Posts by Cynic_999

Re: far less [likely] to reoffend

This type of thinking would justify putting a lifetime driving ban on anyone who got a speeding ticket. After all, many people have no remorse when convicted of speeding, and so it would remove the temptation to re-offend ...

Meanwhile back in the real World, if you make it difficult or impossible for a person to earn a reasonable and honest living, they are likely to seek dishonest ways of making money. In most cases the assumption should be that the criminal has "learned their lesson" and will prefer to live within the rules of society if they can.

However it depends whether the ultimate goal is to reform criminals and so reduce the total number of crimes, or whether it is to cause them the maximum hardship for revenge and spite without worrying about what effect that may have on their future behaviour (or indeed the effect on their entirely innocent family).

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Did you miss the bit where many people don't know they have photosensitive epilepsy until they have a seizure?

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True of many things. Most people don't know they have a nut or bee sting allergy until they have a (possibly fatal) reaction. However anyone who sets out to deliberately produce any serious & harmful reaction in someone else without their consent is guilty of a criminal offence regardless of whether the act in question is capable of producing such a reaction in that person.

If I shoot a person in the chest with a .22, I don't get off a charge of attempted murder because unknown to me the victim was wearing a kevlar jacket and so my act had in fact no chance of hurting them. Conversely If I shoot someone in the head with what I believed to be a harmless blank and the person dies because I was ignorant of the fact that the shockwave from a blank is just as deadly as a bullet at close range, I am not guilty of a crime.

As another pair of examples - if I buy talcum powder believing it to be heroin, I am guilty of a crime. But if I buy heroin believing it to be talcum powder, I am not guilty of a crime. Whether such a story is believed by a court is of course a different matter.

It is the intent, not the outcome that matters.

The key ingredient is *intent*. For most offences the act itself (actus rea) only becomes a crime if the actor had malicious intent (men rea).

In law, *anything* that was carried out with the intent to harm someone who did not consent to such harm constitutes an assault. Yes, even merely causing a screen to flash.

Giving someone you know has a nut allery a peanut butter sandwich might even get you charged with attempted murder.

I read the OP as asking what criminal charges would be brought against a person who used the postal service in such a way - the interence being that similar charges should be brought against someone using the Internet to send similarly potentially life-threatening payload. BICBW

You can changeyour education, but not intelligence (significantly)

Re: Let's ban more words

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You'd be referring to this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5dy9URkLFI

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Of course. A brilliant prediction by the BBC, though they got the target wrong. Walking on the cracks in the pavement is a particularly egregrious crime that deserves a far harsher sentencing policy. And of course "urinating in a public convenience" is digusting behaviour which quite rightly saw most such establishments closed down or subject to a hefty entrance fee (which must be paid using archaic metal tokens).

Re: Show this to the Mexican police

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The alternative is to just obey the rules

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The whole point is that it can be *impossible* to obey the rules. If there is insufficient time to clear the junction between the time the light turns amber to the time it turns red, you can never guarantee that you will not be in the junction when the light changes to read, and so are hostage to fortune.

Re: Fuck China

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... with an aggressive mindset...and nukes?

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Are you talking about China or the USA?

Re: That reminds me...

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Though I did find it strange that the minor detail that it couldn't possibly work, and would have buckled during assembly, exploded on firing or failed to actually launch a round out of the end didn't seem to matter to anyone.

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Quite. So ask youself whether the statement that Iraq was attempting to build such a thing could possibly have been true. It's not as if Iraq lacked scientists and engineers who would have been able to tell what is and is not feasible. Of course, the West wants you to believe that ME countries are full of stupid, uncivilised barbarians incapable of understanding anything more sophisticated than a catapault.

Re: Anyone surprised

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Amnesty for arrested protesters Article 27: freedom of speech, of assembly, of procession and of demonstration

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*So long as said protests are peaceful.* There is no right for violent assemby, procession or demonstration. From what I have seen on the news footage, the protesters are more violent than the police, and frequently commit acts of wanton vandalism for no legitimate purpose.

They may have a noble cause, but they do themselves no favours when they smash up legitimate buildings and throw molatov cocktails.

Re: Anyone surprised

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No cyber-military industrial complex?

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None that would be willing to go head-to-head with China.

Re: Open source (China already has one...)

Bit like the way the USA treats other people's oil ...

Re: end UK dependance on GPS?

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But how does your device know the distance to each satellite?

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It doesn't (initially). The calculation is very much chicken-and-egg. Initially you only know the approximate *difference* in distance between you and each satellite being received - this being calculated from the difference in the time-stamps each satellite sends from its on-board atomic clock. (It is approxiate because the amount of refraction of each signal is at that point unknown). The latest time stamp being from the satellite closest to you, and the earliest time-stamp from the most distant satellite. As you do not know the absolute distance between you and any satellite, you also do not know the real time to any great accuracy, and hence the exact position of each satellite in its orbit.

But so long as the geometary (relative positions) of the satellites are favourable, then there will only be one place on the surface of the Earth where any particular combination of distance differences between 3 or more satellites can occur. So if you are receiving 3 or more suitably placed satellites you can calculate your approximate position. Then you can reverse calculate the distance to any satellite, also its elevation to get a more accurate figure for the amount of refraction of its signal as it passes through the ionosphere, and from that calculate the time its signal took to reach you, and hence get a more accurate real-time as given by the satellite's atomic clock.

So the whole thing is re-calculated with the more accurate information. Do this several times (iterations) and the position will (should) converge until it stops changing between iterations or reaches the desired accuracy.

Note that the refraction amount is not an accurate variable even if you know your time & position 100% because the ionosphere is constantly changing in strength, height and thickness in a way that cannot be accurately determined, and so the amount of refraction cannot be known with absolute accuracy. This puts a limit on the best positional accuracy possible with the system, especially if all the satellites used are low to the horizon.

If you have an accurate real-time clock, then you could calculate position with only 2 satellites rather than 3 (Add one satellite if you are not on the surface of the Earth).

Re: end UK dependance on GPS?

The reason you need an accurate clock is so that you know exactly where the satellites are in their orbit. The difference in the times reported by the satellites gives you their relative distance from each other to you (the signal takes longer to travel from the furthest satellite). As this only gives you relative distance compared to all other satellites being received, you need at least 3 satellites to compute a position (so long as you know your altitude). If you had an accurate local clock, you would only need 2 satellites.

The old "transit" satellite navigation system used the change in doppler shift of 1 satellite as it orbitted to find a position, but that depended on knowing the distance and direction you had moved while taking the readings (which took about 20 minutes to complete). A transit satellite would pass within range about every 2 hours on average (more frequently the closer you are to the poles). So you could only obtain a position about 12 times per day. So no good for precision real-time navigation.

Re: end UK dependance on GPS?

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... someway that a really accurate time source provides position without the need for signals from satellites, measuring the position of astronomical objects etc.

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Yes. It's called "celestial navigation," discovered (invented?) in 1837 by Thomas Hubbard Sumner. The big problem at the time was that there was no way to determine the time with sufficient accuracy when you did not know your position - thus prompting the race to invent a super-accurate clock that was impervious to both a ship's movement and temperature changes.

Re: Interesting

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Is that actually a clock, which gives time of day, or just a very stable/accurate oscillator?

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It's a stable oscillator (0.5ppb) Which equates to 1 second drift over about 100 years.

Re: Interesting

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I doubt that many need more precise than 1 ms.

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It's the *drift* that's more important. If the clock runs slow or fast by 1mS per day, it will be 1 second out in less than 3 years. Whether than is important depends on the application - especially how frequently it can be corrected from an accutate source.

Re: Odd But

Should (say) programmers be paid according to what they themselves believe they are worth, what their boss thinks they are worth or what their fellow programmers think they are worth?

Because only the last case will ensure that nobody gets upset if they find out what other people in the department are being paid.

Try justifying to an employee who thinks s/he is the most brilliant person on the planet and indispensible because they write huge amounts of code per hour why the younger person who writes half as much code per hour is getting 20% more pay. The fact that their code, which may have taken them only a week to write, usually doesn't quite fulfil all the requirements and/or has to have 100's of bug fixes before it can be sold as a commercial product, but the higher paid programmer, who took twice as long, invariably writes rock-solid code that could be released to market almost immediately is completely lost on the hot-shot.

Re: Odd But

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I've never really understood why pay rates (and other remunerations) are considered confidential information.

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Because it frequently causes jealousy and discontent. There may be very good reasons why one employee gets paid more than another employee who is "doing the same job" Perhaps the better paid employee does a far *better* job than the lower paid employee. But the lesser paid employee is convinced that s/he is just as good (or better) than the other, and so becomes very unhappy.

Re: Hypothesis: Wear-leveling bug

I very much doubt tat an hour counter is used in any way by the housekeeping task. An hour is too long a duration, and in any case the counter needs to be resettable

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... be faster and cheaper to recover from a backup and keep driving.

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But in this case there is a significant probability that the backups are stored on the same SSD model, and so have all failed at more-or-less the same time.

The manufacturer must have *some* way of initially programming the disk, and whatever method is used could also be used to recover from a completely bricked condition. Even if the method involves soldering in a pre-programmed EEPROM or CPU, it would be possible to desolder that device and fit a new one.

Yes, involved and time-consuming, but if the loss of data will cause the company to lose £millions, then no matter how involved, the company would do it.

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The customer data storage area is flash, not EEPROM.

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Erm ... "Flash" is a subset of "EEPROM". so your statement is a bit like protesting that you drive a car, not a motor vehicle.

There is nothing to prevent the controller's housekeeping data from being stored in a special section of the main customer data array (and it probably is). Spinning rust HDDs commonly store controller variables on the same platters as the customer data, just in physical sectors that are inaccesible via the normal interface.