Re: Here we go...
Read the reply again.
It is not a case of 'we need to solve this problem', but that of 'existing science shows there is no (efficient) solution to this problem'.
125 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Sep 2013
Many many years ago I was asked to create some tests for a file storage system. The intention was that a file could be moved between two storage areas, but you only ever saw it in one. The whole file could be accessed from 'A', or 'B', but you should never see it in both at once, nor should you ever be able to see a partial file anywhere. I specified: use a large file so you have a few seconds to act in, start the transfer, disconnect the network cable, wait a few seconds, check. No problem with that one. The second variation said start the transfer, disconnect the power lead from one side, then the network cable, repower but do not reconnect the network, wait for startup to complete and check. The project flat out refused to run this test. Considering this was a system intended for usage in combat areas (even though in staging posts rather than front-line), I did not consider it an unreasonable scenario. However, the manual stated that systems must always be shutdown down cleanly by following the specified procedures.
Ditto. I was on the project that built the system feeding flight information to the hundreds of monitors around the new Hong Kong airport (CLK), so of course all our dev and test machines also had to run the Chinese version of NT4. (It was in 1998, so it is possible it was still NT3.51 instead of using the modern stuff.) Once it was installed it could be reconfigured to an English locale for ease of use, but it had to be running the same underlying OS as would be used in production. The installation routine was in Chinese of course, but each multi-choice answer prompt still had a single English letter for the ALT+something shortcut. This was enough to provide a reminder of what it was asking about.
Assuming atmospheric pressure, 25C, one mole of a gas has a volume of about 24 litres. 3.7m^3 = 3700L = 154M. Energy from burning 1 mole of hydrogen = 286KJ, so 154M = 44.1MJ, which is equivalent to about 1kg of petrol - call it 1.25 litres. I wonder how well the process scales, and scales, and scales...
The EDF nuclear plant at Civaux in France has a large (very deep) swimming pool and a tropical aquatic centre next door. La Planète des Crocodiles. Fish might not appreciate hot water, but the crocodiles seem to like it.
Since I was last there they seem to have expanded into a small theme park, now with added dragons too. https://www.terre-de-dragons.com/
Depending on whether you are talking about single-mode or multi-mode fibre. Multi-mode fibre does have the light bounce from side to side at a range of angles hence taking different length paths, which is why short pulses spread out over distance, limiting the bandwidth. Single-mode only allows a very restricted range of transmission paths - possibly not just 'straight down the middle', but not far off.
Reminds me of a similar mis-use of statistics I came across a while ago. Apparently some very high proportion of women (1 in 2? 1 in 3? or thereabouts) claims to have suffered sexual abuse according to the report highlight. Then you read the details:
Sexual abuse includes sexual harassment. Sexual harassment includes being looked at, while in public, by somebody who you don't want to look at you.
I am certainly not defending real abuse, but if the publishers of these kinds of reports were honest then something might be done to protect the 0.5% that really do suffer instead of everything being dismissed because 50% 'obviously' are not suffering.
What happens when whoever has control of a country's gold reserves not only sells it off, but announces they will in advance, hence boosting the known supply side of the market and crashing the price before the sale?
If you follow the price of gold, that dip is known as Brown's Bottom. Just one of the stupid things he did. Destroying the UK's private pension industry was another.
But the timber lengths were probably all multiples of 0.3m, otherwise known as 'metric feet' by carpenters. It does lead to the problem of some 'full size' boards being 2.4m by 1.2m and others are the full 8' x 4' (2.44m x 1.22m). Very annoying when you really do need those last 4cm, or should that be 1 9/16in?
I am on the TPS list, and still get a lot of green deal, insulation fitting and oven cleaning calls, although the latter seems to have dropped off recently. However, since the caller ID number is spoofed and any company name they give is likely to be false too, how do you know who to complain about to the ICO?
The obvious fraud ones - "I'm calling from BT/Microsoft..." I normally respond to with "[Do you sleep well at night knowing| Does your mother know] you spend your days [committing fraud | as a petty criminal]". They normally hang up.
My son uses one of my old iphones to play games on. It has no SIM card in, so is generally only useable around the house, on the WiFi network. Only I can install new apps on it, and I make sure that everything is suitable for his age. However, adverts do not seem to have any link to the age rating of the app, and I have often seen completely inappropriate ads being shown in the middle of a what is supposed to be an age 4+ rated game. (He is somewhat older, but that is what some of the apps are rated.) Looking at various Apple forums, this seems to be a problem going back years, but Apple never do anything about it.
Take a balloon filled with hydrogen and poke it with a lit match. You will have produced a cloud of water vapour. Now return that to separate hydrogen and oxygen. You all allowed an energy budget equivalent to one match.
Physics proves through the laws of thermodynamics that there is a preferred way for things to go, and that going back costs more energy than going forward. You can reverse things, but only at an energy cost, and eventually you (and the rest of the universe) run out of energy.
This shows an example of how little match there is between many simulations and reality. Having written a number of simulators for various parts of my academic research (a long time ago) I could tweak parameters until there was a good match between the simulator and previous observations under known conditions. However, take one step outside the boundary of those known conditions and I could guarantee the simulator would be useless.
Climate model simulations are the obvious exception to this. They have perfect predictive abilities for up to a century ahead.
Switches in both leads might be the required practice these practice these days. It might even be carried out in new installations. However, it is certainly not always in place in older installations. Light sockets in particular can still be live even when the switch is off.
Exactly. The whole intention of a phishing attack is to make it both believable and tempting. The problem with many unions is that they will automatically consider any change to current conditions 'a bad thing' which needs all details to be communicated, discussed and agreed beforehand.
I am a security consultant and one of the security education services my company is working on will allow test phishing emails to be sent if the client wants that part of the package. As long as there are clues in the email that it came from outside the organisation I would consider it an acceptable test. On that basis, GoDaddy screwed up by sending it from a legitimate internal address and providing no clues at all that it was meant to be fake, but this one I would consider a valid test.
A Chinese wall is not big and impossible to pass. Quite the opposite in fact. It comes from the use of paper screens which everybody then pretends are impossible to go through, and usually refers to artificial divisions to keep information about two areas separated. e.g. A company doing work for two clients who are competitors which each other.
On the basis that it refers to a purely language based construct with no physical presence that stops you from doing something I am surprised it is not praised rather than rejected by reformists of woke or SJW flavours.
Somebody once collided with my car in the company car park, cracking the bumper, but left no note. There were obvious cameras overlooking the area so I went to the security office to ask whether they had footage of the incident.
"We turn the cameras off during office hours."
You could not make this stuff up.
Might have been a flame rather than a spark. Sparks normally have something at the other end to complete the circuit. (As this place is pedant infected, yes, I do know about cloud to cloud lightning). I had a PC back in the early 90s which I had unplugged to plug in something else temporarily. When I turned the PC on nothing happened. Oh yes, the plug. Reach under the desk to plug it back in, putting my head next to the PC case, and a flash of flame goes past my face. There went the main house fuse, the ring circuit breaker, the plug fuse and the PSU fuse. Further inspection of the inside of the PSU revealed a large ceramic (maybe tantalum bead) capacitor with a crater in one side.
There used to be an accreditation scheme - CAS(T) - which telecoms providers had to meet if they wanted to sell into the government or public sector markets. This was deprecated when the new Telecoms Security Requirements were announced. Announced, not available, so this was around the middle of last year. The Telecommunications (Security) Act 2019-2021 has now been approved in late November so this sets the requirements. I would assume that there will eventually be an accreditation scheme, but I am not holding my breath.
As a security consultant who often works in the telecoms area, I can foresee a very dull period ahead reading the Bill and trying to work out what the requirements really are. An initial glance through reveals this will not be enjoyable.
I had a Gateway in the second half of the 90s. Various bits got swapped out occasionally until just the original case survived. Eventually the changing form factors of various components meant it too had to go, but it was still in perfect condition. Built like the proverbial outhouse.
I am sure mine must still be around somewhere, although it was a little smaller. An open case with a 25 way connector on each end and 25 pins sticking up. Jumper leads could be added as necessary. The last resort in my serial toolkit, which also included a long straight-through cable (1-1, 2-2, ... 25-25), short adapters for common requirements such as null-modem or 25-9 serial, gender-benders. If two boxes could talk via a common protocol through a 9 or 25 pin D socket, I could probably connect them.