Posts by Martin Gregorie

Revealed: The amazing premise behind Ridley Scott's Monopoly

Bee done before

Books, films and stage plays based on board games are pretty old hat and generally a bit naff. I reckon the only person to have done it right was Lewis Carroll.

McKinnon’s mum 'snubbed' by Home Secretary

A modest proposal

If NuLabour had any balls they'd refuse all American extradition requests until they also ratify the agreement and start accepting British extradition requests accompanied by the same level of evidence.

How I rebuilt Europe after the Berlin Wall collapsed

Halcyon days

That reminds me of a get-together with some Ukrainian friends a year or two later. We were comparing prices and were gobsmacked at the price of public transport in Kiev. Sacha saw this, grinned and said that their wages were low too, adding "Hey, the State pretends to pay us and we pretend to work!".

Volcanic African 'unzipping' could see continent divided

Nice bit of science

Its always good to see when theory and reality match so well, and will be really useful for geology if this rift does work like the undersea ones.

However, its scarcely "splitting Africa in two". Follow the links to the Rochester Uni page and zoom out on the satellite view and you'll see its just splitting off the fang-shaped bit at the SE and of the Red Sea. When it finally splits off it will be just a large island a bit more than half the size of Madagascar.

Globo-renewables all electric future touted again

Seems like a fair summary

Seems like a fair summary of how an electric future might work. Seeing some realistic cost estimates is good too. However, you missed one item - the obvious benefits of developing sailing or sail-assisted cargo vessels.

Thanks for pointing out the likely impact on air travel of not having suitable fuels. Hydrogen is an obvious non-starter due to its sheer bulk and low energy density. Biodiesel aviation fuel is probably also a non-starter due to the enormous amount of land its production would require, so wave goodbye to cheap charters and weekend breaks along with noise pollution round Heathrow and the second Stanstead runway.

Fortunately for those of us who simply enjoy flying, this will still be possible and affordable in a zero-emission world. Mines the one with the key to the electric glider winch in its pocket.

Rigid sky-train to fly through magnetic rings on sticks

Tubular rail is far too slow...

..... because every fule kno that the Starman Jones train was supersonic.

Tories would take an axe to Labour IT policy

@ M E H

Spot on, that man.

Back in 1968 we were taught that the analyst should get the system scope from the bosses and then talk exhaustively to the workers/intended users to find out what the new system had to do, why and how it should do what its users perceived it should do. It was well-known then that the bosses knew stuff-all about what the job was really about and could be safely ignored on that subject, but you'd best understand what the workers actually did and implement a system to support them.

Any system that isn't designed with this principle in mind is very likely to be yet another expensive failure.

Amazon Kindle fails test at Bezos alma mater

I'm with John Mangan

I've thought about what I'd need to consult a reference book and none of the current devices have it. For starters it needs to have at least an A5 page display size with print-quality resolution. The device should be thin (5mm would be good) and, preferably, flexible. It should run for at least 24 hours between charges. This seems like a practical minimum battery life for the way such a device would be used.

My ideal form factor would be two thin, hinged covers with protective outer surfaces and a touch-sensitive A4/A5 display on the inside of each. This would let me keep the 'current' page on one display while using short cuts to flip the other between contents, index and pages selected from the contents or index. Both displays must have page forward/backward controls, and also shortcuts to the start/end of the section and chapter. Swapping between books and magazines *must* set and retrieve bookmarks.

Something that could do the above could probably handle any reading task well, specially if it supported hyper-linking in addition to the contents and indexes. Conversely, an e-reader that can't do all of the above is almost useless because it would be a pain to use.

I suppose wireless connectivity might be nice, but I don't need it, especially if its always on to annoy me with ads and run up the comms bill. USB 3 will do nicely, thank you, particularly if issues of magazines I subscribe to and books etc that I buy are automatically delivered to my home server. I'd like the ability to keep a few reference books, a magazine and a novel in the e-reader, but would expect my main library to be on the home server, not the reader, so it doesn't need more than a gig or two of non-volatile memory.

I'm happy to buy a worthwhile reader and to pay for content I need, so I *don't* want to see content I didn't ask for, especially ads.

Bank sues Google for identity of Gmail user

@ AC 20:39

"Quarantining the identified email for a temporary period of time (i.e. 30 days), upon the request of the sender, until the court order is received, is a much better solution - to protect thousands of people for the rest of their lives from identify theft."

How does that work then?

For a mail to be quarantined so the sender has time to have second thoughts before the recipient gets it, the message must be held somewhere before its delivered. This must apply to *all* mail since the MTA can't know who is likely to screw up. You do realize that you can't quarantine mail after its been delivered, don't you?

So, who do you expect to hold the delayed mail and for how long?

Are you seriously suggesting that all e-mail should be delayed for 30 days?

Kindly get a clue.

Home Office shifts feet as vetting database looms

Wot I heard O'Brien say

I heard this morning's Radio 4 interview. At one point O'Brien said that Soham was entirely due to two police authorities failing to exchange information about Huntley and that the new, monstrously intrusive, ISA scheme was designed to plug that gap. What he didn't explain, and that Humphreys unfortunately didn't ask, was why they didn't simply bash some police heads together instead of spending money they no longer have to build a vastly expensive surveillance database.

I am left wondering if the ISA is merely a front for yet another attempt to entrap the whole population in the NuLabour police state's database.

Boffins: Give up on CO₂ cuts, only geoengineering can work

Best we get on with non-carbon energy

Best we get on with non-carbon energy sources anyway because oil is already past peak production. Even coal won't last long if consumption goes on up. So, we need to have alternatives ready ASAP. Besides, it would be nice to have a bit of oil left for use as a lubricant.

However, solar shades alone are not enough. There's still the problem of oceanic acidification and its effect on marine life if CO2 levels continue to rise. So, there's no escape from the need to reduce net CO2 emissions.

Last but not least, reducing CO2 output is probably a lot cheaper than sequestration schemes, let alone solving the problem of securely storing the sheer volume of captured carbon.

Stratus, NEC see double with fault-tolerant iron

Stratus guts

The setup inside the box seems to be basically the same as the original 68xxx based machines that I last used, so here it is in a nutshell.

Every board in the machine is paired and hot pluggable

All disks are mirrored - Raid 0

Each logical CPU consists of 4 logical CPUs, two in each of the paired boards. The same sort of arrangement also applies to comms boards, disk controllers, etc, but for simplicity I'll just describe CPU boards.

The basis of the system is that the two CPUs on a board are very tightly synchronised. They both execute the same instruction at the same time and fast comparators compare the outputs of the pair. If a comparator spots a difference it can turn the board off before the bad data gets onto the main busses that connect all boards in the cabinet.

The entire box has a single system image with paired boards synchronised at the bus read/write level. This means that a failing board can be turned off without affecting system operation - unless, of course, its pair has already failed. IOW the system is completely tolerant to single point failures and also to a more limited set of multi-point failures. You can pull up to half the boards out of the system without affecting its operation or performance provided that you don't pull both halves of a pair.

There is only one copy of the OS and of each application program in memory. Each running process is a single image, but each executes simultaneously on all four processors that make a logical processor: when everything is working correctly the data from three of them is discarded. If a board fails, things go on in the same way, but now the logical processor has only two chips until the board is replaced. On replacement the board is tested, brought up and synchonised with its active pair-mate, so the logical processor is again made of four physical processors. During all this the affected processes have continued to run without interruption and at full speed.

It used to be said that any non-fault-tolerant OS could be run on a Stratus with one change: it needed a special fault detecting interrupt handler whose only job was to kick off the phone-home process if an error interrupt ocurred.

Two things happen when a board fails: its switched off and after a 30 second delay, the system rings Stratus and tells them what broke so they can send an engineer round with a replacement. The delay was introduced because in the early days actual faults were hugely exceeded false alarms that were due to people showing their mates that you could pull a board or two without anything happening apart from BOARD FAILED messages appearing on the console as you took them out and IN SERVICE messages appearing when you stuck the board back in. The delay let you pull the board, say "look Ma, no fault" and stick it back in without the system phoning home.

Stephen Hawking both British and not dead

American newspapers

Just goes to show why Americans are so ill-informed. Its not their fault: all their news sources have agendas to which they twist what little news they convey[1] before lies are added to make sure the message gets rammed home. Well, maybe it *is* their fault. I've heard it said that a nation gets the newspapers they deserve.

I worked for a year in NYC back in the mid 70s, which then had four thick, respectable daily papers, but only one of them, the New York Times, carried any foreign news at all and 80% of that was about Israel.

The really amazing things about this story are that enough Americans have heard of Hawking to get his name in a paper and the ease with which the unavailability of health care to poor Americans was kicked under the carpet.

[1] I've never forgotten watching the prime time ABC news in LA one evening. It was nominally an hour of news but 50 minutes of that was sport. The remaining 10 minutes covered five stories. Four were the sort of stuff that would make it into a local rag on a quiet night here (a row of four shops on fire in Ventura was the lead) and the remaining one was a Washington DC story that was covered the way the BBC might cover an Albanian election.

British boffin named first ever 'doctor of texting'

Gotta use the time somehow

Well, if you consider that in the current economy, with its lack of jobs and glut of useless degrees, she'd probably have been unemployed for those three years, it was as good a use of her time as any and at least she kept her mind occupied.

I'd throw rocks at her supervisor for picking/approving the research topic and at her university for wasting a PhD degree. They don't grow on trees, you know!

El Reg space paper plane christened Vulture 1

Balloon and self-guiding glider

Take a gander at this web site:

http://members.shaw.ca/sonde/index.htm

This plane flew several times before it was lost when it hit the top of a mountain. It used a weather balloon for launch though it was a simple balsa and tissue model rather than paper. It took photos all the way down from 70,000 ft while guiding itself back to its launch point.

As it was a one man project, something like it should be easily done by a gang of El Reg hacks. Just make sure you have a competent model aircraft builder in the team. This way you're more likely to get a plane that flies rather than plummets.

As JetSetJim says, talk to the guys at CUspace since they have several successful weather balloon flights under their belts.

MoD Minister: This is the last generation of manned fighters

When roboplanes are harmful

I suspect that the American UAV bombing in Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan is doing more harm than good and heres why.

The tribal societies in those areas are largely regulated by personal honour. That's what governs everything from inter-tribal feuds to the day to day behaviour of every individual. A man without personal honour doesn't survive long in that society.

Now, lets look at a Predator operator from the Pashtun viewpoint - and don't make the mistake that they don't know about Predators. They are not stupid. They see somebody sitting in perfect safety in the US of A bombing and killing them while being too cowardly to meet them face to face. This attitude will affect their view of all Americans, giving them no reason to believe anything said by such a dishonourable bunch.

Nissan to build e-car batteries in Blighty

200 million for 350 jobs?

£200 million for 350 jobs is £572,000 per job. Geezus!

At the current average wage of £479 per week, that's almost 23 years wages. I bet the factory will be replaced with something else in well under that time, so why not simply give 350 people, say, £500 a week for the average life of a factory in the North-East. That should be just about within the government's competence and a sight cheaper too.

Robot land-steamers to consume all life on Earth as fuel

Previously described art

Does anybody else remember the coal fired, steam powered robot in Harry Harrison's "The Stainless Steel Rat"?

Boffin predicts pee-powered cars

Brewers heaven!

Even on the incorrect assumption that a pint of beer results a pint of piss, which in turn makes hydrogen equivalent to a liter of petrol, most 8000 miles a year (say 45 litres of petrol a month) people would need to double or treble their beer consumption.

In fact there's about 18g (1.8%) of urea in a litre of urine. As the good lady was talking about electrolysing dissolved urea and not, presumably, breaking down the water, it looks like an 8000 miles per year driving habit will will call for at least a 150 litre beer throughput per month to keep the car running. Cheers!

Mine's the one with brewery shares in the pocket.

Lamson - email app coding without the palm sweat

He's missing something

... and the something he's missing is JavaMail. Its there. It works. Its pretty damn easy to program, and can handle POP3 and SMTP sessions out of the box.

People can and do write MTAs with JavaMail, but its real benefit is providing a clean way to put your whizz-bang mail server, etc, where it belongs: as an MTA client, so it can be run behind something well-tested and reliable like Postfix. Its documentation is OK: even starting from scratch you can have code up and handling mail or USENET messages inside a day.

I agree with Ted about the horrors of sendmail, but really, if he can't install and configure Postfix and have it up and running in an afternoon then I bet I can shine a torch in one of his ears and read my paper by the light coming out the other one.

'Get cameraphones out of nurseries' plea

Names, misuse of

This horse has long bolted, *BUT* why has the meeja spinelessly used paedophiles own somewhat misleading pet name for themselves?

Kindly call the bastards what they are and what they always used to be correctly called:

child molesters

Prof: Global windfarm could power entire human race

Nice one, Lewis

Good analysis - much needed too.

Any chance you can do something similar for wave, tidal and direct solar? I have a strong suspicion that of those, only solar has a chance of meeting global energy requirements and, of course, will still need the Mother Of All Power Grids.

Germany poised to impose police-run block list

Why don't they..

Why don't the Germans use takedown orders on German websites and reserve block lists for those outside their jurisdiction? That seems fair and rational as a general principle, which is that you:

- use take down orders for objectionable content on sites falling under the national legal system where these orders can be directly enforced by the police. This would also allow wrong or mistaken take-downs to be challenged in court.

- reserve the block lists for sites that national law can't touch.

Of course, it follows that the law must explicitly state exactly what types of content is covered by the law to rule out scope creep.

Storage world asks: Is a copy a backup?

What's all this 'different format' rubbish

I use rsync for backups to USB drives, so are these bozos telling me that, just because rsync makes identical copies of files in the backup media, that they aren't backup copies?

'Better IT could have stopped 7/7 bombings'

Better choices

This report shows exactly how NuLabour's major failing is that, having recognised a problem, they immediately chuck immense amounts of money at inappropriate and expensive 'solutions' rather than spending a little time thinking about the issue and coming up with a workable solution at a reasonable cost.

In this case it seems to me that if, rather than chucking billions at their ID card obsession, they had spent a bit of money on a comparison and selective linking system to match data on the Special Branch computers, the Police National computer and MI5 databases they'd have got something that was actually useful without invading everybody's privacy.

What is it that makes them ignore expert advice in favour of some half-baked[*] scheme dreamed up by a knowledge-free advisor? Are they really scared of revealing their ignorance or just monumentally stupid?

[*] I was going to say 'Heath Robinson' scheme but that would demean Heath Robinson, whose gadgets could be built and would actually do what they were intended to do.

DARPA to try out goose v-formation trick with jets

Finger four

IIRC the RAF nicked this formation from the Luftwaffe.

During WW1 the RFC used close formation flights of three in V formation. These were in close enough formation that the workload from holding position must have reduced their ability to spot the opposition.

The Finger Four formation was rather more spread out, so any effect on flight efficiency is doubtful. It is best understood as two combat pairs in loose formation. Each wingman supported his leader and both pairs could support each other. The benefits are that each pilot only has to keep station on one other plane, so has more time for lookout and, in addition the wider spacing further reduces the station keeping workload.

Can you talk and drive?

@ Ben

Yes, somebody jabbering from outside the car is more dangerous than a passenger talking to the driver: most passengers can see a situation developing and will shut up.

As a pilot, I'd add another thought: we're taught that the priorities are aviate, navigate, communicate in that order. This also means that ATC or another pilot communicating with an aircraft will not be surprised or annoyed if, instead of a reply, they get a silence while a higher priority event gets dealt with followed by 'say again'.

Most people get annoyed and more insistent if they think they are being ignored no matter what the reason might be. Getting shouted at for not listening is exactly what you don't need during a traffic situation.

Love on the buses: The S-100 and me

..and the SS-50

I built my first microcomputer about the same time, but using the SS-50 bus and the vastly superior (to assembler programmers) MC6809 8/16 bit MPU. Superior because of its nicely orthogonal address structure - if it seemed reasonable to use an address mode for the instruction you needed it was usually permitted: suck on that, Intel: no wall charts of instruction vs address mode was ever needed.

I still have the system. It would boot into Flex9 right now, if only I had a reliable 8-bit parallel keyboard or unlimited supplies of switch cleaner. Its successor, an MC 68020 running OS/9 as I write, is accessible from this Linux laptop and is run daily. OS/9 predates MSDOS and, as a multi-user, multi-tasking system, relieves itself all over Bill G's bought-in OS.

Its about time 'This Old Box' covered the SS-50 bus, Motorola chips and their operating systems.

Apple moves to patent mobile color

@Kevin McMurtie

Forming the coloured moulding in one operation isn't patentable - there's prior art.

Gliders (aka sailplanes) have been made this way since at least the 1980s. I bet Lotus uses essentially the same technique. Its the obvious way to make even quite small production runs of CRP and GRP composites: if its worth making a female vacuum-forming mould for the part it saves money to colour it as part of the moulding process.

Obama pledges 3% of GDP for science

Finding the 3% should be easy...

...just claw it back from the w^Hbankers.

If its left in their claws it (A) won't get lent to any businesses because (B) it will magically turn into a Bank Boss Bonus.

OTOH, spend it on energy research and it will all get out into the economy as wages, equipment purchases, etc., so its money well spent helping the economy even in the unlikely event of the research finding nothing new or useful.

NASA: Clean-air regs, not CO₂, are melting the ice cap

Errr, I think you've got that backward

This data (and graph) doesn't say that clean air regs have caused warming at all.

What its actually showing is that the aerosols have been masking the temperature rise due to CO2. Now air pollution is being cleaned up (and not before time - have you seen the junk that the Chinese have to breathe recently) the effect of throwing all that CO2 into the air is being revealed.

We need less aerosol pollution and CO2, rather that being choked by pumping out more of both.

Spies hacked US electrical grid, says WSJ

Regulation, smegulation

It doesn't take National Security Regulations to show that connecting a SCADA system to the Internet is a really bad idea. Only an idiot, an MBA or a cost-fixated bean-counter in the wrong job could have so little understanding of the possible consequences as to do it.

Then again, look at the people who are running water companies, power plants, the national grid, etc.

I rest my case, m'lud.

Fulton imbues protection with power

Efficiency?

Does anybody know what the efficiency of these proximity chargers is compared to a regular wall rat?

If people leave a TV on standby when its not in use you can guarantee a proximity charger will be plugged in and turned on 24/7. So, what about the power they use when, most of the time, they're just being a mat and the device(s) they are there to charge are elsewhere?

Lies, damned lies and inflation statistics

....and another thing

...and another thing that deserves discussion is the effect of 'Economic Easement', aka printing money. This is effectively devaluing sterling and will continue to do so.

As the UK now makes bugger all and oil prices are measured in dollars, the cost of almost everything except locally grown food is set to increase in direct proportion to the speed that Brown runs the money factory and devalues the currency.

Mormons demand ICANN plugs net smut hole

Why is a Pron Port such a good idea?

I think I need somebody to explain in simple monosyllabic words exactly why a special Pron Port is such a great idea when the proposed XXX tld was really bad.

I see no difference between having a dedicated pron port and setting up a dedicated pron tld.

I wouldn't expect pron-mongers to be bound by either convention[*] if it was ever agreed on by ICANN or the US Department of Commerce. So, why even discuss it?

Lastly, it seems to me that the people who are now behind the pron port are the same bunch who shouted down the .XXX tld, so what has changed?

[*] I said 'convention' because either idea is utterly unenforceable within a global Internet.

Mobile money for the masses: Do the numbers add up?

Thanks...

...for giving a clear description of the situation. Microfinance banking by mobile phone sounds like a genuinely useful thing for the Gates Foundation to be supporting. Its shameful that McKinsey have the cheek to take money for a job they can't do: surely they could do this type of consultation for free. One would also hope they have the integrity to come clean if they can't do the job.

One niggle: microfinance has remarkably little to do with either governments or mainstream banking. The concept was developed and implemented by an economics lecturer, Muhammad Yunus, at Chittagong in Bangladesh. His initiative became the Grameen Bank in 1983, a decade after its initial start. It's basis looks to have more in common with credit unions than with the banking industry or government development initiatives. Banks and governments have historically ignored the people microfinance helps because they prefer to lend relatively large amounts to almost anybody except the poor.

McDonalds to cook up EV charging station network

A greenwash joke

McDonalds are just taking the piss here.

A 230v 16A charge point is a joke. That's a whole 3.68 kW, which means that it would take over 14 hours to fully charge a Tesla's 53 kWh battery.

California to get 'space age' three-wheel EV

Please get your facts straight

The Aptera is rear wheel drive and always has been, with a toothed belt transmission. This is a no-brainer: it's simple since no universal joints are needed, light and cheap.

The shopping bags would not be plastic - Americans were using paper bags almost exclusively last time I looked. Paper is better: it makes bags that actually stand up and stay open while they're being filled at the checkout counter.

EU security agency draws 'privacy baseline' for ID cards

UK Muppets obfuscate yet again

Amazing, here we are, less than 12 months from UK cards starting to be distributed and yet our bunch of plonkers STILL won't tell us how or if they intend to implement privacy on the ID card's data content.

The safest approach is to assume the anybody can and will read everything on the card without the owner's knowledge and, using whats on the card, can and will read everything on the database.

Welcome to the goldfish bowl, citizen.

Blizzard of smut cuts off Council websites

So what's new

Last year I found the same had happened to an aviation-related online magazine. Possibly co-incidentally, this happened during a change of editor.

I e-mailed them about the problem, never got a response. After a month or so nothing had changed in the forum^W pron listing though new material had started to appear on the front page.

I scrapped my reference to them at that point, so now I neither know nor care what they've done about it.

Russian rides Phantom to OS immortality

Yawn -- very old ideas reinvented

Sorry mate, but both the core ideas in Phantom were first implemented over 35 years ago and remain in production use today:

NO FILES: first implemented around 1970 by IBM's Future Series. FS was canned, to reappear in the late '80s as System/38 and its descendants the AS/400 and System i. These machines have no filing system, only virtual memory. File-type objects are in reality persistent in-memory tables.

PROGRAM STATE PRESERVATION: first implemented in 1975 in the Tandem Non-Stop series of fault tolerant computers. HP's Integrity series are linear descendants. The internal state of all programs is saved and replicated every time an externally recognisable event occurs to a program, so the program can always be restarted from that point. This is better than Phantom since the replication is to another copy of the program in a separate CPU - if the active program's CPU fails the backup copy takes over seamlessly a millisecond or so later.

Both systems maintain separation between program and data so recovery from programming errors is never more of a problem that it would be on a conventional *NIX or Windows box.

The pan-European Office for the Ecodesign of everything

The art of looking for what isn't seen?

All I can say is that its a pity that more economists don't seem to be aware of this definition of their job. Why, pray tell, do so many of them fail to see the cost of waste disposal and environmental damage?

Google and the Great Wikipedia Feedback Loop

On finding non-Wikipedia pages

Google could make itself a LOT more useful if it excluded all the plagiarised copies of articles from the search results.

Example: the other night I wanted to find out about Pan Am Flight 943.

- as with many topics, WP was near the top. It happened to have the best account occupying a full page and including several pictures of the ditching, but that's another story.

- next up was a piece by the NY Times. It was OK, but it was short with no photos and no technical details.

- after this a very high proportion of entries were unacknowledged clones of the NYT piece.

- buried in all the NYT clones on about page 4 was a Britannia article. Apart from one paragraph the rest of its article could only be read by using plastic so like most people I ignored it.

- also buried in the clones on about page 6 was a U-tube copy of a US Coastguard movie containing actual footage of the ditching padded with stock USCG footage to make a nice PR story.

- after that I got tired of the NYT clones and gave up

The annoying thing about Google listing all those clones is that not many cycles would have been needed to dump them: almost all could be recognised as duplicates simply by looking at the 3-4 line summary in the search results.

Google Analytics crippled by autoimmune disease

Something to hide?

Google can't possibly be doing this to hide the amount of spam issuing from gmail. Oh no, surely not. Such a thought would never cross their minds. That would be Doing Evil.

Where has all the bad storage gone?

Just use rsync

Rsync is the obvious choice if you don't mind writing a script to specify exactly what you want to back up: you need only do this once. Then simply start the script before heading for the pub. Or let your scheduler take care of running it.

Rsync is free, available for Windows as well as *nixen and fast. My weekly full system backup takes about 12 minutes, though the initial backup will take some time. Its fast because it only does the minimum work needed to keep your backup disk synchronised with your system disk.

It can either back up to a locally attached disk (USB, etc) or across a network: since the backup is a duplicate of the system disk, drag'n drop handles individual file recovery. Of course you can use rsync itself to recover a whole disk.

First-ever pics of lunar polar crater interiors released

Aricibo?

The Aricibo radar has the same view as an optical telescope looking from Earth. It can't see the polar regions well either, so my guess is that the large area photo is from one of the earlier lunar orbiters, not the Aricibo radar. Besides, it has the look of an optical image from the Apollo era. You'd expect the crater interiors to be dark since the sun can't shine into them, which is why selenologists think they might have icy bottoms.

MPs bitchslap MoD mega-IT architecture project

EDS vs usual Defense suspects

If the MOD thinks EDS is OK, what does this say about their usual suppliers?

Password guessing attack exposed in Twitter pwn

Very ancient, solved problem

Digital's VAX/VMS operating system had a strong solution to this 25 years ago, so there's no excuse for such easily crackable login code.

After the third sequential failed login attempt VMS disconnected the login program from the account and replaced it with another program that looked and acted the same, but whose only actions were to log that it had been started and then accept and discard all following login attempts. Once the switch-over had occurred the account could not be used again until the local BOFH had reset it. The technique was reinforced by requiring users to select long passwords that were not in a dictionary of common words, etc.

This was in the days of dial-up access: the idea of the fake login program was to see how high you could run the perp's phone bill before he twigged that his automated dictionary attack was never going to work.

Adapting this approach to the Internet Age is easy: implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.

'First algae-fuelled airliner flight' takes off tomorrow

RE; Silly question maybe

Biofuel is carbon neutral IF AND ONLY IF the fertiliser and energy needed to grow and process it are made without using fossil fuels.

If that condition is met, then biofuel is carbon neutral because the CO2 produced by burning it originally came from the atmosphere. It follows that a 50:50 oil:biofuel aviation fuel is low carbon since only a proportion of it releases CO2 from fossil sources to the atmosphere.

$400m US space interceptor deal inked

Why Poland for block 3?

If either Russia or Iran is trying to hit America the obvious way to throw missiles is over the pole since that's the shortest Great circle route. Radars at Fylingdales, Thule or in Alaska make sense since they are able to look at the tracks side on. GDMs in any of these places don't seem sensible since they're a long way to the side, meaning even bigger missiles are needed and the longer flight time makes a timely response more problematic.

Poland, OTOH, is further off track than Fylingdales or Thule because its further south. GDM missiles would have not only further to go but would have a stern chase, giving lower approach speed and so much less impact energy, which varies as the square of the impact speed.

So I really don't understand the benefit of radar in Poland, let alone putting GDM stuff there. Unless, of course, the real purpose is to piss Putin off and start WW3.