Posts by Adam Foxton
652 posts • joined Friday 16th November 2007 13:39 GMT
Re: How is Google able to influence the UK government given it pays no UK taxes!
They pay every penny they are legally obligated to. It's just that the rules say that's not many pennies...
Re: Lunch time
They were reading freely provided, unencrypted transmissions on unregulated frequencies that anyone walking past could have read as well. I still fail to see what was wrong with that legally.
You do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy if you are shouting your details out of your front door.
If they had cracked a single packet of encrypted data, though, they would have been hung up to dry. But they didn't, or at least no evidence was uncovered, so nothing bad happened.
Posted in Drone to deliver beer-as-a-service
GPS grid?!
That better be augmented by some serious differential positioning; having my beer delivered to within 5m of me is likely to result in about 100 people getting to it before me...
The net-on-a-pole solution sounds good, though- with a QR code or similar tagging the top the GPS can guide it in and a camera can then position it perfectly to drop the beer.
Using a system like an oilrig escape chute would help it land safely, though a little shaken. Or a funnel-shaped net.
I give it 2 festival deployments before it's hacked to carry suspicious packages from person to person...
Re: Eric, fixed that for you:
In his defence, Google Streetview goes round once every few years- I think they just started their first update after however many years its been up- and captures maybe a dozen frames of anywhere near your house and all within a minute or so. They also take images down if you raise privacy concerns.
A drone, or collection of drones, could provide 24-hour live coverage of your house. That is substantially more intrusive and targetted- a whole other ball game to Streetview.
I'm not sure if Streetview is creepy or not, but having a drone watching me would be far, far unnerving than me appearing in a photo on Streetview.
Surely at least the Third time?
After all, PocketPC/WinMob were out for years before the iPhone and still did most of the stuff modern phones do. Just not as fast or with a nice UI.
Re: For those just knowledgable enough to be dangerous.
If they build it in orbit, it'd start its journey at the relevant escape velocity and accelerate from there.
You can tell Jobs is gone
He'd just have pushed on, got on with it and built the worlds best Office building. Now cook is in charge theyll compromise and compromise until it's utter crap. And still over budget.
Re: So MS lobbying to protect their cash cow and keep Google out
At the moment, the Pope isn't a Catholic.
Apogee did this years ago
Fish thought patterns are "Swim. Swim. Hungry" and eat anything alive and moving near them, though they prefer heroes.
Re: hmm
Well, I mean, I mean, can't we board it up or, you know, put some plywood over it or something?
Re: Flexible phones.... why?
If it's bendier, it's also better for use-cases where it's better to wear or implant a phone. Not a day-to-day scenario, but an improvement.
*your comment from 1985*
What possible use it a Mobile phone over a regular phone? Regular phones do a perfectly good job and there's always a phone box around anyway
Turns out you can't always see the point of something when it's invented; it's up to the customer to determine if what you have is what you want.
Re: wow
Of course they have their own rainforest, it's where they manufacture the paper for their books!
How about a halfway point?
DDOS is legal, so long as youre only using people at a keyboard hitting refresh. Want to take down a company? Use an army of people so youre showing a significant number of dedicated protesters.
Using software dedicated to doing this is more akin to building a wall around a building- it'll stay up forever and the people can wander off so arent actively taking part of the protest- which would be illegal.
Anyone else
See the smiley face in the 'Fjords' picture?
You do now! The colossal formerly-oceanic Face on Mars, they'll call it :D
So essentially
Its useless for headphones if theyll ever be worn near, say, a zip? Or while in an aircraft- take a look at youtube to see what Gallium does to aluminium. Network cable would find itself rendered useless if stretched, too (differing resistive/capacitive properties would really screw with the signal properties). And you couldnt keep a bundle laying around the house because if they got hot you'd end up with heavy metal poisoning.
I really hope this doesnt catch on...
Re: "i said it all a million times,."
ZModem.
I think I see where you're coming from, but it's utterly wrong. You've seen a 2MW generator and thought "hey, if I spin that shaft I'll get 2MW!" then thought "Hey, you know what spins really well? An electric motor."
Unfortunately the electric motor will have to put more than 2MW of power into the dynamo to get 2MW of power from it. This is because as you spin the rotor of the dynamo the resistance to movement builds up more and more; spinning the dynamo shaft inside the coils of the dynamo creates a magnetic field which acts against the motor you're using to drive the dynamo shaft. You can't get rid of this field; it is this magnetic field growing and collapsing that pushes the electrons through the wire and so creates an electrical current.The faster you spin it the more resistance there is.
If you think you can do it, build a smaller model. Even a model that produces no excess power but spins itself forever would be worth approximately all of the money in the world. You would become an overnight billionaire, worth substantially more than the oil companies who'd really not like you (but to whom you would pose little immediate threat). Maplin or RS (or even eBay!) would be able to provide you with an appropriate motor, dynamo and other components to give it a go.
Re: Graham Bartlett
You can't arrest a bot.
However, that bot is run by a department in a company. That department has a head, and he can pass the buck to the CEO of the company.
If MS provided the filters it may be possible for the CEO to pass the buck to MS. And then some upper-middle-management type ends up in prison for a while. Or maybe they'll see their chance and kick Ballamer behind bars, allowing them to get on with improving as a company.
If MS didn't provide the filters for the company, then the bot-operators are at fault and need to figure out who to point the police towards, i.e. who was responsible for the Bot at the time the offence was committed.
Re: Todays target...
It's described in the film as 'small, but particularly dirty'. This implies that it will produce a moderate sized bang but a massive amount of fallout. Think of it as a bunch of nails wrapped around a bottle of coke with some mentos in it. You'll get a small, briefly dangerous explosion followed by a wide spread of dangerous leftovers.
The radioactive fallout covering the gold would prevent anyone from actually removing the Gold from the vault, meaning it's off the market for the next 58 years. The heat from the blast would have embedded some of the fallout in the gold, too.
Given the immense upheaval that this would cause to the US goverment and world markets, they'd probably just wash the gold and melt/recast it again. The fallout would float to the top or sink to the bottom and could then be removed to make it 'safe'. This would be massively expensive but with a 10x rise in the value of Gold- when they're unable to access the markets for it- it'd make economic sense.
That's not what you worry about
it's Google.MIL that you worry about! The patent war with Apple is about to go nuclear :D
Another crossover... with a twist
Bring back Colin Baker, McCoy, Eccleston and Smith if you must... but the real story is Peter Davidson and David Tenant.
Both already met in a canonical TV episode so the newer audience is already at least aware of the older Doctor. Both are still alive and, with a bit of timey-wimey hand wringing the age gap between his time as the Doctor proper and now can be explained.
But, crucially, David Tenant is married to Peter Davidson's daughter. And David Tennant / Georgia Moffett now have a daughter together (and a son).
You've had "The Doctor's Daughter", now you can have "The Doctor's GrandDaughter". With the Doctor's actual granddaughter, as well as the Doctor's actual Daughter! Properly written this could be (a) a good episode and (b) the cause for a never-again-seen nerdgasm/mindfuck that will set the Internet alight for a good long time.
That is some expensive Steve Jobs memorabilia
When I read the price, my first reaction was "Oh wow, Oh wow, Oh wow"!
<tumbleweed>
Too soon?
That's the point of the !Bong! posts.
At least, I REALLY hope it is...
Posted in WTF is... Li-Fi?
Re: So...
Point one:
Security through obfuscation is NOT known to be crap, at least not in this instance.
To explain: With Bluetooth or WiFi your neighbours can see your traffic (assuming you're in a regular urban/suburban environment). They can't necessarily read it- you'll have encryption turned on- but they can see it. And breaking encryption is just a matter of time/processing power anyway. You can even outsource it to the Cloud these days.
With an IR network, your neighbours aren't even aware of your network- or at least can't see your data. Those above/below you have inches of concrete / wood / plaster and carpet between your network and them, and those across from you can be blocked by closing windows / shutters. I'm sure there's a range of glass coatings out there to block out IR as well, so for most 'home' applications you could even have the curtains open.
On a smaller scale, say touch-payments, it would be enough to have a squishy O-ring seal around the photodetector, or have it in a box (same idea as some Chip-And-Pin pads that have a 'mask' over the top).
Compare this with NFC cards which can be read through a pocket- or RFIDs that can be read from many feet away.
No interception of your wireless signal means there is NO external access or interception. That is a proper physically-secure wireless network, and on top of that you can add further security.
Point two:
Bluetooth (class 2) broadcasts over a sphere up to 10m in diameter. IRDA has a beam width of 30 degrees (less than 1% of the covered volume and a 'standard' range of 1m (though according to Wiki the newer standards include longer ranges).
Also, Bluetooth seems to drain power even when not being used. IR just sends data when you want to send it and receives it when you want to receive it.
So yes, it'll be lower power.
Point three:
If you have 3 IR LEDs in a known arrangement any mobile phone nowadays should be able to give a full 3D position fix just off the camera. So could be deployed to provide a low-cost 'local GPS' system for use in emergencies.
Or, more likely (and more profitably), you could have an Augmented Reality display like a dancing leprechaun in front of an irish pub. All while beaming the menu and current drinks promotions to you wirelessly- without interfering with the broadcasts of the shop next door.
Yes, this requires a bit more infrastructure in the real world, but then so does owning a Website or adopting NFC or printing up QR codes.
Point Four:
Nearly every gadget in my house (and, amazingly, car) has an IR remote control. With IRDA back in smartphones you could control your various devices just using the IR connectivity rather than using bluetooth/wifi as modern TVs etc seem to want you to.
Point Five:
IRDA is nowhere near good enough for a broadcast infrastructure like TV or mobile phones and I'd not claim it is. Even for wireless headphones it's not as good as BT.
But as an addition to a mobile phone, it's better than a lot of the currently "in" things. And even helps with advertising, providing location-specific location, etc.
Point six:
IR is far superior to LiFi, because, amongst other things, it doesn't need your lights to be on to use your Internet at home.
Rant re-stated!
Posted in WTF is... Li-Fi?
So...
it's Infrared- as used in millions of devices for decades? But with visible light? And slower? And your lights need to be on to use your LiFi device at home? If you'll excuse the pun in my sarcasm, that sounds Brilliant. There's nothing I like more than having some irritating light at the side of the room letting me use my new Wireless keyboard, or playing computer games in a well-lit room so my phone can sync.
Which retard thought this up, and how long will it take before they come up with the "revolutionary" idea that they could use an invisible wavelength of light for it?
One of the massive advantages that visible or IR light comms have over WiFi or Bluetooth- or even NFC- is security. You can have broadcast wireless data comms all over a building- and keep the contents secret by closing the blinds. Want to make an IR pay-wave system secure? You get coatings that would scatter any 'leaking' IR and stop it from being intercepted.
Plus it's almost certainly lower-power than Bluetooth for 'normal' speeds. And at Gigabit speeds is almost uncontested in the wireless space.
And using an IR one would mean you can control your TV/SkyBox/etc without needing the daft WiFi/ Bluetooth combination my Samsung supposedly-smart-TV requires.
tl;dr: IRDA FTW, LiFi Sux, Rant over for now.
Posted in Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Amazingly enough
I was playing this earlier today!
Sat in a boat which is itself sat on the equator, there's nothing better to while away the hours than Nazi-shooting. Except C&C matches, but the old work's laptop won't run it :(
Excellent game, almost makes up for the lack of pints on this tub.
A fix for the Latency issue
would be to TUNNEL THROUGH THE CORE OF THE EARTH ITSELF! *maniacal laughter*
Rather than free
couldn't he just sue for actual damages (they'll be neatly logged in his iTunes account, I imagine) and have Apple enforce a new naming convention? Call them Freemium. Jobs himself said that changing App names wasn't difficult, so how hard can it be?!
Free should be free, or at worst ad-supported.
Also, any game that can't be completed (at least the 'main quest' with the more complex games) without payment should NOT be described as free. Because it isn't. It's free-to-a-point.
And after that, anyone who doesn't disable the micro-payments (previous poster gave instructions) should be more or less responsible for their own losses.
Re: Terrorist communications
Or, you know, just talked in person about it? Clearly we should close all pubs and bars and ban all public gatherings!
Re: Scottish independence.
As an Englishman living in Scotland, and as a human being- so someone with no faith in Salmond's ability to run a country- this is still something that would make me vote for independence.
And that's a thought that makes me want a stiff drink!
Change your product's name
it's not that big of a deal.
And for once that was a serious suggestion- rename it "the iPad US4G" or "4G USA" or something like that. Or even "iPad + [major standard it works with]".
And stickers are NOT cumbersome. Why I have a sheet of them here, complete with (possibly apple-inspired) rounded edges.
Posted in Oz billionaire says CIA backs Greenpeace
Saying Greenpeace would have government backing on some things- not mental.
Saying the CIA would deliberately use underhanded techniques to achieve their aims- a given.
The USA funding undesireables to achieve their own aims... yeah, that'd never happen...
If he DID say it was aliens etc he'd be a nutcase. Saying Greenpeace was entirely funded by the CIA would be crazy. But that Greenpeace has received some funds to further an aim that supports the US Economy? It's not THAT outlandish, is it?
Posted in Boffins render fibre obsolete
Re: Old news...
You do know that you can light a lightbulb without wires in almost any home in the UK, right? Just take said lightbulb and stick it in the microwave.
Given the nature of some of his work (Tesla coils and stuff like that) it's pretty likely that he just stumbled across a similar effect- a high frequency current induced in the wire filament.
He wasn't tapping into the Earth's neutrinos, he was just using the same bit of physics that lets you heat a Carbonara in 3 minutes from chilled and sit and watch pictures broadcast from a nearby tower.
Re: Progress :-(
Isn't it just Apple that don't have user-removeable batteries? Every phone I've ever owned (just bought a Samsung Galaxy Note) has certainly had them!
"Science.. er.. uh...
finds a way."
It might also have something to do with
about a billion companies around the world making- and selling- Android phones.
And those Android phones are now outselling the iPhone, suggesting that the total profit they're bringing in is going to be pretty much on a par with Apple.
And standing in a line isn't good User Experience. It's a sign of stock shortages, poor staffing levels and/or the need to drum up publicity for a product to make it sell. Again, WITHOUT needing people to wait in queues Android is outselling Apple.
Only Apple could have 'standing in a queue for 16 hours' as a plus point!
Example- I recently bought a Samsung Galaxy Note. Took me- from getting to the store to walking out, new contract and phone in-hand- under 45 minutes. THAT is an excellent user experience.
I went onto the Internet and was able to use it's web browser to browse regular web pages without daft 'missing plugin' icons. THAT is excellent user experience.
It took about 30 seconds to download my Google account data- without having to connect the device to anything. Again, an Excellent user experience.
To be fair to them
Just think how long it'd take to get out there to put another quid in the meter!
It's been pretty well documented
that Jobs was a pain to work with. Same with Ballamer and a lot of other high-level managers.
The design of every famous Apple iProduct was done by Johnathon Ive
The technical work and design behind the first Apples was done by Woz (and probably the other one). Further designs were done by other engineery types.
The OS that Jobs brought with him (OSX) was taken from NeXt- with the core based on BSD and the rest done by paid programmers. It was then given to Apple's larger pool of programmers who did more work on it.
Jobs wasn't a designer. He was a manager. Most importantly, though, he was almost certainly the Worlds Finest Marketeer.
Said as an aside
potentially in jest, to an ancillary character who was asking about some big secret of the Doctor's that he was about to tell the surgeon (Grace?).
...please tell me no-one took that as Canon?!
Non-violent video games
with a similar set of objectives. Say, comparing a regular FPS with Portal. After all, you can still call bullcrap if the 'non-violent' game being played was (say) Pong and you were comparing it to Deus Ex.
Voyager's code:
10 keep going
20 goto 10
Say they're moving at the same speed as a UH-60
that's 180mph max. Supercar speeds, rather than jet-fighter speeds. So reactions aren't too much of a problem assuming you've got good visibility. And you would- you'd have a pretty up-to-date terrain map. Fly above the height of a streetlight and there's not much going to change from one hour to the next. The space directly above my street, for example, barely changes. And above the nearby dual carriageway? Nope, nothing above the streetlights for a good long time until you hit thousands of feet and start getting occasional aircraft. So they'd be flying through otherwise unoccupied space.
ROVs use Sonar to see what's around them and how far away things are. They use LBL/USBL/etc for knowing where they are in relation to the LBL array.
So what you're saying
is that getting 3D images from static pictures is impossible? Or that you can't georeference static pictures? How about knowing where you are in the world using GPS (with INS providing a higher update rate)? Oh, wait- it'll be the HMDs with headtracking. Those will never happen. Yeah.
Maybe your problem is someone navigating using a 3D map?
Maybe your problem is with the idea of 'not talking over comms' to cut radio comms emissions. I'd have thought that not deliberately creating any radio emissions would have done a good job of cutting radio emissions, but hey- that's just me.
The helium-chilled fuel was a bit of a stretch, I'll admit. The insulation would be pretty bulky. And the meta-materials bit may be another stretch.
Aside from the chilled fuel, perhaps you'd like to enlighten me about what's impossible or even massively hard about it?
* Stereophotogrammetry is a common trick- there are even FOSS programs that'll do it.
* Showing a 3D environment is done every day by millions around the world.
* Georeferencing maps is pretty simple, so lining up your 3D map with the real world would take very little time.
* GPS and INS tracking is done every day by... well, by a handful of vehicles. But it's still done daily.
* I'm pretty sure turning off the radio and radar would cut down on the EM emissions pretty significantly.
* With a satellite link, there's nothing stopping the map from being updated 'live' with data from a UAV.
Aside from the chilled fuel and sound deadening, It's barely even DARPA's normal level of science-fiction project.
Once they're no longer in-transit, they can turn on the whole sensor suite/open the windows and start shooting.
And it explains the use of the term 'Jedi'- you'd be flying 'with the blast shield down', relying on something other than your own eyes to tell you where you're going.
No EM emmissions?
Can't be THAT hard to get it down really, really low with techies like DARPA. Paint it matt black, dump the heat into the fuel tank or a tank of liquid nitrogen (or even better liquid helium cool the fuel tank- after all, we're not talking amateurs on limited budgets here!), with a vent setup that releases gas only when it's at ambient temperature. It's dangerous and expensive, and difficult to engineer, but seems like it'd work beautifully.
Then drop active Radar, Sonar, LIDAR, whatever. It's totally unnecessary for a night-time raid on a building; the building's hardly likely to move, is it? So you use your spy satellites and use multiple photos from multiple angles/positions, feed that through a computer program/team of boffins and get back a georeferenced 3D terrain map (potentially even with other details gleaned from the spy sats overlaid). Then use the accurate military GPS, an INS and a bunch of accelerometers to give you an accurate position fix. Stick the map up on a HMD that shows you where you're looking at. You can now see the terrain as clear as day, despite potentially having no windows and it being night time.
Similar technology is already employed in some high-end subsea ROV systems, so it's definitely feasible.
If you need more up-to-date imagery (say, live IR footage) or the possibility of a 'call off' signal, either mount a suitable camera or have a UAV do a flypast and get the relevant data sent to you by satellite (with a receive-only dish on the 'copter, naturally). It coming from a satellite means that they can only know that there's someone receiving something in a thousands-of-square-miles area.
Comms emissions can be kept low by... well, by not talking over radio until you land. Pretty common sense, that one. Remember those telephones with wires from the last century? Using tech like that (using lower voltages and over STP or even fibre rather than regular phone cable to keep external emissions down) you can get internal comms that are basically impossible to see with a radio receiver and yet are again clear as day to the users. External comms would be receive-only.
As we're talking DARPA, how about some mad science in the form of some sort of vehicle-cladding in a material / meta-material that works like the frequency doublers for lasers? A glance at the physics says it looks like it could work for a sound wave as well as for light... and there's no need to make the engine silent when you can knock the noise up >120kHz so you're not even annoying the local bats! Smaller, faster-rotating, more-bladed rotors would provide a totally non-helicopterish sound from the rotors, too.
Now the 'traditional' stealth bit- shape it and build it from appropriate materials to screw up radar. Cover the rotors with a fine radar-absorbent mesh.
So we've now got a helicopter which, although massively expensive to build and run, is capable of producing little or no heat (at least until the liquid He runs out- give it a big tank!), flying at an entirely reasonable speed very quietly (at the very least with a non-helicopterish sound) and which produces no radio signals for navigation or communications.
Have I missed anything? Except my mad-scientist calling in life? :D
Do you own a cat, or have any intention to ever own one?
No? Then you're fine. :P
Just wait until the mainstream papers get a hold of this- there'll be people using 'THE BRAAAAIN WOOOORMMS!' as a legal defence, 'Holistic Medicine' shops selling expensive water that fixes or neutralises the parasite, etc.
I may just be being daft here,
but wouldn't it be cheaper to just sling up an ultra-secured-at-hardware-level fibre optic network, utterly separate from the Internet, for the purposes of controlling and monitoring massively sensitive equipment?
Control of things like power stations etc should never, NEVER, be put outside a tightly-controlled group of people in a few, very specific bits of the world anyway- so there's no need to have (say) WiFi access. Or access from home.
Posted in Man builds smartphone dock into arm
You're surprised at Apple?
They're the company that made infamous "you're holding it wrong". How do you think they'd react to a person wanting to have it mounted in their arm?!
Posted in Apple gets patent for ‘unlock gesture’
Lots of different logos?
How about 10 of them, arranged in a 3x3 grid with a single central low one? Tap in the correct code- which I'd count as a gesture given the broad nature of patent-language as it involves a predefined motion of the hands and fingers- and you gain access to the phone.
Actually, didn't WinMo have the option to unlock screens from back when it was PocketPC?
This has prior art going back years. Back when Apple were making colourful plastic toys rather than black-and-silver toys.
Posted in El Reg in SHOCK email address BLUNDER
I assume
that 'Lessons will be learned'. That the person in question wasn't named implies that they won't be 'reconsidering their position' too soon- probably okay for a simple list of email addresses and names.
Thanks to El Reg for being honest and informing us about the existence of- and the scale of- the problem.
I hope the affected will be notified?
Actually,
isn't this what Patents were designed for? Halliburton Energy (no relation besides a relative briefly working with another halliburon subsidiary years ago) will have gone to tremendous effort to create a very accurate model of the world, performed research and done work to figure out exactly what research had to do. They'll have put a LOT of time, effort and money into it. Oil industry simulations are expensive, massively complex things.
So they've applied for a patent to limit the ability of their competitors to see it and say 'oh, so THAT'S what we need to look at!' and create a copy of it. As far as I can see, that's basically what Patents are for. Without this patent being possible, there'd have been a lot less drive to actually develop the simulator. So in this case, it's driving innovation- they know that with this patent they can prevent their opposition from creating the same simulator.
With commercial software it's different; it's software designed in itself to make money. This is a bit different- it's made with the intention of making something to make money. So it is patentable. Otherwise you'd not be able to patent anything designed on CAD- "it's a chunk of code".
Sorry to be the pro-patent devil's advocate kinda guy here, but I think the courts made the right decision from the sound of this article.
