
"...they belong to George Lucas. "
Tsk. You were doing so almost well until there. Fuck no they don't. Not once he released them - from then on, they belong to the collective memory of everyone who ever saw them as originals, and if Lucas later decides to fuck them sideways that's his choice, but hell if I have to bend over and let him do the same to my childhood memories. As far as I'm concerned, only three Star Wars movies exist, and they're called the "despecialized edition".
"there was a variation in the results"
Considering only the two facts of a) how long it took for mankind to come up with anything that could actually experimentally measure the speed of light at all and that b) the kind of equipment used to finally make that measurement was multiple orders of magnitude too imprecise to measure _variations_ in the speed of light which is why Michelson and Morley had to come up with something much, much more sensitive, it's not hard to imagine that the measurements they took had, you know, a non-zero precision error. The whole interferometer had to be floating on mercury to make the measurement at all, FFS!
"That discrepancy was confirmed later" [Citation needed] - also, clarification whether that was _the exact same_ discrepancy (now that would be something...) or just some discrepancy again, due to instruments inexplicably _still_ not measuring the speed of light with absolute precision (go figure...).
"...every element we could to a foreign environment? Would they all endure intact?"
Considering what you specifically seem have in mind is not at all a foreign but _the native_ environment of ALL elements, I don't see what about them do you expect to change. We only have all those elements at all because at some point a fusion reactor floating around in space (also known as "a star") kindly constructed industrial amounts of them before they got to stick together into this huge ball of dirt we live on and call a "normal environment". That "we are all made of stardust" is not a figure of speech in the slightest you know. What exactly are you thinking of that would qualify as "more extreme" than that, barring the very singularity of a black hole...?
"this is engineers making technology for the sake of it without working out what you are really going to do with it"
Nope. This is sparkly-eyed management and marketing telling their engineers that everyone else is doing it so they better come up with internet-connected versions of whatever they had before. And since the engineers have no real choice in the matter they produce yet another IoT gizmo even if even they know there's precious little they can do beyond taking something and tethering it to a cloud and/or a smartphone. Right now, IoT is the ultimate MeToo - nobody really knows why anyone would want it (it's always highly contrived use cases for Other People), but nobody wants to get left behind.
Yup. Got bored with "robots" in general as soon as I realized they can't possibly hope to be more than basically glorified RC cars any time soon, lifeless without a puppet master (no, ability to follow a line or somesuch makes no difference to this, sorry). Physical versions of a tamagotchi - at best. What makes people fall in love with the idea of a robot (yeah I'm refusing to use the Lucas-patented term deliberately, sorry George - I like mr. Čapek more) would require consciousness, and we're precisely as far from that today as we were when the first Star Wars came out. What people want is their very own loyal sidekick and friend; well, bad news kids, Santa is still as imaginary as ever - but hey, at least Barbie is there for you, right...?
Yup, this silliness is about to come out now-ish... I think...
"solder led"
That's blatantly unrealistic. Something believable as a properly flexible bare minimum might look like this:
sudo solder LED --led-color green --regular-intensity --mounting smd --case 1206 --side-view -I /home/myroom/wall\ part\ drawers -I /home/myroom/desk\ drawer -I /home/myroom/junk\ parts\ bin --use-tweezers --use-leaded-solder --use-extra-flux | fume_extractor > /dev/null
...with a few hundred additional entirely optional parameters that every user worth his salt ought to know by heart because that's the way Real Men do it, obviously.
You don't necessarily need an actual filament along the "blade". Strictly speaking, current plasma cutters are about as close to tiny light-sabers as we can get currently - they certainly do cut thick and hard stuff like butter, and all they need is electricity and a steady flow of compressed air (yes, really). Don't let the shower of sparks fool you in those pics, that happens only once you're cutting something. Granted, the plasma stream isn't exactly blade-length (or glowing green / blue / red...) but hey - baby steps...
Note: as anyone knows, showing up to a light-saber fight without a properly attached ground clamp is extremely bad form...
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