Posts by Simon Ball

More videogames to face censor scrutiny

@Ace McDunk

There already IS one. What part of the "15" or "18" ratings on the side of games are people missing? It's the exact same damn symbol used for films and DVDs. It even says on the back that it's a BBFC rating.

A conscientious parent shouldn't NEED educating about these things - he/she should be on the lookout for such rating systems; should research the games he/she is buying, to judge their suitability. Be pro-active about supervising their children. At this point it is simply impossible for me to believe that parents are not aware that some games contain material which may not be suitable for young children. Which leads me to the inevitable conclusion that either they just don't care, or, more positively, that they have more faith in their children's ability to separate fantasy from reality than the hysterical lobyists.

Bottom line, this will not change a thing, and I remain to be convinced that there is even a problem.

Bunker-nobbling US megabomb test delayed

Not pointless

Firstly, you can't just add 30-40 feet of solid concrete to an existing building - the foundations almost certainly couldn't take the strain.

Secondly, from what I've heard, the MOP is designed to penetrate up to 200 feet of concrete.

Thirdly, if they're resurrecting Barnes Wallis's Earthquake Bomb concept, they don't even need to penetrate the structure itself - if the bomb detonates beside or under the foundations, then the structure will simply collapse.

Finally, nukes are actually overrated. A heavy, streamlined kinetic energy weapon dropped from a great altitude may actually have much greater penetrative power than a nuke, because it concentrates all of its energy onto a very small area, and in a single direction, whereas a nuke spreads all its energy in all directions. A 14-ton bomb moving at 1000m/s (just over mach 3) can concentrate 7Gj on less than a square metre of ground, whereas a megaton nuke would have to detonate within 250m (a distance which would result in a lot of fallout) to do the same. Plus, the mechanism of energy coupling is very different - the nuke expends its energy vaporising the earth, while the penetrator simply pushes it aside - which is much more efficient.

A380 superjumbo in natural-gas powered test flight

Minor criticism

It's not analagous to Fischer-Tropsch synthesis - it IS Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. FTS is simply the process by which synthetic fuels are produced from a mixture of Carbon Monoxide and Hydrogen (Syngas or Synthesis Gas) - where that mixture comes from is irrelevant. Coal, natural gas and biomass can all be gassified to produce syngas.

Blu-ray winning in Europe

@Tom

People who bought the PS3 primarily as a blu-ray player aren't all that relevant to the discussion, since they presumably would have bought a standalone player had the PS3 not been available. Remember, the point of Sony's strategy was to use the PS3 to turn gamers into Blu-Ray consumers, not the other way around (although you could argue, given the price difference between the PS3 and similar standalone players, that the possibility of turning movie fans into gamers was not ignored).

I suspect that HD-DVD was operating on the assumption that only a small proportion of gamers would be willing/able to purchase the large HDTVs that are necessary to make the PS3's Blu-Ray playback facility useful. Clearly they underestimated the allure of big-screen HD gaming.

BOFH: Carbon neutrality

@AC

You are aware that extracting resources usually requires energy - and in some cases, quite a lot of it - aren't you? For example, extracting aluminium from bauxite requires about twenty times as much energy as melting it down and re-casting it.

EU watchdogs probe German and Swedish gambling blockades

@John Blackley

No, but the jumped-up uber-bureaucracy in question DOES decide what the LAW is - a state of affairs that Germany, more than most EU countries (save France), is actually responsible for, so I can't say that I have any sympathy.

In any case, this is yet another example of the issues covered in USA vs Antigua. If you want to ban gambling, then you ban it completely. State gambling monopolies (like those of say, oh, Germany and Sweden) are in contravention of the free trade laws that both voluntarily signed up to. Free trade means free trade - not free trade except when it is inconvenient.

Samsung PS42Q97HDX 42in plasma HD TV

To be fair

Is it actually possible to buy a 40"+ LCD/Plasma that isn't HD Ready these days? If all you want to do is watch standard definition, then you'd definitely be better off with a native standard definition set, but I don't think I've actually seen one that size for quite a while. Large screen these days seems to mean HD-Ready, whether you like it or not.

720P

Lester, out of interest, have you tried the 720P output mode? I ask because there’s not much point upscaling to 1080I when you’re feeding a 768x1024 screen; since the TV will have to downscale it in order to display it, and the whole point of an upscaling DVD player is to avoid using the TV’s internal scaler entirely. Regardless of how good your scalers are, scaling something twice is definitely to be avoided.

Garmin takes on iPhone with satnav mobile

@Terry

Unfortunately, it' only going to be confusing for people who have actually heard of Mariner - which is now a tiny fraction of the navigation-system-using population. SatNav is now a pretty ubiquitous shorthand description for consumer a satellite navigation system, so I'm afraid that you're going to have to put up with it.

Should probably have added

Technically GPS isn't the correct name for a navigation system anyway. GPS refers only to the co-ordinate-based positioning system - the additional systems that use those co-ordinates for navigation purposes are not part of GPS.

Top secret UK data network goes live two years late

Strengths and weaknesses?

If intercept use is common in most other countries, then I'd of thought that most of the bad guys would already know the strengths and weaknesses of current techniques.

HD DVD fights back in the US

We've have this debate many times before

No-one knows precisely how to account for the PS3 effect. On the one hand, it IS a Blu-Ray player, but on the other hand, that is not it's primary purpose, and not every PS3 owner will be using it for that now, or possibly ever. Including PS3 will overstate blu-ray player sales, while excluding it will understate them. There's no right answer unless someone takes a representative sample of PS3 owners and asks them what they're actually doing with it.

Amateur code breaker honoured for defeating Colossus

@Nexox

Brute-force code-breaking is not only parallel - it is embarassingly parallel. It takes no effort at all to break the problem up into an infinite number of separate elements, since all you're doing is performing the same mathematical operation again and again with minor variations in the initial conditions (the key being tested) - there's no dependence between operations whatsoever.

Actually, no....

Churchill was quite devious. Most of the Colossi were dismantled, but two were transferred to the newly formed GCHQ. Ultra was kept deliberately secret after the war, so that no-one would realise that ENIGMA had been broken, and therefore people would continue to use it. And they did. In fact, the allies deliberately encouraged the sale of ENIGMA to developing countries. Moreover, even where ENIGMA was not in use, ignorance of the advanced cryptanalysis techniques and technology that had been developed during the war held back the development of more advanced cryptosystems for some years - ENIGMA was supposedly still secure, so why bother with anything significantly more sophisticated?

Churchill' s secrecy was still yielding results twenty years after the war ended.

DARPA seeks $750m for hypersonic roboplane testbed

Unless

What's to stop DARPA unveiling the technology that was developed for Aurora, and claiming that it's a product of this current research programme, whilst diverting a good part of the $750 million for the NEXT generation of ultra-secret propulsion systems?

'Wii workout' for overweight pupils plan slammed

@ Matt

I couldn’t agree more. I can remember the frustration I felt with games teachers who seemed more concerned with perfecting the game than actually playing it. The primary purpose of schools sports is to force kids to get some exercise, with the secondary purpose of trying to instill

a love of energetic activity that will keep them exercising. Treating the “school team” as though it were the end-all and be-all of sports does nothing but discourage those kids who will never be good enough to be part of it. Teachers who spend all their time heavily coaching a minority of pupils in order to beat a heavily coached minority from another school are missing the whole point of sport.

I could go on about how “professional sport” is a contradiction in terms, but I don’t have the energy.

Spy satellite to slam Earthside

Secrets...

I doubt there's much risk of giving anything away. Unless they've suffered a catastrophic malfunction, it's probably one of the KH-12 photo-recon or Lacrosse radar-recon satellites launched in the early nineties that's come to the end of its operational life. After fifteen years I doubt there's much there that's ultra-classified. The KH-12 is little more than a downwards pointing Hubble Space Telescope and there's nothing particularly secret about synthetic aperture radar these days. If there's anything secret it'll be in the instrument package, and that is highly unlikely to survive re-entry. It's usually heavy and robust things like pressure vessels or bits of the space frame that reach the ground.

As for toxic materials - I doubt it's beryllium they're concerned about.

More likely there's still some hydrazine left in the station-keeping thrusters. Hydrazine is very, very nasty stuff.

HD DVD player sales share slumps

@Mark

Given that plenty of DVD players can't decode Xvid/DivX (much less VC-1/MPEG-4 AVC/H.264), most can't output HD, and none (that I know of ) can do both at the same time, you'd still require a new generation of players. They'd most likely be cheaper than BD/HD, but they'd still charge a premium for them, and for the movies, and it would provide ample opportunity for the implementation of a new encryption scheme.

In any case, you'd still have to get an HDTV, so there definitely IS a cost.

Former top brass call for first-strike nuke option

Not quite that simple

To be fair, the doctrine of MAD and deterrence in general, doesn’t actually work very well (or at all) when your opponent is hell-bent on martyrdom and doesn’t mind taking millions of people with him.

The whole logic of a “no first use” policy is that if you relieve your enemy of the fear that you will launch a first strike against him, he will not feel impelled to launch a first strike against you. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work when your enemy a) isn’t actually afraid of being attacked, and b) hates you enough to attack you regardless.

MAD only functions when both sides are broadly “rational”, and a) value their own lives (or at least the lives of their fellow citizens), and b) are not actively seeking to completely destroy one another. Do Al Queda et al fall into that category? No, I don’t think so. If your enemy can’t be deterred, then a pre-emptive strike is really the only option.

Having said that, unless you get so little warning of an impending attack that only a ballistic missile would be able to respond fast enough, I don’t see why a strike with conventional weapons wouldn’t be a viable option. These days, large, precision earth-penetrating conventional weapons are equally as effective as nukes against hardened targets.

Lightsaber voted top movie weapon

@Andrew Bolton

Well, there are a view more powerful weapons in TV/anime series; the Dakara superweapon in Stargate can destroy all life in the galaxy; the Buster Machine III in Gunbuster blew up a large part of the galaxy; and of course, the wormhole weapon in Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars, could potentially destroy the entire universe. However, as far as mainstream movies go, I don't believe we've got beyond nova weapons yet.

Microsoft backpedals on Blu-ray for Xbox 360 comments

Usual MS ruthless pragmatism

They're not going to talk down the format while there's still the slightest chance of it succeeding, but they don't want to get stuck with a failed format, so they're making contingency plans. Perfectly normal.

Super Soaker inventor touts solid state heat-2-leccy

Hmm

So essentially it’s an electrochemical external combustion engine? A cross between a Stirling engine and a fuel cell? Very interesting. The ability to combine the high efficiency of a fuel cell with the ability to run reliably on any fuel/heat source of a Stirling would be very valuable. Not the least because it would negate the need for all the expensive scrubbers/filters you need to run a fuel cell on anything other than pure hydrogen.

With a good boiler design, it would give flex-fuel a whole new meaning. Return of the steam car, anyone?

Lord Triesman on P2P, pop-ups and the Klaxons

@AC

Sorry, but that argument is a straw man. The AC post didn’t say “the community doesn’t support intellectual property rights”, it said “the community doesn’t support intellectual property rights as they currently stand”. It is eminently possible to support the idea of rewarding gifted creators for their work (as most people do) and yet disagree with the current legal and economic structure of the record industry. Indeed, one of the primary charges levelled at the record industry is that gifted creators DON'T get rewarded for their work.

Most people want to see gifted artists rewarded fairly for their work, and most people are prepared to pay a fair price towards that end. The problem is that the current industry doesn’t support that – it massively overpays a minority of artists, exploits the rest, overcharges the public and churns out a considerable volume of utter dross.

Anyway, if you add up everyone who implicitly approves of file sharing, or benefits from it - most of the teenage population, their parents, ISPs, etc - it probably IS the greater part of the community.

US Marines: Osprey tiltrotor doing OK in Iraq

Distractions

To be honest, I've never really been a fan of the V-22. To my mind, the emphasis placed on the amazing complex tilt-rotor technology has diverted attention and funding from other equally (if not more so) viable approaches like autogyros with ultra-high inertia rotors (see Cartercopter), or the Carnard Rotor Wing (see the X-50 Dragonfly or the Whispercraft from "The Sixth Day").

I can't help thinking that if they'd just updated the Rotodyne with modern technology, the programme would have gone a lot faster and been a lot cheaper.

Paramount poised to drop HD DVD

@Mark

And anyone who thinks that technical specs are the be all and end all is most likely suffering from the need to justify their purchases to themselves. Personally I have no preference for either format, but having watched "Planet Earth" on HD-DVD and Blu-ray side-by-side, I have to say that I can't see any difference. And if you're part of that bunch that believes it can tell the difference between PCM and TrueHD taken from the same studio master, at the same bit-depth and sample rate, then God help you.

MIA in Iowa - personal data on 3m UK driving test candidates

@ The Other Steve

"I mean honestly, is it so hard to find UK firms who can do this ?"

What, massively screw up and fail to adequately secure people's personal data? Sure, we have plenty of firms that can do THAT. Maybe we could turn losing data into an export market. Thoughts?

DPA

I believe the DPA says something along the lines that personal data may not be trasmitted outside the EU unless the recipient country has adopted adequate data security laws of its own, or the data subject has consented.

I'm not exactly sure how compliant the US is with EU data protection law these days, but something tells me that it's probably not enough for DPA purposes,

UK gov: Feds will get BAE bribe files when hell freezes over

Odd

Given that there is essentially no distinction between the personal finances of the Saudi royal family and the finances of the Saudi Arabian government, I never understood how bribery was actually possible.

You can't have a case of public funds being diverted via the contract to the pockets of government officials when public funds and private pockets are the same thing. It's really just a transfer from one part of the Saudi royal famly to another.

Running queries on the HMRC database fiasco

Format

I'd guess on .mdb. Basic fomats like XML and CSV don't have passwords, and I can't see HMRC bothering to use an external programme to wrap them up. As for Excel - it's not possible to password the whole workbook without using encryption (though the default isn't very good). .mdb has a file password but doesn't use encryption.

Top US engineer in piss-off-everybody car fuel solution

&Anonymous Coward

To be fair, if the value of all the externalities of relying on oil that Zubrin mentions were included in its price - environmental damage, islamic radicalism, enormous military spending, long-term involvement in dubious regimes - oil might actually BE uneconomic. Zubrin just doesn't seem to frame his argument that way.

But I have to disagree with the core of his argument. While considerable sums may have been directly diverted into Islamic radicalism, I would say that the majority has been used to bribe the Saudi population into passivity. This has partially contributed to radicalisation by producing a large number of educated young men with absolutely nothing to do, but it has mainly obstructed any move towards political and economic reform in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is totally reliant on oil money, and if the funds are suddenly shut off, the place will probably collapse, creating a turbulent breeding ground for islamic radicalism.

Unfortunately, at this point, it's too late to disengage with the Middle East - we have to clean up the mess before we can get out.

El Reg fires up online standards converter

@Chris Purcell

The Norris is defined as the MINIMUM force that Chuck is capable of exerting. If we used the MAXIMUM force it would be a completely useless measure, since any subdivision of infinity is still infinite.

Charlie Sheen in upside-down iPhone outrage

Lester......

Need I remind you that "mobe" is verbotten by popular edict?

A parents' guide to the HMRC data giveaway

Addendum

Should have mentioned, in all fairness to MS, that the password protection scheme used in Office 97 and later does impose encryption, however the default setting only has a 40-bit key.

Password

Password-protection does not obscure the actual data in the file - all it does is wrap it in a structure that the program in question will not open unless it is fed the proper password. Since the binary code that makes up the file is always accessible, and the "wrapper" used by a mainstream program like Excel or Access is constructed according to known parameters, it's not difficult to identify the code that makes up the wrapper, and substitute in code for a valid wrapper that is not password-protected.

It's a bit more complicated in practise, but password-protection in itself essentially offers no protection at all.

Analysts warn of US broadband meltdown

Hmmm

Some would say that preventing leviathans like Google from emerging is no bad thing.

Fox News: Filthier than the internet

More relevant Simpsons quote

"Fox deliberately runs shows that will earn them huge fines, which are then funnelled through the FCC straight to the Republican Party!"

Simpsons 18x22 - You Kent Always Say What You Want

Good episode, that.

NASA to trial Moon balloon pneumo-podule in Antarctic

I second TeeCee

Don't NASA have massive vacuum chambers use for testing spacecraft integrity? Wouldn't one of those be more useful for testing this thing?

Animal rights activist hit with RIPA key decrypt demand

@ A J Stiles

Sorry, but I have to disagree. You cannot produce child pornography without sexually exploiting children. By consuming it, you encourage the production of it (especially if you pay for it) and are therefore an accessory after the fact to a criminal offense.

Addendum

Since this basically boils down to the question of how to protect the accused against planted evidence, I might observe that this is hardly the first time this issue has come up before the courts. Any "new" form of evidence is subject to lengthy examination regarding its reliability and falsifiability before courts start to rely on it.

Don't jump the gun

I agree that this is a potentially dangerous law, but do remember that it has only just come into force. Which means that it has not yet been subject to judicial review. Any competent defence will raise these issue, and if the police cannot answer the critique, there is a fairly good chance that the judge will find for the accused and strike the law down.

If the police actually CAN prove beyond all reasonable doubt that the accused did know about/use these files (which I doubt, but maybe it's possible), then I really don't see the problem with them demanding the keys under penalty of law. It's no different to demanding e-mails, financial reccords, or indeed any other form of evidence.

@Mad Mike

"Rather seems the legislation is at odds with the technology. Also, it is rather interesting that the police can't crack it!! Given their resources, you would have thought it would be possible."

NOBODY has the resources to crack a file that has been properly encrypted with a sufficiently large key. Not even the NSA. That's the primary reason the US tried to prevent the dissemination of PGP, and why this particular clause of RIPA exists.

Besides, even if, hypothetically speaking, NSA/GCHQ and the like have acquired quantum computers or discovered some miraculous method of rapidly factoring massive prime numbers, they're certainly not going to tell the police unless they absolutely have to. You don't risk revealing a capability like that to the world unless the situation is absolutely desperate.

Second Skynet satellite to launch tonight

The satellite came first.

Sorry to interrupt the conspiracy theories, but the first Skynet satellite was launched in 1969 - well before Terminator.

MoD's Baron techwealth quits for Le Mans biofuel bid

@ Jon B

I actually heartily agree. But that has less to do with precisely where our equipment comes from and far more to do with the scandalous inadequacy of the defense budget. Current funding is wholly inadequate to our needs even if we bought from the cheapest supplier. I was simply observing that the premium on British kit is worth paying simply to keep the money, the jobs and the technology in the country.

Though as far as battlefield support helicopters go, for the love of God take the bloody things off the RAF and given them back to the army. We'll never have enough of them as long as the procurement decisions are being made by fighter pilots.

Defense procurement

Some would say that when the government takes money out of the UK economy in taxes, it has an obligation to put it back through spending, not send it abroad. Defense spending on UK products represents a stimulus to the british economy, maintaining british jobs and developing high-technology industry. Defense R&D in particular is an investment in science in general, not just in the military.

Equally pertinant is the fact that American kit is cheap because US companies are able to achieve greater economies of scale by flogging the stuff around the world. If we sold more stuff abroad, and the US less, the price differential would not be so noticeable.

Besides, it's one thing to buy US parts because they're cheaper, it's quite another to lack the ability to produce them yourself. The DIS is designed to maintain capabilities, not necessarily to produce everything in the UK. Maintaining capabilities occasionally requires buying the more expensive option.

Free trade is all very well, but the world does not show any signs of becoming a peaceful utopia any time soon, so there are certain things you need to be able to produce for yourself.

Microsoft spoils Christmas with Xbox 360 locking feature

Yeah, right.

Given how unimaginitive the average person is with regard to their passwords, I doubt it will take long for kids to disable this feature.

Man wrongly detained for 50 days has ISP to thank

@Lindsay

Was that supposed to be satire? I can't think of any network LESS even-handed than FOX - it's legendary for its ultra-conservative bias.

Manhunt 2 hacked open to reveal 'removed' gore

@Anonymous Coward

Providing that the CGI depraved filth is effectively fulfilling the wierdos desires and thus reducing the number who feel compelled to act out their sick fantasies in real life, I'm all for it. The question is, of course, whether it does actually substitute for the real thing, or whether it increases their desire for it. The debate on that has really only just begun.

Singapore Airlines bans A380 rumpy-pumpy

Hmmm

If I were them, I’d be less worried about public decency and more worried about the cabin crew wiring the suites for sound/video and then wasting time perving - not to mention exposing the airline to considerable liability for invasion of privacy.

Student taser victim spared electric chair

@David Wiernicki

"Hot Coffee" anyone? Before you say anything, I know that the context was rather different, and that the content wasn't actually supposed to be part of the game as sold. However, I rather feel that the reason it was pulled out prior to release in the first place is because Rockstar thought that it was likely to get the game banned in the US (or classfied AO, but in the US that seems to amount to the same thing). I don't particularly agree with the Manhunt 2 decision, but in my observation the US is equally as censorious as the UK, it just objects to sexual content rather than violence.

World's most gullible supermarket chain falls victim to online scam

Oh, I don't know..

Being a moron may not be a criminal offense. However, in business, it is a de facto civil offense - failing to exercise due dilligence in your stewardship of shareholders resources IS more than adequate grounds for a lawsuit.