Posts by Christoph
1371 posts • joined Monday 24th December 2007 19:20 GMT
Not difficult
It's very easy for a computer to be cleverer than a human being - when the human being is forced to mindlessly follow a script no matter how ridiculous it is or how inappropriate to the actual problem.
Watch out for foreign governments
"any backdoor would be open to abuse by hackers, including foreign governments"
The government of the USA *is* a foreign government. Why should they have backdoors into software used in other countries, which judging by their past performance they are guaranteed to massively abuse?
Not what I would describe as a good move
Have the cOMICS Group never heard of the Streisand Effect?
No problem
They're in Texas - just sue them because chewing up computers has been patented and the patent sold to a troll.
How much will it cost for this not to work?
I wonder how much money and how many years they will put into this system before abandoning it as not working?
Meanwhile I have for years been able to order a rail ticket online and designate any one of hundreds of stations to pick it up from - all details individually specified down to my seat reservation.
There's still humans involved
"getting humans out of the military equation"
No, there will still be plenty of humans involved in drone operations.
As targets.
Other reasons to grab tham
"it implies that the company being invested in has some tech the alphabet agencies would like to use, clone, or keep an eye on."
Or it has customers whose private information the agencies would like to siphon off.
Re: How are they going to stop cheat-sheets?
I'd expect the details to vary with the subject and the exam level?
But thinking about it they could be even sneakier, unless the examiners jam mobile phone signals.
Photograph the exam paper and send it to a friend (or group of friends). Paste in the answers that they send back.
Trivial with the kind of kit that is currently available. Even more so in a very few years time.
That's not high enough
“we don’t recognise the £90m figure”.
So how much more do they think it is?
How are they going to stop cheat-sheets?
Way back when I took exams, some students would go to great lengths to smuggle in cheat-sheets - a few sheets of paper with important snippets of information.
It is now very easy to get micro-SD cards which will hold 32 Gigabytes of information. They are so small that they can be hidden trivially - strip-searching every student is unlikely to be practicable.
If the students can bring their own devices, just how is it going to be possible to be reasonably confident that they don't have access to more text books than there are in the school library?
Re: Bad security?
Then how do they get to the credit card information? If they can use that they have a method of getting the keys, so that method could be used for other information.
I'm not a security expert, I don't know how they access the keys safely, but they seem to have some method of doing so. One possible method would be to use a separate machine to decrypt, passing only the cipher text and clear text between the machines.
"worked out some kind of tenuous IT link"
A live webcam so you (and we) can check on what the dogs are doing?
Re: Does it have a name?
Star A Star. It's that Lensman's headquarters, obviously.
It is not their choice to make
Yes, this field is very new. Yes, it might well be to those authors' advantage to have the books scanned. Lots of people think it would be very good for the authors.
Lots of other people disagree. It is very new. It isn't settled yet.
The authors might be right, they might be wrong, it might be much more complicated than that.
But it should be the authors who choose! It is their work. It is their livelihood. It is their creation.
For many of them that creation is far far more than just a job of work, it is their dreams given shape.
It is for them to choose by what they personally consider best for what they personally want to happen to their work. It is not for Google to decide by commercial force and lawyers.
Air bearing?
That second video, he says that to him it's magic. To me it's a frictionless bearing or track - has anything been done with that?
Bad security?
That reads like both the passwords and the credit card information were reversibly encrypted.
That's needed for the credit card but should not be done for the passwords - they should be one-way hashed.
You check the input password by hashing it and comparing the hashes, you should never be able to retrieve the original password.
And these days, with so many reported breaches, you should encrypt everything. They already have all the code set up so it would be trivial to encrypt the email addresses as well. I'm not sure about best practice for the user name, I'm not a security expert - but encrypt everything else.
Re: Much greater discovery masked by headline
How is "the end of the universe" the same as "the centre of our universe"?
"derivative products relating to Bitcoin fall squarely in our jurisdiction,"
Have they explained how Bitcoin falls within the jurisdiction of the USA?
Err, hang on a minute ...
"What the public sees and reads is with rare exception, fantasy mixed with a few kernels of truth."
Have I got this right? They are going to extreme lengths to keep their work and their functioning secret. They are doing everything they can to stop the public finding out what they are doing and how they are doing it.
And now they are complaining that the portrayals of them are unrealistic?
I'll wait for the next version
I want one of the atomic clocks they're designing now, which they reckon will be accurate to better than one second.
That's not one second in X million years, that's one second in 13.8 billion years. Better than one second accuracy since the Big Bang.
Call me a taxi
"chip-enabled jeans which, when bonked on the floor, automatically call you a cab"
You're a cab!
Re: And none of this new-fangled broadband to overload the webforms neither
No, you have to use a connection that is RFC 1149 compliant.
"I do not hesitate to say that having an ICT workforce more representative of humanity must result in technology which is more humane"
How to promote gender equality - describe one gender as intrinsically inhumane.
If I were to claim that anything designed by women was automatically inhumane I would be deluged in abuse. And quite possibly charged with a criminal offence for hate speech. So why is it acceptable to make such a claim about men?
"in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense."
Tough luck Signor Galvani - making frogs legs twitch doesn't help secure the defence of the United States!
Re: Hurrah
If someone wanted to damage the United States, but couldn't attack them militarily, and so decided to undermine and sabotage all the things that keep that country prosperous and dominant - how would their programme differ from that of the Republican Party?
Re: Just imagine...
Just imagine if the first study linking smoking and cancer was the only such study done.
So it doesn't work? So what?
We know it's ineffective. We know it doesn't work. We know there's easy ways round it. We know it will wrongly block innocent sites. We know that there will be creature feep - it will be extended to cover more and more and more, every time there's a scandal.
But we're still going to do it, because the Daily Mail told us to.
Re: Nowhere Legislation
Of course they wouldn't pass a bill that meant the end of global terrorism. They wouldn't be able to keep passing more laws to abolish basic rights and impose oppressive security, their friends would lose all their lovely profits from supplying all those counter-terrorism services, lots of spooks would be out of work - it would be awful!
Quite - I really don't want to carry around enough power to jump start a car in my trouser pocket.
Yes, I was wondering about that. Maybe they'll just patent everything in ASL, and Yanks with hearing problems will all have to learn BSL?
Obvious isn't obvious?
"so there's an ongoing race to establish the most intuitive physical articulation for common actions"
They want to patent the gestures that are the most obvious ones for people to use for particular actions. And they want the 'invention' of these gestures to be patentable on the grounds that they are not obvious.
Well, they've got to keep all those nasty Latinos out of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles
And what happens when the information is wrong, or out of date?
Are they going to be updated every time one of those apartments changes occupant?
And another one
Another possibility - Mitchell Burnside Clapp's 'Black Horse' concept for Single Stage to Orbit. It used mid-air refuelling.
It sounds unlikely, but it's apparently quite practicable. It used standard existing technology as much as possible - and Mitch pointed out that the US Air Force does mid-air refuelling up to hundreds of times a day.
Maybe they could even add Liverpool Street Station to the public transport information?
Re: Commercial power generation potential?
If it doesn't put out more usable power than went into it, then what is the point?
Why not use the power to accelerate the propellant directly such as an ion engine? Why bother with all the extra gubbins at all?
ObJoke
I thought the missing link between monkey chatter and human speech was YouTube comments.
Re: Devious and Disgusting
As I understand it UK law says you're guilty if in the court's opinion the subject looks underage, even if you can prove that they are not.
(Presumably that means someone could be done for photographs of their young-looking wife?)
Very dangerous indeed
The real nasty with this is that the person who sees it may assume that other family members have been viewing the pornography. The results could be horrible.
Posted in Has Europe finally passed Peak Disk?
Something wrong there
"23.6PB in 2012"
That can't be right. That would mean that the 3TB drive I bought last year was over a ten-thousandth of the total capacity shipped. There were several of that model sitting on the shelf in the one store. And a production run of only ten thousand even of that one model doesn't sound very economic.
"Either that or the death penalty, but where the profit in that?"
Lots and lots of profit. You keep them on Death Row for decades while the lawyers argue back and forth.
What is the point?
The value of big data is mining it for information by subjecting it to whatever crafty analysis you can think up.
But if it takes months to simply read the data in for analysis, the eventual results will be hopelessly out of date.
The data that's valuable in and of itself without all that analysis is only a miniscule proportion of that data heap.
Also very useful if they can get the scan done quicker using this due to seeing immediate results.
Besides giving greater throughput of scans per machine, a friend gets very bad claustrophobia when she's put in those machines so the less time it takes the better.
Hi! The car that you are driving is running low on fuel. There's a suitable garage a couple of miles ahead on the right.
And your sales for this month are a bit low according to this spreadsheet.
Oops! And while you were reading these pop-up notifications you ran through a red light and squashed a couple of pedestrians who were too busy reading their google glasses to notice you coming.
"Women in technology need consistant [sic] messaging from birth through retirement they are welcome, competent and valued in the industry,"
Is she saying women don't need to actually *be* competent? From the moment they are born they must be told they are welcome and competent and valued?
Odd. Us blokes have to spend a couple of decades after birth learning how to be competent. And if we want to be valued we have to actually do some valuable work.
And if just occasionally some time between birth and retirement someone happens to make a casual remark to us that isn't totally welcoming then we have to suck it up and get on with our lives.
I've know several extremely competent women (including one who was almost frighteningly competent!). Not one of them assumed that they were competent by right of birth and could sit back, do nothing,and demand to be made welcome.
Fine while it lasts
Their policy on patents sounds very good - but what happens if they get taken over and the new owners don't give a toss?
Re: Still missing
Good point - they should have done the Mariana Trench when they had the chance recently !
List your devices
Tell us exactly what electronic devices you are carrying, down to individual memory cards and even SIM cards - but without being allowed to check first.
Now tell us exactly what coins you are carrying in your coin purse, down to each individual cent - again without checking.
If you can't tell us you're obviously a spy.
But then if he was spying, why on earth would he try to transport electronic files physically? He could trivially encrypt them, upload them somewhere, and put the link on a message board.
Pathetic
£90,000 for phoning up strangers and threatening them? The buggers should be in jail for that one.
