Posts by The Mole

Devolo dLAN 500 AV Wireless Plus: Triple-tech connectivity for the home

Re: 100Mbps < 500Mbps

Comparing raw bitrates of fundamentally different protocols can be near meaningless.

Ethernet supports full duplex operations so you will potentially be able to get nearer 200Mbps for a given link, it's also running on much better quality wiring so probably has significantly lower error correction and tollerances compared to Homeplug. Some protocols (like wireless) alternate between the hub and device communicating so you can only get at most half the data transfer in a particular direction, there's also differences in quite periods in protocols after a given device has transmitted.

That said it seems stupid not to have a gigabit chip - at the very least the ethernet connected devices would get a benefit when talking to each other. I've also never worked out why more powerline plugs don't have multiple ethernet ports - once you have one I can't believe adding a couple more adds much to the cost of production.

Lasers to carry 622 Mbps Earth-Moon link

Re: terrestrial

And there was I thinking the big difference was doing it between two objects in totally different orbits which I imagine is a tadge more complicated compared to doing it between two objects bolted in a fixed position to the same land mass (or failing that two continental plates moving at a relative mm/year to each other).

Are driverless cars the death knell of the motor biz?

This was my initial reaction and then I thought about it a bit further. For many two car families this scheme would make a lot of sense. They'd keep ownership of one car, the one they tend to use together at the weekends, for shipping road trips etc. For the majority of the time you do need two cars (commuting or other planned times) you would be able to book far in advance what time you want to arrive and will be given a scheduled regular time you will be picked up.

Public transport (whilst better than private car ownership) is on the whole very inefficient outside population centres. You have to run a constant service on the off chance that someone will want to get on board, which is probably fine at peak hours but can result in regularly empty vehicles off hours that you still have to run, as if you cut it too much people won't use it at all. A dynamic system of cars like this could much more efficiently replace public transport - on regularly busy routes during peak hours it may well end up being a scheduled fixed standard route with larger vehicles which is run.,Off peak smaller more efficient on demand cars are provided giving the best of both worlds.

Spear phish your boss to win more security cash

Re: How irresponsible !!!

My understanding is the Police do this sometimes, they'll relocate unattended backs/bikes etc to demonstrate people need to take more care

MPs demand UK rates revamp after Google's 'extraordinary tax mismatch'

Re: "pay its fair share of tax" - @ the goalpost-moving politicians:

Where there is a clear exemption that Parliament decided then that isn't a loophole. A loophole is where some accountant/lawyers takes and/or combine the exemptions and use them in a way that was never intended by parliament

BBC boffins ponder abstruse Ikea-style way of transmitting telly

Nothing new

This is exactly how digital TV already works. A multicast mpeg transport stream is broadcast containing separate elementary streams for each video, audio, subtitle and interactive track. There is also some metadata (PAT and PMT tables) which associate which streams go together. It's not unusual for a programme to be broadcast with multiple audio streams (english, welsh + english audiodescriptive for instance) and being able to select different video streams is also regularly used for wimbledon and similar.

There probably is scope for better metadata and user interfaces to identify what each of the streams are/package combinations together, but mostly we just seem to be in a timewarp back to when people sprinkled 'object oriented' because it is new and exciting.

Ed Miliband brands Google's UK tax avoidance 'WRONG'

Re: "When Google goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid paying its taxes, I say it’s wrong."

In the UK imposing taxes is a God given right if you want to follow (outdated rarely thought about) historical tradition and theology.

The power to impose taxes is given to Parliament by the crown - taxes can't be imposed without royal assent.

The power of the crown is given to the monarch during their coronation by the Archbishop of Canterbury in a Christian religious ceremony as the power and grace to rule is considered to be given by God.

So yes, the power to impose taxes in the UK is a God given right, and there is a big (moral) difference between minimizing your tax affairs by taking advantages of the schemes and systems parliament intended in the law, and avoiding and/or evading tax by deliberately twisting and using contrived structures and reading of the law to go far far beyond what any reasonable person would consider the spirit or intention of the laws.

Google formally recognises Palestine: Puts it on the virtual map

"This change raises questions about the reasons behind this surprising involvement of what is basically a private Internet company in international politics,"

perhaps should be:

"This raises questions about the reasons behind this surprising involvement of politics with what is basically a private Internet company" ?

UK Supreme Court backs news leech in copyright fight

Of course the web browser needs to cache the page it receives in one form or another. Otherwise every time you scrolled the page or had to repaint part of the window it would have to go fetch the webpage again.

Whether this cache is on disk or in memory, whether it is the html or a rendered view is a separate question, but either way it is storing a copy in memory (independently to the copy the graphics card is holding to display on screen).

Note the Judge says "correct and efficient" - efficient being the key word as to why the cache is needed.

New rules to end cries of 'WTF... a £10 online booking fee?'

I think the argument is that Direct Debit payements are much less likely to be missed. If a human has to remember to manually pay be card then they are much more likely to forget meaning that letters have to be written, phone calls made and/or debt collectors contracted. This costs time and money. They are also faced with a higher risk of fraudulent transactions as a different card may be used for every payment.

In your case why not setup a second bank account from which the direct debits are taken. If the charity has enough money it does a bank transfer to put the cash in the account 3 days before the DD is due. If it doesn't you transfer money in from your personal account?

Bitcoin-mining malware ENSLAVES computers

Re: Solving PI vs. time to mine one Bitcoin...

"If PI could be solved, then due to its unique never repeated series, all digital info could be compressed into just two numbers, an Index into PI and the original size of the item... That would make sending a large file over the internet potentially instant!"

Unfortunately this idea isn't worthwhile.

For a bitstream of length n there are 2^n possible values, each of them unique. This means each of them needs a separate index into PI, 2^n possible indexes., Unfortunately the due to the random nature of PI the first consecutive 2^n indexes will result in some duplicate patterns and so you'll need a larger number space for the indexes to pick every possible value - in other words for 2 digit patterns '14' may be at index 0 but '00' isn't available until index 307. This means you've now used 3 digits to represent 2 digits which isn't a good compression ratio.

I'm also not sure you can prove that every combination of sequence of digits is guaranteed to occur. the Sequence is n ones followed by a zero, followed by n+1 ones is none repeating but will never have the sequence 222 in it.

Provider of FIFA goal line tech chosen, tracks ball in space and time

Encrypted radio signal

My knowledge of the rules of football isn't the best, but isn't it basically the case (ignoring the offside rule and other things that system can't monitor) that if the ball crosses the line it is a goal? If the article is accurate and an encrypted signal is only and automatically sent when the ball crosses the line (1s doesn't give long enough for a human to be involved) doesn't that mean the encryption is pointless? The mere presence of the message tells you what it means.

Though I guess the encryption may actually be authentication to prove that the message is genuine.

Sci/Tech quango promises an end to 'events with no women'

Re: Jobs for the girls

"Note how they are making no effort to increase the representation of ethnic minorities, or those whose background is not from the "right" universities."

You obviously missed this bit in the article:

"It claimed the initiative was just the beginning of a drive to "challenge dominant ethnic, class and disability representation in public life"."

That said I totally agree with the rest of what you said...

After Leveson: The UK gets an Orwellian Ministry of Truth for real

Re: Plenty of regulation of the printed word

Yet the main debates and arguments seemed to be around the fact that they couldn't possibly have parliament pass a law to regulate them - even though plenty had already been passed to regulate them already. It seemed to me a deliberate attempt to reframe the debate out of reality.

The argument there are plenty of laws already covering them and it's a failing of the police to enforce them is much more convincing, and it certainly seems this new law (sorry royal charter) is badly phrased and rushed - partly because everyone was wasting time arguing semantics about the form it took not the contents of what went into it.

Plenty of regulation of the printed word

"After that, at last, it was a taboo for Parliament to regulate the published word - until quite recently. Regulating the press simply wasn’t British."

I'm still confused why newspapers don't think they they are currently regulated. I'm not a lawyer but off the top of my head I can name plenty of regulations which apply to the printed words and limit what newspapers can print. e.g.:

defamation law

contempt of court and stringent reporting restrictions on court proceedings

injunctions/super injunctions

obscene publications act

financial reporting regulations

fraud law

Pornography/child porn laws

Incitement

Race Relations Act

Data Protection Act

Unfair Consumer Practices Directive

Official Secrets Act

and probably many more.

Some of these may have partial exceptions for the purposes of journalism but these exceptions rarely give them free reign

Honk if the car in front is connected

Re: And when it all gets hacked...

Billboards telling cars there is congestion ahead so they have to slow down and read the message?

I'm not convinced how the system could ever be made secure, and even if there are new laws it it is going to be hard to prove who brought the motorway to a standstill by sending the fake message that they have just done an emergency stop.

Turkey prepares to hand $5bn to US biz for intelligent electricity

Re: It's free, Jim, but not as we know it.

Is it that complicate? If you don't have any thieves then Awesense will spend lots of their money trying to find them and then not charge you a penny - hence they will do the work for free. Call it No Win No Fee if you like - its exactly the same model.

Now UK must look out for crappy SPACE weather - engineers

They don't want it for the position, they want it for the accurate clock signal to ensure all parts of the network are in sync.

Oh, those crazy Frenchies: Facebook faces family photo tax in France

Workers...

So if anybody who uploads pictures in France is considered a worker then presumably this means they are a worker and it would be illegal under the working time directive for them to be on facebook more than 35 hours a week. Under minimum wage laws presumably Facebook would also have to pay their users/'workers' €9.40 each hour they spend uploading their 'product'...

Adobe demands 7,000 years a day from humankind

Every single update...

What I don't get is why Adobe feel the need to force me to agree again for every single update. I've already claimed to have read the license agreement when I first installed the software, this is just an update so it doesn't revoke what I have previously agreed to.

In fact even if Adobe had changed the clauses of the EULA, the fact they don't inform you of this means that they aren't enforceable anyway - as a reasonable person could assume the EULA is the same as the version they agreed to 5 years ago!

Comet crashes to Earth: 125 stores wiped out

Which ones

Does anyone know where to find an updated list of which stores are being shut and which will be left open for a bit longer?

Singaporeans get hard token baked into credit card

Picture caption...

I'm pretty sure a decent hard token will produce the one time password 123456 approximately 1/1000000 of the time unless they have deliberately compromised cyptographic integrity. If they removed all the number combinations that humans sees patterns in then the pool of permitted values quickly declines.

Ohio voting machines have 'backdoor', lawsuit claims

Re: US Civics 101

Point 4 is trivial to solve.

You get a print out of your vote, then place this in a ballot box. The first count is done electronically, but If there are calls for a recount it is the paper printouts which are recounted not the electronic register - this greatly protects against hacking based fraud and ensures that people don't go home with proof.

Firm-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named's tax dodge profit shift? Totally legit

Re: Ban international companies.

That's exactly what they do - which is what the problem is.

Starbucks setup a UK company, then on one side of their balance sheet they have all their income. On the other side they have all their costs - which includes licensing the "Starbucks" trademark from their parent company (and other intellectual property) at very high rates (after all it's a very valuable brand I'll have you know). They probably also pay to be included in the Starbucks.com website and all sort of other 'expenses'.

'We invented Windows 8 Tiles in the 1990s', says firm suing Microsoft

For once I'll be on Microsoft's side in this fight.

First example off the top of my head is the system tray next to the clock on the task bar. Introduced in Windows 95. Take task manager for instance - when minimized it shows a mini graph in real time of cpu usage, but when clicked on it magically opens the application.

(http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2007/07/29/simple-windows-task-manager-tips/ shows this even happened all the way back before this amazing patent was discovered.)

I'm pretty sure Active Desktop could do all sort of wacky things like this as well - it was microsofts first attempt at tiles and widgets etc.

ICO: Education ministry BROKE the Data Protection Act

Wide concequences

Surely, given how many people reuse password, revealing both email addresses and passwords means that there is a good chance sensitive details have been made available indirectly or other serious harm could have occurred. If the password was for the email acount, or face book then you are almost certainly to find information on sexual orientation and quite possible religious views or health information.

New Oz road rules forbid touching mobes

But that is also another example of how the law doesn't keep up with reality. Keyless ignition systems are now pretty common, or perhaps in this case the entire car is considered the ignition?

German ebook firm aims low with cheap 'n' simple €10 ereader

Hackability

It definetely sounds like a candidate for hacking with the Raspberry Pi, arduino or goodness knows what else. At that price (or even double it) it allows for a whole new range of low power devices with screens. With battery life being quoted as that long and a price that cheap it almost certainly a very simple controller circuit in it which means the interfacing is likely to be very simple and therefore easy to replicate.

Guidelines issued for Qi wireless gadget charging in cars

Impossible requirements

This seems to have created impossible requirements for any cars that have keyless ignition (many Fords etc) as the key fob can pretty much be anywhere in the car. In fact many people will probably take their phone and keys out their pockets and place it in the same place so there is a good chance the key fob will be in the recharging bay..

Juries: The only reason ANYONE understands patent law AT ALL

Re: the party of the first part...

No, the point of jargon is to provide a single word/phrase to replace a generally complex concept that otherwise could only be said in multiple sentences - often that concept could be phrased in multiple different ways which may not be immediately self evident to actually mean the same thing. They therefore exist to improve the efficiency and accuracy of communication between people who are knowledgeable in the subject.

They also have a benefit to new comers to the subject as the jargon word can simplify and hide complexities and details that the full definition may need to touch upon. Most novice programmers will know what a procedure or function is. Trying to provide a concise but accurate description of it may be harder - particularly one that won't be criticized (or potentially misunderstood) by experts who understand more of the subtleties and differences in low level implementations.

It can be misused to try and exclude people but generally that is an issue with people not being prepared to explain and support new entrants to the field - getting rid of the jargon isn't actually going to help that.

Phoenix IT Group fesses up to 'accounting irregularities'

Re: Big Gov overseas IT Outsourcer uses dodgy accounting

The news is the fact that they have admitted to it.

Microsoft awards itself Google-esque power over Hotmail, SkyDrive etc

Re: *Shrug*

Actually Royal Mail can open letters if the letter is undeliverable because the address is illegible or similar then they are allowed to open it to find a return address and will return it to the original sender. I don't know if they still do this but they have the power to do so- now they probably just deliver the letters to a hedge somewhere..

Zabulon Skipper: Butterfly harbinger of climate biodiversity doom?

Re: Evolution might work here

Save the day from what?

Some species will adapt and maybe even evolve. Others will die out. While it may be the end of the world for those dead species, as the first comentator pointed out the world will continue and new creatures will take their place. That may be a shame but it isn't a disaster for the planet. Humans I'm sure will adapt, though there may be impacts on standard of living and possibly a few wars in the process...

In fact the scientists have seemed to missed the big conclusion of the butterfly study - as the temperatures change animals will move and start showing up in ecosystems that they were previously rare in, moving with the temperature bands.

Breaking: Megaupload seizures illegal says NZ High Court

Re: Possible Copyright infringement by the US then

You are forgetting that he may own copyright to any file names and structures, metadata files, source code that may be on the same share, and other database rights in the organization of said copyright infringing data..

Boffins program peripheral visions for ultra TV immersion

Re: Isn't this just a spin on...

You could even go far to say (quoting the article) that it is "ambi-light on steroids"

To be fair though that is like saying video calling is just a spin on the telephone (the practicalities and adoption may be just as wide spread as well)

Compulsory coding in schools: The new Nerd Tourism

Re: It might help give children a better model of what a computer is and does

Well my wife successfully taught most of her class of 10 year old's how to use features like sum, average and conditional formatting in excel. Being still in primary school averages is the limit of their statistical knowledge. Conditional formatting however is teaching the basics of programming, I don't know whether secondary school will actually progress them beyond this level of excel usage but there is hope. The biggest issue however is the fact that many teachers are still scared of computers and probably don't even know that conditional cell formatting even exists let alone how to teach it.

Publishing giants sue open textbook startup over layout

Re: Idiots

This seems to be the bit everyone else is missing.

The hardest part of writing a text book is working out an effective way to split up a subject into sensible chapters, how to split those chapters into sensible and well ordered subsections and working out what details to include and exclude and where diagrams and photos are appropriate an useful. The decisions of how to do this organisation is much more a creative and aesthetic decision than a purely technical process.

Crap PINs give wallet thieves 1-in-11 jackpot shot

Choice...

Did they ask the obvious question of how many people had actually chosen their pin and how many people just use the pin provided by their bank (which is effectively random)?

French court lays le smackdown on Google Maps

You weren't the only one that made that mistake!

Huge US command-&-control airship gets quantum optics

Who on earth approved that name? The locals will probably be slightly annoyed that America is hovering over them watching their every mood; but when they then find out it is the DEVIL watching them and their god fearing country I'm sure they'll be delighted (regardless of which god it is they follow).

Perhaps they should go the whole hog and paint a massive bullseye on it as well?

Truly unlimited mobile for $19: How can it be true?

Owner not liable?

In this case the owner can probably get away with it and it would instead by the handset manufacturer who would be liable. They are selling this as totally seamless with no owner knowledge or control of the interaction - unlike wifi squatting where it is user initiated/controllable.

The manufacturer on the other hand are controlling the interaction with their DNS hack and so would be the ones attempting to circumvent access restrictions.

Of course this all depends on the quality of the lawyers doing the arguing.

Iranian TV claims royals ordered Ofcom to ban it

BBC World Service hasn't been funded by the the TV license, the World Service has been funded directly via the Foreign Office. This creates the perception of them being a government mouthpiece even if somehow they have managed to keep a large degree of journalistic integrity and independence.

Where am I going tomorrow? My electric car charger wants to know

Overly complicated

The basic idea is good, it has just been made way way way over complicated.

What you need to tell it are two basic things:

1. Minimum acceptable charge level/range (ie how much charge you need to get to and from the hospitable in an emergency).

2. When you want it fully charged by - eg 6am.

The charger is clever enough that when you plug it in it works out when to do the charging.

If the battery is below 1 it starts charging immediately.

If it is over 1 then works out how long it takes to charge to full and uses the most optimal approach to perform the charge - ie if the car is at 95% it may turn the charger on at 3am to do the rest of the charging when it is cheapest.

Linking into online calendars and everything is just an optimization and complication too far.

Boffins fear killer gamma death blasts from space

Anybody know what they mean by short and long bursts - astrophysicists often have strange definitions of these things (afterall 1000 years is short in terms galactic lifetimes)

Oracle: Java 8 will be revolution, not evolution

It's Fork/Join not Form/Join!

HideMyAss defends role in LulzSec hack arrest

Not HideMyDonkey.com?

Facebook: 'We don't track logged-out users'

He isn't accessing a Like button, who is visiting another webpage on a totally unrelated site which displays a facebook like image, loaded straight from the facebook server which will see the cookies and be able to work out what page the image is embedded in. No user interaction required.

NASA to trial laser-powered space broadband

Because you are too tight to pay for it?

If you want to spend a couple of million to get it I'm sure you could be provided with incredibly good broadband no matter where you live. In fact you probably don't even need to pay that much, just more than £5/month or whatever the current price you are paying is...

Gaps in the apps mean shops miss out on sales

Would have been nice to know where out of thin air they pulled these numbers, from reading the article it's presumably just "site XYZ doesn't have feature ABC that is 1% of their earnings missed out on".

How do we know the figure isn't zero? <flawed logic>Clearly if no body had online grocery delivery then nobody would buy their groceries online and instead we'd get them from the shops, pretty much the same amount of money would be spent in either cases therefore they haven't missed out on any sales!</flawed logic>

Facebook security profiling doesn't like African log-ins

Dynamic IP Addresses?

Could it be to do with dynamic IP addresses? Perhaps Sam in Africa is on dial up or something and gets a new IP address each time, the guys in other countries may have stable IP addresses and so each login isn't considered totally different?