Posts by Cynic_999 2855 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Aug 2013
It will surprise you, but there are many people who use a computer as a tool rather than being a project of itself. Yes, I do expect my OS to "just work" the same as I expect my washing machine or vacuum cleaner to "just work" without the need to take off the covers and tweak the belt tension or change a pulley for one with a different diameter - or in fact know anything about what they look like inside or how they work.
And I fear you have just illustrated why the attitude of the Linux community is ensuring that most people who use a computer for serious work will stay with Microsoft. People do not necessarily want to battle trying to fit a cam belt to their new car before they can drive it away while the garage staff mock them from the sidelines for their lack of expertise.
I seriously considered buying one of their rigs a couple of years ago, but then did the maths and realised how long it would take to break even, even assuming bitcoin held its value (it didn't), the mining did not become significantly more difficult (it did), and the cost of electricity would not increase (which it has). Now it looks like I would not even have received the rig, so that's one decision I'm not regretting.
I joined a mining pool using my GPU for a few weeks until I realised it was generating far less income in bitcoin than it was consuming in kWh.
People don't know about or forget about the hidden parts of devices that they don't usually interact with. I've "repaired" TV sets where the poor picture was the result of the aerial amplifier being switched off or unplugged, but I don't blame the non-technical user for not even knowing that they had such a device.
After all, the only on/off switch on any of the things that the average computer user interacts with in on the monitor, and in many work places the computer is tucked away somewhere out of plain sight (just like the aerial amp), and often have a power switch that is even more hidden.
One of our office printers has its power switch in such an unlikely position that it took me 15 minutes to find it - and I knew what I was looking for!
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If someone murdered me, I'd want the police to access my iPhone, and that of my killers, wouldn't you
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Well, catering for the ability for others to access your data if you should die is up to you. After all, that part is no different whether you were murdered or run over by a bus, and I can think of many objections to the idea of providing automatic access to the encrypted data of anyone who dies.
As for accessing the data of your killers - why? They have already been caught and punished, so the data is unlikely to be of significant importance as far as you or yours is concerned. Unless of course you really meant to say that access should be granted to the data of your *suspected* killers - who may of course be entirely innocent, or could even be data of innocent people who the government would like to find out about, and where if you had your way a false accusation would then open the magic door ...
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My guess is they think they are going to use supercapacitors because it is simpler than the complex battery management done by the firmware
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No, it's so they can handle the huge spurt of energy of regenerative braking. Batteries cannot take a large charge in such a short space of time.
I'm afraid that I cannot get at all worked up about the idea of children seeing porn. By the time they are old enough to have any significant interest in watching it, they are well aware that it has as much similarity to reality as James Bond, and is simply sexually stimulating entertainment. A few minutes and a couple of Kleenex later and its back to playing GTA with no harm done.
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For me it's any time I need to deal with a bank and have to do all that prove-your-identity / know-your-customer crap to prove that you aren't a terrorist
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Banks could save a lot of time by simply providing the customer with a mirror. That way the customer can quickly check that it's really them and not a case of identity theft.
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Basically, in a warzone (or police shootout) you can't stop your enemy shooting at you but you can take many steps to make it less dangerous -
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My point was rather how do you ensure the safety of the enemy? After all, if the enemy kill you, that's a failing of their H&S. But if an enemy soldier wanders into dangerous fast-moving bullets from your machine-gun, that's surely down to a H&S failure on your part.
A USB to serial interface is really something that ought to be implemented as a HID class device, the same as a keyboard or mouse. If it had been then FTDI would have nothing at all to gripe about because the PID and VID would not need to be the same. The Chinese devices are not copies as is claimed, they just provide similar functionality, the same as the plethora of keyboard and mouse chips do. Having used several Chinese parts I also disagree completely that they perform badly - indeed it is difficult to see how something as simple as a serial interface could perform badly.
The use of FTDI's PID and VID is necessary in order to allow it to use the FTDI driver, and I'm not convinced that deliberately altering necessary values so that a device is compatible with someone else's software is either unlawful or unethical - it is really little different to the way that OpenOffice has "stolen" the tag values and formatting from Microsoft so as to be compatible with Word documents.
I am however quite certain that writing software that deliberately damages someone else's product is unethical, and may well be unlawful.
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So taxes pay for things used communally. Police forces, fire services, roads, rail etc etc
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Most of the communal stuff you speak of is supposed to be paid for with my council tax, other than roads which are supposed to be paid for with my road tax. Public transport has been privatised and should pay for its own infrastructure from its income in the normal way - the same goes for utilities.
It is difficult to see the justification for other types of taxation - and I certainly do not get value from the "communal services" that amounts to the 80% or more of my gross earnings that end up in the government's hands via on form of tax or another.
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if companies use differing territorial tax rates to avoid paying it where it morally should be paid ...
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Huh? Essentially it is a ruler who has unilaterally declared that you must pay him for the privilege of being ruled. A legalised protection racket. The vast majority of tax is spent on things that benefit the rulers rather than the ruled.
If there is any moral aspect whatsoever, it is a moral duty to avoid paying more than you absolutely have to pay.
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Because water is heavy and pumping it up from sea-level to a building above sea-level needs a lot of energy : far more than you save in reduced cooling costs
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Not if you are circulating the water rather than releasing it at the surface. The weight of the water coming up is then exactly balanced by the weight of the water going down so the only energy you need is to replace that lost in friction of the moving water against the walls of the pipe.
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Does the machine choose the greater good - or avoid a direct action that would deliberately kill the man on the spur?
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It follows the algorithms that the human who programmed it wrote. If those algorithms have unintended consequences, it's the result of the programmer's lack of foresight rather than the fault of the machine.
Machines do not "make decisions" and are not likely to do so in the foreseeable future. They just follow a pre-programmed algorithm - albeit one that may be pretty complex.
Artificial intelligence is never a threat of itself - only when it is deliberately used and directed by one human against another, e.g. CPU controlled "intelligent" bombs, missiles, guns etc.
The only thing that might be of concern would be if a machine were developed that was self-aware. It is however very possible that sentience can only be a part of living organisms, and we have absolutely no idea what "life" is, but it is very unlikely that it would occur spontaneously in a silicon chip.
I can't see the idea of delivery by drone being practical except for a vanishingly small percentage of deliveries. The main problem is that most delivery addresses are nowhere near any place where it would be sufficiently safe for an automated drone to navigate to and land. A secondary problem is that a battery operated drone won't have sufficient range to deliver more that a few miles from a warehouse.
Human piloted aircraft are constrained to fly at a height sufficient to be able to land clear of any congested area should they suffer a power failure. Any useful delivery drone has to be large enough to cause fatal injuries if it were to fall on a person, so would surely be subject to a very similar regulation. But unlike fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters, multi-rotor craft have zero gliding ability, so they would need to be equipped with a reliable fail-safe emergency parachute system at the very least, and even then I cannot see them getting approval. They would also no doubt only be permitted to deliver to an area that was guaranteed to be free of people, otherwise there is a high risk that someone could walk into the lethally rotating rotors of a drone as it came in to make a delivery. Which means having a navigations system that is more dependable than a GPS receiver operating amongst urban canyons.
So on the one hand the police whinge that they don't have enough manpower to investigate crimes that are reported by real human victims, but on the other hand they want to investigate crimes that have not even happened?
There is however some logic in the idea. It is easier and far less effort to set up an automatic search to find 99 people who typed a racial insult into a drunken social media post and prosecute them for "hate crime" than it is to find the 1 person who burgled a house. So the police trawl for the former type of crime even when nobody has complained, and they issue a crime number but otherwise ignore the latter type of crime, and thanks to the work of the computer can still proudly report a crime clear-up rate of 99%.
It would be trivial to restore proportionality. Simply exclude from the CRB check any reference to offences that are "spent" under the Rehabilitation of Offenders' Act. That way serious offences (which are never "spent") will always be reported, but one-off less serious offences committed some years ago will not stand in the way of a person getting a job. It is, after all, exactly what the Rehabilitation Act sought to achieve, and what the CRB checks negated.
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Is basically one huge binary with everything including programs compiled in that presents itself to the user as a normal OS. Sounds like a ROM based 8 bit computer.
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Which is all that you need on a device that has dedicated functionality such as a router, set-top-box, smart heating & lighting control systems etc. Or a PC that you are *using* for a dedicated function.
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People don;t object to having their car inspected for roadworthiness at regular intervals: perhaps the same approach should apply to Internet-connected devices?
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OK - so all operating systems must have government approval before they are legal to use on the Internet (Microsoft and Apple will be able to afford to get approval, but it will probably be illegal for Linux users to connect to the Internet). All users must take every Internet device they own to a dealer and pay $$$ for an inspection and certificate every year. After any major change to the system (e.g. installing a new application) the user may not connect to the Internet before taking the device to a dealer for approval.
Also 3rd party insurance will be mandatory in case your computer gets infected and causes damage to someone else's system.
Still sounding like a good idea?
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Just waiting for the day when cops can execute a "search and seizure" of your home PC if it's identified as having a malware infection.
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Yes, that would be great. And even better, the same law would almost certainly also allow search, seizure & arrest if your computer is detected as connecting to an ISIS website. Or a communist website. Or an anti-Christian website. Etc.
Wouldn't that make the World a far better place?
The fact is that computers do the job better than a human most of the time - and would be even better if programmed to handle common failure modes. I am certain that there would be far more aircraft accidents if the autopilots were removed and all aircraft were hand-flown all the way.
Many of the things that computers control these days are too complex for any human (or team of humans) to be able to manage. Heck, as just one example, see how long you could keep a quadcopter in the air by using 4 throttles instead of a computerised control board ...
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Why should Diablo blank their framebuffer if they're just going to immediately overwrite it anyway?
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Immediately? The contents remained without overwrite long enough for the user to recognise the image it contained. Which is one heck of a long time in CPU cycles - consider that the entire buffer can be completely overwritten within 1/30th second at the very least (otherwise it would be incapable of displaying standard NTSC videos).
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If that is allowed, it seems that you could get an big increase in apparent brightness of a regular incandescent bulb just by applying a mirror coating to part of the inside - and thus make say a 20W bulb which is "equivalent brightness" to a 60W bulb?
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When you require a directional light source that is most certainly the case, yes. There are quite a few incandescent bulbs that have such an arrangement, e.g. the conical "spots" and various photographic bulbs have mirrored sections behind the filament.
Most rooms have white ceilings and light-coloured walls, which means that the light from a ceiling bulb that is not directed downwards is not wasted - it is reflected off ceiling and walls to create a more diffuse light without the harsh shadows associated with directional light sources.
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One press release said it could land with just one rotor> I notice the word "safely" was missing.
It is minor details like that, and the diameter of the rotors, that has me crying "bullshit"
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It may be possible. The craft would obviously roll if three rotor pairs failed, but if the remaining rotor could rapidly swivel so it was pointing up on the now 90 degree rolled aircraft, it could well produce sufficient lift to act like a parachute and the craft would descend at a safe speed. The unpowered arms would also act as a shock-absorber when it hit the ground.
The biggest issue that I see is that it would be unable to carry out an emergency landing in the event of a complete power failure (which both fixed-wing and helicopters can do). This is mitigated by the fact that it has 8 motors (so a critical number are unlikely to all fail at the same time), and the software could be made to ensure that it carries out a controlled descent in the event that the battery is depleted below a set percentage. I should think that to stand any chance of certification, it would need to have 2 completely independent power systems (2 battery packs and power busses). The main consideration being that no single failure would result in in dropping like a brick.
Proof-of-concept is one thing, actually deploying something in the real World that is at all likely to be worth the effort is something else entirely. I'm pretty certain that the security flaw in the MD5 algorithm is very unlikely to affect anyone. (Which is not to say that it should be entirely ignored).
The fact that the (sarcastic) suggested fix was no better than the original is not the point at all. The point is that it accurately identified the exact nature of the vulnerability. Had the principle of operation of the free decryption application not been revealed, the black-hats may well have remained ignorant of their mistake.
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