Posts by Lukin Brewer 236 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2007
... an early 3D game that ran on 8-bit home computers. It had a proper 3D graphics engine, but took about a second to render a complete screen, and about three seconds to render a complete screen from a new viewpoint. However, the entire gameplay concept was designed around this "feature", and it worked.
It also featured fractally-generated world maps and passwords, seeded from the map number, because there would have been no room to store such things on the old cassette-based systems that most people had.
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" describes an identical system. The Guide is electronic, subscribers are automatically updated, and it's presumably secure and chargeable (at least after the vogons got their sweaty hands on it).
Mine's the dressing gown, with the bath towel stashed down one sleeve.
Back when the might of the US intelligence services and the Shah's security forces succeeded in preventing Ayatollah Khomeini from broadcasting propaganda to Iran, he simply had his followers record his speeches on audio cassettes and take them into Iran as hand luggage. Islam, both extremist and moderate, has been spread by word of mouth for centuries. So go ahead and block the entire internet if you like - the radicals already know how to get around it.
How soon before it is able to detect (and shoot) possessed marines? Or aliens masquerading as humans like in The Invaders or V? Or lizard overlords? Or Google Streetview cars? Or Kevin "Captain Cyborg" Warwick? Or vultures masquerading as humans like in the Register's editorial office? I think we should all be told. (I also think we should all get ready to duck!)
...all you need is a little experience. I have lost count of the number of (cheap) plastic things that I have levered and popped open, often in spite of the fact that there were no serviceable parts (user- or otherwise) inside, or screws outside. If I had to get the top off a Mac Mini, knowing that there were no vulnerable parts waiting to be gouged (and that the case wouldn't split) would be *all* of the battle.
Cojones be damned!
is it illegal/criminal to remove or interfere with a police bug or tracking device on your property?
"Sure, you were able to keep your dabs off the money laundering operation, Sfonzini, but we got a good set off that microphone you removed. That's unlawful interference to start with, and when we match the shoe prints, it'll be criminal damage too."
...if the USSR isn't there to provide high quality satellite imagery to our enemies any more...
Seriously, though, you can glean very little from the aerial pics of MI6 and GCHQ. It's not much use without a floor plan. As for Faslane, you could map that out from the other side of the loch. If you wanted grid coordinates for any of these places, you could just triangulate them the old-fashioned way. The only terrorists Google Earth will assist are the lazy, armchair variety.
If you search for "Area 51" on Google Earth, it comes up immediately - one result - and takes you straight there. It's been visible there for years. It even has pictures. All in all, they reveal nothing that would be of any use to an enemy of the US. The only thing that's missing now is the old graphic of the little green men recharging their saucer and having a barbecue.
Is this like the Jehovah's Witnesses going door to door in pairs, to guard against spiritual corruption (or abduction by sex-mad dog cloners)? Or like the Inquisition investigating "unholy" works, with one monk reading and the other praying and flogging him?
In which case, film classification should only be done by people of indomitable spiritual purity, or rather, by people who claim such spiritual purity loudly and incessantly. Press all the the fake gurus and televangelists into service and see how good they are at ripping off their followers after some twenty-four hour stretches of scat bondage.
How about the case of the printer (as reported in "Computer Wimp" by Robert? Bear) which wouldn't stop doublespacing (yes, this does date it). The cause was eventually found to be a banana slug that had crawled into the printer and died in some horrible way, shorting out some electronics and causing the double spacing error. "For once the engineer's lament - 'I ain't never seen that before' might be fully justified."
I can confirm that I have disassembled a PC and found a (small) dried-out slug in it. I also found one containing a very much alive earwig wedged in a gap between the welded parts. The surprising thing is that, in spite of the number of spiders that I *know* are inhabiting the house with me, not one has come to grief in any piece of equipment so far.
Casinos are there to make money. They do so from having punters walk into their establishments and lose money. (They certainly don't make it on the drinks or shows, which are there to draw in the punters and help them lose money.) In the case of pure chance games (i.e. roulette), this happens by default because the odds are set so that the house will win over time. With games where skill is involved, they rely on the house edge, and the fact that most of the punters aren't very skillful. Card counting, or high levels of skill, can enable a punter to beat the house and reduce their profits, something they want to prevent. They like having the *occasional* big win - it encourages the punters - but only occasionally and preferably in someone else's casino.
As private establishments, casinos can choose who they admit (provided they don't do it along racial lines). Basically, anyone who wins against the house on a consistent basis is going to end up on the banned list, regardless of how they are doing it. Card counting isn't cheating - it isn't breaking the game mechanic, just being able to work with it better - but as far as the casinos are concerned, the only distinction is whether or not they can get the law involved.
So, in Nevada they have a law that enables them to prosecute people who use mechanical/electronic aids to increase their chance of winning, regardless of whether that actually constitutes cheating. It's a testament to their lobbying power in that state. If they could codify a law criminalizing card counting in general, they would be lobbying for that too. If they could prevent *anyone* from beating the house, without putting off all the punters, they would do that as well.
To sum up, casinos are expensive fun, and they have no shortage of customers ready to lose money to them. If you are able to take money from them instead, they don't want or need you as a customer. Play with friends - it's cheaper.
Scene: police interview room.
Knuckles: You got nothing on me, copper!
Officer: Oh yeah? Take a look at this, Knuckles. (he puts a child porn photo on the table in front of Knuckles)
Knuckles: (looks) Oh you slaaaaaag!
Officer: Ha! Bang to rights! I am charging you with viewing child porn. Take him to the cells! And bring in that suspect who was heckling the Home Secretary next!
"Fixing this problem is going to add further to the taxpayers’ bill for this shambolic IT project and will leave Welsh speakers having to ask for special translations until September.”
I thought that the last authentic Welsh monolingualists died off years ago, and that the existing mandates on bilingualism were brought in to prevent the language from dying out.
I don't want to see Welsh disappear. However, you can't really say that this oversight is going to cause any inconvenience (unless you are now tasked with re-engineering the system, of course :-).
This might be a bit simplistic, but isn't it just a coil, with alternating current running through it, inducing alternating current in another coil? So a device could cater for its own voltage by having the right number of turns in its coil (just like in a transformer). It could even have a multitap coil which can be electronically switched, and adapt itself to incompatible base stations. Or am I missing something fundamental?
@Tim:
This could be one example of where that classic internet-age mis-spelling of "losing" might actually work...
"I fired my power out into the air,
It did some work, I know not where..."
I have a feeling that even if this is passed in the US, it will be heavily cut down or selectively applied. As we have seen, US corporations make good money in some of these countries, and attempts to curtail or complicate such things tend to meet with resistance. Also, the US often has extremely good relations with oppressive and authoritarian governments - the only thing it can't get on with is "communism" (i.e. limits on private ownership, permitting trade unions, etc.) or trade protectionism that disadvantages the US. Anything that gets in their way, in other words. Friendly governments get their support - in whatever they want to do - usually for a price.
Historically, the US has regularly condemned human rights abuses in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and so forth, but were rather less vocal about the human rights abuses in Iran under the Shah, Chile under Pinochet, Nicaragua under Somoza, or Guatemala under the United Fruit Company. Come to that, Saddam Hussein escaped official criticism while he was a bulwark against radical Islam, and Manuel Noriega was only called to account when he stopped obeying orders.
Skimming through the wording of the legislation, it looks like there will be substantial wriggle room, not to mention the almighty blind eye. It just doesn't seem likely that the US will force its large, successful corporations to risk profit-damaging censure in any foreign country, let alone force them to aid criticism of friendly nations in the face of such censure.
If so, those interlacing artefacts might have cost them marks. Remember to deinterlace your video before you post it, guys.
In an opposite example to the story, the lighting automation in one of our windowless stairwells went on the blink once - it kept turning on and off at random. I did a sign saying "Warning: dimensional rift ahead. Beware of the cacodaemon."
It was either that or "Warning: Turner Prize-winning installation ahead. Watch out for pretentious artistic hissy fits."
In a shambling zombie sense? "Store of the Dead"?
Or is it more a Frankenstein's Monster / Herbert West affair - a bolt of digital lightning here, a shot of AJAX there?
What I think it most reminds me of is the part in "Hellraiser" where Frank Cotton, the escapee from Hell, has consumed his brother Larry and is wearing his skin.
We got about five or six inches of snow overnight. The roads and pavements were salted and gritted the day before, and snow isn't settling now on pavements that have been cleared. All the schools are out (this never happened in *my* day) and SW Trains are running reduced services. It's supposed to be bin day today, but they haven't been and probably aren't coming.
Not bad, all things considered. After all, this is the first proper snowfall in years.
BTW, I always used www.livedepartureboards.co.uk for train times. It's running fine.
You've probably heard of some of them. The statute that requires all able-bodied men to practice archery every Sunday, for instance, on an archery range that the parish is obliged to set up and maintain. It would never be invoked now, no matter how angry the authorities might be with someone, but it still has legal force.
More hazardous are the statutes that we don't know about. There are hundreds of old statutes on scrolls of vellum tied with red tape and sealed with wax, some in Old English some in Old French, sitting in vaults, long forgotten. Unless specifically repealed (or possibly, unless contradicted by more recent legislation - IANAL), these statutes form part of the law. In one infamous example, trial by combat remained a legal right until the 1830s when a man on trial for murder invoked it. To the horror of the judiciary and the victim's family, the old statute was ruled valid, and since none of the victim's family felt ably to go up against the murderer in single combat, he was acquitted. Needless to say, that old statute was repealed in record time.
English law could do with some serious purging. Unfortunately, this is less likely to happen while its guardians are so busy pumping out new stuff.
(By the way, to give reassurance and head off discussion, the so-called right of "Primae Noctes"/"Droit de Seigneur"/"The Local Lord Gets to Rumpy-Pumpy the Virgin Bride on Her Wedding Night" was never written into law. Rather, it was an application of force majeur - i.e. it happened because nobody who was prepared to stop it was powerful enough to do so.)
is that it can't be monitored. Solid fuel rockets don't degrade as fast as fireworks do, but misfires can happen when an area of the fuel reacts with itself in storage and becomes dud. Unless the dud area is visible on the surface, there is no way to detect it (barring some sort of NMR scanner). And no, you can't take a core sample - the rocket then won't burn in the manner expected. With gel fuel, it will be possible to fuel up the rocket closer to anticipated use, stir up the fuel and take a sample in which any rogue reaction products will be detectable, and, if necessary, suck out the fuel, purge the plumbing, and refuel.
On another note, it should not surprise anyone that British comedians got to this first. There was a Goodies book featuring "5-star treacle essence" as aviation fuel, which the Goodies had to replace with their own invention, "Goody Goo", to beat a shortage. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Goons hadn't explored this at least once.
A friend of mine was doing building work on a site out in the satellite towns of SW London (Chessington, possibly) in the mid 1990s. If there was any site security, it wasn't up to the task. There were ne'er-do-wells roaming the site, grabbing anything that could possibly be scrapped or fenced. Bollards and railings would be pulled out of the ground before the concrete had time to set. If you put down a tool, it was gone. Even the old oil drum filled with water for washing off tools in was emptied and stolen. In the end, the crews took to taking in cheap polaroid cameras, persuading the thieves to hold off until the line of bollards or whatever was installed, and then photographing the completed work as proof that it had been done, and done properly, before the thieves had it away.
First, if they didn't have suitable cutting equipment to hand, someone rubs their hands together until they are sore. Then they saw something in half - anything light will do. Then they shove the two halves down the coach and push them together to make a whole. Repeat the last two steps until there are enough holes to reduce the weight, then one man can start unloading the gold. Then each man shouts for joy until he is hoarse, and then loads up his horse with as much gold as it can carry and rides it away.
Well, I'm sure it would have made sense back in the playground.
One factor that helped end the career of Senator Joe McCarthy (of McCarthyism infamy) was that the American Broadcasting Corporation started broadcasting his hearings. When the public got to see how he actually worked, his public approval began to decline.
Could this be what is worrying RIAA?
...should be mentioned in the same comment. The so-called Ring of Steel was set up around the City of London's financial centre to control vehicle access and prevent the IRA from driving carbombs in. IRA members are pretty well exclusively Irish and white. With this in mind, the police manning the Ring of Steel had an extraordinary penchant for stopping black people.
And need I remind everyone of the Lara Croft incident, where the owner of said gun-toting promotional mannequin was arrested, detained, and charged with firearms offences?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/17/lara_croft_bust/
Dear Vyv,
This may sound silly but I think I am going mad my courtiers won't obey me any more banana banana even my tailor has started making me stupid white canvas jackets loganberry that you have to wear back to front grateful for any advice.
Yours Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte I.
(Broadmoor)
Dear Bonie Your Highness,
You are not mad. I suggest you invade Russia this winter.
Vyvyan Basterd MD
Anyone who has been paying attention will have guessed that Gates and co have been fantasizing about this for years. Indeed, it was probably an addendum to Gates's initial vision: my software, running on everyone's computer, (and wouldn't it be great if I could charge by the hour for it?).
As to why it's emerging now, we can only guess. Maybe they think they've nothing to lose. After all, they managed to release Vista...
The UK Patent Office is rather more thorough when digging out prior art. I recall that one patent for raising sunken ships using inflatable airbags was denied because Donald Duck had raised a sunken ship with ping pong balls in a Disney cartoon.
And speaking of overly broad patents, check this out:
http://www.nukees.com/d/20000811.html
Skip forward a week or so to see Gav wheel out his armoured lawmech.
At the time of the industrial revolution, there was no shortage of workers. They weren't being enticed into the new industrial towns and cities from an impoverished countryside by competitive wages, they were displaced from the countryside by the Enclosures Act and later the mechanisation of agriculture. The factory owners might have been in competition with each other, but they were all agreed that they wanted to pay as little as possible for everything (including labour) and since there were rarely more vacancies than there were unemployed workers, the employers could set wages as they wished. True, there were highly skilled posts, but these were less of a concern of factory owners. Industrialisation was all about finding the jobs that could be deskilled and mechanised, making a machine to do the job and then sacking the artisan and hiring an unskilled worker to work the machine. There were a few employers who did pay higher wages to unskilled workers, but they tended to be benevolent idealists. The only thing that has consistently made wages rise is the ability of a workforce to organise, withdraw their labour, and prevent the factory owner from acquiring a new workforce. Say what you like about the labour unions (they are far from faultless), but it was the factory owners who struck the first blows by paying low wages, trying to control their workers' lives, sacking them when they complained, and trying to criminalize them when they organised. Both sides of this were able to band together to fight what they perceived as a common enemy.
On the oft-cited subject of competition, while there are sectors where real competition exists between companies, this is a lot less widespread than capitalist pundits would have you believe. In most established markets, the producers' market shares are fairly stable, and all the producers plan (depend, even) on this remaining so. An example that has appeared in The Register on many an occasion is LCD screens. While the boys in the backrooms are researching like crazy to improve everything about them, and the marketing boys are busily plugging away trying to improve their market share, they still can't produce more units than their existing fabs can, or sell more units than the market is prepared to buy, or afford to store much dead stock or let their sales channels run too dry. When supply faltered, there were no competitors leaping out of the woodwork to fill the gap - instead, prices rose and LCD monitors became harder to obtain. Simply put, financial and market realities prevent unfettered competition or rapid changes in market share, no matter how the products perform.
... in the hunt for Royalists, and prior to that, by Henry VIII in the hunt for Catholics, the New Model Trading Standards Agency struck at a nest of Welshmen today.
"They might think that no one will look at their licencing situation, or find their priest holes, but the Poundheads are on their case now, and the Lord, I mean, the Law is on our side."
Strutting expansively as he tried to keep it inside his trousers, the spokesman continued, "We will go upstairs, downstairs, or in your lady's chamber if necessary, woooh-hah, searching for old excuses and men who won't pay their dues. Tip-offs aside, we'll be taking a gander at businesses at random because this sort of thing is so common; wealth will go to the software houses that deserve it, and the Lord Copy Protector shall reign unhindered, warts and all."
... or maybe it was only Lucy Sherriff. :-p
BTW, the funniest Grinch parody that I have seen is the one on the Encyclopedia Dramatica page concerning Fred Phelps (It's definitely NSFW).
Anyway, regarding disappointment felt about Spore, here is the review that everyone should (have) read before they part(ed) with their cash:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/218-Spore
^ Plenty of punctuation here, though! :-)
Yep!
@AC
Indeed, the Real World (TM), where corporations selling/nursing expensive but faulty products/systems prefer to shoot down any messengers of doom as a short-term fix. Sure, the researchers wanted to get some kudos in the white-hat community, just as the company wanted not to have to admit that their equipment was less than fit for purpose, or develop and roll out a fix. Or to put it another way:
It's not my job to run the train, the whistle I can't blow,
It's not my job to tell how far the train's allowed to go,
It's not my job to let off steam, nor even clang the bell,
But watch the damned thing jump the tracks and see who catches Hell!
Student hackers close vulns in Mifare
- "All's well that ends well," says Transit Authority, "but next time don't go public. Capisce?"
Student hackers die in ticket barrier testing related tragedy.
- Transit Authority: "They had no honour, and God was watching."
p.s. Name that film.
After looking at the distorted features of that pooping homunculus, and reading of its fell purpose, I went immediately to YouTube to search for a video of someone setting light to one. But there was to be no relief, as no such cleansing-by-fire could be found.
I shall have to make do with pasting it into a few Bonfire Night scenes with Photoshop. Web 2.0, you have failed us once again, where it could have made a difference.
Paparazzi photograph people in unchivalrous fashion all the time. It's how they work. The angry faces and raised fists of the celebs are sometimes triggered by unprintable abuse directed at them by the paps. Anything that gets the shots is good. I'm not passing judgement on the paps - we have a legal system for that. So how many paps have been through the legal system just for doing business as usual?
---
I understand why the the Home Office don't want to set anything in stone. I understand why police don't like to be photographed. I understand why the whole police chain of command would like the coppers on the ground to be able to say "stop photographing" as and when they feel necessary, and then have their actions backed retrospectively. I understand why police don't want to be confronted by street lawyers quoting the law at them.
But the police understand, as do we all, why people want to take things that aren't theirs, why people sometimes want to attack, hurt or kill people that have upset them, or indeed, how people can decide to drive themselves home after taking a skinful. They understand, even as they make the arrests. Which is why we set down laws: to stop us from doing things like that, which any of us might find attractive at some point.
Laws are difficult to get right. They are difficult to fine-tune. It is sometimes difficult to prevent them from catching things that they shouldn't touch, even with the best will in the world. Ultimately, they reflect our imperfect state of being (as described above), and that is the only reason for tolerating their existence.
So we have to make do with what we have - a law making body full of expert (*please* don't make me a liar here) legal officers who are supposed to come up with these precise definitions of what we should and shouldn't do. So, sirs, we'd like a precise definition of what we are allowed to do with our cameras in public places. This is what you're paid to do, by us. It's not as if we're suggesting that you go and arrest someone other than us - a "real criminal" - as the boys in blue are so often directed. Thanks. Any time in the next three months will do.
They do teach conformity, though. It was designed into the system.
And no, it wasn't a vast conspiracy-type thing. The story can be found here:
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.htm
John Taylor Gatto was a teacher in the US. This book began as an attempt to determine just what he'd achieved during his 30-year career.
"But that's... blackmail!" the PFY says, looking aghast. "Anyway, how do we know that you've not passed this information on others who'll blackmail us as well?"
"I have told no one. And you may rest assured that my solicitors will neither unseal nor read any of the copies of the evidence that I have lodged with them, merely pass them on to the Police, the Inland Revenue and all the company directors in the event of my death."
but some of Edexcel's reasoning escapes me. If Word is not allowed, why Powerpoint? And why Shockwave Flash??? It sounds like they are begging to have coursework that displays itself on their browser window two words at a time, with lots of unnecessary transition effects, accompanied by a flame background and a bleepy techno soundtrack, and slows their PC to a crawl.
And how about revenge as a dish served with a Flash-borne rootkit? If Edexcel haven't thought their security out, the kids might end up awarding *themselves* top marks. :-)
It does seem to carry some unintentional irony these days, which is probably why we don't hear about it much. The first principle contains a clue as to why the Metropolitan Police Constabulary was founded. Its purpose was to break up the "London Mob" and arrest the ringleaders so that they could be tried for sedition. The government was rather worried about the London Mob, and had been considering deploying troops onto the streets, with all the attendant problems that would bring.
But, contrary to what the government thought, the London Mob was not a shadowy movement, causing outbreaks of rioting and looting with a view to revolution. It was in fact a phenomenon caused by dire poverty. In any given street, there would be many people who were starving, but also food aplenty. If one desperate person broke a pane and began grabbing food, or someone knocked over a baker's tray or apple cart, most of the street-dwellers would join in, and things would develop from there.
The so-called London Mob was eventually stopped by some of the first social security measures, which were brought in at around the same time as the Police. These eased the poverty at the bottom of society, and gave them a benefit that they stood to lose if they were caught rioting. Of course, the Metropolitan Police were ones credited with "curtailing the London Mob".
The purpose for which they were founded carries through to this day. A demonstration carries a threat to public order and the State - it will be well policed. A burglary carries no threat to public order or the State - you may not even see a policeman as a result.
sucking the usage data out of the networks. Or sneaking into Virgin customer's bedrooms to drain their personal info.
Of course, he will be suitably cautious where bedrooms are concerned, having ended up with that "self inflicted" black eye in one well-known case.
Coincidentally, he was my constituency MP before the boundaries were redrawn, putting me in a new constituency with a Liberal majority. Fortunately, he didn't show his face around the constituency much.
> But back around 1999 (TaDum, TaDum), I got a call from someone who had been told I had IBM1401 experience. He had an _urgent_ need to reverse-engineer some 1401 binaries that had been running in a customer's workflow, under emulation, since, well, since that hadn't been a truly daft idea.
> The latest release of the mainframe OS, required by the latest hardware upgrade, no longer (some 30 years after migration should have been complete) supported 1401 emulation.
Knowing IBM, what's the betting that this was heard around 1996:
"Have you seen our latest company-wide software and systems audit? They've done something about that last 1401 system - it's not listed any more."
"Really? I'll make some enquiries, make sure we're not treading on anyone's toes, but I'd say we can ditch 1401 emulation in the next upgrade."
---
Legacy *can* be the idea that worked. There are legacy systems that were tailor-made then, and still fit now. There are also ones that don't fit now. And also ones that were an expensive, troublesome "best bodge" back then, but could now run on a LAMP server, with web browser clients accessing it over SSL - if the people in charge could get their fingers out and make the changes.
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