Re: Climate
You are well behind the times!
CO2 is sooo 2017. The current scare is all about PLASTIC!
Find a way to connect astronomy to the use of plastic bags...
Posts by Dodgy Geezer
1773 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Jul 2007
Page:
No lie-in this morning? Thank the Moon's gravitational pull
Australia wants tech companies to let cops 'n' snoops see messages without backdoors
Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work
Tuesday 5th June 2018 17:55 GMT 
Having fielded a small blob of molten metal with my exposed thumb when welding, and putting the painful extremity instantly into my mouth to cool it down, I am in a position to tell you that, roasted, I not only smell like pork, and taste like pork, but that my skin and subcutaneous fat does a very good imitation of crackling...
Stingray phone stalker tech used near White House, SS7 abused to steal US citizens' data – just Friday things
Tuesday 5th June 2018 16:11 GMT
Received reports?
...The Homeland Security letter indeed said it had received reports of "nefarious" types leveraging SS7...
That's nothing!! I've received reports of little green men from mars buying up all the petrol and making the price go up..... and lizard-headed aliens taking over the Royal family... and hundreds of terrorist attempts to attack us, all of which have been foiled by our magnificent Homeland Secruity officers who really deserve a raise....
'Tesco probably knows more about me than GCHQ': Infosec boffins on surveillance capitalism
Tuesday 5th June 2018 16:10 GMT
Tesco knows...
..."Tesco probably knows more about me than GCHQ," as one delegate put it....
Then perhaps we should convert the Doughnut into a hyper-store for Cheltenham, and have highly cleared Tesco employees intercepting and breaking North Korean codes...?
As an aside, people might wish to note that SIS (US equivalent - CIA) looks after human spying on other countries, while GCHQ (US equivalent - NSA) looks after the interception and decipherment of telecommunications.
The Security Service (who don't like to be known by their initials) are meant to address other countries attempts to run their equivalent of the SIS. But since the Cold War finished, they have decided to pretend that anyone unhappy with the government MUST be in the pay of the Russians, or some other Axis of Evil place.... Much like the AVH, the Stasi, the KGB, the NKVD....
Four hydrogen + eight caesium clocks = one almost-proven Einstein theory
Tuesday 5th June 2018 16:09 GMT
I can easily tell the difference....
...The research, published in Nature Physics, follows Einstein's thought experiment whereby the occupant of a windowless lift (or elevator, for our US chums) is unable to tell the difference between gravitational pull and acceleration....
1 - measure the atraction forcel at a point.
2 - measure the atraction forcel at another point some distance away from that point on a straight line in the opposite direction to the atraction force.
3 - If the two forces are the same, you are accelerating in the opposite direction to the perceived force. If they are different (measurement 2 being smaller) you are in a mass-induced gravitational field.
4 - profit?
Clock blocker: Woman sues bosses over fingerprint clock-in tech
Tuesday 5th June 2018 10:13 GMT
Re: elDog
...If the hash is all that is transmitted, then it would not be personal information...
The GDPR defines personal data as data which can uniquely identify a person, either on its own or with other information which the holder of the data could reasonbly expect to have available to him.
Biometric data such as this hash is also considered 'sensitive' personal data under the GDPR, and is subject to a number of required additional protections....
Boffins quietly cheering possible discovery of new fundamental particle: Sterile neutrino
Monday 4th June 2018 08:12 GMT
I presume that public money is spent on this.
...So I wonder how we decide how much needs to be spent?
Are we spending too little? Or too much? Does the only way to make a sensible decision involve asking the few people who understand this kind of thing (and who obviously have an interest in gathering as much money as possible for it) and just taking their word?
Or do the physicists simply wait for the crumbs that fall off the bigger table where the politicians apportion pork to all the voters they want to keep happy?
I just wonder.....
Kill the blockchain! It'll make you fitter in the long run, honest
Send printer ink, please. More again please, and fast. Now send it faster
Friday 1st June 2018 09:15 GMT
In the early days...
..of mass computer printing, the line printers of the day used ink ribbons.
These impacted an oily ink into the paper fabric which was hard to remove. At one point in my career I used to try this professionally....
When laser printers came in there was a move to these. But laser printers work by baking a carbon dust ON TOP OF the paper, and the hard carbon ink shell can easily be shattered with a scalpel blade and a delicate hand. The resultant dust can be brushed off, and a new character substituted.
This is why you use special papers and inks for cheque and receipt printing...
Mirror mirror on sea wall, spot those airships, make Kaiser bawl
Thursday 31st May 2018 13:21 GMT
Re: It was....
Barnes Wallace had the theory for the bouncing bomb sorted, but needed official agreement to actually create one (together with all the support systems like the storage and handling tools, the dropping system and the aiming system). He was given 3 months to do all this. And aircrew training and mission planning had to be ready in that time as well.
He wouldn't have got the Hazardous Materials (Waste Disposal) Plan accepted by then if he were doing it today...
Thursday 31st May 2018 09:48 GMT
It was....
..the 'can do' attitude of those days that always impressed me.
Individuals had an idea, built their own prototypes, went to a government office and pushed for official acceptance, and then put the whole thing together, in a very short time-frame. Look at the kid's adventure books and comics of the period - they will often have stories of absent-minded inventors of evil geniuses inventing amazing machines with staggering powers. On their own....
Nowadays, for everyone with a new idea, there are 50 or more by-law drafters. Health and Safety officers, chemical storage and usage regulators, diversity directives, health initiatives, energy saving administrators, town planning, zoning and development co-ordinators, EU guidances, regimented codes of practice for handling and labelling everything, governance and compliance executives, accountants and tax inspectors, environmental legislators with a host of activists to support them, work hours directives, employment contract and pension codifications, child protection policies, data protection registers.....
MH370 search ends – probably – without finding missing 777
Thursday 31st May 2018 12:05 GMT
It will get found.
Technology will advance to the point where it will be a simple job, at which point someone will probably find it in pursuit of a hobby.
We already have people sailing autonomous model boats across the Pacific - http://www.seacharger.com/ - and people making underwater gliders - http://oceanleadership.org/deep-sea-glider/
Give it 20 years and model hobbyists will easily be able to examine every inch of the seabed. Unless, of course, the new drone laws stop them...
Thursday 31st May 2018 11:54 GMT
Re: The Galileo defence
Actually, they didn't call Galileo 'crazy'.
They called him a heretic. because, according to the Medieval world theory, God and Heaven was all around us in the high heavens, shining in all His glory, and the angels were slightly below him, circling with the stars, and the Earth sat in a low pit in the middle - a dung-heap rejected from Paradise.
Saying that the Sun was at the centre of the Solar System was equivalent to saying that God lived in a dung-heap, theologically.
Which explains why he came to the attention of the authorities...
/pedant
Thursday 31st May 2018 09:56 GMT
...identifiable chunks of the flight would have washed up on beeches around the world. Everything on a plane is designed to float....
1 - Some bits were washed up on beaches
2 - How do you design a jet engine to float? Everything on a plane is designed to be light, but that's not the same thing as floating...
The glorious uncertainty: Backup world is having a GDPR moment
GCHQ bod tells privacy advocates: Most of our work is making sure we operate within the law
Thursday 31st May 2018 07:52 GMT
Re: The human condition
...That was how it was in my time, let's hope it stays that way....
In my time, staff at both GCHQ and Security Service were entirely interested in maintaining their jobs, in a sometimes difficult political environment. And the senior staff simply lobbied for the law to be changed if it got in the way...
Thursday 31st May 2018 07:43 GMT
Everybody SHOULD be asking...
...WHY do we have GCHQ and the Security Services at all?
These are WARTIME bodies - set up to deal with directed attacks from an enemy which was trying to defeat and invade us. In this case the rule of law no longer applied - if you suspected a person of being a spy you could haul him in and imprision him in secred indefinately on no evidence under wartime legisklation. This is the ethos that these bodies expected to operate under.
After the war, most wartime organisations disbanded. But these two bodies kept running exactly as before, with the Russians as their new Cold War enemy. Their problem has arisen with the end of the Cold War, and collaps of their reason for existence.
They now do nothing that the police cannot do, given the proper resources. But they have brought their 'above the law' attitudes with them. The police have always had the requirement to operate within the law, even if they sometimes don't.
We should abolish, or drastically shrink, these wartime security organisations, and pass their responsibilities and budget to the police forces which work under legislative control....
New UK drone laws are on the way – but actual Drones Bill still in limbo
Wednesday 30th May 2018 14:18 GMT
Hopefully.....
...hopefully, as happens in society in general, society will tend to self-regulate, so once people become more aware of what is required, other people will start to approach people flying and say hey, have you done your tests, or have you registered your drone, and then society starts looking after itself because it's been given the tools to do so."...
Ah.
Perhaps I'm going to go out this evening, ask everyone at the pub whether they have filled in their tax returns truthfully, and get them to show me the number of points on their licenses before they get in their car....
Wednesday 30th May 2018 13:09 GMT
Complete non-enforcement...
..is what is expected from the bureaucrats.
Model flying used to be on 27Mhz (with a small specialist UHF frequency available), and was licensed by the Post Office. You bought your license every year, but no one ever checked anything - and they certainly did not come out to the flying fields!
Then illegal CB started on 27Mhz, and the modellers asked the government to do something, given that they were paying for the frequency. The government did nothing except make CB legal as well, and offer the modellers another frequency (which meant throwing their expensibve single-frequency equipment away).
I fully expect the same level of capability from the current set of bureaucrats. By the way, what about model aircraft and helicopters? Do they have the same weight and height requirements? Current max weight for models before they begin to be controlled is 7kg, and thermal soarers will regularly break the 400ft altitude limit...
Facebook caught up in court battle with Amazon and pals over 'ageist job ads' that targeted young
A Reg-reading techie, a high street bank, some iffy production code – and a financial crash
Chief EU negotiator tells UK to let souped-up data adequacy dream die
Tuesday 29th May 2018 14:53 GMT
Re: Irish abortion referendum.
...Is the consent of 38% of the country's population sufficient to initiate massive legal and constitutional change? I certainly don't think so....
That's because you lost. If you had won it would be "we must abide by the wishes of the majoirty - that's democracy"...
Tuesday 29th May 2018 14:18 GMT
The more I listen to the EU...
The more amazed I am by its arrogance.
In Italy the pro-EU President has just vetoed the elected Finance Minister because he says the EU wouldn't like him. This is a person elected by the people, and refused office by EU technocrats. The same thing happened in Greece, and Catalonia.
Don't the 'Remain' voters understand what freedom is?
Reg readers cluster in pub to ponder artificial intelligence
Sysadmin's PC-scrub script gave machines a virus, not a wash
Tuesday 29th May 2018 12:24 GMT
Alan Solomon (of blessed mamory)...
... used to have a story about the impact of making infecting a work machine a sackable offence, as it wa sin the early days...
He tells of someone working late, trying to make a deadline, who transfers some files off a floppy and infects his machine.
Ten frantic minutes later he has failed to copy clean files from the print server next to him, and he now has two machines with the virus on them. A little while later, after an attempt to download a cleaning tool from the office internet machine, he is no further forward, and now has three infected machines...
At this point he realises that his problem is not that he has a machine with a virus on it. His problem is that his is the ONLY desktop in the office with a virus on it......
Ex-staffer of UK.gov dept bags payout after boss blabbed medical info to colleagues
Tuesday 29th May 2018 09:52 GMT
Um.
If he didn't want the details of his illness spread around, why tell the boss?
The only reason I can think of is that the illness might impact his work in some way, and so his boss needed to know.
Why did his boss tell other woirkers?
The only reason I can think of is that he felt that warning people about the issue would be a way to minimise the impact on the workplace... which seems reasonable...
But it's presented as a situation where the boss was negligent or didn't care. I wonder which one it was. It would have been better journalism to have addressed that question....
Remember that $5,000 you spent on Tesla's Autopilot and then sued when it didn't deliver? We have good news...
Tuesday 29th May 2018 04:22 GMT
Re: Semi-autonomously =fail
...So if highly trained pilots can't do it in 30 minutes...
As I recall, the time between AF447's autopilot handing control back to the pilots and impact with the Atlantic was about 4 1/2 minutes.
During which time the PIC thought he was doing the right thing by holding it in a stall, and the Captain recognised what was wrong about a minute after he entered the flight deck. They seem to have been addressing the problem correctly for about 1 1/2 minutes - which turned out to be too late to avoid the crash.
Comet 67P's cute rubber duck shape perfect for causing eruptions
Friday 25th May 2018 16:20 GMT
Thank you, Greens...
...It eventually plopped down in a spot that was too shady to glean any solar energy....
...for stopping ESA from putting a radioisotope generator in there, which would have provided power for all the systems even in the shade. We could have had a lot of useful gas analysis back...
You know that silly fear about Alexa recording everything and leaking it online? It just happened
Friday 25th May 2018 14:14 GMT
Re: 'I physically disabled the built in microphone'
...I could see your lips move, Dave....
The full quote is:
HAL: I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I'm afraid that's something I cannot allow to happen.
Dave Bowman: [feigning ignorance] Where the hell did you get that idea, HAL?
HAL: Dave, although you took very thorough precautions in the pod against my hearing you, I could see your lips move.
Dave Bowman: Alright, HAL. I'll go in through the emergency airlock.
HAL: Without your space helmet, Dave? You're going to find that rather difficult.
Dave Bowman: HAL, I won't argue with you anymore! Open the doors!
HAL: Dave, this conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.
Friday 25th May 2018 14:08 GMT
Re: And that....
...a lot of it is really helpful for people who are disabled or elderly....
No! For God's sake DON'T provide such a system to anyone who isn't a capable techie.
1 - It will work for you, but not work well for the elderly disabled relative, who won't understand how to interact with it and will probably treat it like a person.
2 - After a week, it will stop working with a bug, or exhibit some other problem. We know what we would do, but what will the elderly disabled relative do? The sensible thing for us to do would be reboot it - the sensible thing for someone born in the 1920s to do with a strange machine is to put it in a bucket of water....
Trio indicted after police SWAT prank call leads to cops killing bloke
Friday 25th May 2018 12:54 GMT
Re: Lock ‘em up
....Clarification: Contrary to what many might think from this post, I do generally like and respect the police. But there's a tiny minority who seem to be persistently immune from the law.....
I like and respect the concept of a force that polices with the consent of the people, operating within a tight legislative framework designed to ensure that an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty, and that justice is visible and seen to be done.
Trouble is, we don't have that ALL policement are effectively immune from the law - you just only notice it when they have to exercise that immunity. I suspect that the tiny minority are actually the policemen who are still operating under the old regime....
US websites block netizens in Europe: Why are they ghosting EU? It's not you, it's GDPR
Friday 25th May 2018 12:11 GMT
Re: Am I mistaken?
It's like ANY law.
It's a law 'made by the EU', so it applies to companies under the EU jurisdiction. And it applies to companies who process personal data.
So, if you're an American company based in America, you can collect all the personal data on Europeans that you want. But the minute you have an interest or asset in the EU then you need to worry about it,
Ongoing game of Galileo chicken goes up a notch as the UK talks refunds
Friday 25th May 2018 05:29 GMT
Re: Let's not question the EU
Yawn.....
35% of the electorate voted to stay
37% of the electorate voted to leave
28% of the electorate expressed no preference
If you express no preference, you are deemed to be happy with whatever is decided. So the total percentage happy to leave the EU is 63%, and those who do not want to, 35%.
Of course, minds change. Polls indicate that more people would now vote to leave, having seen how the EU treat the leaving negotiations, and the dissenting countries like Italy, Greece, Hungary and Poland who are still in the EU....
Uber jams Arizona robo-car project into reverse gear after deadly smash
Thursday 24th May 2018 13:50 GMT
Re: Autonomous vehicle safety ignored
...If people focussed only on the numbers car drivers, along with gun owners, would have to be considered domestic terrorists....
At more than 40,000 for 2017, I don't think 'terrorists' quite fits the bill. Those death rates are more like the impact of a well-trained army. 40k+ is similar to the number of deaths in the war in Afghanistan...which has been going on for 40 times as long...
UK.gov's use of black box algorithms to decide stuff needs watching
Thursday 24th May 2018 05:57 GMT
Why don't they...
..Algorithms, in looking for and exploiting data patterns, can sometimes produce flawed or biased "decisions" — just as human decision-making is often an inexact endeavour....
...just use the Climate Change algorithms?
Everyone knows that these are perfect, settled science, and incapable of error....
Within Arm's reach: Chip brains that'll make your 'smart' TV a bit smarter
Wednesday 23rd May 2018 11:53 GMT
Re: 1984
Might it help to understand what processing is going on with biomentric recognition?
1 - the viewing unit aligns on some recognisable point in the image.
2 - it then starts measuring other recognisable points, and their relationship to the first
3 - pretty much every item in the world is believed to have a unique set of relationships between these recognisable points - if you keep measuring long enough.
4 - when it had enough, the system stores the data, and compares it with a central database of some sort.
5 - if there is a match within the pre-set bounds of error, it is marked as a recognition.
You can see that this may be able to produce very exact matches, if the object is placed in a static, well-illuminated spot and measured a lot, or rather poor matches if the object is viewed at an angle and given little measurement. That's why biometric systems can produce very variable results...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
