Posts by Phil O'Sophical

Mars attacks! Morocco pelted with rocks from the Red Planet

What could cause such an event?

Mars getting hit by a fscking great asteroid a few km across?

NASA study identifies the ‘low hanging fruit’ in climate change

landfill gas

There was a paper from 4-5 years ago which pointed out that landfill gas is the biggest single source of renewable energy in the UK at the moment, producing about 30% of such energy.

Pirate Bay dropping torrents after magnetic attraction

> Under UK law, theft is defined in the Theft Act 1968. Go and read it. You will find that you are simply wrong.

OK, I've read it, and I still disagree. Some excerpts:

---

A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it

Any assumption by a person of the rights of an owner amounts to an appropriation,

“Property” includes money and all other property, real or personal, including things in action and other intangible property.

Property shall be regarded as belonging to any person having possession or control of it, or having in it any proprietary right or interest

A person appropriating property belonging to another without meaning the other permanently to lose the thing itself is nevertheless to be regarded as having the intention of permanently depriving the other of it if his intention is to treat the thing as his own to dispose of regardless of the other’s rights

---

It is clear that usurping someones right to make copies of their work, with the intention of treating such a copy as if it were your own, amounts to theft.

@Vic

"I am very carefully and deliberately making the statement that copyright infringement is not theft - which is a true statement"

I disagree. Your statement would only be true if the value of a copy did not depend on the number of copies that exist, which is rarely the case. In practice, making an unauthorized copy will reduce the value of authorized copies, or will reduce the market for sales of authorized copies.

In practice there is no difference between making an unauthorized copy of something, and stealing an authorized copy, the net effect is the same. Both are theft of property.

Theft

The repeated comments here that it isn't theft because making a copy doesn't deprive the owner of the original are disingenuous. The situation is called *copy*right not because it affects the original, but because it affects the right to make copies of that original. It is theft of those copies which is at issue.

When a band plays a song live at a concert, it is clear that no amount of copying of that performance is going to detract from the experience of those who paid to see it live. The original has indeed arguably lost nothing.

However, copyright allows the band to make THEIR OWN COPIES of that performance, and to distribute them for money. The availability of unauthorized copies will obviously reduce the number of copies that the band will sell, and could depress the price of those copies. In that sense it is very much theft, since making 500 unauthorized copies and selling them yourself is the same as breaking into the band's warehouse and stealing 500 legitimate copies to sell. Just because there are a potentially unlimited number of copies avaiable doesn't make stealing them less of a crime.

There is the argument that someone who takes a pirate copy isn't necessarily someone who would have bought a legitimate copy, so the losses cannot be equated to 100% of the unauthorized copies. That is true, but it is equally true that *some* of those pirate copies will correspond to a lost sale of a legitimate copy, so the loss is not 0% either.

Oracle punts carrier-grade Sparc T4 servers

Telephone exchanges have used -48v supplies pretty much since the beginning. It's high enough to power several miles of cable, yet low enough not to be dangerous. It's the one power supply that you can guarantee to find in any telco rack.

As to price, equipment that complies with NEBS Level 3 certification will never be cheap. It's specc'ed for fire resistance, earthquake survivability, lightning strikes, etc. It's not unknown for such equipment to still be functioning normally when the racks are lying on their side in a pile of rubble after the exchange building has collapsed on them. Try that with a standard PC! :)

French get unlimited mobile for €20

Femtocell

A tiny personal cellular base station that links back to the phone network via an internet connection. It's the next size down from a picocell...

French court fines Google $65k over search suggestion

Association doesn't mean blame

If lots of people had been searching for a phrase like "Crook takes Lyonnaise de Garantie for 1bn euros" couldn't that generate similar associations, with completely different connotations?

Vint Cerf: 'The internet is not a human right'

What's the difference

An internet is a network of networks. What does it it matter in terminology terms if it covers all the networks in the world, or a subset of them, public and/or private? Even the global entity that you refer to as "The Internet" doesn't include all internets in the world.

Fast food firm fields Sith sandwich

Sith sandwich?

Just wait 'til someone puts that on a menu, and runs it though the spellchecker without proofreading it afterwards...

BT, Scotland Yard form copper theft crackdown supersquad

Lots, they've all had the covers nicked...

Shoppers love fondling iPads to fill out sex health survey

Oh look

Is that an iPad? Can I have a look.

Oh, sorry, I think I touched something there, was it important?

Beeb rescues old Who episodes

He probably has a Large Hardon Collider tucked away in a TARDIS room somewhere as well.

Mythbusters cannonball ‘myth-fires’

lose a few in the name of entertainment.

Only if we get to choose which ones

New account of Flight 447 disaster published

Wonder if this will get reported in France?

It's interesting (if that's the right word) that as soon as the first indication of pilot error came out, Air France responded "couldn't be, not OUR pilots", and the French mainstream press stopped reporting anything about it.

Google hands Britain’s eTown award to Scunthorpe

Correct about the Limerick/Cork, my mistake. The problem with the name isn't that Facebook says "no", but that it says 'no, this is offensive".

Then again, this was reported in the BT, a newspaper whose comment forum software turned Saturday into Sa****ay... Who knows how they'd have coped with a comment about Arsenal :)

Caen is a nice place

And at least it won't get its name censored on Facebook, a fate also suffered by some poor folks near Cork:

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/republic-of-ireland/facebook-versus-the-effin-people-16085481.html

God particle may be within our grasp

God particle

The story I heard was that Higgs called it the "goddammed particle", but his (American) publisher wasn't keen on that as a book title, and reckoned that "God particle" would sell better.

2011's Best... Cars

BMW series 1

Yes, but who in their right mind wants to be considered a plonker who sits in the middle lane at 60MPH and doesn't know how to use his indicators? BMWs are like iPhones, shiny-shiny fashion accessories for people with more money than no taste.

Netflix snubs 'Tech City' for Luxembourg

bill VAT at your local rate across the EU.

Only if you don't have a trading presence in the country you're selling to.

Order a book from amazon.co.uk when you live in France and you'll be billed French 5.5% VAT, not UK 0%, because it's treated like a purchase from amazon.fr.

Headmaster freezes schoolkids for Gaia

Not sure about barbaric

but it would serve him right if they all turned in sick notes for the following week...

Voyager probe reaches edge of Solar System's 'bubble'

More interesting: what language is it written in?

Vulcan, of course.

'I'm the first to admit that we've made a bunch of mistakes'

> It's clear that anonymous and friends have no idea (or don't care) how the banking system works.

They don't have much of a clue how the WORLD works, come to that.

Lovefilm dumps Flash, BLINDS Linux fans with Silverlight

legitimate version

You could turn that around:

You'd think in any viable business model the version that offers the customer the best all round experience will be the de-facto legitimate version.

It's what will happen.

NASA wants space washing machine for ISS, Mars bases

So they'll get their undies washed in recycled pee? lovely :(

Just use scotsmen, I'll bet a kilt doesn't need washing as often, and the underwear problem just won't exist.

The BBC Micro turns 30

I was just a tad too old...

I really wanted an Atom, or later a BBC B, but by that stage I was at Uni, and had discovered that I had easy access to Apple II's (well, ITT 2020s really, with that bizarre graphics conversion), a VAX, and several ICL mainframes. It was hard to justify spending £200 - £400 on a gadget of my own when I could do far more on the other systems. Maybe if I'd been a couple of years younger when they came out...

I ended up playing with 68K assembler on Force VME boards, now that was *real* computing :)

Revealed: Full specs on Mars rover's nuclear laser heat ray

Just in time to steal the Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, one hopes?

Yet across the gulf of space

[they] slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

Car safety agency sparks e-car battery probe

Lithium isn't the fuel

Technically the equivalent test would be to crash it with a flat battery. The problem isn't the fuel, but the structural material that the battery is made of. Of course, they could require people to remove the batteries before they have an accident...

Cruel new punishment for hackers: Twitter, Facebook bans

cyber-sanctions?

From the same legal system that can't even stop people smuggling mobile phones into jails?

Global warming much less serious than thought - new science

Flying first class

Since the CO2 emissions are shared among all passengers, one could argue that flying first class emits less CO2 per dollar spent, so we should all do it. Must tell the boss...

US quakes before MENACING TURKEYS, snow globes

Deep-frying the turkey is significantly faster and seals in the moisture?

Stuff the turkey with moist stuffing, including halved limes. Cover it with rashers of streaky bacon, some butter, then wrap it in foil. Put it in a very low oven just before going to bed on Christmas Eve. Wake up on "the day" to a wonderful aroma of succulent moist perfectly-roasted turkey.

I wish I hadn't thought of that. It's hours until lunchtime...

Cheers

Climategate 2.0: Fresh trove of embarrassing emails

That's what gets me about this "Save The Planet" crap. The planet was here before humanity arrived, it will be here after humanity has gone. "Saving" it just means the selfish "we like it the way we've got it now, so let's stop it from changing any more". Why is that any more scientifically acceptable than saying "hey, it's changing, lets see what happens next".

There are sound reasons not to squander finite resources like oil, for which there are better uses than just burning it off, but "saving the planet" isn't one of them.

Huge PDP-11 in a lorry: How I drove computers into schools

Christmas project

Must see if my PDP-11 will boot, haven't tried in years. Only a teeny one, I'm afraid, in the deskside tower, but...

Now if only I could find RSX-11 for it, instead of the Ultrix it's running. I still have the RSX distribution on RL02, but no drive, and only have RT11 on floppies. Anyone got any ideas?

Wish I'd managed to find a VAX...

Red Hat serves up red-hot Ceylon sauce

Had to happen

1: Someone invents a nice, simple new language that concentrates on the essentials and leaves out the unnecessary stuff that makes older languages hard to use.

2: Over time people realise that the "unnecessary stuff " was there for a reason, so it gets bolted back on as an ugly wart. Eventually the clean new language is a warty, twisted mess that is just as impenetrable as the ones it replaced.

3: Then someone invents yet another simple new language that leaves out different "unnecessary stuff".

4: Goto* 2:

*Yes, Prof. Dijkstra, but it always gets put back in, eventually.

NASA nuclear Mars tank launch delayed by one day

Sky Crane

"Fitted with 25 feet of high-tensile steel cable."

"You mean 25 metres of cable."

"No, I'm sure the spec said feet."

Man sues boss for 'condemning him to eternal damnation'

Not much of a fanatic

A real religious nutcase would have voluntarily had an industrial accident on day #665, just to stick it to the boss.

Does tech suffer blurred vision on 3D future?

3D versus Stereoscopic

They most certainly are not the same thing. When you are looking at a true 3D scene, some objects are close, some are distant. As your gaze moves between them your eyes have to move & refocus. A stereoscopic view is flat, your focus point is in one place, the screeen. That is why some people (not me, it seems) get nauseous or have headaches, their brain expects to have to change focus, but their eyes don't need to. It's a similar sensory disconnect to that which generates seasickness.

Creating parallax via head tracking is fine with individual goggles, as used in expensive VR simulations, but with a single source projected onto one screen, there's not much you can do when there are multiple viewers. I also disagree that it's not important, even quite small movements of your head generate noticeable parallax in the real world, especially if the image is supposed to be something like 200+ degree immersive.

As to generating it with a computer, it's easy for animated stuff, just takes lots of power. Post-processing flat real-life stuff is likely to give crap results, agreed, just like "colorizing" old moves did. That's probably why the animated stuff like Avatar gets the rave reviews. Of course, just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you *should*, especially if you don't take the time & money to do it really well.

Overall I still believe that it's as much of a gimmick today as it has been every other time it's been tried, and is only being pushed by the TV companies because they need a new way to get people to replace their TVs, since they're running out of steam after widescreen, flatscreen, and HD.

It's not 3D

It's stereoscopic. Like 1960's ViewMaster toys.

Maybe when 3D actually gets here, holographic, where you don't need glasses and can get real parallax effects when you move, it might stay. This current round is just an attempt to cash in on a single special efect that's too easy to do (badly) with a computer.

Greener Arctic may be down to lemming poo, not climate

Speaking of Lemmings

The Amiga version used to have a two-player mode, where you could plug in two mice at the same time. It could turn quite, well, nasty at times...

Do any of the more recent PC versions allow that?

Obama security in Oz lost booklet FAIL

In this day and age, shouldn't that sort of info be on an encrypted PDA, or at least attached with a bit of string to the suit's pocket?!

NASA working on nuclear rocket for manned Mars trips

> Why are they spending money on projects such as this in a time of huge economic crisis?

There are several reasons. One is that the amount they are spending is petty cash compared to the amounts involved in the world economy. Giving NASA's budget to the banks would be as much help as trying to calm down a volcano by pissing on it.

Secondly, economies and civilisations end up in crisis when they stagnate and start looking inwards instead of outwards. It has happened many times over history. The day when we stop spending money on discovery and exploration which *might* be useful, and instead spend it purely on patching up the old systems that we've had for years, is the day that the western economy dies and a new one takes over. I for one am delighted to see that some people have the vision to spend time and money on this, I'm way too old to start learning Mandarin or Korean now.

> What happens if a nuclear powered spacecraft breaks up on launch/re-entry. Where does the fallout go?

The obvious answer is that it would be designed so that anything which contained nuclear material would survive the break-up. One proposal is to ship a reactor (which is fragile) up empty, then send the fuel up in small, tough canisters which wouldn't suffer serious problems even in a serious launch accident. The canisters would only be opened to fuel the reactor once all was safely in space.

There are always solutions, if people have the vision and courage to look for them.

TCP/IP daddy Cerf: 'Don't rewrite the internet for security'

secure internet

I have minimal requirements for encryption, outside of credit card purchases. A far more useful form of security to me would be a guarantee that the sender of a packet is who they claim to be, and that the packet hasn't been altered in transmission.

It's not the governments people should worry about, it's the media rights holders. A secure internet isn't a big worry, but a DRM-ridden one is.

Mozilla updates to Firefox 8, disables add-ons

Its a classic problem with free software. They don't have a revenue stream from supporting customers, and making small changes that the customers want, yet they have to keep shipping new versions to keep up the hype and prevent the latest entrant from being "flavour of the month". The result: bloat, with new features added just to be seen to be doing something.

I like Firefox, I especially like AdBlock, yet I find myself going to IE more & more often these days :(

Billions on mobe broadband in Ericsson's dystopian future

Cities

1000 people per km², and they want to spend their time on the net? Maybe they should get a life and talk to their neighbours instead.

I'm reminded of Thoreau's definition of city life: millions of people all being lonely together.

Adventures in Tech: Dive on in, the IPv6 is lovely

geo-location

Geo-location using IP addresses is an abomination, and I sincerely hope that the huge number of addresses that IPv6 offers will make geo-location so unreliable as to be useless. That would be a point in its favour.

Manufacturers testing wider cars for swingbellies

Making BMW drivers walk would also greatly improve the driving experienece for the rest of us.

Minnow Android slab maker BEATS Apple in court

Catalan etc.

> Does an Irishman in Northern Ireland feel any less Irish because of an arbitrary dividing line?

If I were you, I'd stop digging now. That hole is way deep enough...

Record flight is step toward HYPERSONIC SPACE AIRSHIP

heavy shielding

Magnetic fields aren't heavy, would they be practical for this?