Posts by The Indomitable Gall

Wikipedia Foundation exec: Yes, we've been wasting your money

Re: not quite

What do you mean, "no"? Your argument is based entirely on the Wikipedia definition of "editor", whereas the Register is using the term "editor" as defined by the publishing/press industry. Of which they are a part.

Police constable 1337 stunned by Lego lookalike

Re: They don't look <b>that</b> similar

But they've both got moustaches that wouldn't look out of place in a period drama. OK, so PC Thomas would have to be in an 80s period drama, whereas PC Lego would be more Dickensian London, which means they're really very different, but reality must bend when newspapers seek to write puff pieces.

Former Microsoftie in AUTOMATIC BEER MAKER funding plea

Re: we were there first

There's a problem, though: the single-container construction means you won't be able to start batch n+1 until you've finished batch n, leaving a 7-day gap in the beer supply. Disaster!

Re: push button beer, not

Years ago I saw a big copper microcontroller-powered hombrew kettle that was built around a one-vat process, that would allegedly do everything. There was the option to draw off the wort to do a keg fermentation so that you could get another brew going.

So I'm curious as to how this qualifies as something really new.

On the other hand, if they have genuinely managed to implement a perfectly repeatable process, then we might see similar technology (on a slightly larger scale, naturally) slowly penetrating into smaller pubs -- a supply of fresh, additive-free beer might go down quite nicely....

NSA: Yes, some of our spooks DID snoop on overseas lovers

Re: Dan1980’s frothy skinny latte

"So you would you like capital punishment? Effectively you are suggesting some low level employee be shot for what is essentially a ‘domestic’?"

I thought he was rather clear on this, so stop trolling.

No action has been taken against any of these ex-employees, as they all resigned before internal action could be taken. But what they did was a criminal act, as defined by US laws. Why haven't they been put before a jury to answer charges of wiretapping?

Re: Tacky

To be fair, if you're a secret agent and someone with a foreign accent shows interest in you, you have legitimate cause for paranoia -- outside of MAD Magazine, a lot of Spy vs Spy is about making love, not war...

Google's robot army learns Spanish

Re: "Exploiting Similarities among Languages for Machine Translation"

"No indefinite article, no words for "yes" and "no" as such, no present tenses apart from the two verbs for "to be", no verb "to have","

The technique is for guessing at translations of unknown vocabulary. Normally when natural language processing guys talk about vocabulary, they're talking about words with an independent and relatively unambiguous meaning -- so-called "lexical words", eg "cat", "hamburger", "galactic". The other class of words is called "function words", and these are the grammatical glue that has next-to-no meaning outside of its context -- eg "me", "now", "would" etc. Within natural language processing, these are often not even considered "words" because they follow directly from grammatical rules, and there is very little choice when using them.

These "function words" also form a closed set -- consider the number of pronouns in any given language with the number of common nouns. It is therefore efficient to deal with these more explicitly than lexical words, and even if you're doing pure statistical translation, all of the function words in a language are likely to turn up in your training data (and if not, you've not got enough data) -- and therefore these things are therefore not going to be "unknown vocabulary", so not applicable to this technique anyhow.

To use an example of how vectors would work to translate between very different structures, consider disease.

Say the software knows how to translate "I am hungry" to Gaelic, but doesn't know how to translate the word "thirsty" from English to Gaelic.

&nbsp;I am hungry -- tha an t-acras oirm (lit. is the hunger on_me)

However, the system does know that the only difference between "hungry" and "thirsty" is that "hungry" is about food and "thirsty" is about drink, so the software can generate a vector (-food, +drink) that given "hungry" as its input/starting point will give "thirsty" as its output/endpoint.

Now that same vector will of course also go from "hunger" to "thirst", so it doesn't matter that the Gaelic equivalent of the phrase uses a noun instead of an adjective.

Very clever stuff.

Re: Can it handle a poor starting material

Anything that works for vocabulary can work for idioms, which are often as not thing more than multiword "words".

No use...

"I wonder if this would help interpret written material in extinct languages where we have a few known words? Though there might not be a big enough data set."

This stuff, along with existing Google Translate technology, relies on a massive monolingual dataset as well as a smaller bilingual one. We don't have enough data.

Re: Vectors!?!

Pretty obscure reference, to be fair. I got what they mean by the example "king - man + woman = queen", whereas the silly "graphs" were more confusing than anything.

A vector, by the definition, is simply a move through n-dimensional space.

The mind-twister here is that the "dimensionality" of a word is kind of arbitrary, because the component parts of the meaning change from word to word.

The example used of "king" (or "queen") tells us not only gender, but also the importance of the person, the nature of the constitution of the place.

The weirdest thing about vectors in a lot of AI applications is that they've mostly abandoned the idea of axes -- notice that the vector has to subtract "man" as well as adding "woman", because the system doesn't recognise the existence of a gender "axis".

Instead, we have a selection of "features" that are measurable only in terms of presence or absence.

Boffins have constructed a new LIGHT SABRE. Their skills are complete

Re: These midichloridians are resistant to multiple antibiotics!

Medieval magic? There's very little of that. A few understated psychic techniques based more on eastern mythology than medieval Europe, plus an old man with electric hands.

Chaos Computer Club: iPhone 5S finger-sniffer COMPROMISED

Re: Pinky?

DougS

"You really think a thief is going to cut off a finger?"

Does your car have a fingerprint reader? No? There's a reason they stopped installing them...

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

NomNomNom...

If your person appears out of scale with the gameworld, just chant "Fee fie fou fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman" as you stomp around....

Braybrook?

Not a hugely common name that... any chance he's related to Andrew Braybrook of Graftgold, creator of some of the cleverest games of the 80s?

Grand Theft Auto V: Violent, sweary and amazingly ambitious

Cel shading...?

Am I the only one who thinks cel shading is a waste of processor cycles? The bold colours only serve to exaggerate the polygon artifacts and lack of true curves... and surely we now have enough oomph in our silicon to process curves, particularly low-fi cartoony curves...?

Re: Let me get this straight...

Yup. Playing Paradroid on my C64 emulator and Elite on my BBC emulator really is still fun, almost 30 years on. And no-one gets a penny out of me for all that replaying.

Douglas Adams was RIGHT! TINY ALIENS are invading Earth, say boffins

Panspermia is an interesting theory, and there are very few genuine thinkers who dismiss it out of hand, but the claims here are ridiculous. If panspermia occurred, it would most likely have been a freak event, a one-in-a-million-billion-trillion.

However, these guys claim that they sent a balloon up at random and caught a dead plant that must have fallen in from space in the previous week, which (given the volume of the upper atmosphere vs the volume of their sample) would imply that the Earth's undergoing a constant hailstorm of alien micro-flora, which would have to have been detected by now -- scientists would have noticed if falling sealife was contaminating the DNA samples they were collecting in mountainous regions.

Speaking of sealife, surely water-bourne life is incredibly poorly adapted to crossing the vast emptiness of space...?!?

First rigid airship since the Hindenburg cleared for outdoor flight trials

Re: Megairbus?

If you think people moan about delays on Ryanair, just see how they would react to budget airships -- fog, heavy rain, even just a stiff breeze and you'll be seeing delays rack up. "On time" would be a very rare occurence indeed....

@Don Jefe Re: Rigid Airships have a place

I don't think an airship's a good option for precision lifting due to its poor stability in even slightly breezy conditions. Airships are really only any good for the haulage side of things, where they're competing with your barges, not the helicopters.

Most industrial installations need large water supplies, so barges are normally reliable for plant & materials delivery. There's a reason airships are being touted for very specific purposes, such as oil drilling -- most other uses are always going to be close to existing infrastructure.

Re: "Explode"

"When we say explode here, we really mean violently burst."

...which is one of the dictionary definitions of "explode". Your point, caller?

BBC releases MYSTERY RIDDLE poster for Doctor Who anniversary episode

Re: Ee, when I were't lad

T' Lad, was he a Yorkshire Timelord? Cos "when I were the lad" wouldn't make any sense. "A lad" yes, "the lad," no.

Deus ex machina? Nope...

Actually, the sonic screwdriver doesn't classify as deus ex machina, but rather deus in machina. This is because the "god" is not introduced at the point of crisis from outside the universe, but is in fact an established part of the story mythos - in Dr Who, we already know that the sonic screwdriver can do pretty much anything.

Deus in machina is the driving force in (eg) the Odyssey and many of the most memorable Greek epics, and in particular their Holywood adaptations, which tended to include scenes from Mount Olympus.

More modern deus in machina would include early Superman stories, where he'd suddenly have just the right power to defeat the latest threat, or Adam West era Batman's utility belt, which could always br relied on to contain just the right gadget to save his skin.

Note that James Bond and Knight Rider don't classify as deus in machina, because the previously-unheard-of gadget would be introduced by Q or Devon well in advance of the moment of crisis.

Dr Davros?

The Doctor can't be Davros -- the Daleks were designed to fight for genetic purity based on Kaled DNA. The Doctors timelord DNA makes him a valid target, and a Dr Davros would have been one of the first against the wall on Skaro.

@Idocrase Re: Spitfires

" But if ANY aircraft could stand up to Daleks, then you better f*cking BELIEVE it would be spitfires! "

Oh yeah, rule Britannia, Britannia rules the skies, God bless the queen and her Spitfire! Funny how everyone bought into that myth. Spitfires were not that great. Among other things, their limited flight ceiling made it difficult to engage safely with a Messerschmidt, and the metal fuselage offered very little value as armour, but meant that most of the fleet was grounded for repair at any given time.

It was the much larger fleet of canvas-clad Hawker Hurricanes, patched up and sent back into the air before the paint had dried, and engaging the enemy from above that got us through it.

A lot of people will be looking forward to the first episode, though. I have to say, I'm more excited about that than the new one!

Speaking in Tech: 'I'm not a pimp just because I wear a fedora'

The thumbnail pic...

Your thumbnail pic looks more like a trilby than a fedora... the brim's quite narrow...

Now we know why UK spooks simply shrugged at SSL encryption

Re: Getting boring...

I won't accept BAA. It was an effective monopoly and was making my crisps and sandwiches artificially expensive when I waited for my price-inflated flights. I'm glad they've been broken up.

@ Pete 2... Re: The code-ring on the golf course

"But so what if they *do* keep everything, indefinitely.2

Most intel is time critical. However, one of the best ways to get time critical information is by an informant. One of the best ways to "turn" a potential informant has traditionally been blackmail. To blackmail a mark, you sift through their history, looking for some potential snifter of scandal -- in days gone by, sexual indiscretion was enough, and if it was man-on-man, so much the better... threaten to out a fine upstanding citizen for what was then considered a crime and socially unacceptable behaviour and he'd spill any and all beans you asked for. In those days, getting the evidence for the blackmail was an operation in itself, and often required active "honeypot" agents in the infidelity. But if you've got the mark's life history on disk, you'll find something if you dig hard enough.

So what, I hear you cry, it's for the bad guys.

Well, no. You don't have to be a "bad guy" to be the informant... you may simply work alongside the bad guy, or you may just be his window cleaner. And that "bad guy" might actually be the goodie, and you might be forced to betray him in order to stop that picture being posted on the website of your local primary school....

OK, forget the 3D telly fiasco: 4K is gonna blow you away - say tech giants

Re: 4K is old hat

16K? You're havin' a laugh. You need to get the 48K model to play Manic Miner....

Nintendo is FLATLY UNHINGED: New 2DS is a handful of game

Never split the market!

If they did that (or added a seconf thumbstick, as others suggest) they'd suddenly have two distinct platforms, and developers wouldn't much like it.

They'd also screw up hardware sales and confuse the issue of which system is the "top spec" one. Making the budget device more appealing than the full-price one would be crazy.

Amazon.com trumps other online retailers' sales by HOW much?!

Null percentages points

"Which figure would you prefer to trumpet to your investors, an actual market share growth of 0.5 per cent, or a growth rate of 100 per cent?"

Well that first figure is incorrect anyway. That's half a percentage point, which is very different from half a per cent...

Ten top new games for phones ’n’ slabs

IT professionals can be very patronising and condescending. What this means that they talk down to you because you don't understand the big adult words they're using.

But being a lowly "user", you wouldn't understand this, of course.

EXPLICIT VID: Man filmed trying to bang brand new 'budget iPhone'

Re: As much as i hate Apple..

"But they do however always manage to make new stuff mainstream before anyone else does."

It's not difficult to be the first to market if you've got an exclusive contract and you sit on it for a while. If Samsung had the usage rights, I reckon there'd be several models using it by now...

Doom guy teleports into VR startup Oculus Rift

Re: Abrash as well.

Vertigo and motion sickness is caused by latency - the brain gets confused by the disconnect between acted movement and intended movement. The guys behind the headset never claimed to have solved the problem yet, although they seem to believe that they can get it under an acceptable time.

Can they? I don't know enough to say, but I've read several comments from people who seem to know what they're talking about suggesting that the only viable way to do so is a couple of electrodes to detect the impulses in the neck muscles before the actual movement starts.

Lawsuit: Infosys abuses visas to discriminate against US staff

trying too hard....

The woman's legal counsel are trying far too hard not to look racist. People "of Asian descent"? You mean Asians, right? Ones who actually come from Asia? Because Americans of Asian descent don't need visas.

People who try that hard not to look racist generally come off looking very racist....

You're doing WHAT with friends? Zynga sues Bang With Friends maker

Re: Until they sued them...

"What I don't understand is the motive. Most of your friends know whether you are a drunken tart or an uptight virgin."

But still, propositioning a friend can be very awkward and potentially embarassing. With the app, if the attention's not wanted, they'll never know you want to get them in bed. THAT's the motivation.

How Alan Turing wanted to base EDSAC's memory on BOOZE

When you've quite finished playing with paper planes....

"It's a pity that they won't have the time or the resources to prove whether Turing's fanciful idea of a gin delay line memory would have actually worked."

I think I see your next special project on the horizon....

Boffin's claim: I have found how to get girls into tech

@AC

"Are you new to the Internet?"

That's a fail, AC. It's stereotypical and patronising, but it doesn't manage to be sexist. Must try harder.

Play the Snowden flights boardgame: Avoid going directly to Jail

Re: Airspace

@Aldous

"No fly list's exist and can be a real ball ache if your name is similar to a known terrorist"

I think you mean a suspected terrorist. Most known terrorsists (in the legal sense of innocent until proven guilty) are in jail... or dead.

Some of these suspected terrorists are really terrorists, but some are just people who have visited the wrong place at the wrong time.

Telly psychics fail to foresee £12k fine for peddling nonsense

Re: Anyone can speak to their dead granny

Frankee,

If a tree falls in the forest and there's no-one to hear it, does it make a sound?

If you speak to your granny but she's dead, is it speaking?

"Respect"

There is a difference between not respecting someone's beliefs and insulting people based on their beliefs.

I used to be religious. Why? Because the people around me were.

I stopped being religious. Why? A Damascene conversion? No, that would be preposterous. Just because the people around me weren't.

Anyone who claims they're atheist on intellectual grounds is deluding themselves -- one way or another, we've all been acculturated.

Re: Cure

Argh... that hyperpowerful Javascript is using up all my processor cycles!

Snowden: 'Hey, Assange, any more room on Ecuador's sofa?'

@murph

" I can understand the outrage at spying on your own citizens but blabbing to all and sundry about how the US spies on China and Russia, etc?"

As that "etc" is every effing country on the face of the planet, and as that includes me, I'd say he was in the right. I am not an intelligence target. I am not a fundamentalist of any philosophy. I am not a politician. I have access to no sensitive documentation. Why are you lumping my personal correspondence in with Chinese stack secrets?!?

Nissan to enter 300 kmh electric car in Le Mans endurance race

Re: Only as a hybrid not as an EV

BornToWin said:

"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand you need a really long power cable to drive these cars more than in the city."

Wikipedia said:

"Le Mans (French pronunciation: ​[ləmɑ̃]) is a city in France, located on the Sarthe River...."

John McAfee releases NSFW video on how to uninstall security code

Re: Heroic

Well, the fact that you included Bill Gates in there proves the treatment for your necrophilia is at least having some effect....

Number of cops abusing Police National Computer access on the rise

Lessons not learned from the fingerprint database.

Something I remember hearing when these police über-databases were first mooted:

The retention of fingerprint data had increased over the preceding years, with innocent people, bystanders, etc stored. "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear."

This gave rise to two problems:

First up, fingerprinting isn't as accurate as most people believe, and one of the strengths of the old fingerprint database was that by only having criminals on it increased the accuracy, because the only people on it were ones likely to commit crimes (recidivism rates). Retaining non-criminal prints led to increased false matches.

Secondly, it turned out that the police used the fingerprint database as a list of suspects. As they weren't allowed to keep data on people charged-but-released, they had been considering anyone in the old database as "a criminal who hadn't been caught yet". They kept this attitude up after they started retaining non-criminal, non-suspect prints, and there were stories in the press about people who would get harassed after local crimes with no link to the crime or the victim other than living in the area... and being in the fingerprint database. Now imagine you have your house broken into: the police take you and your significant other's prints to eliminate them from the forensic search... and keep them on record. They never find the guy who did it, but every couple of years the police come knocking on your door because there's been a burglary in your neighbourhood and because they have no leads, they go mining the fingerprint database for "criminals who haven't been caught yet"....

The two lessons that should have been taken from that are that:

1) indiscriminate retention decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and increases the risk of false positives and (crucially) reduces the number of genuine positives.

2) the police always abuse databases.

But instead of tackling the root problem of the abuse, they just mitigated the symptoms slightly by reducing the set of innocent bystanders that are incorrectly identified by the police as "criminals who haven't been caught yet"....

Soylent days and soylent nights

Re: Bah!

I spent yesterday visiting a research orchard and sampling multiple varieties of citrus fruit. By the end of it, I smelt more like a fruit than an animal, but that was more down to the juice and the oils -- and not just because of the juice running down my fingers: when you tear open a citrus fruit, you generate lots of aerosols from the oils in the skin, and if you burst a segment (rather than eating it whole), you aerosolise juice, too. Spend long enough in a mist of lemon aerosols, and the mozzies probably can't smell you at all....

Liquid diets

A study a few years back addressed the "drinking water staves off hunger" myth (which we all knew was untrue from experience anyway) and showed that the stomach can detect the difference between "empty" water and food. They then went on to investigate the quantity of solid matter that needs to be suspended in the water for the body to detect it as food, and determined a very fast shelf between the body's distinction between "food" and "not food". As I recall it, the conclusion was that having meals bulked out with water (thick sauces and soups, stews ets) would trigger a "full" response in fewer calories than equivalent meals with a lower water content, but thin soups, soft drinks etc would supply calories but would not be recognised as "food" and would therefore not reduce your appetite.

Hence also why posh restaurants prefer thin soups and consommées as starters, and potato soup is a lunchtime pub meal.

I have had meal-replacement shakes a couple of times in the past (not on diet grounds, but instead due to having dental work carried out shortly before lunchtime and not being able to chew) and the solid content is definitely enough to trigger the "full" response. From the description of this crud, it sounds solid enough by miles....

Desperate Venezuelans wiped clean of bog roll

A quick tip...

Google translate is crap. Which is actually on topic here...!

Re: Alternative theory

@I ain't Spartacus:

"Like you can't buy baby milk in Hong Kong....But anyway, that's why capitalism works."

I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here... Is this a "breast is best" angle, and you're praising the market shortage of totally unnecessary formula feed as the "invisible hand" promoting child health?

The meer existence of baby milk is proof that capitalism is all about conning people into buying stuff they don't need.