Posts by John Galt

3D printed guns: This time it's for real! Oh, wait – no, still crap

Here's how a rational attempt behaves

FWIW

http://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2014/11/04/warfairy-charon-3d-printed-ar15-lower/

A set of G-code files for a proper gun made from common stock materials would be far more meaningful than the plastic fantasy crap. CNC machine tools are in the same price range as plastic 3D printers.

Good 3D printed guns (e.g. the sintered stainless steal 1911) are possible, but only as a stunt. Production costs and labor are ridiculously high relative to normal production processes.

GCHQ tracks diplomats' hotel bookings to plant bugs, say leaked docs

Yawn.....

http://www.newser.com/story/177343/how-obama-outwits-spies-with-a-tent.html

There are a slew of other stories on the subject. Pick one. NYT's is pretty good.

In Japan they've been bugging hotel rooms for years to collect sex videos to sell online. There's a wide offering of bugged lamps, clocks, radios and smoke detectors available cheap. It's completely impossible to clean a hotel room of cameras and microphones without demolishing the room.

So any VIP who doesn't realize this is going on is clueless and has an equally incompetent staff.

'I WAS AN ADMIN FOR SILK ROAD': Alleged hit-man target tells all

Let us know how that works out

Clearly you've not considered either the NSA and friends or the nature of Bitcoins to any significant degree.

Months before they found DPR, they found the server. How did that happen?

If you can figure out how to hide a publicly known server you can make a lot of money. But if you fail, you go directly to jail. Running one for a few weeks is not a problem. Running one for a few years and not getting caught is impossible with the current surveillance systems.

So sad about the NSA web-spying bombshells - but think of the MONEY!

Read "On Trusting Trust"

"on the basis that any compromise by the likes of the NSA or anyone else will be clear to the rest of the open-source community."

Ken Thompson described hiding a backdoor to login in the compiler binary in his Turing award address. The ultimate result was a trojaned binary that would recompile clean source for the compiler and login and insert the backdoor into login and the compiler when they were recompiled.

This may well be how NSA has compromised existing devices.

Great Britain rebuilt - in Minecraft: Intern reveals 22-BEEELLION block map

Seems an excellent intern project

The important skills demonstrated are mapping and merging large datasets and interacting well with other staff. MoD, DoD and similar all around the world are using game engines for planning and analysis work, so developing techniques for importing data to create simulated worlds is highly relevant to the Ordnance Survey's function and mission. In geospatial disciplines this is what "big data" looks like. First create a set of surfaces and then paint other information on the surfaces.

I suspect the coarse resolution was a compromise on dataset size. Hopefully there will be a good paper on the process so others can implement finer resolutions and build models for other game engines.

On any measure well done!

Seems an excellent intern project

The important skills demonstrated are mapping and merging large datasets and interacting well with other staff. MoD, DoD and similar all around the world are using game engines for planning and analysis work, so developing techniques for importing data to create simulated worlds is highly relevant to the Ordnance Survey's function and mission. In geospatial disciplines this is what "big data" looks like. First create a set of surfaces and then paint other information on the surfaces.

I suspect the coarse resolution was a compromise on dataset size. Hopefully there will be a good paper on the process so others can implement finer resolutions and build models for other game engines.

On any measure well done!

Scan your branes LIVE IN REAL-TIME, thanks to GPU-surfin' boffins

Very nice job!

That's one of the best pieces of technical journalism I've read.

I'm a research geophysicist/programmer w/ a BA in English literature. I really appreciate good technical writing. It's hard.

Well Done!

Reg

Hitachi claims glass data storage will last millions of years

Won't last 100's of millions of years

Glass crystallizes. It's called "devitrification" It's commonly seen in obsidian which is volcanic glass. Or to put it another way, it just wants to be a crystal again. Glass is a metastable state.

It will outlast plastic media by thousands of years. But 100's of millions is fluff.

Ice core shows Antarctic Peninsula warming is nothing unusual

A longer history of sea level

A google of:

"sea level change last 250 million years"

should provide a long textbook PDF on sea level for the last 5-6% of the earth's history. It's got nice graphs showing how much both the amplitude and rate of change vary over time.

Relative to the earth's age, 20,000 years is the blink of an eye.

There's lots more literature for anyone who is actually interested in facts.

The climate has always changed.

Arctic ice panics sparked by half-baked sat data

Scientists despair of the public's waning interest

I certainly don't despair of anything other than the continual blather promoting anthropogenic warming.

FWIW I'm a geologist turned geophysicist. So I know a bit about the history of the earth and time series analysis. Sadly such combination seems all too rare.

The thing that amazes me most is the life of this silliness given that a casual look at a sea level curve over geological time (e.g. 250 million years) will show that the rate of rise and fall of sea level is quite variable.

Greens wage war on clean low-carbon renewable energy

Has someone actually solved the technical problems?

US DOE was studying dry rock geothermal 30+ years ago at Jimez near Los Alamos. There's a fundamental physical chemistry problem. I'd be fascinated to hear if someone has solved it.

Hot water (> 150 C) dissolves quartz and pretty much anything else w/ ease. Which would be OK except that when you cool it down by extracting the heat energy from the water, all the dissolved solids come out of solution and plug up the pipes. So far as I know there's no way to avoid that. All those pretty quartz crystals you see in rock shops and new age stores were grown by precipitation from hot water circulating in the earth.

However, it may be that at higher energy prices you can afford to clean the pipes.

As for the heat source, it's actually non-renewable nuclear energy, so maybe that's the issue for the Greens.

Big Data is now TOO BIG - and we're drowning in toxic information

BS

More data is only a problem if you don't know how to process it. I say this from the perspective of having done a lot of it.

It takes about 100,000+ samples to provide any real confidence that a population is gaussian w/ only a single mode. It takes a lot more data to provide convincing evidence that there's not one or more other populations in the data. Anyone that doubts this is encouraged to fire up R and run some experiments.

The Black Swan, which I'm giving up on half way through, is a series of half clever repetitions of, "The statement in this box is false."

The gaussian distribution extends to infinity. So a "black swan" might easily be from the extremely low probability part of a normal distribution, not an aberration. You need massive amounts of data to decide the case.

Of course, for the clueless, any data is too much.

How the fate of the US economy rests on a Dell workstation

HPC side of things

Here's more on the subject:

http://www.hpcwire.com/blogs/Making_the_Quantitative_Models_Work.html

Griffin pitches out-loud music without wires - or speakers

It's just a horn such as Edison used

Jeez! It doesn't amplify at all. It does an impedance transformation. If you want to write about technology at least learn something about it first.