Re: Man on the sun
If we can put a man on the moon, surely we can calculate the exact value of π
Posts by John H Woods
3577 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Nov 2007
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FBI boss: We went to the Moon, so why can't we have crypto backdoors? – and more this week
What if tech moguls brewed real ale?
Boss helped sysadmin take down horrible client with swift kick to the nether regions
You're burning £1.2bn for what? UK spending watchdog gives digital court plans a kicking
Wearable hybrids prove the bloated smartwatch is one of Silly Valley's biggest mistakes
Trump wants to work with Russia on infosec. Security experts: lol no
Sad Nav: How a cheap GPS spoofer gizmo can tell drivers to get lost
No, seriously, why are you holding your phone like that?
Happy 10th birthday, Evernote: You have survived Google and Microsoft. For your next challenge...
Google offers to leave robocallers hanging on the telephone
Potato, potato. Toma6to, I'm going to kill you... How a typo can turn an AI translator against us
Cops: Autonomous Uber driver may have been streaming The Voice before death crash
Friday 22nd June 2018 22:25 GMT 
At best...
"At best, it would have hit her at 11.5 m/s or thereabouts (24mph)." - Lee D
Firstly, and decent car can brake at 1g. An XC90 has a 100km/h stopping distance of 36m. So, a=v²/2s gives us a deceleration of 10.7m/s² or 1.1g
(Surely the car deceleration increases as the velocity drops, so this is a minimum.)
A single second (1.0s) of full breaking could therefore reduce the impact speed from 40mph to 16mph. Its still gonna hurt, but it's an order of magnitude less likely to be fatal. Even if your calcs were right and you can only get down to 24mph, it must be at least 5x more likely an adult would survive such an impact than a full 40mph impact.
Note also that you only need another ~0.5 seconds to avoid the impact altogether.
No fandango for you: EU boots UK off Galileo satellite project
Thursday 14th June 2018 10:05 GMT
Re: Dictionary anyone?
@Vimes: "It's a mistake to portray leave voters as stupid in my opinion, especially when the government itself didn't know initially what leaving would entail."
Insert the word "all" and I'd agree.
Before the referendum I engaged with over 1000 people about Brexit on social media and news media comment pages. Of those, 956 engaged with 2 or more responses to my questions. 37 of those were "it's just how I feel" type answers, and 9 had serious arguments that actually made me think.
All of the rest were absolute, utter, irredeemable morons. Now it's quite possible that 99% of remainers are also morons. But they were voting for the status quo, which is a slightly different thing.
Way back when I was a lad, people who had no real knowledge or understanding or interest in politics used to say so. Now it seems that a lot of those same people have unaccountably strong opinions. Here's a typical exchange:
Brexiteer: "Why do Remainers treat me like an idiot? Show me some respect and you'll see I have good reasons, I've done a lot of research"
Me: "Ok, give me your one best reason for voting Leave"
Brexiteer: "Well, there's so many, but probably the most important one for me is the status of the Commissioner. He's like a godlike figure: he's not elected, he can't be censured by the commission, and what he says goes"
Me: "Errm, he is elected, he can be censured, and he doesn't really have much executive power"
Brexiteer: "You see, you're just dismissing my arguments out of hand"
Me: "Not really, I'm just pointing out that, after "all that research" and the opportunity to give me your very best reason for voting Leave, you've just said three things that a few seconds of internet search would confirm to be false"
Brexiteer: "Well, I still stand by my original position"
Da rude sand storm seizes the Opportunity, threatens to KO rover
UK.gov online dating tips: Do get consent, don't make false claims or fake profiles
Wednesday 13th June 2018 17:54 GMT
Mad
Luckily for me I met the out-of-my-league Mrs Woods in a nightclub where she made the first move, God knows why.
But we have a single friend, younger than us (i.e. 40s) who is nice, witty and in fabulous shape (possibly because she is an HGV driver delivering heating oil!). She's tried a couple of dating sites but just ended up with one-date utter bellends.
I'm hoping to find her a nice nerd who will appreciate her. Let's have a commentard photo/profile gallery...
(You won't need my photo as a) happily married and b) have the great misfortune to look almost exactly like Anders Brevik).
Dixons Carphone 'fesses to mega-breach: Probes 'attempt to compromise' 5.9m payment cards
Wednesday 13th June 2018 16:13 GMT
Re: Perhaps I need a forwarding email address for every shop
A lot of web forms incorrectly reject it but a "plus form" address (RFC2822) is what you are looking for.
yourname+anythingyoulike@yourdomain.com will be delivered to yourname@yourdomain; but you can still see the originally used recipient name, so when you get spam/phishing to, for instance, yourname+CW@yourdomain you know who leaked it.
Wednesday 13th June 2018 16:08 GMT
Re: Timing is interesting for me
Them: "Can I get some security information before we proceed?"
Me: "Can I ask you a question first?"
Them: "Well ..."
Me: "If I did have an account with you, what would be your advice about sharing security information with unknown people?"
They: "Oh, you should never do that"
Me: "Thought so. Goodbye"
Tesla undecimates its workforce but Elon insists everything's absolutely fine
Which? calls for compensation for users hit by Windows 10 woes
Tuesday 12th June 2018 09:08 GMT
Re: Good luck with that.
"UK tort law starts with having to show a "loss", and your time is worth .... nothing." --- JimmyPage
But, if you can't fix it yourself, and you pay someone to fix it for you, I think* their time is worth something, and you might well be able to claim that having to pay them is a 'loss' you might expect to be at least partially reimbursed.
Perhaps, by making the updates compulsory, MS have increased their exposure to such claims?
*IANALBIPOOTI
Don’t talk to the ATM, young man, it’s just a machine and there’s nobody inside
GNOMEs beat Microsoft: Git Virtual File System to get a new name
1,300 customers of Brit bank TSB defrauded due to botched IT migration
Five actually useful real-world things that came out at Apple's WWDC
Did you test that? No, I thought you tested it. Now customers have it and it doesn't work
Boffins quietly cheering possible discovery of new fundamental particle: Sterile neutrino
Monday 4th June 2018 09:51 GMT
Re: I presume that public money is spent on this.
Money doesn't just disappear from an economy.
If you give researchers, or any normal citizens, money to do stuff, you'll get some back immediately in tax. The rest will be spent on goods and services, and more tax will come back, ad infinitum.
The only way to "disappear" money is to give it to the people who are equipped to move it out of the country where it escapes national taxation. And where, even if it is used, none of that money comes back because even if it is subjected to taxation, it now benefits other national economies.
Stingray phone stalker tech used near White House, SS7 abused to steal US citizens' data – just Friday things
Experts build AI joke machine that's about as funny as an Adam Sandler movie (that bad)
Headless man found in lava’s embrace
A Reg-reading techie, a high street bank, some iffy production code – and a financial crash
Wednesday 30th May 2018 18:27 GMT
Re: Or...
@handleoclast
I wasn't joking, but I was very unclear. Apologies, I was "thinking out loud" - for some value of thinking.
The three bits of code aren't meant to be a replacement for the loop but various ways of defining the operation "sum" which is then written only once.
Elsewhere collections would be summed using sum(array) in a functional approach and array sum (or array.sum() if you prefer C++ type syntax) in an OO.
The central point that I struggled to make is that I believe it to be simpler, more elegant, and less error-prone to use such a method rather than cranking out a loop every time you want to sum elements of an array. The definitions are just to emphasize that both functional and OO paradigms allow you to add such capabilities even if they aren't part of the base language and libraries.
But it was very poorly explained and I appreciate the downvotes!
----8<----8<----8<----8<----
Smalltalk note: Well, I might have used the first one; in a Smalltalk world no one would bat an eye at the inject:into:) construct.
However, I'd have probably have written...
totalExposure := positions exposures sum
... had a method on the Positions class to return the exposures...
Positions>>exposures
^self collect: [:each each exposure]
... and would be relying on a method called sum in the Collection class...
Collection>>sum
^self inject: 0 [:each :sum | each + sum]
Wednesday 30th May 2018 13:12 GMT
Re: explicitly code a loop?
"For each X in Y" is pretty clear, no? Why shouldn't that be explicitly coded? -- David Nash
Ah I may have been unclear. Of course "for each" is a much better way of writing a loop than "for i=0; i<total; i++"
My problem is explicitly coding a loop to sum a collection. Most language / library combinations will already have a method to sum a collection of elements.
For instance, in SQL, surely it would be a bit weird to use a FOR EACH loop instead of a SELECT SUM()?
Every time a coder manually bashes out a loop to sum elements they run the risk of getting it wrong. Reusuing a fully tested age-old function (or Collection class method if we're talking OO rather than functional programming) is surely preferably to cranking out a brand new bit of code?
Wednesday 30th May 2018 11:59 GMT
Re: Or...
Will someone please tell me why I am wrong to say that no-one using a modern language (of a higher level than Assembler or C) needs to explicitly code a loop to sum [attributes of] the elements in an array?
NB I'm not objecting to downvotes, I'm just interested in discussing it with people who know more than I do.
Wednesday 30th May 2018 10:47 GMT
Or...
You don't need verbosity with a better programming paradigm
Smalltalk...
totalExposure := positions inject: 0 into: [:pos :sum | pos exposure + sum]
Java / More general OO approach...
totalExposure = map.values().stream().reduce(0, Integer::sum);
F# / General Functional approach...
totalExposure = [1..n] |> List.map exposure |> List.sum
NB indicative pseudocode, but the general point is that few people writing business software need to be explicitly coding a loop these days
Russia to Apple: Kill Telegram crypto-chat – or the App Store gets it
Overhyping AI doctors, language translation goes open source, and new jobs on the cards
Max Schrems is back: Facebook, Google hit with GDPR complaint
Uber robo-ride's deadly crash: Self-driving car had emergency braking switched off by design
Friday 25th May 2018 11:03 GMT
Should have gone to SpecSavers
You might want to stop driving until you do.
Any reasonably alert and competent driver could have (should have) been able to reduce the speed of the vehicle from 43mph to at least under 20mph in that time, even looking at the (possibly artificially darkened) YouTube footage. If, as it seems, the area is more brightly lit, they would have had time to stop the car.
Friday 25th May 2018 08:52 GMT
Six seconds at 43mph (18m/s) ...
... is plenty of time to slow to dead stop at 0.3G, it's hardly emergency breaking and how the hell would it be 'erratic behaviour' ... slowing down, even gradually, to avoid impact? Are they really prioritizing a "smooth ride" over not actually bumping into stuff?
If Uber want to spend 4 seconds waiting for the driver to do something (why?) they could still have dead stopped at 0.9G in the last 2 seconds which, though uncomfortable, was still easily doable (especially in the prevailing road conditions). Even a single second of full braking would probably have avoided the fatality, and anyone with more than half a brain must know that once you are in the last second there is ZERO chance of effective back-up driver intervention, and the system might as well do the very best it can from that point on.
The rental car I'm currently driving can already stay in lane; follow the vehicle in front at a set distance if that is less than the set cruising speed; and still brake the car hard if there's an object in front of it (while displaying a BRAKE NOW message and sounding a shrill alarm). This vehicle, in that mode, is doing more "self driving" than Uber was doing on that day, and if I hit a pedestrian because I was, say, responding to a new route suggestion on the Sat Nav, nobody would accept the excuse "but this car is supposed to be self-driving"
Uber basically put a person in a car that doesn't really qualify as self driving, told them it was self driving, and crossed their fingers. Absolutely disgusting behaviour, even by their own bottom of the barrel standards.
You know that silly fear about Alexa recording everything and leaking it online? It just happened
UK chancellor puts finger in air, promises 15 million full fibre connections by 2025
Wednesday 23rd May 2018 17:10 GMT
There is a magic money tree*
Not a big fan of Corbyn but we've got to realize that questions about how things "are going to be paid for in reality" are, at least to some extent, enthymematic, and the enthymeme they contain is, at least to some extent, false.
A national economy with its own central bank and a still decent national credit rating is not 'like a household budget' and the ingrained idea that it is, in my opinion, perhaps the worst legacy of the Thatcher era.
There are clearly some very good reasons for controlling the amount and type of government spending (a quick look at the litany of failures of command economies is instructive) but "where's the money going to come from?" isn't, as far as I can see, a very useful question. Better to ask, for instance, "will spending this money now be worth it, in terms of economic growth (or indeed some other social good)?"
* In fact there are two magic money trees: both the state (public sector), and the banks (private sector), can simply create money. I'm not saying whether the existence of these trees is good or bad, or which it is preferable to eat from: I'm just saying "there is no magic money tree" is, purely and simply, not actually true. Those reluctant to borrow should say: "we don't want to spend that amount of money on that issue, and here's why" and those who want to borrow should say: "we think this is a good investment and here's why" --- then we can have a proper debate and get away from this "sorry there's no money left" nonsense.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
