Posts by John Smith 19

US public hate Snowden - but sexpot spy Anna Chapman LOVES him

Home Secretary == Security Service Sock Puppet

Which is this BS has persisted through eight of these oxygen thieves.

Now this letter int he Time

What's really despicable is Lord Carlisle, whose supposedly reviews "anti terror legislation" is in favor of it.

Britain. You've been here before. RIPA. "Only going to be used against paedophiles, terrorists and serious criminals" (oh and the odd fly tipper, and perhaps a family sneaking their kids into a good schools catchment area and....).

£500m/year and alleged savings of £150m (WTF from?).

Build your own coalition. If your MP is Liberal, tell them you support Cleggs stand, and explain why MI5 stated roughly 2000 Islamist suspects (suspects, as in viewed/posted on website, spoke to an informant, not actually making a bomb vest). That's 0.003 percent of the UK population. Or £5.3 (excluding that alleged savings of £150m) for every man, women and child in the UK.

Re: surveillance was an unnecessary intrusion into American lives

"Anna is THE HOT, though."

Yeah, but remember. Odds on bet gingers are crazy.

What?

Re: even when the truth sets them free

"Nobody likes to be told they need to do work to get something a little bit amorphous like "freedom" or "democracy", not when they are having to struggle to pay the rent and feed their families. I can understand that. Nobody, especially here in the privileged, comfortable, west likes to be told we might have to make sacrifices of any kind.

People would rather be comfortable in a spacious cage than struggle and sacrifice to live under the free sky."

The short version.

"Freedom is the right to be uncomfortable. "

Re: Morsi Support Declines

"William Hague was quick to approve of the military government, and Tony Blair says the coup was necessary."

All coups are necessary, provided the government approves of the new lot.

Unless they don't, in which case they are not.

Re: Propoganda

" the economic importance of surveillance talked by the Wall Street Journal. I"

And Rupert Murdoch really understands the importance of both thorough surveillance and having good contacts in the police.

It's worked wonders for News Corps operations over the years.

Re: The main reason

"tl;dr.

The General Public."

Nice.

Re: Dear Mr Snowden

""Do you you love freedom, apple pie and the American dream and support those who protect it? Or do you hate democracy and want nothing more than this great country to be laid waste by suicide bombers and godless communists?""

Excellent point.

Ask the "right" (or in some cases very right) question and you get the right answer.

I suspect it's actually very difficult to devise a question on a subject that actually has no effect on the choice of the respondent.

Thumbs up for the question, not the buffoons who seem to want liberty and security at the same time.

UK.gov to drive stake through heart of big IT outsourcing deals

£4m -> £45k. Impressive. Now let's see that with a *big* system.

I'm talking £100m minimum

Or one of those bespoke MoD contraptions because (as you know) no one anywhere does anything like what the MoD does. IE develop, store and move staff and equipment around the world.

"Stake through the heart of outsourcing"

More like a piece of wet celery.

Re: Down the rabbit hole.....or IT in wonderland (UK Government)

"There are good IT departments and people in UK Government - I know that for a fact. The Home Office is not representative - in fact it's a centre of excellence for generally being crap at everything"

There spy-on-everyone-all-the-time-forever plans (the National ID register and Snoopers Charter) make much more sense now.

Still mad, disproportionate and grossly undemocratic of course.

Your own £19 Pocket Spacecraft could be FOUND ON THE MOON

Re-entry might be more survivable than you think.

Following Challenger some of the internal tanks were found intact in Texas.

Yes they are about orbital velocity of 7950,/s but it's how fast they lose velocity that matters and a lot of that is down to mass per unit area. Very light gives a longer reentry (10s of minutes to hours). Depending on thermal conductivity and emission properties they might survive to ground level.

Of course wheather their RF and solar cell would be in any state to send out a signal so people would know is another matter...

Thumbs up for a bit of lateral thinking.

Elon Musk's Grasshopper tops 300m, lands safely

Powered by ARM

Possibly their smallest customer in terms of units but (probably) one of their most visible.

You've got to wonder what these new sensors are. Have then gone for higher grade units or have they had to shift their design and use new things. For close range high precision location assisted GPS should be fine, as the approach speeds should be well within the allowed civilian specs. If they're not it's all gone seriously pear shaped.

Thumbs up for excellent work and I'm really looking forward to their Dragon pad abort test sometime in Sept.

That should be spectacular

US Navy coughs $34.5m for hyper-kill railgun that DOESN'T self-destruct

Re: Revolutionise what?

"Lol, pity it hasn't thought of the submersible carrier yet. Now there's a project that could keep the military fed for decades, even without fighting. Well, supposing we ever fix the economy (about that...)."

Has actually been tried.

In the 30 at least one sub was built with a (small) aircraft hangar. It leaked. Not a good thing in a sub.

In the 1950s at least one sub was built for (IIRC) the Regulas cruise missile, which having fixed wings needed a bit of a takeoff run to get it up to flight speed.

A true aircraft carrier sub would be obscenely expensive.

So perfect BAE project.

Re: Be fascinating to find out a little more...

Might I suggest the even years of the IEEE Trans on Magnetics.

IIRC Jan or Feb is their railgun / coilgun special edition conference proceedings.

Happy reading.

Re: stealth boat

"http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2185831/Declassified-170million-Cold-War-Stealth-boat-snapped-2-5million-condition-scrap-parts.html"

OMG it's Elliot Carvers "yacht" from Tomorrow Never Dies."

14Knots, invisible on radar and with lots of interior cargo space. What's not to like?

Psychotic blonde henchman not included.

IT design: You're not data, you're a human being

Re: The blind

"It basically means writing two sites; one simple and textual for blind people. No fancy anything, no graphics, no fooferah. The other a pain in the ASCII CSS nightmare for the sighted."

Back when I was still on dialup I'd regularly load a site without graphics for speed.

I think I might try that with the reg and see what that happens.

Regarding images is the problem that no one bothers with a text description of the image rather than just some random string of letters and numbers?

Re: Metrics tell you what but they don't tell you why

"So design by metrics is an algorithm that converges on a product with no features at all."

Well it will have an "exit" option on the file menu.

All users everywhere use that.

Design driven by "metrics" has a long and *dishonorable* history.

Ford Edsel anyone?

Somewhat ironically aren't most of those "corner cases" the reasons (or at least the justification) why most of those "bells and whistles" exist?

So you should be left with a core, fast application.

Yeah, right.

Microsoft offloads heap of critical fixes in 'ugly' Patch Tuesday

So MS can *just* handle their own updates but Linuxes can do *all* apps running under them

Mmm.

I sense my next OS choice is getting easier.

BTW I note plenty of AC's posting.

MS PR dept out in force are we?

Re: Let's hope that the software engineers behind the space programme never fall into that trap

""Yeah.... Let's hope that never happens.

Mariner 1"

:-) Fair point!"

In 1962.

Let me describe how the team behind the Shuttle software wrote it.

1) Devise specs

2)Implement specs. Maintaining detailed bug lists and error rates and regular walkthroughs by other people. It's a project. No one "owns" their code. The project does.

3)When you find a bug work out how your review process did not catch it.

4)Modify the system to catch future instances.

5)Scan the codebase for all similar cases and fix them as well.

If you work in a dev shop look around you and ask yourself "Do we do any of that?"

It's estimated that their code was 10x the cost per line than the average cost.

That's why Shuttle flew 134 missions and the software never failed.

Battery-boosting breakthrough grows on trees – literally

Being slightly less cynical for a moment.

Yes the test battery lost 52% of its storage battery in 400 cycles.

People, this is V 0.1 tech.

They are nowhere near a fully engineered system and I'd expect this to worked on if it goes anywhere at all.For a commercial system I'd expect a 5-10 year life as a minimum requirement.

Whenever I want to know how far battery tech has to go I just figure out (roughly) the volume

of a battery that is occupied by the electrons. It's currently less than 0.04%. All batteries are therefor capable of considerable improvement. Getting that onto the market is another matter.

So thumbs up and I'll wish them well.

So OK maybethis is the new battery tech that will change the world. but i won't be holding my breath

Re: Another one to add to the list.

""Boffins develop 'practically free' sulphur-powered batteries"

"Hot new battery technologies need a cooling off period"

"Boffins build ant-sized battery, claim it's tough enough to start a car"

"Doped nanotubes boost lithium battery power three-fold"

"Dying to make greener batteries"

"Korean boffins discover secret to quick-charge batteries"

"Stanford boosts century-old battery tech""

What he said.

Cosmic blast mystery solved in neutron star's intense death throes

So sort of like the EM burst when you pull the plug on a big transformer.

A very big transformer with a very fast switch.

Hopefully this will add another small piece to the cosmology jigsaw.

Thumbs up for this.

BBC abandons 3D TV, cites 'disappointing' results

Bottom line. Probably needs a dedicated new tech display to work acceptably

And how many people will shell out for that? It's a chicken and egg situation.

Smart TVs. Yet another PC with an endless boot sequence to go with my 30sec STB and its 5 sec channel change time. F**k off.

Sharper picture you say? Depends have the broadcaster pared the data rate to the bone?

Remember the days of push button tuners when you could wear out the locking pins if you switched often enough? The number of channels enabled by the technology is a benefit. Beyond that. Meh.

INVASION of the UNDEAD ANDROIDS: Hackers can pwn 'nearly all' devices

Re: The big question is

"How will Eadon blame MS for this...?"

I think he just did.

So the mechanism that mean to stop unauthorised changes to an app does not *work*

That will be the one that ensures you can trust that app with your data.

That will the things people pay money for.

And it's existed for four years. so this is the illusion of security without actual security.

Germans brew up a right Sh*tstorm

Germans have an *award* for this?

Weird.

MoD and tech, arms giants start super-duper cyber fight club

"government and industry can work together – sharing information"

I think we knew that already. Especially when it came to sharing peoples personal detail with the government.

US: We spied on you Europeans but we can still be chums. Right?

Send your data to the (American) cloud. Your data. Their advantage.

As a business ask yourself is there a US competitor who'd like to know X about my business?

Will that information be in your new (cloud based) system?

How well connected are they to the US govt?

How well connect could they become if it meant getting a complete dump of your system for their perusal?

Still reckon your new cloud based system is cheap?

"hey're politicians, of course they have something to hide."

Something they should start to remember with regard to their citizens.

Of mice, the NSA, GCHQ and data protection

"allegations relate to disproportionate interception of personal data "

That should be grossly disproportionate.

Hanslope Park: Home of Britain’s ‘real-life Q division’

Re: The on site pub...

"was called The Plug and Socket."

You're just making that up.

Pix or it didn't happen.

I'm 'pretty comfy' with PRISM + 'It's Google. What else do you expect'

I think it was an American politician who closed down their WW1 naval code breaking office

with the words

"Gentlemen do not read each others mail."

They've come a long way from that position.

Note that he was talking about diplomatic traffic between countries, not all traffic, on all media, between everyone.

No doubt a conslutants report would argue against this.

The forcing down of the Bolivian ministers jet is especially concerning.

Moving Coke by the kilo. No action.

Move a human being whose only crime is against another country and only in that country and Europe wide efforts are made to bring it down.

Looks like the real war governments have been fighting are against the twin evils of democracy and transparency

Mastercard and Visa block payments to Swedish VPN firms

Re: Financiers took our tights long ago

"Citizenship comes with the right to an account at the Central Bank, its your money not the banks! Instead , the powerful players rented this access from you long ago, and now they use it as a monopoly to beat you with. They better be careful or citizens might come to their senses and demand their money back - only now it comes with a crushing debt of $3/4 million debt per household in US."

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Re: The Internet - the great web of freedom!

"...turns out to be the biggest snooping monster ever. I'm afraid it's getting worse than the post-WWII communist control freak states ever were."

No. In some senses the internet (because there's still quite a bit more of it that is not "The Web") is neutral.

It's just a medium but the suppliers of that medium and what you watch on that medium have realised there is great value in your data.

And remember it's your data they are taking, not theirs.

If you believe in the positive view people will wake up to that fact. Google would not make the profits it does if it had to pay users to profile them every time they searched. Some would accept the spying, some would not, but everyone would be aware that it was happening.

Some people already are and this suggests some people afraid that awareness could spread.

This "data fetishism" must be recognized as the disease of warped minds that it is.

French snooping as deep as PRISM: Le Monde

Ever wondered what the EU Data Retention Directive *does* ?

Written in Britain by those freedom loving people of the "Home Office" following the Madrid train bombings.

WTF did you think was going to happen?

Re: And in Egypt...

"Meanwhile over in Egypt, the new military dictatorship is rounding up supporters of the former government using all this lovely meta-data linking them together."

The former government was othewise known as "The Moslem Brotherhood." an outfit Osama Bin Laden was quite fond of.

My impression of the MB is that for a lot of Middle Eastern countries they are about as popular with their governments as the Paedophile Information Exchange would be running for office.

Being elected is about as great a stress test of democracy as any I can think of.

Cryptocat WIDE OPEN, new version a must

Open source or closed source.

If open source. Shame on the users. Eyes on the code is one of the points of OS.

If closed source. Shame on the devs. That sort of thing smells of some dev being "clever."

I suspect if this world is finally destroyed in a man made disaster its root cause will also be some dev being "clever"

BTW give what's know about government surveillance all that back chat has been stored and can be processed off line. So no if you're serious about privacy you can't release early and fix later on. It's too late for that. I am especially p**sed off at this as I've had to fix "clever" code before and none of the t**ts had heard the phrase "premature optimization is the root of most evil."

Spending watchdog SAVAGES rural broadband push

Cost+ contract with *unauditied* costs and BT as the *sole* prime contractor.

What could possibly go wrong with this scenario?

Seriously.

Given BT know exactly how far those phones are from their exchanges (and I'd put a modest wager down that 99% of them are BT lines) I'd think they could put in a fairly accurate bid.

Not so sure about other competitors but couldn't OFFCOM requested a copy of that information to give a level playing field?

Re: Rural is misleading

"If only we could have had a contractor with imagination, using wi fi and microwave but all BT knows is stick a cable in a pipe."

Or IDK maybe you could form a group of your own to handle the work, as seen here, below the crab

FRBs and variable forces: a big week for astronomy

Re: sounds right to me

"Chris - thanks for the catch! I have corrected it to "universe".

Richard Chirgwin"

Now how about changing it from "wavelength" to "frequency".

Hitch climate tax to the actual climate, says top economist

Sounds a pretty good idea.

Probably not going to be implemented.

Vulns 'like a hacker camped in the server room' all across the net

Devs need to start thinking remote management -> data link -> encryption

Not as an afterthought.

Going lo-tech to avoid NSA snooping? Unlucky - they read snailmail too

physical systems are the *only* thing that can overwhelm the NSA's processing ability

Because there just aren't enough snoops to process every physical item in the way every digital item can be stored.

Re: Photograph THAT !!!

"I'm going to start drawing little pictures of Obama sucking off George W Bush on my

envelopes in future."

I think you'll find the other way around should cause much more offense.

Toshiba extends enormo flash fab, hopes to bust NAND capacity barrier

Now if you could build a solid stage magnetic disk system.

Just saying.

Some attempts were made in the 1950s with a sort of inverse magnetic ring system using holes in a NiFe alloy sheet to localize the fields and electroplated copper (newly developed for the printed circuit board industry).

Time to have another go?

Whitehall's ball-breaking efficiency tsar quits for a quiet life in Oz

Lets see if the MPA uses *regular* update reports.

It damm well should.

Here's the thing about most big projects.

They are business change projects, part of which is the IT system.

IOW a hell of a lot of it is about people and specifications. Fail to get the people feeling they are at least minimally involved and at least adequate specs to build the systems (or more likely the interfaces to the existing systems) and you are f**ked.

Americans attempt to throw off oppressive, unresponsive rulers on 4th of July

Re: Sadly, it only protests spying on people residing in the USA.

"Because you're a terrorist? William Hague said only terrorists and criminals would be have something to fear from this."

And adultorors

And whistleblowers

And journalists

And anyone else who who is not committing or planning a crime but just wants their stuff kept private

Re: Yesterday was more important

"Also the 25th anniversary of Iran Air flight 655 being shot down by the USS Vincennes."

I think you could have had the "IT Angle" icon as well.

Re: They do read it

"What you've changed that into is this: you get a warrant to spy on *everyone* for *everything* on suspicion of *nothing*. "

That is the core of this problem.

The complete lack of any limits on this process. I don't mean the BS "court" that most people are not even aware exists and whose defendants and plaintiffs cannot even admit they are plaintiffs or defendants, let alone talk about its proceedings.