Posts by vtcodger

Fly me to the M(O₂)n: Euro scientists extract oxygen from 'lunar dust' by cooking it with molten salt electrolysis

Nuclear power on the moon

"Maybe a better option would be to use partially spent nuclear fuel, the energy density is still good enough to make it a viable source of energy."

Nuclear power seems a reasonable solution for power on the moon. But, there's one thing. Nuclear power plants here on Earth are really heat engines that run off the thermal energy difference between a working fluid heated in the reactor and some cooling entity -- typically a lake, river, or ocean. On the moon, you'd need a probably need a large radiating array to provide the cool side. And half the time you'd need to shade the array from direct sunlight. That's all probably doable. But likely kind of complex.

Maybe solar power and a BIG battery would be simpler.

I've heard rumors

That there are things called "plants" that will convert Carbon Dioxide and water -- both byproducts of human metabolism -- to Oxygen and a bit of waste material. Not only that, but the waste material is said to be edible (as long as it isn't something called "kale").

Further research is needed.

Top Euro court advised: Cops, spies yelling 'national security' isn’t enough to force ISPs to hand over massive piles of people's private data

But don't you feel safer knowing that your personal data is safely locked up in an undisclosed location where no one except a couple of million folks with appropriate security clearances can view it?

Is there anything else we freedom loving Americans can do for you today?

Spanking the pirates of corporate security? Try a Plimsoll

A decent backup strategy

The absolute defence against ransomware is a decent backup strategy.

And what about all the transactions entered more than X hours after your last good backup? Where X is a number largely controlled by the same fine folks who trashed your disks. It's not hard to see where that path leads. You make backups and save transactions. The ransomists respond by booby trapping your backups. Load them and you're reinfected (and the ransom amount goes up). You respond by ... I dunno. You'll think of something ... and they respond by ... They'll think of something ... and you ...

I'm not saying that frequent and complete backups aren't a good thing. I'm just questioning that they are going to be a universal effective answer to ransomware.

The dream of a single European patent may die next month – and everyone is in denial about it

Re: Good, good!

"If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”

Bill Gates - internal Microsoft memo 1991.

What can we rid the world of, thinks Google... Poverty? Disease? Yeah, yeah, but first: Third-party cookies – and classic user-agent strings

Re: Conflict of interest

I imagine that it's still the case since the User Agent String seems to be the only clue the server has as to what capabilities the user's browser has. As a communication tool, UA strings would seem to leave a **LOT** to be desired. But I'm not sure that I trust Google to fix them properly. Entirely too much of a "What Big Teeth You Have Grandma" element in that situation.

IBM, Microsoft, a medley of others sing support for Google against Oracle in Supremes' Java API copyright case

Re: Historic potential ?

"Didn't some early PC clones have a different engineered BIOS but use the same APIs ?"

Indeed. Here's an article describing the situation. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/how-compaqs-clone-computers-skirted-ibms-patents-and-gave-rise-to-eisa/

According to the article, Compaq worked out the IBM PC BIOS API by experimentation. I imagine that's correct. However, my frequently faulty memory tells me that they actually had some folks analyze IBM's published, but copyrighted, source code and write a spec. Then they had different folks write a BIOS from the spec. Maybe I made that up. Or maybe someone else -- Phoenix perhaps -- did that.

Re: War over API

"You've gotten that one wrong. The two are not at all similar. ,,,"

I think you are correct about that. The situation would be that had Open Street Map decided to copy the Google Maps APIs in order to access the OSM map data, Google could charge them for doing so. Or tell them to cease and desist.

As it happens, OSM defined their own API (I think). But OSM does use Google's "Slippy Map" format for their actual maps, and doing that likely would be a copyright violation if Oracle wins this

Re: Why not let idiotic orgs let their APIs slide into obscurity via failing to license freely?

"Every single computer interface, even those dating back to punch cards, would be copyrighted."

Exactly. A bonanza for lawyers. Not a huge problem for China which seems to regard copyright as yet another crazy round-eye concept that they must occasionally pretend to respect. An utter disaster for US and probably EU computer companies. Even if the lunacy is eventually resolved rationally, the damage will be deep and long lasting.

(Actually, I think perhaps only stuff copyrighted after 1977 has an effectively eternal copyright. But I could be wrong about that.)

Y2K quick-fix crick? 1920s come roaring back after mystery blip at UK's vehicle licensing agency

Re: 2038

Work is also progressing on 32-bit kernels and 32-bit compatibility api

... and a good thing it is. It's a safe bet that code is being written today that will still be running in 2038 (well the first couple of weeks of 2038 anyway--maybe not after January 18). And furthermore, the simpler, and more forgettable the application, the more likely it is to have a 32 bit time counter. It's unlikely that the Internet will go up in smoke when the 32 bit counters roll over in 2038. And Excel 2037 will, I'm sure, generate innumerable pointless spreadsheets of CFOs far and wide for Feb 2038. But your microwave oven or front door lock may well quit working.

The sooner toolchains and such even for 16 and 32 bit devices are fixed to work beyond 2038, the better.

Google's clever-clogs are focused on many things, but not this: The Chrome Web Store. Devs complain of rip-offs, scams, wait times

Your Inquiry

The Register asked Google for comment but no one responded.

We're sorry, but your personal Alphabet AI agent is on break. A fire drill is scheduled later this afternoon so your agent may be unable to reply today. Normally we'd promise a reply tomorrow, but that's when Diversity training is scheduled. So maybe Thursday. Your inquiry is currently number 3267 in the queue. Rest assured, your inquiry is very important to us.

It's a no to ZFS in the Linux kernel from me, says Torvalds, points finger of blame at Oracle licensing

Re: The problem is not Oracle (for once)

"If you do not like the license then you are at liberty to write it all from scratch and release it under some other license."

Unless, of course, it's a API or some other entity that Oracle feels possessive about

Flying taxis? That'll be AFTER you've launched light sabres and anti-gravity skateboards

Re: When God wants to punish a nation, he makes them invade Afghanistan.

"we've already been in Afghanistan and we didn't like it much." Russian NATO ambassador Dmitry Rogozin when asked in 2010 about possible Russian support for NATO's efforts in Afghanistan.

Re: @ Warm Braw

Getting the vehicle INTO the air really shouldn't be much of a problem. If it doesn't want to leave the ground, neither should you. Getting it OUT of the air with the payload and surroundings more or less intact might well be more of an issue at times

Re: Uber Flaying Taxis

Of course they are pilotless. Who in their right mind would risk their life driving a flying taxi as a sub-minimum wage, no-benefits job?

Eggheads have crunched the numbers and the results are in: It's not just your dignity you lose with e-scooters, life and limb are in peril, too

If e-scooters are here to stay

We need to genetically engineer future humans with thicker skulls and/or integral airbags and/or more flexible bones.

Blackout Bug: Boeing 737 cockpit screens go blank if pilots land on specific runways

Actually

If you thought that headings were significant, you'd probably just run a loop "for I in (1,360,1)" or maybe "for I in (1,361,1)" during unit test. Except that low level math routines usually work in radians, not degrees, so you'd probably do something like "for I in (0.001, 2.0*PI, 0.001)" which might or might not catch the error.

Software testing is **HARD**. Which is one of the (many) reasons that hardly anything works quite right.

Re: Why is the company still alive?

It is worth noting that the standby aircraft of the US Strategic Air Command is the Boeing B52 introduced in 1955. The versions actually in use today are a bit younger. But not much.

Re: Why is the company still alive?

Boeing does seem to be having rather a bad year. Clearly a name change is in order. If you can guess the the new corporate moniker, I'd suggest grabbing the associated .com domain and selling it to them for enough money to finance a comfortable retirement.

LAX

Except that the world's fourth busiest airport -- Los Angeles -- has has four parallel runways running more or less (but fortuitously, not quite) East-West. Actual runway headings there are 251 magnetic, 263 true.

Hash snag: Security shamans shame SHA-1 standard, confirm crucial collisions citing circa $45k chip cost

collusion detection

"collusion detection" sounds extremely useful. OTOH, I wouldn't be surprised if research in that field wasn't kind of dangerous. There could well be powerful interests who would prefer that collusion remain undetected.

No horrific butterfly keys on this keyboard, just you and your big, dumb fingers

Home Keys

I'm forced to wonder how it copes with people keeping their fingers on the virtual home keys.

asdfjkl;!!! and furthermore, asdfjkl; ...

5G signals won't make men infertile, sighs UK ad watchdog as it bans bonkers scary poster

Report on Experimental Results

Or just throw a baking potato in the Microwave. Set the it on HIGH and set the timer for 60 minutes instead of the intended 6 minutes. Move on to your next task.

I have (unintentionally) tried this experiment. Mean Time To Smoke Alarm (based on sample size one) = 27 minutes. Potato reduced to ash with a few weak flames flickering. Microwave was never really the same.

Re: Infertility - maybe not such a real problem in this day and age

I am not convinced that a little bit of 5G infertility would actually be such a bad thing.

Just skimmed over today's Google News headlines. If anything, the problem would seem to be that it's only a little bit of 5G male infertility.

Oh well. Maybe 6G will do a better job of killing sperm. Progress works that way sometimes. One just HAS to be patient

Snakes on a wane: Python 2 development is finally frozen in time, version 3 slithers on

"The world needed a Python 3 as much as it needed a Perl 6."

I think that probably depends on whether you need unicode. I'm fine with ASCII, so I'm sticking with Python 2.7 -- possibly forever. But if Python was going to break the language in order to better handle East Asian characters and such, it was probably a good idea to simultaneously fix all the other language stuff that turned out to be a dubious idea. Things like print being a statement rather than just another function meaning that you need to do some trickery to print from a list comprehension in Python 2.

Re: Apple's walled garden

Such a lovely place. But can you ever leave?

El Reg presents: Your one-step guide on where not to store electronic mail

Re: Deleted

If a deleted email disappeared immediately after that "are you sure" button was clicked then the hapless user would learn PDQ not to do it again.

Ah yes, the human trainability assumption. The notion that humans are capable of learning from experience has been around for thousands of years. It is apparently rooted in mankind's long standing association with the domestic dog (canis familiaris). Dogs -- chihuahuas, terriers, and springer spaniels excepted -- learn from experience. They are trainable. Some folks naturally, but incorrectly, assume that people are like dogs in this respect. Not so.

Pro tip. If it has a tail and non-retractable claws it is quite likely trainable. Otherwise you'll save yourself a lot of effort if you simply design around its idiosyncrasies.

LibreOffice 6.4 nearly done as open-source office software project prepares for 10th anniversary

Re: I think you underestimate it...

"why more people aren't standardizing on Libre Office is beyond me..."

An example of a sane reason is a grammar school friend whose major source of income is income from sales of a college textbook. He appreciates a bargain as much as the next person and maybe more than most. He gets no joy from sending money to Microsoft regularly. But he doesn't feel that he can take the risk that his publisher might have trouble with his updates if he doesn't use Word. If he uses the publisher's preferred version of Word and the publisher can't read the file(s) it's (probably) not his problem.

Hard to argue with that

Re: I think you underestimate it...

I think at this point, the most dire threat from cloud storage might be collateral damage from cyberwarfare. And not necessarily between the countries one might expect. It seems unlikely that the malware, bots, and God only knows what else released during a serious conflict between say India and Pakistan or Iran and Saudi Arabia will stop at national boundaries. It seems impossible to predict what digital services will still be running in Europe, North America, or the Far East if such a conflict erupts. I imagine that humanity will survive the event. But it's not clear that all businesses and governmental agencies that don't have solid local backup will survive.

Vivaldi opens up an exciting new front in the browser wars, seeks to get around blocking with cunning code

Re: Unsurprising

"The problem here is with over-zealous web developers ..."

Are you suggesting that there might be intelligent lifeforms involved in website development? That's an interesting theory, but I can't imagine how one would go about testing it.

The IoT wars are over, maybe? Amazon, Apple, Google give up on smart-home domination dreams, agree to develop common standards

Re: It's the most (energy) wasteful time of the year

I assume you've looked at X10. I've never had occasion to use it. But it uses power line signaling, has been around for 30 or 40 years, presumably is reliable, probably can't spy on you, and doesn't seem to be outrageously expensive.

That damn problem has to be around here somewhere

IoT seems to me to be largely a greed driven solution to a non-existent problem. It isn't that there aren't use cases. There just aren't enough use cases to justify the cost of developing good solutions. So the development money is going into expensive, (proprietary), vulnerable, high-margin toys. Standards probably won't do any harm and might do some good. But really, I think probably home automation is going to be a rather minor market segment until we get affordable robots that can actually do complex jobs like taking the trash out and scrubbing the bathtub -- without accidentally killing the pets or throwing out the mail. I should think that'll happen. But maybe not for another three or four decades.

And there really seem to be few good engineering reasons to make internet connection a core element to home automation rather than an optional feature.

Re: you would be well advised to wait a year

A century might be better. What the heck, let's make it two centuries.

Colorado cryptocoin execs spark up blunt '$722m ponzi scheme' criminal charges after investments go up in smoke

Re: How is it possible

All a ponzi scheme needs is a crook, human greed and the existence of money. In as much as banking was purportedly invented around 2000BC in Assyria, (1400 years before the earliest coins) my guess is that the first Ponzi scheme probably dates to about 1999BC.

LightAnchors array: LEDs in routers, power strips, and more, can sneakily ship data to this smartphone app

Re: Yes, but for what?

I imagine that there are industrial applications. Situations where wired or wireless connections are difficult to implement or unreliable. Might even be some domestic utility.

... And it could potentially be used to spy on users of course ...

How much cheese does one person need to grate? Mac Pro pricing unveiled

Re: Pointless

You're expecting a $50,000 status symbol to actually do work? How naive.

There's a rumor that linux will usually run fine in a VM on Macs. Assuming that Apple doesn't prevent you from running VMs on these monsters for some nutty reason.

Not an issue for me. I am not, never have been and probably will never be, Apple compatible.

Non-unicorn $700 e-scooter shop Unicorn folds with no refunds – after blowing all its cash on online ads

I had to look it up

"Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names." Wikipedia

When is an electrical engineer not an engineer? When Arizona's state regulators decide to play word games

Re: As this article mentions, up to 98% of people with "engineer" in their titles

"What about those unlicensed sanitation engineers? I want my trash pickup charges back!"

Fair enough. But you have to take the trash back as well.

And then there were two: HMS Prince of Wales joins Royal Navy

Maybe

"BTW some armoured carriers were armed like cruisers with 8inch guns, under the flight deck."

If I recall correctly, in the 1930s there was some sort of weird deal that capped US, British, and Japanese Pacific fleet battleships in a 5:5:3 ratio. I believe that the Japanese response to that was to build aircraft carriers -- which weren't capped -- with the plan of ripping the flight decks off when/if war came. Result -- near instant cruisers/battleships. Except it turned out when war came that the carriers were far more useful as carriers than as battleships.

I could have that all wrong. I'm not a naval warfare buff.

Re: Air Cover?

Maybe if you ask Trump nicely and come up with a bit of cash, The US Marines will sell your Harriers back to you thereby allowing The Donald to brag about what a great deal he has struck.

Tesla has a smashing weekend: Model 3 on Autopilot whacks cop cars, Elon's Cybertruck demolishes part of LA

Re: Top Gear idea?

One other potential problem with laser windshield cleaning. You have this gunk on your windshield. Or maybe a a tiny scratch. You whap it with a beam of energetic photons. Where are the photons that aren't absorbed by the target going to end up? I'm thinking that the answer to that question for some of them is likely to be "the driver's eyes".

Re: Top Gear idea?

Clearing windshields with lasers seems kind of a nutty idea, and one that I'd like someone else to test extensively. I suspect it might be subject to problems with gradually removing the windshield when confronted with stubborn deposits or minor scratches from wind driven sand. I really doubt it will work out, but I can imagine it being an option at car washes even if it doesn't work very well. "Laser clean your windshield, sir?"

It does illustrate one of many flaws in the current patent system. Your "invention" doesn't have to work in order to be patentable. (example:. the field effect transistor was patented in the 1920s but wasn't actually built even in a laboratory until the 1950s)

Re: Unfortunately adaptive cruise control radar doesn't work like that

The Wired article is clear and comprehensible. But really folks, if your collision avoidance system can't avoid collisions, you probably shouldn't deploy it . At least not at high speeds where the driver has essentially no time to figure out that the vehicle has failed to detect an obvious obstacle and isn't going to avoid it. What might be sort of OK at parking lot speeds simply isn't acceptable at high speed any more than a steering wheel that occasionally fails to turn the car would be,

I just can't wait

To see what bizarre, costly, unreliable, high tech solution Musk comes up with to the problem of emergency vehicles and bridge abutments interfering with Tesla drivers' God given right of way.

Does the Cybertruck really need side mirrors? I should think it would ship with full time rear view cameras even in the most basic configuration. Easy enough to do, possibly useful, and inexpensive. It looks like other vehicles have gotten waivers for the side mirror requirement. I'd worry more about the questionably legal exterior lighting and the apparent lack of proper bumpers. https://cleantechnica.com/2019/11/27/tesla-cybertruck-fud-they-cant-build-that/

BTW, has the Reg really missed out on this Tesla issue: https://www.thedrive.com/news/31274/more-teslas-on-the-road-meant-hours-long-supercharger-lines-over-thanksgiving ?

Advertisers want exemption from web privacy rules that, you know, enforce privacy

Inadequate

Users can turn it on or off and it is easily understandable.

Sounds to me like a clear violation of Advertiser Rights. Clearly, such a dramatic override of advertiser intent should only be permitted by means of a properly registered letter to the advertiser accompanied by a notarized opt-out form and a certified copy of the user's birth certificate as well as legally valid copies of any relevant powers of attorney. A simple browser setting could be faked by the Iranians!!!

WebAssembly gets nod from W3C and, most likely, an embrace from cryptojackers online

Re: Flash ah aaaahhhh!

Implementing pretty good security wouldn't be all that hard. Just don't provide any Web Assembly access to the hardware or to the OS. However, the first version of Chrome that bypasses THAT will probably appear within 72 hours. Firefox will take a bit longer. Maybe a week.

It depends?

I’d say that JavaScript is rubbish and slow.

A few JS entities -- Open Street Map, text editors used for comments on some web sites -- seem pretty decent. Others -- Amazon, anything from Google -- are utterly atrocious -- slow, buggy, -- a user experience reminiscent of running Windows 1.0 from floppies. I admit to being mildly curious about why. Not curious enough to start tearing code apart.

But I submit that there is a possibility that Javascript per se might not be as bad as it seems

Re: I will not use this

It's cute you think you will have a choice long term ...

I fear that you've nailed it. I think that Web Assembly -- which looks to be a **REALLY** BAD IDEA will likely turn out to be the final nail in the Internet's coffin. The inscription on the gravestone should read "The Internet 1991-2021. So much promise. Sadly unfulfilled"

Re: Readability of JavaScript

Indeed, A few months ago I took a shot at reverse engineering 700k of "compressed" Javascript to see if there was any chance of detecting when it was finished doing its work.

My take. Reverse engineering of JS can be done. But not by me.

I threw the whole thing out and replaced it with a hundred or so lines of Python that did the same job (faster) using standard tools like curl and image magick.

Windows 10 Insiders: Begone, foul Store version of Notepad!

Re: Isn't this also usually followed by...

Indeed. The one (and only) time I tried to use vi, I was confronted with a blank screen and no clues as to what to do next. That was in 1990 or so. For all I know,that terminal session is still running. And probably still stuck in vi.