Posts by labourer

Which scientist should be on the new £50 note? El Reg weighs in – and you should vote, too

wot! no Hedy Lamarr in the foreign section?

GIMPS crack whip on plucky processor to find largest prime number

Re: mod 3

This simplifies to 3 divides 2^n-1 if and only if n is even, so we're good, it's not divisible by three. Phew.

Prosecute driverless car devs for software snafus, say Brit cyclists

Re: Fair enough, but...

I think you make the point you were arguing against quite well, the number car drivers that kill pedestrians due to outrageous driving far outstrips the number of cyclists and in general there isn't anywhere near the outcry that this particular tosser on a bike caused.

El Reg assesses crypto of UK banks: Who gets to wear the dunce cap?

Re: Dunce Cap tip

> However you can also be pretty confident they're not hashing them -

> these systems are old and would have balked at the space constraints

> implied by hashing + salting all the partial password combinations.

Hopefully we can be sure they're not protecting the password by hashing the partial combinations because it's a poor idea. Trivial to recover the partial password given the hash, 24 bit exhaust at most for a three character partial.

Blighty's Coastguard goes into battle against waterborne Pokemon

Re: New Brighton Marine Lake

> Was it too much trouble to create a channel from the lake to the ocean,

are you familiar with tides?

Sacred islet Rockall defeats Brit adventurer

fair point!

Sacred? to whom?

Elon Musk pledges transcontinental car juicers by end of year

Re: Fossil fuel isn't taxed?????

> Electricity is made from fossil fuels - oil or coal fired power stations.

> And because of inefficiencies in the grid and production, only 1/4 of the power produced reaches the socket.

> Thus electric cars use almost four times the fossil fuel which petrol or diesel ones do.

Only if you have 100% efficient car engine. Actual fugues vary but 100% is certainly very wrong.

You've made other mistakes too, but this is the big one.

You're point about batteries is good though. Lets hope this one is solved quicker than the 100 years or so it took for cars to get as reliable as they are now.

Climate shocker: Carry on as we are until 2050, planet will be fine

Re: The very fact

Almost all scientists (including it seems the authors of the report mentioned in the article) agree that global warming/climate change is going to be bad, the only scientific discussion is on the details of how bad it will be.

Page has written a series of articles highlighting parts of this discussion in order, it seems to me, to cast doubt in the whole science of climate change. Similarly creationists will often highlight differences of opinion between evolutionary scientists in order to attack evolution in general . We should pay each just as much attention.

Microsoft: 'Update your security certs this month – or else'

A minor correction

It may be that experts are advising increasing RSA lengths beyond 1024 bits, but the link in the article was to a piece about generation of RSA moduli with poor random number generation schemes, specificity those which result in a small number of possible primes. These schemes offer no more security at 2048 bits as they do at 1024.