Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26107 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
The google effort doesn't work very well yet - select 'by foot' here and it won't let you use any bridges - it insists you go miles out of your way to take the foot ferry across the harbour.
www.cyclevancouver.ubc.ca uses google data but also knows about roads with cycle lanes, cycle friendly 'major road avoiding' routes and best of all - it can calculate routes based on a maximum hill gradient.
GPS measures the difference between the very accurate clocks on each sataleite to get your position - it doesn't need it's own clock.
Except - the actual date is sent as a number of weeks since GPS started (about 1980) and then hours, mins etc. The GPS week field wrapped around just before Y2K.
they recently increased the number of bits sent in this field so my guess is that the Garmin is overflowing and interpreting this as a signed number
The problem is OFAC - a big, and badly organised, list of people/countries/organisations you aren't allowed to do business with. The penalties are pretty much unlimited fines and 7years in pound-you-in-the-a** federal prison.
The trouble is that 'do business with' is very badly defined.
So if you are a US ISP and you route an email from Spain to Cuba you could be in violation,
If you a US company that makes the cable that somebody in Spain uses to send an email to somebody in Cuba you could be in violation.
That's why you have to agree to those silly clauses about not exporting to Iraq when you download an update from Dell.
This is really an domestic thing to stop some redneck politician in nowheresville using it as a political tool to prosecute a company just to show how tough he is on commies/terrorists/redcoats etc
There is a proposal to ban people on the no-fly list from planes crossing US airspace.
Unfortunately 80% of Canadian domestic flights are routed through US airspace.
So if you are a Canadian citizen, want to travel in Canada - and have the same name as say Edward Kennedy, Michael Mouse, Donald Duck or any of the other names on the list - you are in for a very very long drive.
It is a software problem. The implementation of the algorithm leaks information about it's internal state if you inject a bit error, or stop the processing at a particular point.
It's a well known attack, it was done 10years ago against IBM crypto chips using radiation induced errors.
There are a bunch of well known security programming tricks to stop this, and the similar power load analysis attacks.
Didn't some Scandinavians do this years ago?
Drop a bunch of battery powered cell towers over the area, they mesh network themselves together and the troops just have Nokia/whoever cell phones to call in.
Cheap, quick, easy. And the amount of RF flying around from the towers meant the enemy couldn't tell if there were any actual troops in the area.
Of course a bit of a problem if your fire control is a call centre in Bombay: press 1 to request an airstrike - you are in a queue, your target is very important to us etc. meanwhile here is some music.....
Is it a good thing that the only reason to care about the latest Linux distribution is the new seasons colours?
I suppose it means that everything just works - you aren't waiting for a distro that finally supports Adaptec scsi cards or 100Base network, like 10years ago, - but it seems a bit depressing.
The Russian team were very young, this was a throw-away games to give them experience so that they would be at their peak for the 2014 event.
Except the hockey players, who should have done better, but they aren't going to be in Sochi anyway - they all play in the NHL and the team's aren't about to give them 3weeks off to go and play for a bunch of commies.
The new minimal toolbar look is fantastic on netbooks.
It's like chrome but with some control on your browsing.
One feature of the 10.xx opera. When you do a search with ^f and hit enter it searches google not your current page, you have to take your hands off to hit that little down arrow - or am I missing something?
Skype doesn't route other people's calls through your computer (exactly what would be the point?) it can use networked computers as directory discovery servers (supernodes) but unless you are the only computer connected to a major internet feed in your country it ain't going to be you.
In major countries skype uses a set of dedicated login servers to handle the load - it isn't going to be using your TV as they UK's supernode.
ps what else where you using the CPU in your TV for anyway?
They worked because they mostly did one thing.
You didn't have to worry about the new disc inserted popup message having a bug in it's gui theme that could hang the server.
Even MSFT recommend running each copy of SQLServer and each copy of Exchange on their own machine and not using the machine for anything else.
It's just that MS would also like you to have an expensive licence on the machine on your desktop aswell.
Two obvious explanations - not sure which is more worrying as a Brit that lives abroad and travels a lot.
The ids of the Brits living in Isreal were borrowed. So a couple of inteligence agents turn up and ask if for the good of the country, god and whatever the Jewish equivalent of apple pie is - can we borrow your passport for the war on terror. After all your average Daily Mail reader would do this for MI5.
This means that the UK gov is going to start getting difficult about people that live abroad and hold dual nationality, perhaps limiting their British passports.
Or on holiday the airport swipes your biometric passport, copies all your details, takes a photo of you and your fingerprints - and files it away until they need to use an agent that is close enough to your description. What happens when Hamas gets a copy of your passport from a stopover in Dubai and uses it to send a hit team to London or Washington? Are MI5 going to be so understanding that it was identity theft?
Would a historian today like to have the thoughts of the ordinary people at the Peterloo massacre rather than just the official reports of the general.
More upto date, the cabinet papers of the miners strike are going to be released in a few years, they are not going to tell you a lot. The postings of people in Barnsley on local websites and live tweets from Orgreave might tell you a bit more.
Or in the future historians are going to think , from official papers, that the NHS It system, Nimrod and the Eurofighter were all good ideas and everyone supported them. If they also had the comments from El' Reg they might think differently.
This is why serious libraries archive pulp novels alongside literature, you don't know when pulp fiction, like Dicken's, might become literature.
It's a very good browser to use if you are developing websites.
It's about the most standards compliant browser, if it renders on Opera - it's correct.
It might not look correct on IE6 but if you design for the bugs in IE6 or 7 or 8 you have to redesign next year for the bugs in the next IE 7,8,9
If these worked and every home used them to generate electric from their gas supply then you would only need electricity at peak demand, or if they failed.
So the electric company couldn't balance selling cheap baseline load 90% of the time and peak expensive load for 10% - it would all be peak expensive load, so your electric cost/unit would have to go up 200%.
A cynical person might thing that civil servants and MPs have been having a little talk with their old universities (both of them) - who are concerned that people are coming to the UK to study at any UK university and diluting their little monopoly.
So introduce stronger tests that only a couple of universities meet (ok add in Imperial College - we need to train the next generation of Iraqi nuclear scientists) - and their foreign fee income goes back up.
>why spend time implementing what isn't needed commercially,
Because more often than not they go to extreme lengths to block something, inventing complex security solutions to stop you doing something reasonable that you would buy the device for.
Like Nintendo stopping me running Mplayer on the new Wii - when I would buy a second one if I could.
Apple blocking you using the iPhone as a 3G dongle is for the benefit of the carriers.
But if Android (or Apple) let me use a USB dongle there are a bunch of apps we currently run on Windows CE machines that I would switch to smart phones.
Yes,
If the guy doesn't feel any pain or fear - your chouices are to club him unconscious or shoot him.
Both of which are likely to lead to bad outcomes.
Tazer as an alternative to a bullet or fractured skull = good
Tazer as ana alternative to simpyl talking to someone = bad
Cost of producing a copy of chrome<cost of building a phone
Remember - they aren't making any money from the phone, it's made by somebody else and sold by the networks. All google want is market share rather than per unit profits.
Google are quite happy for only developers to have the phone for the next year. They were handing them out for free at the dev conference last week.
Give it a year for the developers to work out the bugs and write lots of new apps - then gradually let the plebs buy them.
But you would put them in the same domain.
The problem with this is that I don't want my browser downloading content from different domains on the same page.
Specifically if I'm reading a story from the reg i don't want anything from x10 or spam_adserver.com, more importantly if I think i'm on my bank's site because the logo is served from rbs.com I want to block the rest of the page if it is coming from dodgy_nigerian_scammer.com
If google start doing this nobody is going to be able to use simple adblockers - which is presumably what the worlds biggest ad server is aiming at
It hasn't taken 20years to crack the encryption.
It happens to have been 20years before somebody bothered to publish a conference paper on the attack.
We don't know who/when/if somebody has already cracked this.
Since the strength of the encryption relies on the secrecy of the algorithm the easiest way to have broken it isn't to mess about doing electron microscope analysis of the chips - it's to have paid somebody at a 3rd world DECT phone making company $100 to give you the details.
>courses that actually have some recognition with professional bodies and employers
Tricky:
A BSc in Vitalistic medicine with crystal healing by the university of Westminster is approved by the Association of Homeopaths (http://www.dcscience.net/?p=227)
Who approves a Physics Phd at Cambridge?
