Posts by Dave Bell 2133 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2007
It's likely a pretty fair summary of all the potential hazards, when you look at the list of weapons covered, and see it includes the non-lethal types. That infamous crowd-cooking microwave contraption could easily put Air Force personnel at risk, with all the potential for reflections, though I really hope the engineers checked for antenna side-lobes.
Any mention of unexpected black helicopters?
But if international money laundering is going on, it's something that the cops maybe can understand, prove, and prosecute.
And because of that, at the end of it all we can be fairly confident that they've nailed the right guys.
There are, for instance, British computer-specific laws which could be used to hammer the operators of any bot-net, but it would be a struggle to prove anything.
The way these people are headed, I'm expecting the imminent arrival of the Mekon.
(Yeah, been reading the recent Dan Dare comic that Virgin published.)
Lewis, tell your Admiral that I thoroughly approve of his cinematic tastes.
(Note on icons: the pirate flag matches the descriptions of that flown by John "Calico Jack" Rackham, who had the famous Anne Bonney and Mary Read in his crew (according to reports, they were the only pirates sober enough to fight back when captured).)
The BBFC is a bit of a mixture.
For the cinema, the statutory power is held by local authorities, who accept the BBFC rating as guidance, but can set a different rating, or permit to be shown a film refused a rating by the BBFC. Though the Extreme Porn business has given some special status to a BBFC rating.
For videos, the BBFC gives a rating which is backed by law, and this is the starting point for rating of games. At least initially, it was the cut-scenes in the game which could get the BBFC involved.
Personally, I'm not sure the BBFC or ELSPA have really sorted out their thinking: participation by the player makes a game different from a film, and the great experience of the BBFC may be misleading.
Then, at some point, there will be a Wii attachment and a related game with an explicitly sexual purpose. I hope to be able to watch the argument from a safe distance: another planet, perhaps.
As the first section, on photographs, etc, shows, there's no need for any perpetual licence.
You might, for a news server, want something a bit different: an item posted will end up on servers around the planet, with no control over who deletes it when.
But for a web page?
As it is, it looks like somebody has taken the ancient rights-grab boiler-plate, and then a proper lawyer has, for whatever reason, written an exception.
It might be interesting, in an academic sense, to trace just where this bit of garbage started out. It's probably legal ass-covering from the early days of the commercial internet. And for it to survive, it's probably never been challenged in court. It's never been tested.
And maybe, just maybe, this particular instance is a sign that it might soon die. Why shouldn't the the clause on photographs, etc., clear and unthreatening, become the default?
There's a lot of people expected to work long hours in the IT industry. I know what it feels like. I know what it can do to my mental state.
We don't know why this guy did what he did, but I've heard enough stories about Programmer Death Marches. And the sort of thing he did: it feels familiar.
I'd suggest that there is an institutional recklessness in IT management. Most of the bugs you curse in the software you use are probably down to the same ultimate cause: an excess of programmers running on pizza and Jolt cola.
On the one side, they have been asked for information about two very specific instances, and the court should be able to judge whether the particular comments matter.
But what does the newspaper know? They maybe have an IP address logged, and they also are likely to have an email address. Connect from a wifi hotspot, and have a few email addresses trawled, spammer-like, from the net, and you can make that useless.
The trouble is that the old-style anonymous informant is filtered by a reporter. There's a choice made, and often the reporter ends up knowing who the informant is. That relationship, and that knowledge, deserves protection.
If I choose to "post anonymously" here, I don't feel I should expect the same protection. This is still me in a public place. If I want that protection, I think I should be sending a personal email to a reporter.
In the past few years a special font has been designed for traffic signs, with the aim of being readable at a greater distance. It apparently started in US Academia, and, from what I recall, seems to live up to the claims.
Google is your friend, of course, but there certainly are websites out there.
The font we use in the UK was designed a long time ago. This is an area where the improvement would be pretty simple, though only on new signage.
There's probably a fat contract in it for a bunch of consultants somewhere. I mean, would you trust anything the Americans told you?
Honeywell are right about the cost of fitting every airliner with protection against a rare threat. But this isn't a cheap answer either. And it still seems to need extra gear on the airliner.
And actually getting these robots to work as advertised is going to be an interesting, and well-paid, engineering problem.
Building robots which will collide with fewer airliners than are successfully attacked by MANPADS could be a tad tricky. And they shouldn't be accidentally falling out of the sky, either. Look at where the flightpaths for Heathrow are.
Age-15 is where the snooping is getting difficult. If, as might have happened here, they could easily pick out the dodgy traffic, it's quite different from reading through everything.
It's a time of transition, part child and part adult, and by that age the balancing is getting tricky.
And previous events matter. It might have been pressure at school over academic performance, but the history was there.
Mind you, I have enough sour memories of teachers that I wouldn't rule out school problems as a factor. Sex has the appeal of being something adults do.
My first reaction is to think of that older staple of DIY explosives: weedkiller and sugar.
Hydrogen peroxide would replace the weedkiller as the oxidising agent.
Tang contains, I suppose, a lot of sugar.
Like ANFO, you'd need a fairly hard thump from the detonator to get it to explode.
I may be completely on the wrong track, but it doesn't sound as chemically crazy as the ideas being pushed out in the early scare-story reporting.
Incidentally, it doesn't need to bring the airliner down to be terrifying. Badly damaged over the North Atlantic, loss of cabin pressure, doubts about the structure, and all the 24-hour news channels: that's a really potent terror recipe.
1000 takedown notices, however broken they might be, are an expensive legal headache. How do you check that the person signing them has authority to represent the rights holder?
And, despite some pretty glaring cases, even some which didn't meet the basic legal standards for the wording, nobody seems to do any checks, and I've never heard of anybody being charged with perjury.
Microsoft have been pushing XP as the OS for this general class of computer, so I'm not all that suprised.
And everyone and their dog sells USB stuff with XP support. Linux, on the other hand, can be a trap. Even "Linux" on the packaging is no guarantee. And, because of that, supporting Linux can be a PITA.
But there is a very comfortable space between no official support, and not being able to easily run Linux. The stupidity is when a manufacturer sells a machine like this which cannot easily run Linux.
The price for the computer is astonishingly low.
Isn't anyone buying on eBay any more?
It's what I'd expect to get for my ancient Thinkpad, with the dud screen (probably cabling fault), on a "spares or repair" sale.
There's something smells a bit funny here. It could be a theft. It could be careless disposal by Charnwood. And, if the Police can be believed, actually charging a suspect can pretty well halt the investigation.
How do we tell that the cheap market-stall laser, or the level from Lidl, is legal if we happen to be going to Australia?
If we don't bring the instructions/packaging, how do those fine protectors of the Australian environment know that a laser pointer is lawful?
This only seems a practical obstruction for wholesale imports.
You didn't need Google and the Internet to find the flaws in the original Chernobyl scare stories. My old Penguin Dictionary of Science was enough.
It's easier than ever to check the basic science of a story. And they still get away with printing meretricious crap. Am I in the wrong job?
How many of the great movies of the last century will be improved by watching them in HD Blu-Ray?
I bought my first DVD player for The Lord of the Rings.
Right now, Hollywood seems to be remaking everything that ever showed a profit. with the latest generation of actors and the latest cinematic tricks and methods. And they're not getting the same talents applied.
And DVD jumped you from the rather low quality of VHS, without having to change the TV. The one I first had hooked up to the DVD player was over a decade old. I look at what Blu-Ray needs to show the benefits, and I can't see it making Bogart and Bacall looking any better than they are.
Will more pixels improve Citizen Kane? Will they improve Laurence Olivier's little bit of Harry in the night?
We have a world of old material, currently still valuable, and Blu-Ray might make it almost worthless because the image quality isn't there for HD.
And Sony and their ilk will be in another frenzy of copyright extension and download hunting.
You have an antenna system which has to punch out a lot of power, and then switch to being a very sensitive receiver.
Trouble is, you don't know when you are going to get an EMP attack. The receiver is overwhelmingiy likely to be vulnerable, listening, absorbing all the incoming energy it can.
So this has to be doing something clever. And it might be a new trick for military radar. A faster switch from trasmit to receive means a shorter minimum range.
I find it hard to believe that a vehicle-mounted Bowman set is too heavy, and consumes too much power for, a military Land Rover.
I've driven ex-military FFR Land Rovers. I've seen the amount of gear they carried, and witnessed the ruddy glow of valve filaments. Too much weight and power?
It sounds as if the Austin Champ was the vehicular equivalent of Bowman. Is there anyone left who can sell us the radio equivalent of the Land Rover?
And "re-imagine" is particularly worrying, while the timing seems rather tight.
I fear we're going to get a bit of a rushed hack-job.
But consider the visual quality of the re-imagined "Doctor Who". And remember that people want wide-screen material. If the BBC is thinking ahead, it'll be produced in HDTV format, and they'll have a version which has some life in the market.
At least they're starting from a good story. But I wonder how they'd handle "Greenmantle"?
(Yeah, the green coat. What did you expect?)
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