Posts by NumptyScrub

Feds crack down harder on 'lasing'. Yep, aircraft laser zapping... Really

Re: Empathy Test

quote: "Picture this, you're flying a passenger jet. At least once every day you get dazzled, you don't know when or if its going to happen on any given approach or after take off.

Suddenly you can only see green light. What are you feeling having just been dazzled?

Its just me but I'd probably snap and find a machete.

Dazzle the perps at random intervals for 14 years I say."

Really? To play devils advocate, I would suggest that drivers who fail (or refuse) to switch their headlights to dipped from full beam (aka high-beams) when faced with oncoming vehicles endanger far more people each year than anyone shining lasers at aircraft.

People are always happy to suggest draconian punishments for something they don't think they'll ever be guilty of. The real test is whether they are still comfortable with such punishment if it is something they could easily become guilty of. So in that vein: are you are willing to extend your cruel-and-unusual punishment suggestion to all people who are endangering those travelling in a vehicle by dazzling them needlessly? Do you think a 2+ year custodial sentence, or random blinding over a 14 year period, is appropriate for anyone who dazzles people in charge of a passenger vehicle, regardless of whether it is an aeroplane or Ford Fiesta, and regardless of whether the cause was simply them "forgetting" to switch to dipped beam in their own vehicle?

Might be worth remembering that aeroplanes have autopilots that can now handle takeoff and landing hands free, so pilots rarely have to use manual controls. Cars have no such mitigation mechanism for an incapacitated driver (currently) ;)

(Yes, I regularly get blinded by oncoming traffic, and yes, it does piss me off, and furthermore yes, I do believe that blinding oncoming vehicles is just as dangerous and life-endangering as blinding pilots in planes, if not more so. One thoughtless driver can easily dazzle 10 or more vehicles in a single journey, which would be 10-40 potential victims)

Quantum teleportation gets reliable at Delft

Re: Einstein is fine - nothing to see here.

quote: "No, but it can reproduce all the ones this article is banging on about."

I had a quick browse of the Arxiv paper, and they claim that the qubit state for their setup is deterministic. As in you aren't dealing with complementary random values of shoe, but complementary deterministic ones instead.

Then I saw loads of difficult looking maths and got scared off ^^;

Re: Question.

quote: "I would assume this is the first step towards real teleportation. Teleportation of data happens almost instantaneously through measuring entangled particles."

It might help to think of it not as teleportation of data, but as "action at a distance"; as you measure (and thus set) the spin of one electron, the other immediately takes on the complementary spin. Nothing has teleported, all that happens is the probability function of the electron spin breaks down into a single value determined by the value measured at the other entagled electron.

These guys have apparently managed to get a qubit that has a deterministic, rather than random, sequence of values, and if that is actually the case then we could theoretically get "subspace" communications of a sort going between these discrete entangled qubits. It is not going to enable matter teleportation though, no matter how much I'd like that to be the case. :(

Google TOO WHITE and MALE, says HR boss, looking in mirror

Re: This is just another shot in the war against non-elite white men

quote: "With an average IQ of 85, blacks aren't smart enough to have done it."

quote: "The only aim of these groups of women, blacks and Hispanics is to assert their own power. In their eyes, it's all about them and everyone must agree. Anyone who doesn't is racist and sexist."

Nice try :)

Your post is a quintessential case for Poe's Law, given the lack of obvious humour (or inline smiley faces). I'm going to choose to assume it is actually a parody (as per the Corollary to Poe's Law), because that is the kindest interpretation to give it :)

Re: Diversity is bollocks

quote: "Yes, it can. As you've just so eloquently put, when it's based on the ability of a candidate to do the job."

Aptitudist! Discrimination based upon a person's aptitude for a certain role is abhorrent, and must be stopped. There should be an equal distribution of aptitude across all roles, and the only truly fair method of candidate selection is to roll dice against a list of all people in the country. Whoever's number comes up gets the job (regardless of what they were doing previously).

Doing so would also fairly distribute wealth, as you could be moved from a low paying role to a high paying one, or vice-versa, at random, as soon as the role becomes available. It is an infallible system, I tell you!

SPB's mountaintop HQ menaced by wolves

Wolves are as dangerous as tigers and lions. Which is to say that all of the surviving ones have learnt that, on the whole, humans are fucking dangerous and best left alone.

You get attacked by the desperate ones (infirm / elderly / ill), the ones that are making a basic living off the land usually give humans a wide berth. Sounds like you got a fairly intelligent one who noticed a potential free dinner in the offing and decided to chance it ;)

It is no coincidence that we domesticated them into Canis lupus familiaris, after all...

Spy platform zero day exposes cops' wiretapped calls

Err, these computers would be inside service providers buildings, aka the switch floor. Dunno if you've ever worked in a telco but I can't recall any cops with guard dogs around when I did.

Also, should you manage to compromise the internal network of Virgin Media, for instance, you could potentially route through to one of these devices. Going in through internet facing webservers or mail gateways could be tricky, so probably some form of targeted phishing on middle-managers with laptops might be in order. Not easy, sure, but not impossible either.

And that would be completely ignoring the curiosity of existing network engineers actually employed by these companies, when they see an accessible interface on that dark-room kit...

100% driverless Wonka-wagon toy cars? Oh Google, you're having a laugh

Re: yes. but.

quote: "Looking wider, there is the state research funding allocated EU-wide to "intellegent cities". That could pan out in all sorts of ways."

I've been playing Watch Dogs the last couple of days, and "intelligent cities" will either be the best or the worst place to live, depending on how awesome your phone is (and also whether you've ever been attacked while driving your neice around Chicago, turning you into a bitter vigilante bent on revenge) ;)

quote: "Who could possibly have antipathy to a technology that kills over a million people every year around the world?"

Over 7 billion people worldwide, so while 1 million may sound like a large number, you can compare it with all sorts of odd things like child mortality; 6.6 million child (<5yo) deaths in 2012. Driving a car is far safer than being a child, apparently. Won't somebody think of the children?

LG G3 fights off screen-res war rival Samsung with quad-HD cutie: In pictures

2560 x 1440 on a 5.5" phone

but 1080p is considered perfectly adequate for a 17" high-end laptop or 20+" desktop monitor. There would appear to be a cognitive disconnect here somewhere... :'(

Samsung WRISTPHONE – for those who wanna whisper to strap-ons

Re: Samsung

Yeah, Samsung now have 2 wrist-mounted tech gadgets (one is already a retail product, the other now being confirmed) before Apple have even announced their first.

Of course, once Apple actually do release theirs, naturally the iWatch will single-handedly define the market for smartwatches, and Samsung's first-to-market devices will be considered cheap copies etc. etc.

As long as any watch device has bluetooth and a headset jack you'll be able to make calls without holding your wrist to your face; I know people who use their iPhone earbuds as a hands-free kit, and it's not like existing watches are too small to fit a 2.5mm jack on. If fashionistas are happy to wear chunky Breitling or Patek Phillipe timepieces on their wrist, you can bet smartwatch manufacturers can get away with something a similar size and put a decent battery in it, as long as it is considered fashionable.

Ditching renewables will punch Aussies in the wallet – Bloomberg

Re: If renewables can compete on price ...

Exactly, if they already represent a commercially viable energy production method, then market forces would suggest that providers would be jumping on them without subsidies. Or that there is some giant conspiracy preventing their adoption for some (fiscal) reason, which would mean we still wouldn't be subsidising them.

quote from the article: "The reasoning is simple: the RET as it stands today has attracted investments that would add more than 14 gigawatts of power capacity from non-fossil fuel sources to the grid by 2020. Once in place, that eco-friendly generation would drive down wholesale prices, which should slash what consumers pay."

So, how has that panned out in other countries who are subsidising renewables? I don't recall any reductions in energy prices in the UK, more the opposite, as the consumers foot the bill for the current feed-in tariffs. I also can't recall any official promise that prices will get cheaper the more renewables we have, although that might just be my terrible memory ^^;

After the cyberpunks, prepare to fight a new wave of nasties

Re: A huge error in the article

quote: "It was a threat to the user. The user sees the tick on the shield, believes they are protected and makes decisions on that basis. A false sense of security can be very dangerous."

Given that no AV suite can be 100% effective, by that definition all AV suites can be considered a "threat to users". Or to rephrase, any user who believes that their AV suite makes them invulnerable has been badly educated, and does not understand the nature of the security suite they are using.

The only real fix for that is user education, alongside pulling apps found to be misrepresenting (intentionally or otherwise) their capabilities or purpose. Making it clear that deliberate misrepresentation of capabilities/purpose is covered under existing fraud legislation (aka actually prosecuting someone for it) would also go a long way to dissuade developers from pursuing such tactics in the search for a quick buck.

ET hunter: We will find SPACE ALIENS in 20 years

Re: I've heard that before...

quote: "Furthermore, the environmental conditions required to produce intelligence are incredibly specific. Anyone who has seen or read Jared Diamond's excellent documentary series Guns, Germs and Steel will realise how specific the combination of geography, climate, ecology, and sociology have to be in order for advanced civilisation and technology to emerge. When you consider the specificity of those conditions, and the resulting tiny time window in the vast sweep of this planet's history, it is easy to see that while life in the universe is probably commonplace, intelligence almost certainly is not."

The environmental conditions required to produce us are pretty specific, I grant you. However a truly complete study would have to cover all potentially possible biochemistries, and include the viable environmental conditions that those biochemistries would require for continued function.

We have armoured metal snails that live next to geothermal vents, and humans obviously can't survive there. It would be a somewhat unscientific stretch to claim that those conditions are therefore incapable of supporting intelligent life though, given they demonstrably can support multi-cellular life already.

Also, Mr. Diamond's work was not a study of the conditions for emergent intelligence, it was a study on why Eurasian culture became dominant over other indigenous cultures (African, American, Australian) that it migrated to. Intelligence had already emerged, and is in fact a pre-requisite for the study. So while the laid-back PanzerSchnecke culture of the Pacific Rim might end up dominated by the more prolific and technologically advanced PanzerSchneken from the Atlantic, you still end up with technologically advanced PanzerSchnecken pootling about in the volcanically active oceans of <insert exoplanet here>, regarding this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drawing their plans against us....

No such luck: Apple, Samsung say peace talks are off – way off

Re: Frivolous and vexatious litigation

quote: "As soon as people like you concede that Samsung are serial plagiarists."

Since the thrust of Apple's argument is that Samsung are just copying them, then I would find it hard to argue that Samsung were not serial plagiarists :)

_{hee hee hee}

Uncivil engineering: US society skewers self-published science

Personally I would assert that the real crime here is that copyright, which is legislation meant to protect the creator (author) of a work is instead being used to punish the creator (author) of a work.

According to wikifiddlers in the US a transfer of copyright(s) "must be memorialized in a writing signed by the transferor", which would suggest that any form of electronic submission would not be sufficient to claim a transfer of rights, even if it specifically stated that it would on the submission form; such clauses would be unenforceable unless accompanied by a signed written transfer of rights. It also states "Non-exclusive grants (often called non-exclusive licenses) need not be in writing under U.S. law. They can be oral or even implied by the behavior of the parties." which would definitely cover electronic submissions, but would not allow the Journal to pursue the actual author of the work for copyright infringement, as the author still has copyright(s) over the work in question.

At least that's the way I am interpreting it. YMMV of course.

Bitcoin blockchain allegedly infected by ancient 'Stoned' virus

Re: the whole message

quote: "So this virus (presumably written by pot smokers) infected a machine which then stopped working, without even 'taking care of business' first. Why am I not surprised?"

Compared to some government IT procurement projects, Stoned was both more functional and more complete, even taking the fact that functionality was missing into account. It was also several million pounds less expensive to have developed.

Stoner programmers being as effective as multinationals as well as cheaper? Who'd have thought? ;)

Boffins 3D-print biomimetic shark skin

Re: Scientists spend money discovering already known facts?

quote: "We already knew what the denticles on shark skin do."

What this did, which had not been done previously, was quantify the exact effects of specific denticle shape and placement.

from the article: Lauder enthused: "This is the first time that anyone has measured the energetic cost of shark skin and the reduction in swimming cost relative to a smooth surface."

Honey, the satnav app says you're to leave at 6am... Yup. I'll have that coffee off you

Re: if your satnav told you to eat a brillo pad

If your boss at work told you to delete all the files pertaining to last months financial records, would you?

If a police officer told you to lay down on the floor with your arms spread out, would you?

If your significant other told you to shut up and hand over the TV remote, would you?

Some people have driven up to the edge of cliffs, into swollen fords, or on to tidal flats because the satnav told them to. If a person trusts some(body/thing) giving them advice, they are likely to take that advice. This has been the case for millennia, history is full of people(s) apologising for bad decisions taken under bad advice.

If your NSA chief told you to invade Iraq because they are making and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, would you?

Apple, Beats and fools with money who trust celeb endorsements

Re: Why the spite and bile at hifi lovers?

quote: "£500 vs £30k and you, having never met me, are absolutely sure I couldn't hear the difference?"

Nope, the point being made was that you seem convinced you could. I'm fairly sure I could not, such that I would also find it believable that others could not, regardless of their personal feelings in the matter.

Were I to suggest that the £500 kit was in fact component cost, and furthermore custom built by an acoustic engineer, are you sure you could still tell the difference between £30k retail kit and £500 custom engineered kit in a double-blind test using the same CD as the input?

Google CAN be told to delete sensitive data from its search results, rules top EU court

Re: Barmy (@SquanderTwo)

quote: "I suspect that many or at least some of those proposing the idea may have "spent" convictions themselves or friends or relatives that do. I would expect these may be for one off incidents and may also be at the minor end of the spectrum. Most people vote along self interest lines..."

Whereas you have been, and know people who have been, victims of a crime, who from the sound of it wished the perpetrator had been given capital punishment even though we no longer do that here (it is barbaric). As you say, most people vote along self-interest lines.

quote: "Can you give us an example of one of these extremely prevalent crimes that is actually just a stupid minor mistake as opposed to a deliberate criminal act? You keep mentioning it as if it's plainly obvious that that's what most crimes really are. I don't think it is that obvious, and I don't think that's a reasonable response to someone who is clearly and explicitly talking about GBH.

I was sort of hoping that someone would pick up on that point sooner or later."

I have been the victim of violent crime, just like I have been the victim of burglary, and the victim of bad driving; as a result my motorcycle was written off and I sustained ABH including a broken wrist and massive blunt force trauma over most of my body.

Had I not survived the accident, the other motorist would have been guilty of vehicular manslaughter, for pulling out of a side road without properly checking for traffic. Is pulling out of a side road a deliberate criminal act? Of course not, but it is possible for it to result in the death of another human being; in my case it resulted in severe bruising across my entire body as well as broken bones, similar to the result of a severe beating from several street thugs acting in concert.

I cannot and will not stand for that idiot driver being hounded until eternity for a misjudgement, even though I received extensive injuries because of it. Hopefully he is no longer an idiot driver; I have learnt many of my lessons the hard way, and those lessons are the ones that tend to stick. That it the essence of rehabilitiation; that someone who acted "wrongly" for whatever reason has the chance to see why it was wrong, and correct that behaviour for the future.

How about another example of non-deliberate but still criminal behaviour: Trolling people on the internet is now a criminal offence with a custodial sentence.

Is airing an unpopular view that some might consider offensive a deliberate criminal act? Rocky ground, I know, given the previous content of this debate ^^;

Re: Barmy (@Psyx)

quote: "Well, I don't believe the penalty for someone beating someone unconcious in the course of a wannabe gang robbery, while breaking several of their bones, should be a suspended sentence and no criminal record after 12 months, which is currently the case. No, really, go and check on the penalty handed out for Section 20 GBH - 3 year start, 1/3rd off for pleading guilty, another 1/3rd off for a first serious offence, and the remaining 1/3rd will be suspended. That, is not justice. It is not rehabilitating anyone. Its just a joke."

I would suggest either starting or joining a lobby group whose aim is to get the sentencing for violent crime increased then. Just be aware that not everyone in the country may agree with you, and that government officials may want some rather large backhanders prior to actually doing anything regarding getting the statutes changed. Apparently that's how politics works these days.

Re: @JimmyPage

quote: "It has to be so, as it can only work provided the victims are generally satisfied that the offender is punished such that they don't need to "send the boys round" to top up any light sentencing.

...

When we reach a stage, and I personally believe we're not as far from it I'd like, that victims of crime feel that the legal system has not punished their offender sufficiently, they will take it upon themselves to do so, by both legal means and otherwise."

"Sending the boys round" does of course make them criminals as well. Not just "the boys" who are committing an act of criminal violence, but the person (original victim?) who commissions the act of criminal violence is also guilty.

I believe the usual term employed is "vicious cycle", in this case more literally than figuratively.

Whilst "most people" may feel that violence against a person who has wronged them is fine, that just makes "most people" potential criminals. Whose criminal convictions would remain unspent, under these proposals, and who would get told (once they lose their job and suddenly find they are ostracised from society) that if they couldn't do the time, they shouldn't have done the crime.

That's how it is supposed to work, right? :)

James Bond producers sign on for Edward Snowden movie

Re: Matt Damon... 's all I'm saying!

The Snowden Identity might be ok.

I'm thinking Rowan Atkinson though, in a Johhny Snowden type romp presenting the whole thing as one long comedy of errors. It may even help take some pressure off the NSA and GCHQ, if they can be presented to the populace as well-meaning but thoroughly inept spycatchers, who blanket surveil purely because they can't work out how to target properly...

You could put Hugh Laurie in as the House-like head of the NSA, Liam Neeson as the CIA operative brought in to track Snowden down, and Brian Cox (not the prof) alongside Brian Blessed as whatever relevant Russian guys. "Snowden's alive?"

Feature-phones aren't dead, Moto – oldsters still need them

Re: It's not just the oldies who like this sort of thing.

quote: "Do the no-texting-while-driving laws apply to riders on a public road?"

Much as I hate to admit it, horses are capable of fully autonomous navigation and hazard avoidance. Not something I can say for any of my current motor vehicles.

The rider of a horse is more like the driving instructor or the person being chauffeured, than the driver.

Indian climate boffins: Himalayan glaciers are OK, thanks

Re: Alarmists, get in line!

quote: "Nuclear winter (1960s)"

Guys, I've found the fix for global warming, and we already have all the kit to implement it!

Panic over :)

Gigabyte Brix Pro: You don't need no steenkin' Xbox... when you have 4K-ing amazing graphics

quote: "PC gaming - gaming for people who like fixing broken crap."

XBox One - basically an x86 PC running a custom OS

Playstation 4 - basically an x86 PC running a custom OS

Brix Pro - basically an x86 PC running either a custom OS (SteamOS) or Windows

My current gaming rig - basically an x86 PC running Windows

So, how do I move from a broken crap PC to something non-broken? :)

Supposedly secure Dogecoin service Dogevault goes offline

Re: Whyyyyyyy?

quote: "Why would you put your cryptocoin (of any sort) in a third party 'vault' when these things have big red 'hey come hack me for big loots!' flashing signs taped to their doors?"

The Italian Job

Point Break

The Lookout

I still put my money in a bank, rather than keep it all under the mattress. YMMV of course :)

What the frag? Earn millions as the world watches you SLAY rivals

Re: Performance?

Both units run HDMI passthrough, so you plug the output of your content generating device into the recorder, and then the recorder into your display. This obviates the need for either dedicated capture software (e.g. Fraps) or for Twitch / other service being built-in to the game client (which I'm starting to see on some PC titles), both of which have a processor overhead.

Given that most current-gen units are HDMI, how do either of these units deal with HDCP content streams presented on the HDMI interface? I doubt any contemporary gaming software will think of doing that, but if people like YouTube / Twitch decide they need to do an MPAA to "protect their revenue streams", you may start seeing developers pandering to them by flagging gaming output as HDCP to try and block inline recording (I'm assuming current GPUs are capable of creating HDCP output, of course). There's also the actual MPAA to think about, as some people may (illegally) try to use one of these to record the output from their BluRay player or something similar.

ENTIRE UNIVERSE created in supercomputer. Not THIS universe (probably)

Godwin already? ^^;

Armed invasion of foreign nations, to remove unsympathetic governments and install a different government more amenable to your cause... I could be talking about Poland and France, or perhaps Iraq and Afghanistan. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, n'est ce pas?

Report: Climate change has already hit USA - and time is RUNNING OUT

Re: It seems to me

quote: "The earth was inhospitable to life for the majority of its history."

Life is surprisingly hardy, it can survive within inches of ocean floor volcanic vents, it can survive in meters of glacial ice, and in all sots of conditions in between. It's also theorised that we've had cyanobacteria around for 3.5 billion years, which would actually be the majority of the Earth's 4.5 billion years. It's only been inhospitable to life for maybe 20-25% of it's early history ^^;

Even if the planet goes up 10C in average global temperature, there will be life. 3.5 billion years and several extinction events have already shown that life is still around, it's just the form that changes.

From a personal, human, perspective, we do need to pull our fingers out though; blamestorming is fine keeping the B-Ark element amused, but we should be making sure that the technology and infrastructure is in place to support the continued survival of homo sapiens in the face of climate change, regardless of the contributing factors. Sea levels due to rise? Sort out some decent (sustainable) oceanic farming initiatives, and prioritise the development of floating installations or placing critical non-floating infrastructure a few hundred meters above sea level.

Re: Marvin would love this news

quote: "on geological timescales, (your 80M years) you'd probably be in the right. Revert to mean n all that.

On our 200 year timescale any rapid increase is suspicious, innit? Certainly atmo CO2 increase has been pretty dramatic over that time and totally out of line with "millions of years"."

Regarding CO₂, here are graphs for CO2 levels for the last ~400 million years alongside temperatures for the same period

You'll note that there are points where high CO₂ correlates with high temp, and also points where low CO₂ correlates with high temps. There are also points where increasing CO₂ correlates with rising temps, and points where increasing CO₂ correlates with falling temps. I'd especially draw your attention to the points between 250-100Mya; if you follow the 30Myr filter line, we sat around 1500-2000ppmv CO₂ (4-5 times more than today), and overall it was indeed warmer than now. However over that period, the first 50My have increasing CO₂ (1500ppmv to 2000ppmv) and falling temperatures, the second 50My have decreasing CO₂ (2000ppmv to 1500ppmv) and falling temperatures, and the last 50My have increasing CO₂ (1500ppmv to 2000ppmv) and rising temperatures.

Over the scale of those graphs, 200 years are insignificant, we can only talk about long term trends. Also, all of those data points are calculated, none were observed. So while I am in agreement that the data from the last 200 years is explicitly more accurate than any calculated paleoclimate data, paleoclimate data does not support the hypothesis that increased CO₂ inevitably and immediately causes increases in global temperatures. An increase of 500ppmv (33% extra at the time) somehow failed to increase global temperatures over a 50 million year timescale (250-200Mya), it barely even slowed an existing decline. Claiming it can (and will) dramatically increase global temperatures in less than a century does not fit those existing data sets, and to be scientifically sound, any new theory has to both fit existing data as well as accurately predict new data. Something is not right, and I would be far more suspicious of people deciding to rewrite paleoclimate data to fit the current models, than of people rewriting the current models to fit paleoclimate data.

Anyway, moving on from my rant regarding some less than scientific practise amongst people calling themselves scientists, I think we mostly agree that people should be doing proper science (which by definition includes unbiased research), and also properly planning for the impact of increased global temperatures. Regardless of who's (or what's) fault it is, we're going to have to live in a warmer world, so we'd better make sure we can do so, right?

Re: Marvin would love this news

quote: "All scientists agree that anthropomorphic climate change is happening. The scientific doubt is effectively zero. And has been for well over a decade."

Citation needed. As I have posted several times, I completely agree that the climate is warming up, but to see people constantly claim that all scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is happening is either well-meaning over-generalisation, or deliberate mis-statement. We have been on a warming trend for over 10,000 years, but are still colder than at any point over the last 80 million years.

Which way would you expect the temperature to change naturally, bereft of any human interaction, based upon that observation?

Traffic light vulns leave doors wide open to Italian Job-style hacks

Re: Hack away you can't do worse than Bristol City Council

You get the same thing everywhere, and if an acquaintance of mine (who works in a local planning department) is to be believed, the lack of synchronisation of lights is intended, rather than accidental. Read into that whatever you wish, but I can't say that it would be particularly surprising if it were a widespread truth; setting a chain of lights up to deliberately catch motorists at each set would let you force motorists to progress down that stretch of road at less than the posted limit. It would also let you massage traffic flow figures in any politically convenient direction, should there be government money available to help ease certain traffic-related problems, that can then be subcontracted to companies run by relatives for a juicy backhander.

Not that councillors have ever been found at the gravy barrel before, of course, but at some point one of them might succumb to the temptation ^^;

This news does lend itself to the somewhat bizarre conclusion that local motorists would be capable of (illegally) making local traffic control hardware more efficient though, and (again illegally) improving local traffic flow and journey times, should they spend some time investigating and redesigning light sequences. What a strange turn of events!

ARM exec: Forget eight-core smartphone chips, just enjoy a SIX-PACK

Re: A bit like desktop then

quote: "That's because your octocore can't use all 8 cores anyway."

I'm taking the "desktop" in the title to mean that this 8-core CPU is an x86 architecture rather than ARM, and thus not running big.LITTLE (capitalisation, meh). In this scenario, disabling cores and overclocking are relatively simple to do, and most desktop use cases rarely stretch beyond 3 threads anyway, so it sounds entirely plausible.

Tim Cook: Apple's 'closer than it's ever been' to releasing new product range

Re: Cook is a fucking moron

iPod, neither the first mp3 player, nor the first hard disk mp3 player

iPhone, neither the first smartphone, nor the first smartphone with almost all screen and minimal buttons

iPad, not the first tablet PC, Android devices were available from 2009 onwards (I own an Archos 5 myself, released the year prior to the iPad), even if you choose to ignore all the various Windows tablet PC efforts that MS have been churning out since 2000.

All 3 are definitely awesome commercial successes for Apple, however none of the 3 are firsts. I would argue that the former is in fact closely tied to the latter; Apple let others make all the mistakes first, so they can tweak their product to avoid most of the 1st-gen pitfalls that plague the first to market models.

If you don't mind my asking, could you confirm why it was you thought any of those 3 Apple products were first to market? I see it repeated time and again, and my personal opinion is that Apple deliberately write their marketing material to infer their products were first, when they demonstrably were not. Public perception is hard to shake, even if it is demonstrably an untruth ^^;

Re: @nexsphil Nothing that innovative coming, then

quote: "Is that an American 'fanny' or a British fanny that you're thinking about?"

Both, that way they can capitalise on 2 demographics, and also be seen to be anti-discriminatory ;)

quote: "Apple has never been first to market with anything; it looks for an establishing market and attempts to launch a sufficiently significant product to capitalise on the initial growth."

Which I usually mention when people bring up the iPod / iPhone / iPad as "firsts", and then they look at me funny. Apple don't do untested markets, they wait for profitability to be established first and then barrel in after someone else has made all the initial mistakes (it gives them time to engineer out those obvious mistakes).

Brilliant strategy, but then (IMO) they spoil it by writing all the future marketing to imply that they did it first. The products are solid enough on their own merits to not warrant attempting re-writing of history, but Apple apparently try anyway :/

PEAK APPLE: Mystery upstart to hurl iLord from its throne 'by 2020'

quote: "Did it occur to him that IF, just IF, this company X started and even remotely looked like gaining some sort of traction in year 1 or 2, Apple could just use some of that $150 billion and buy them?"

He is a venture capitalist. You have just outlined his entire plan in a single sentence, minus the "...for significantly more than I have invested in them" at the end.

What will be amusing is if Apple don't buy the company, and he'll then have to start evangelising to MS / Intel / Google to see if they will take the bait instead.

US Supreme Court supremo rakes Aereo lawman in oral arguments

Re: Who has the bigger pockets ?

quote: "The Aereo model is just like having your own antenna in a position where it picks up a better signal."

The Aereo model is just like a broadcast TV version of tax avoidance; completely legal by the letter of the law, and completely against the spirit of the law.

Aereo have a duty to their shareholders to minimise royalty payments made to provide their service in order to maximise shareholder value, and are doing so in a (currently) completely legal way. I understand why ABC has such an issue with it, much like the UK would love for Google, Starbucks and Amazon to pay up what they should owe in taxes for business conducted on UK soil.

I'm interested to see how this court rule on Aereo's deliberate avoidance of tax royalty payments using legal loopholes. Because it currently is a legal loophole, as far as I can tell.

To paraphrase something I've heard a few times in tax-avoidance related discussions; why should Aereo pay royalties that they don't have to?

Record labels sue Pandora over vintage song royalties

Re: I buy about two CDs a year

quote: "Yeah same here, I steal from Tesco all the time because I know that the farmers hardly make any money of the raw product."

The only way your analogy would work is if the OP was shoplifting the physical CDs from Tescos, or you were talking about downloading eggs from the internet.

Seriously, we all know that copyright infringement is a criminal offense, but it is not identical to stealing a physical object, either in principle or in law.

Here is one for you: I go to Ikea, and take a few pictures of one of their chair designs (aka download music). I then, using my own materials (aka my computer hard disk) make an exact copy of that chair. When I sit on that chair (aka listen to the pirated music files) have I stolen that chair from Ikea?

Of course I fucking haven't because the chair is still inside the Ikea store. No theft has occurred, but I have appropriated their intellectual property (the design of the chair) and used it without permission. I have potentially denied them the income from that chair, but try arguing that one in court, it certainly won't pass as theft :)

Re: Royalties ad infinitum.

Copyright is currently author's life + 70 years (or 120 years from creation for corporate works). Expect another Mickey Mouse extension prior to 2023 that extends it yet again, if previous form is anything to go by ^^;

Whoever you vote for, Google gets in

Re: If you found this surprising then ...

The UK? We're a constitutional monarchy. It would be hard to see how would could be defined as anything else but an oligarchy, really :)

Report: Apple seeking to raise iPhone 6 price by a HUNDRED BUCKS

Re: Does Apple have a short memory, or what?

quote: "Apple can charge whatever they like for stuff they manufacture and sell themselves."

But what they are currently doing is talking to network operators regarding the price those operators will charge, are they not?

If all that is happening is that operators are bargaining Apple down on their volume pricing then all is fine. "Our MSRP is $X and we'll sell to you for $Y" is perfectly legitimate business.

If Apple are attempting to influence the end-price of their product via the operators, however, then that starts to sound an awful lot like price fixing. "Our MSRP is $X and you must sign this contract agreeing to never sell our product below $Y or we refuse to sell any to you" would usually be considered less than legitimate. Apple can choose what price they will sell to Vodafone at, but Vodafone should have free reign in deciding what price they will offer it to consumers at. Any attempt by Apple to influence that end price is an attempt at price fixing, IMO :)

quote: "Over 24 months, compared to a similar £29/month iPhone contract, this seems to save me a shade under £430, money that I shall spend on beer. That's two years of FREE BEER for not using an iPhone!"

That has to be one of the most compelling arguments I have yet seen for considering the "non-premium" mobile device market. Motorola would do well to add that to their marketing repertoire ^^;

Re: I think the article is wrong

quote: "If they can arbitrarily increase the price of the iPhone 6 just because it is a bit larger than the 5s, why didn't they do it with the 5 when it was a bit larger than the 4s?"

Fear. They weren't sure if there would be the same product uptake with a change in form factor, especially when the size of Samsung's contemporary devices was being lambasted as "too big" by a lot of their target demographic.

However the 5 and 5s sold like the proverbial hot cakes, so a price increase is inevitable; it's difficult to convince someone your device is orders of magnitude "better" than the last one unless it is also significantly more expensive. Betcha that the increase is claimed to be down to the sapphire glass, even though they are apparently negotiating the price (rather than simply stating it).

Samsung Galaxy S5 fingerprint scanner hacked in just 4 DAYS

Re: Why not use multiple factor authentication

I employ a crack team of highly trained medical professionals to also perform blood and DNA testing, alongside the facial recognition, voice analysis, fingerprint, iris and retina scanners, all feeding in to the security guard who presses the "open door" button for my volcano lair.

Note that in this scenario, your PayPal password (or the crypto cert used by the phone to authenticate to PayPal, after it assesses the biometric data) is the "open door" button, which is still your single point of failure ^^;

Much like placing a 50cm thick steel door with multiple locking mechanisms on a vault whose walls are made of brick; any smart criminal will go for the weakest link, so you need to make that highly secure door the weakest link.

Re: Lizard People?

quote: "So, do you have a carer, or some other responsible person, who takes care of you? If so, they need to be sacked."

What is this I don't even

Obama allows NSA to exploit 0-days: report

Re: Taking a Walk on the WWWild

It's likely a continuation of the time-honoured "if you don't understand, you're obviously not supposed to know" theme. I suspect there are kernels of truth in there, possibly hiding from the Colonels of Truth (@MiniTrue)

Full disclosure: I have seen more than one completely coherent post from amanfromMars, so I know there is definitely sentience there, despite appearances ;)

Melting permafrost switches to nasty, high-gear methane release

Re: 1980-2010 was warmer than 1970-2000

quote: "· CO2 is a greenhouse gas the effect of which increases with its concentration in the atmosphere.

· The concentration of CO2 has increased from about 315ppm to 400ppm in the past 50 years.

· This has resulted in less heat being returned to space, ergo the planet is warming up.

I regard this stuff as very basic physics. What about you, Squander Two?"

Maybe you can help then, since I don't see a reply from you on my earlier post: here are calculations of the Phanerozioc CO₂ concentrations and a temperature graph of the same timescales. I'm not seeing the correlation between CO₂ and global temperature that I would expect to, especially if the effect of CO₂ concentrations on global temperatures is actually such "basic physics".

Could you shed any light on that? Is the correlation between atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and global temperature only demonstrably so valid for a mere 200 years, and far less valid for the last 450 million?

quote: "If you want to go on longer timescales then those show warming too

1980-2010 was warmer than 1970-2000

How about this: 1980-2010 was significantly warmer than 9200BC-9170BC (source). Global warming is a proven fact, we're all going to die the planet is trying to kill us. Case closed, no anthropogenic CO₂ even needed.

Of course 1980-2010 is also significantly colder than 80,000,000BC-79,999,970BC (source). However it is also true to say that 100,000,000BC-50,000,000BC, 50 million years give or take, would appear to have a significantly higher average temp than the last 50 million years (50,000,000BC-2014). Using those (contiguous, same size) ranges, we're in a global cooling phase. Or using an overlap, 70Mya-20Mya is warmer than 50Mya to 0Mya, showing an "obvious" cooling trend over the last 70 million years.

Statistics is complicated ^^;

Full disclosure: I agree that we are in a warming trend. I agree that CO₂ is good at absorbing and radiating in the IR band. I agree that energy policies need a good fucking shake up, and that better renewables and less pollution are a good idea. I agree with pretty much everything that proponents of CAGW want to do, but I do wish that some people would stop providing shaky conclusions, questionable statistics or appeals to emotion and labelling them as "science". Especially when it doesn't take an awful lot of effort to find base data that can be interpreted in a different way, or that can be manipulated to downright contradict some of the conclusions touted as "obvious" or "established" by people who have a good point but a bad way of getting it across.

And yes, I include myself in that; it's just too tempting to drop to the lowest common denominator sometimes, even though I know I shouldn't. Sorry ^^;

Re: The fat lady has sung

quote: "I believe the scientific explanation for that is the Earth's tilt meant the northern hemisphere was angled more towards the Sun."

Since we're talking ~12kya to present (the Holocene being that time range), does that mean that Earth's axial tilt might be involved in the current 12,000 year warming trend? We need to get axial tilting banned, or at least heavily taxed, and ensure that axial untilting companies get government subsidies to help their business model :)

CAtGW - Catastrophic Axial-tilt Global Warming?

Re: The fat lady has sung

quote: "This is why I don't believe in Evolution or Gravity, after all, they are just theories.

And earthquakes are just God having a sneeze presumably since Tectonic plate theory is just, um, a theory."

Do the current models, upon which all current economic policy is made, and all catastrophic predictions are being made, support the ability of the planet to be colder than it is today with 4000ppmv (or more!) atmospheric CO₂ and a sun running at 95% luminosity?

That's all I'm asking. It is obvious that we are slowly getting warmer. It is obvious that this has happened before (assuming the maths done by paleoclimatology to be robust). What is most definitely not obvious (to me, at least) is that without us being on the planet it would not be warming. Given those previously quoted estimates of conditions up to 450Mya, it is also obvious to me that either: paleoclimatologists are full of shit, and know nothing about climate (possible but IMO unlikely), or: atmospheric CO₂ as the climate devil is being overplayed deliberately as a political tool (far more likely IMO).

As in, tell the public "shit guys it's only gonna get warmer, you'll need to ditch those beachfront houses because they'll be under water in a couple hundred years and there's nothing we can do" will piss people off, and you are not going to get elected. The people getting elected are the ones that will say "shit guys, it's getting warmer but I can fix this! Vote me in and I can stop all this warming so the planet stays at just the right temperature for ever!".

Potentially I am the only person coming to this conclusion using this data set, but it's a pretty logical conclusion IMO. The Earth has had a "climate" for all of it's 4.5 billion years, ignoring all but the last 200 is not scientific. Including even just the last 0.5 billion gives you a more complete picture, and doing so calls into question a lot of the "climate facts" being fed to us by politicians, especially the "fact" that all current warming is "obviously" anthropogenic. IMO it's "obviously" not as the last million years have apparently been the coldest "on record" for 300 million years. Using that background, try this phrase out for size: "the last decade has been the hottest on record in the last hundred years, showing that we seem to be rising out of the million-year cold spell. Global temperatures over the next few hundred thousand years are expected to rise up to 2C, affecting polar glaciation and seal levels accordingly."

I may well be a deluded idiot, but my delusions fit with current climate "facts", and are more pessimistic than most CAGW proponents. I only really differ in that I'm pointing the finger at nature as the warming culprit, rather than anything specifically anthropogenic.