Posts by Ru

NHS trust loses personal data of 600 maternity patients, kids

"Due to not having received up to date information governance training..."

maybe they actually meant "Due to living under a rock for the last 5 years (or possibly longer) the employee had not heard of the dozens of incidents whereby an idiot taking work home lost confidential data."

or, being a little more charitable, "Due to a critical mass of bureacracy, we have been unable to send a trust-wide email say "oh come on guys, stop losing unencrypted stuff""

There is no excuse for this these days. Ignorance didn't really suffice back in the day either.

So what's the worst movie NEVER made?

Well, it isn't a live action remake, but...

This would seem to be a terrible spectre of things to come:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jafd97yJFOI

Euro climate probe Envisat silenced, boffins baffled

Re: so ?

Because it might have broken due to some flaw that might exist in the next generation of satellites too? Because it would be a shame to just abandon a multi billion Euro investment because they couldn't be bothered to press the right reboot button? Because there may be valuable science associated with diagnosing what went wrong that could inform the design of future satellites?

Just because something is living on borrowed time, doesn't mean that doing the bare minimum to try and keep it going is a stupid idea. You may feel the same way in a couple of decades.

Star sacrifices 2,000 comets a DAY to cloak twin planets in dust

Re: "two planets, one closer to the star and one more distant."

Well, probably. But there's always the possibility that they're in the same orbit, at each other's L3 point, sorta thing. Or they might have crazy eccentric orbits, or maybe orbits that might not even share the same orbital plane.

Two teens cuffed after Blighty's anti-terror hotline hacked

"a robot voice which said 'teamp0ison'."

I'm intrigued; how was the '0' pronounced?

Hitachi spins up 'leccy fan motor sans rare earths

Maybe I'm just being daft,

but this particular item is a fairly specialist bit of kit (an enormous synchronous motor). Most industrial motor applications (excluding robotic and CNC axis positioning servos) presumably just use boring old 3-phase async AC motors which don't even need normal magnets, let alone rare earth ones. We're not quite out of the rare earth woods yet.

DARPA boffins seek Terminator-style disaster-zone rescue robot

Re: "Why build a robot to drive a car?"

Cos its in the competion spec. It does have a slightly greater degree of versatility than a big wheeled tractor, especially when it comes to moving or positioning unwieldy vehicles or driving in inconvenient spaces. Doesn't need to be humanoid though.

And yes, a human robot would already be well adapted to spaces and systems designed for human use. Nonetheless, something with tracks that can climb stairs and a poker that can push buttons and a chainsaw that can deal with less tractable obstacles will be able to get most of the places a human can, and could be built by any competent engineering team. The android, conversely, requires massive amount of engineering skill in both construction and control software and the resulting costs will be hugely higher.

Human shaped robots are the least practical idea ever

Seriously. Compare the amount of time and effort that has gone into something like Asimo and the current results of that project, with non-humanoid designs like Bigdog.

Also, I'd go as far as saying that general purpose robots are probably a daft idea too, given that they'll be a couple of orders of magnitude more expensive than two robots that only manage half as much. A winning combination would be something that can drive a car, and a big stompy wall-smashing thing to carry it the rest of the time.

Whitehall needs to dump 'unacceptable IT' – outbound G-Cloud chief

"They can no longer rely on delivering poor service for big money and get away with it"

Oh really.

Anyone notice a sudden dip in the share price of Capita following this announcement? Anyone? No?

Hint: this means that charging big bucks for third rate tripe is still a perfectly valid business practise, and is nicely facilitated by by th Government who can't or won't do anything better.

Japanese bank palms off customers with biometric ATMs

Not at all

The Japanese would be the last people on earth to accept a system that exposed them to that sort of unpleasantness.

The hand-vein scanner is optical and contact free; it is effectively just shining a light through your hand and capturing an image of the result. You just wave your hand in an imaging box and wait for it to identify you. It could conceivably work without using any data from the fingers either, making it not only contact free but robust to a fair bit of external damage.

I'll bet that severed hands whether the blood has clotted or drained out would simply not work because they wouldn't transmit light correctly. Freshly severed and tourniqued hands might, but at that point it is easier to frogmarch someone to a cashpoint and demand they give you money or you'll chop their hand off.

Bacteria isolated for four million years beat newest antibiotic

Re: U mad?

You did see that we're talking about the reply to the Jeebus post, right?

"As new discoveries are made, evolutionists are surprised. Creationists... not so much"

We are pleasantly surprised because our understanding of the world has increased. We learn from our discoveries and reapply them to things we already knew about. We now have new tools to understand antibiotic resistance and its acquisition. These are all surprising things.

Creationists? They aren't surprised because they are learning nothing. They already have their calcified worldview to which they will adapt every new thing to fit, and nod sagely with each fresh confirmation that 'god did it that way' and shake their heads sadly at those who don't understand.

Being unable to understand the intersection of natural selection and evolution though? That's a new one to me. "Like evolution but god did it", I presume?

Chinese coders beat all-comers

So, does Project Euler keep any demographics?

Cos they've been about for a while, and do a reasonable job of exercising computer sciency sorts of skills.

"Interview Street" would appear to have a rather small selection of the World's coders. Not very statistically relevant, I'd say... good for a headline, but not much more.

Publishing giants sue open textbook startup over layout

"Wikipedia-style textbooks"

If that little descriptive phrase didn't ring enough warning bells, what will?

Dot-London squeaks under ICANN deadline

""In years, people will look back and say:"

"Someone actually stumped up a quarter of a million dollars for this?"

Seriously. That's a excessive amount to blow on a vanity domain that not many people are really interested in, when they've got perfectly good .co.uk, .com and .org domains that are nice and short, cheap and actually associated with websites.

Julian Assange™ telemovie coming to Oz TV

Re: I imagine it'll be like all the other "hacker" films...

Obligatory webcomic reference.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2526#comic

Woz warns that patent palaver will stifle startups

"mobile phone operating systems were doing just fine before Apple came along"

Now, I'm a long way from becoming a member of the Apple fanboisie, but I do take issue with this. Before Apple came along, we mostly had Symbian S60 and Windows Mobile. I would describe neither of them as 'just fine', and their passing will not be mourned.

Unexpected nanotube heat transfer suggests new way to cool processors

We can already do that

We've plenty of handy things for converting heat into electricity... thermocouples, peltiers, solid state and mechanical sterling engines, plain old heat exchangers and turbines and so on.

But in this case... no. The nanotubes are neither generating significant amounts of heat, nor magically absorbing it. They're 'simply' acting as a thermal bridge.

Renault Twizy budget e-car

What is it about the brief, "Design an Electric Vehicle" that cripples all aesthetic sense?

Maybe its more the 'very small car' market than electric vehicle market specifically, but this is a starlingly f'ugly piece of kit. Are there no competent scifi-style artists out there anymore who can render something a little more sleek looking than this?

Iran preps Internet cutoff

"would it actually matter all that much "

Yes, I think so.

The problem that the Iranian government have with its citizens is that they're a bit too well informed. There's a strong, young, pro-democracy movement who are well educated and quite well versed in the use of modern technology. They represent something of a threat to the status quo.

When they can't communicate with the rest of the world, and when their only news source is government filtered propaganda, their ability to change their situation for the better is impaired. Thus the current Iranian government carries on as it likes, something that's not necessarily good for the rest of us.

Forensic snoops: It doesn't take a Genius to break into an iPhone

Re: Faraday bag?

Quick question for you there Cliff... how easy is it to pop out the battery on an iPhone these days?

Hint: you may well need a funny screwdriver and a soldering iron.

Re: "Unless, of course..."

You fancy privileged criminals with your perfect 3G coverage and 100% mobile service uptime.

If my phone zapped its brains every time it couldn't get pinged for a short period of time, I'd be lucky to have it last a week.

Dark matter hits you once a minute

Re: I am not a physicist, but...

Dark matter is simply something that cannot be trivially observed, as it only interacts via gravity and perhaps the weak force. We can observe its effects, and one day we'll know what it is made of, too (or find some other explanation for its effects). It is not simply defined as 'stuff we don't know about'.

Weak force interactions could potentially be measured, given a suitable tool. The rate of such interactions would be more or less proportional to the cross sectional area of the nuclei in the material the detector was made of and the density of that material; it woudl then be pretty trivial to scale that according to the average density, cross sectional area and composition of a human being to come up with a fairly useless number estimating the number of WIMP interaction in a given period of time.

1 per minute is a little suspiciously round, but seeing as the number is of supreme uselessness there's no need to give any sort of precision.

Twitter slams top five spammers with legal suit

Re: AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHGGGGGRRRR

Perhaps I should of used the joke alert icon?

Re: AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHGGGGGRRRR

Given that normal people understand the meaning of the sentence just fine, it rather begs the question why anyone should care about this minor grammatical error.

Culture jammers connect Lego clones with 3D printer files

"You can't eat toys!"

Doesn't the Candy Fab take STL files? You could make edible lego clones with that. Hah!

Re: Better download *now*

A good point well made. After all, every time anyone has tried to put information on the internet that the copyright or patent holder has objected to, it has vanished *forever*. IP enforcement is a done deal these days, right?

I'll observe that there are commercially available lego-compatible building blocks out there already. Presumably any key patents they had regarding such things have already expired, and the basic shapes are not protectable by other means.

Re: IT'S LEGO FFS

Not on the internets it isn't.

Facebook to acquire Instagram for $1bn

Re: Smells like... the dotcom years again!

I'm not wholly convinced by that argument. Instagram is essentially an epiphyte here; it has usefulness because it works with your existing social network(s) of choice. I'd be mildly startled if there were people who only socially networked by means of grainy square photos and nothing else.

Remember the little kerfuffle over a twitter client last year? That was a case where the client userbase could have switched away from using twitter to any other similar mechanism and not noticed a difference, because it could perfectly replace their current experience. I'd be mildly startled if Instagram could have replaced Facebook in such a fashion and more than the latest incarnation of Angry Birds or any other massively popular application could.

Pinterest is more of a threat to Facebook, but I guess it has a faint odour of massive copyright lawsuit waiting to happen, so the smart money might well be avoiding it.

Smells like... the dotcom years again!

Seriously, 1 beeeeeleon dollars for a company with no revenues, and no concrete plans to generate revenue, and 10-20 million users a significant proportion of which are probably Facebook users already?

I just don't get it. Clearly this is why I have neither become a millionaire or managed to squander millions of dollars of investment capital.

Samsung rolls out ultra high-speed microSD cards

"If cloud data streaming becomes the norm"

Sir, surely you jest?

Physical storage is not going to go away any time soon. Outside of urban centres, wifi and 3g coverage is patchy at the very best and where it does exist it is slooooow. And after all that, you're faced with either paying per megabyte or running into fair* usage limits because no operator is going to offer you unlimited* bandwidth that's good for HD video streaming any time soon.

Oh, and then you go abroad on holiday or business, and find that there's only the boring, conventional sort of cloud visible from on the plane even if you were allowed to use any sort of radio networking, which you generally are not. And when you get to your destination bandwidth costs are a mockery.

Give it 10 years and a bunch of regulators willing to kick telcos in the balls until they sort their service out, and maybe SD cards will be only occasionally useful, instead of nigh on essential like they are now.

30-year-old global temperature predictions close to spot-on

"CO2 as a result of anthropomorphic activity"

Right, I knew those furries were up to no good, and this is the proof we needed.

Publisher hails CS Lewis 'space trilogy' e-book debut

"interplanetary pirates"

Has the plot of the book changed dramatically in its conversion to electronic distribution?

The first book involves him being effectively kidnapped by an evil scientist, and the second involves him fighting that same evil scientist. I don't recall any pirates.

Not a lot of lions to be seen, but there's no shortage of Christian imagery and dogma. The whole spiritual nature vs evil technology plot mechanic seems to be enduring and popular, alas.

Nature ISN'T fragile nor a bossy mother-in-law - top eco boffin

"enhance those natural systems that benefit the widest number of people"

Right, excellent! It really is as easy as that. Someone buy that man a drink.

Now, how does one know, a priori, a) which natural systems those are and b) what they actually comprise? Here's an easy answer for you: one cannot. Natural systems are complex, to say the least, and we simply don't understand, therefore to act cautiously and seek to preserve rather than selectively ignore and hope for the best is the most sensible approach, surely?

That said, there's no reason why a pragmatic approach to ecology needs to be a punishment for humans, as so may extreme greenies seem to believe. I'm all for fracking and nuclear power, because the alternatives are so much worse, but I do feel very strongly that many current industrial and agricultural policies are going to cause significant long term damage. Sure, nature will carry on, because it has survived a snowball earth and massive volcanic eruptions and asteroid strikes and a few too many pesticides aren't going to kill it off right now. That doesn't mean it'll still be quite so useful to us all in a hundred years time.

Crowdsource yourself a new job

"Crowdsourcing"

A conveniently meaningless term, isn't it?

Problem with places like this is that though they say "experts will always be in demand!" you can't find experts on such a site because they're drowned under a thousand incredibly cheap and ambiguously competent Asian and Eastern European devs touting the same wares.

I've never had any luck on such places, either as a buyer or seller... maybe I'm just doing it wrong. In the end, boring old networking of the old social type (y'know, the one where you speak to someone om real life) is incredibly difficult to beat.

NJ lab claims plasma fusion breakthrough

Re: No radioactivity?

The key thing is the absense of stray neutrons, which require a hell of a lot of shielding and have a lamentable habit of transmuting things they collide with into radioactive isotopes. Charged particles on the other hand are positively benign; alpha and beta radiation is much more easily shielded and is rather more tractable to work with.

Course, neutron sources are useful if you're doing other things, like transmuting radioactive waste into less unpleasant radioactive waste, or perhaps breeding some new plutonium for all your deep space RTGs having carelessly given up production of the stuff years ago. The LPP technique should be quite useable with 'conventional' deuterium and tritium reactions which would produce enough neutrons for these purposes.

Facebook logins easily slurped from iOS, Android kit

"any Android application granted permission to "modify/delete SD Card" could do the same thing"

I understand that managing fine-grained access controls is difficult, both for developers and users.

But seriously, some sets of permissions are clearly very powerful indeed, and should be far more stringently controlled. I have similar irritation with Facebook's own notion of access control granularity for its apps.

James Murdoch QUITS BSkyB chairmanship

"put a stop to this rebranded News of the World"

Why? They wound up a centuries old brand largely out of embarassment, not out of any legal imperative.

The sad fact is that there is a market for this sort of publication, and if the Sun crew don't do it someone else will, and the "journalism" will be much the same.

Long Past Time

No matter what you think of Murdoch senior (and there are precious few people with nice things to say about him) the guy knew how to make a media empire. His son? bit of a waste of food, that one. He's failed to achieve anything of note during his career, and is a striking example of why a tendency towards founding dynasties and nepotism is seldom a good idea.

Game of Thrones Blu-ray disc set

"even the movies often fail to get the genre right."

I would say that even the *authors* fail to get the genre right. As a group, fantasy authors show a crippling lack of imagination which is tied oh so very closely to Tolkien and Dungeons&Dragons (which is also tied pretty closely to Tolkien).

At least this time round we're spared Elves and Dwarves, but there's no shortage of medieval stasis and dragons.

More authors like China Mieville, please.

Terrafugia flies first prototype: Flying cars 'within a year'

Re: Wait for Moller

Can you not tell the difference between the Moller and the Terrafugia?

Hint: one was designed to be practical, and has actual flying, working prototypes. The other is a fantasy. Moller has had rather short shrift from the Reg in the past, for good reason.

If the Terrafugia fails, it will be because it is financially unviable, not because it is total vapourware peddled in a near fraudulent manner.

So much negativity!

It is a plane which provides a convenient means for you to park it at premises of your choosing, saving you paying extra cash to an airfield, etc. It isn't supposed to replace your car, and it isn't supposed to be parked in a municipal carpark where bitter commentards can come up and key it.

Sure, it isn't a flying car... but it actually appears to be an acheivable goal. Too bad there's no UK/EU equivalent of the US light sport aircraft classification.

Thin-client giant Wyse gobbled by Dell

"please show me a Linux OS with a size of 4 meg please[sic]"

Well, I've failed to find you one with a 4 meg image size. I have found a 1.44 meg build, in the form of muLinux. Thinstation images can be as small as 6 and I think Diet PC is comparable, and both are rather more sophisticated and general purpose operating systems than the specialist one Wyse uses, which suggests they could easily be pruned down further.

But really, who cares? Half gigabyte flash chips are so cheap as to be disposable, and have been for a few years now.

IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

"Mrs Jones in her council flat"

Oh, not this tired old argument again. Mrs. Jones won't care, because one day she'll get a new router in the post with a note attached saying 'please swap this for your old router or your internet will stop working'. IPv6 is already plug and play in simple deployments; IPv4/IPv6 translating proxies have been available for some time now and work just fine for basic email and web traffic which is all that Mrs. Jones wants.

The problems the article highlights are entire suffered by 'power users' and small businesses with complex requirements and without the wherewithal (financial, technical or both) to implement suitable solutions. Mrs. Jones does not need multiple ISPs. Mrs. Jones does not need to open any ports on her router. Mrs. Jones does not want to be able to use her home printer when she is out. Mrs. Jones wants no part of your technical arguments.

Yes, Prime Minister to return after 24 years

Indeed... why are new scripts needed?

Just replace the political events of the past with ones that are happening now and keep the plot and dialogue otherwise intact.

The problem will be finding a good cast... the leads of Yes, [Prime] Minister will be exceptionally hard to replace.

£575m school IT bonanza showers Capita, RM, 16 others

Re: Doomed

There was an interesting observation in a recent Private Eye regarding the awarding of governmental contracts.

Essentially, purchasers are not allowed to take pisspoor past performance into account when evaluating a bid from a company as this is apparently unfair and biased. This neatly sidesteps the whole 'free market' thing where companies that cannot produce work that even aspires to mediocrity die a much deserved death; instead we get the old public sector issues where there's no pressure for anyone to succeed, combined with the private sector desire for ever higher profits.

This is one of many reasons why this country is in a bit of a state.

Quitting your job? Here's how not to do it

I like the way these articles are getting less accusatory,

which combined with a decent amount of information makes them a worthwhile read. Nice to know that recruiters can learn, too ;-)

"if firms managed their staff rationally I would have to get a proper job."

I don't believe there's any danger of that happening any time soon. I believe it is scheduled shortly after the average IT user learns about the basic priciples of security.

Lucy in 3.4 million-year-old cross-species cave tryst

"where are the useful mutations happening in the human race today?"

I think you rather underestimate the scales involved in changing a complex species... either time, and quite a lot of it, or environmental pressure, preferably brutal. In our not so distant past we have nice examples of serious pressure on immune systems; those who didn't do so well when faced with smallpox or the black death haven't passed down many genes to us today.

That aside, as a species we are adept at dealing with all sorts of problems that would have killed us off in the past. This may be a backwards step in the eyes of folk like you (OMG, we're encouraging the spread of genes contributing to bad diseases instead of letting sufferers die childless!) but we have social and technological evolution instead which is many ways is vastly more powerful.

Example: back in the day, an ignorant troll might find themselves burned at the stake by a rampaging mob of anthropologists who'd finally snapped. Thanks to the internet, those trolls can now prosper and reproduce in safety, passing their genes and ideas on to the next generation.

Amazon boss finds Apollo 11 engines on seabed

Re: the Russians..

RD-170, apparently. Energia uses em.

Though they manage about 10% more thrust than an F-1, I do note that their thrust-to-weight ratio is somewhat lower (~94 for the F-1, ~82 for the RD-170).

Dotcom hike will net millions of bucks for Verisign, ICANN

Ahh, capitalism.

The free market; we've heard of it!

Monopolies are what everyone really wants though... or at least, everyone who actually matters. Why is it that farming this sort of thing out to the evil Communists in China would give everyone a better deal, and leaving it in the hands of the democratic freedom-loving USA leaves us with what is effectively a state-sponsored monopoly granting magic money making powers to another state-sponsored monopoly?