Posts by mtp

Brit chap weaves silver bullet for wireless health scare bollocks

Re: Perhaps

Send me a pair and I will book a session at a test site and post a formal report. No iPhone but a carefully positioned Nexus 5 should do the trick.

Oyxgen free?

I accept that it is bi-legged and by the looks of it directional but it is it oxygen free? Got to have the ultimate hifi undies here.

Stephen Hawking: The creation of true AI could be the 'greatest event in human history'

Re: like a bird

How can you know that? A true AI could have every aspect of a human or none or many others. For the sake of argument assume a AI that is human equivalent in every way - this is just a thought experiment but if it begs you for mercy when you reach for the power switch then where does that leave us?

Off = murder?

If someone creates a true AI which is self aware then can it be turned off? Logically this is murder. At some point in the future tricky issues like this will need to be dealt with.

Is no browser safe? Security bods poke holes in Chrome, Safari, IE, Firefox and earn $1m

Re: Run them in a chroot jail

Maybe trivial if you have full access and known kernel bugs but from the restricted environment of a subverted browser it is going to me much tougher. A chroot adds a simple extra layer of protection for minimal cost. To break out requires low level access and a known kernel bug but the chroot makes exploiting the bug harder.

Dammit internet... you promised naked videos of my Facebook friends

Internet darwin award

This is some kind of internet darwin award. Anyone who installs this will somehow remove themself from the internet. I can't say exactly how (that is evolution for you) but by some combination of nested viruses and rootkits they will hopefully find the internet so slow and useless as to give up on it - I can only hope.

Boeing going ... GONE: Black phone will SELF-DESTRUCT in 30 secs

Backdoors

They can claim it is secure but it is going to have backdoors. Any phone sold to governments / military etc is going to have at least one backdoor. It might even be illegal to sell a phone without a backdoor if the NSA come knocking. Blackberry has had issues with that in the past.

DARPA hands IBM £3.4m to develop SELF DESTRUCTING CHIPS

Think of the film plots!

This would ruin the plot of "For Your Eyes Only" - that is reason enough to discourage it.

Oh yes - and giving everyone the ability to sabotage military kit from a distance sounds like a really bad idea! Would you fly in a chopper that falls out of the sky if it receives a strong signal at 1234MHz (or whatever)?

RoHS

Military electronics probably uses Lead/Tin solder and who cares about the price overrated capacitors. These two factors are going to be enough to give military kit a vastly longer life than consumer devices. Landfill friendly solder alone is going to clobber fine pitch consumer PCBs within a decade or so. Conformal coating would help but would increase the price so that is two commercially valid reasons why you don't find it used on consumer goods.

Electrolytic capacitors have a well defined degradation, if your kit has capacitors rated for less than 10V over the working voltage then don't expect them to last long.

Ref: (must be doing too much wikipediaing)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whisker_%28metallurgy%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolytic_capacitor#Reliability_and_length_of_life

California high school hackers expelled for grade tampering, test thievery

They tried to cheat

If you cheat in a exam and get caught then expect to be failed. These students tried to cheat in all their exams and were caught. They were lucky in that the school system is just forced to just pass them on to another school. They won't find things so easy when they are in the real world and get fired from a job if they do the same,

University boffins build snoop-spotting snitch app

Root your droid then use a security app

One of the many reasons why I use 'LBE Privacy Guard' (or use another if it takes your fancy). If your android is rooted then I recommend this. It patches up the obvious flaws in the android security model by allowing you to deny permissions to apps. This is way better than the standard all or nothing as provided by android. For example if you are a Angry Birds fan then you can prevent it from reading your location.

Sounds a bit adverty but this is a genuine rant against the all or nothing android security model.

As a genuine example there are 5 apps on my phone that want to access my call logs and 17 that want my position. I block 90% of these - why does barcode scanner need access to my call logs?

The feature that I am looking for in future security programs is limited network access. I used to have Flickr installed but that accessed the network a insane number of times per day (every few minutes). I would reinstall it if I could limit it to sync only once per day.

Japanese quantum boffins 'may have the key to TELEPORTATION'

The quantum world is indescribable but real

When I did a physics degree one of the most significant parts of it was second year quantum mechanics. A large part of that was trying to get over the habits of trying to visualise what is going on and just do the maths. Quantum mechanics has been tested to the breaking point in many ways for almost 100 years and has been proved right in every case but intuitively it just cant be visualized. Anyone trying to describe something that is intrinsically quantum mechanical without using differential equations is doomed to failure. This feels so wrong but basically in extreme conditions the universe does not behave in the way that we experience in day to day life.

HARD ONES: Three new PC games that are BLOODY DIFFICULT

Nethack

The ultimate no save game was nethack. So outrageously difficult that I really doubt that it is possible to complete it without some form of cheating. Death is final and almost inevitable.

A game so popular that my university controlled it with a cron job to make it only playable out of 'working' hours.

BBC's Clangers returns in £5m 'New Age' remake

environmental politics?

It is set on the moon. It is hard to think of a less suitable place to make environmental issues. Just dead radiation blasted dust everywhere.

Still got a extremely vague memory of seeing it on TV although I was knee high to a martian an the time.

Star Wars revival secret: This isn't the celluloid you're looking for

Re: "I'm really not into CGI for space scenes"

But the simulated camera shake is terrible. Every time I see camera shake I jump out of the realism feel and just think 'get a steadycam' instead. I really hope it is just a temporary fad to have drunken virtual cameramen taking CGI videos.

LOHAN team girds loins, aims to take SPEARS to heaven again

Rise for Lohan

To infinity and beyond.

The coming flight is in memory of the UK playmonaught. Not in the world class league but still to be supported,

Intel demos real-time code compression for die shrinkage, power saving

Compilers job

Surely that is a job for the compiler not the CPU

UK.Gov passes Instagram Act: All your pics belong to everyone now

Flickr check

I just looked at the last photo I posted to Flickr. The EXIF data is intact and it clearly states 'Artist = Picasa'.

Drat. So are my photos owned by Flickr, Google (I used picasa to crop the image), the world or just possibly by me?

One of the world's oldest experiments crawls towards a fall

Glass is a solid - simple experiment

A simple observation - if glass behaved as a viscous liquid then lenses that need to be shaped to 1/10th the wavelength of light would not last very long. I have some binoculars that are decades old and still work as well as when they were new so the glass cannot have flowed by any meaningful degree.

Bogus gov online test tells people on dole they're just SO employable

Re: Applied Placebo Effect?

Crazy as it sounds it actually does. When I was a teenager I had asthma and I had a inhaler that relieved the symptoms for a few hours. Unfortunately I could only use it a few times per day so each use tended to run out before I could take the next one. The first step in using it was to give it a vigorous shake and I noticed that my symptoms got better during the shake before I actually used it. I experimented with this and as long as I only did it occasionally just shaking the inhaler and not using it helped for about 10 minutes. Very strange and I don't understand it but true.

Watch the skies: SPACE HEDGEHOG plunges to Earth in Oxfordshire

Re: Re:

@Don Jefe - I am so tempted. This could be a you tube classic in the making.

Londoners can bonk their way to work without Oyster cards TODAY

Multiple cards

About a year ago I noticed that my Oyster card did not work from within my wallet. It problem is that I had a new credit card that supported wireless payment. The tube system could not make use of that card but presumably it was coming to life and messing up the oyster transaction.

The annoying solution was to take the oyster out of my wallet every time I use it. Given that in the near future all credit cards will have wireless payment and most people carry more than one card this is going to be annoying.

Chinese 'Thunder God' plant could crush cancer

Miskatonic University

"University of Minnesota’s Masonic Cancer Center"

Somehow I read that as Miskatonic University. Now that is a university that could bind thunder gods to cure cancer.

Milky Way DOOMED to high-speed smash with Andromeda galaxy

Name

In a few billion years those of us in the neo human cluster of the galaxy will be in the "The Windows 20000001 McBreakfast Googleplex" sector.

Actually I take that back. All current mega corps will be long dead but new ones will have formed.

And the worst film NEVER made is...

Backing singers

Don't forget the backing singers.

Steven Segal as Qui-Gon Jinn (starring in the tap dance scene)

Danny Devito as Yoda

Sylvester Stallone as Senator Palpatine.

Boffins cross atom-smasher streams, 'excited' beauty pops into being

Yup

the decay chain Xi(b)^- to J/psi Xi^- to mu^+ mu^- Lambda^0 pi^-, with Lambda^0 to p pi^.

Who could dispute that.

Eric Schmidt flicks INTERSTELLAR TOWEL at top tech fair

Bistro maths

The result of 2012 - 2011 clearly depends on what kind if bistro you are in.

Venus BELCHES solar wind in shock weather explosion

Solar wind on the surface of Venus?

To be picky there is no way that the solar wind can reach the surface of Venus. There is far too much atmosphere in the way.

You need something like Mercury or the Moon with no atmosphere and no magnetic field.

Reminds me of much enjoyment from watching "The Core". I recommend it as a nights entertainment for any Physicist.

Shetland 'Topiary' suspect extended in custody for 3 days

Wicker man?

Hmm this sounds familiar.

Was it Edward Woodwood making the arrest? Someone is going to end up in a wicker man.

Binary dinosaur drive found alive and breathing fire

BBC

I had a BBC model A serial number in the 200s, if I had kept it then I would have had a genuine museum piece. Pre ordered before they were even released.

If anyone remembers that far back a BBC A cost £299 for most of the time but mine was before that price rise - I think it was £230

Probably the best server survey in the world

What about home servers?

One server sitting in a cupboard as my personal firewall / samba fileserver.

The survey does not ask questions compatible with a home server.