Posts by Jerry

Stage Managed

I've actually seen an excerpt of said video and to my mind it's pretty obvious this is a stage managed 'schlock horror' publicity stunt.

Principal incriminating fact is there is a third party involved who pans the camera as required, independent of the actors.

Either they hired someone to film their varied orifice slurping for private consumption, or this was a planned setup to try and gain a few milliseconds of world fame.

Given the history of Paris Hilton who hawked her own video for all it was worth, I'm inclined to believe this also is a deliberate own-goal.

Also a major usability change/bug

For what seems to be either zealot induced or sheer laziness they have changed the way that multiple tabs open.

In the old firefox you could have a bookmark folder and in it 'open all in tabs'. The default behavior was to get rid of all your existing tabs and open a new bunch from the folder bookmarks. This was ideal for people like me who have bookmark folders of related content that it is useful to open at the same time, such as 'news' or 'weather' .

The old system had an option so that you could make the new tabs additive - i.e. add onto any existing tabs you had open - as compared to the default of opening a new set and ditching the old. This additive option meant your tab line got progressively bigger but suited some people. (I think Opera does the same thing)

The new version has changed the default to 'additive tabs' and has disabled the option to replace tabs.

This is a major operational change and quite insensitively done. At the very least they could have changed the default from 'replacing' to 'exclusive' but kept the option of either. However some zealot has decided to force it's personal preference on quite a few millions of users.

We are not amused Mozilla!

Synthesis Technology?

Given GPS uses atomic clocks from multiple satellite transmitters to fix location on a metre scale, couldn't the same technology be back-fitted into the marine navigation systems?

In the end it's all about time / phase from a known source. With GPS that is satellites with atomic clocks and a published ephemeris. If you used existing terrestrial transmitters (LORAN etc) with atomic clocks you wouldn't need an ephemeris. The transmitters are pretty fixed after all and they have access an awful lot more power than any solar powered satellite.

Asides from the odd propagation anomaly, the earth based transmitters could do positioning to GPS accuracy at a fraction of the cost of satellites.

Experimental Results?

Presumably if there is an effect on Dolphins by various types of Sonar then this should be measurable?

As an example, observe a pod of Dolphins then blast them with Sonar. Do they change behaviour? Does this change have any statistical significance compared to unblasted Dolphins?

I can't imagine it would be hard to get some data. As an example, bird scarers are routinely deployed. They work - birds fly away. What is the equivalent data for Dolphins? Especially so as fishermen would love to have a means to scare off Dolphins from their catch and would use it legal-or-not if it worked.

I expect all this research has already been done many times over. What do the boffins say? (Actually this question is directed at Lewis. As a journalist I'm sure he has covered the relevant material and can come up with a concise answer)

Solar heating - Subsidies are Evil

I live close enough to the equator to use solar hot water (In Orstralia if you care to know). I've been using it for at least 20 years.

The economics have been well and truly thrashed out. If you get enough insolation and are prepared to maintain the kit for long enough you get a positive cash return. In my case I have the pre-requisites so I am making a (marginal) return on investment.

Solar HWS is recently subsidised by State and Federal Governments, and surprise, surprise the price has risen to exactly absorb the subsid(ies). Consumers pay virtually the same now with subsidy as they did pre-subsidy.

Ironically, one of the blockers to whole-of-life breaking-even is the Government subsidies. When I need to replace a system the price is astronomical The Government in its wisdom doesn't subsidise repairs or replacements so I pay inflated post subsidy prices.

If the subsidy disappeared I would be in a much better financial situation, the capital cost would drop and the sales volume of systems would be mostly unchanged because the price would drop to free market values.

I break even by doing my own repairs. If the subsidy-induced price inflation disappeared I could hire someone else to do the job and still break even.

Now I must also point out that I am unusual. Most solar hot water systems are scrapped within 10 years and never, ever provide a positive ROI. This is due to many factors but generally they are seen as unreliable and expensive to maintain. Reliability is not much different to gas or electric systems but maintenance costs are huge.

So overall, forget the subsidies, allow free competition, and allow the market to determine true value of technology.

Been there, done that

I am a longer term visitor to Australia from a fortunately snake free country (Godzone)

In the time I have been here I have had a reasonable share of encounters with the local snake population. I have to admit this is because I do stuff that no self respecting Aussie would do - such as going into the bush. For the most part Aussies are stay-at-home urban dwellers whose most extreme exposure to the bush is a barbie at the local park.

Given that, I

- Have sat on a dugite - one of the world's 10 most deadly snakes. Both it and I were somewhat discomfited and agreed to disengage forthwith. In my case that was levitation against the laws of physics.

- Have trod or nearly trod on numerous snakes, including death adders and tiger snakes (c.f. world's ten most deadly snakes etc). In one case I demonstrated that hop, skip, jump was totally feasible whilst remaining in mid-air.

- Live right next to the world's biggest concentration of tiger snakes (c.f world's deadliest etc etc) where the local council signs say 'warning snakes in grass'.

Now this may seem somewhat unpleasant, but basically being bitten by a snake in Australia is big news. It very rarely happens. The Aussie snakes are very deadly and do kill people but it is the exception rather than the rule.

Now if you go to India for instance, the cobras are not very deadly but kill a lot of people. This is because people have a lot more likelihood to meet and be bitten by a cobra - rather than Australia where the snakes are deadly but the humans are scant (asides from Godzone immigrants)

A Tale of Two Mice

I recently bought two wireless laser mice for my laptop. A logitech 470 bluetooth unit and the nearly identical logitech 450 non bluetooth wireless mouse.

I didn't intend to buy two mice. My brand sparkly new laptop had integral bluetooth so I bought the 470 bluetooth job. After a bit of frigging around I got it joined to my account on the XP SP2 laptop and it started working for a day or so. Then it stopped working. I swapped it out for another 470 but no joy. The laptop bluetooth was working as I could (slowly) pull pictures off my phone and the mouse worked using my linux system. So it was some nasty XP bluetooth mouse driver problem.

I then bought a bluetooth dongle and that worked with the 470 mouse, but what a carry on. Every user on the laptop had to register the mouse individually and repeatedly. My system became slower. It was a right pain in the bum all round.

So I gave up on bluetooth mice.

I went to the shop and bought the nearly identical but not bluetooth logitech 450 wireless unit. It just worked. No bother, no drivers, no registraton, no association, no messing around with different profiles and no speed loss. Plus they say up to a year on one set of batteries.

The new mouse is identical in size and shape to the old one. And it is cheaper.

Does anyone want to buy a near new logitech 470 laser bluetooth mouse? Going cheap.

Fixes aren't allowed, only abstinence

I have noticed a change in the radical climate change rhetoric of late (or should that be the mainstream rhetoric)?

The basic theme is that ways to do things 'better' are discouraged. This includes such things as biofuels and nuclear energy. In a weird way the ultra climateers and old oil have joined in unholy alliance to squish any system that maintains the same energy consumption but is perceived as 'greener'

Today you can see old oil and climateers singing from the same hymnbook about the evils of biofuel and 'risky' nuclear. Old Oil wants to sell more oil. climateers want to stop any viable alternative that uses a CO2 cycle of any sort.

In the end climateers want to massively reduce energy consumption. This will inevitably require drastic reduction in humans. (Old oil will tend to disagree with this point of view, just not now)

Reading your article, the solar shield's main theme of slowing global warming falls into the category of allowing existing energy use but without reducing energy use. Hence taboo to the climateers.

I recognize the anomaly about the particular climateers being pro biofuel, but put that down to their (typically) confused thinking. It isn't mainstream.

Re Better designs

The exhaust on jet turbine helicopters is quite low energy because they have designed the engine to extract maximum power out of the exhaust gas to drive the blades.

By changing the efficiency of the engine they could get quite energetic exhausts but the problem is that there would be less overall power and more importantly the overall efficiency would drop. Simple mass hot gas flow has about 1/4 of the thrust of the same gas driving a turbine / gearbox / propeller, so you would use 4 times as much fuel for azimuth control with hot gas thrusters.

There is a possibly more efficinet alternative with using a ducted fan driven by the gearbox or perhaps a turbofan element in the basic engine design.

AC130 Anyone

If you want a highly mobile artillery system, look no further than the AC130 aircraft gunship.

Designed for close air support the wonderful beast carries multiple gatling guns as well as 105mm howitzers.

This aircraft is in action today, amongst other things raining death on the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan.

A good video of it in action is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpyFMEKQyrk

It's not a risk. Really!

If it actually was a danger to aircraft then every al-quada operative in the country would be standing outside airports flashing lasers at aircraft. It's a lot cheaper and easier than mixing TATP in the bathtub.

The reality is that it is a very low risk of causing an aircraft crash and a quite high risk of getting caught.

I base this comment not on just a couple of incidents in UK and Australia, but many years of commercial release of 'high' power lasers all over the world, including trouble spots like Chechnya, Pakistan, and so on.

On a purely statistical basis, before any fatal crash occurred you'd expect multiple incidents of pilots being incapacitated but the plane still being landed by the co-pilot.

This hasn't happened (or at least ever been reported).

The experience with high power lasers used for light shows hitting aircraft- which started this whole laser thing off years ago - is that the retinal energy exposure is too small to cause damage even with multiple watt lasers.

Prior Art

There is a long history of 'artistic' lasers and perceived hazards. In fact the major danger to aircraft has always been artistic rather than handheld laser pointers.

For once Wackypeia has a reasonable article on the subject. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasers_and_aviation_safety

In summary, people shining powerful lasers in the sky need permission, and aircraft need to employ minimum safe distances from them. For all this there are published standards.

Sanguine

I'd venture to suggest that rather than "I wouldn't have been hugely sanguine about that" You would have been exactly the opposite and in a state of extreme exsanguation.

(For the standard British educated persons, exsanguation means bleeding heavily while sanguine means imbued with / full of blood (resulting in cheeriness - c.f. humors))

Non CO2/Energy fertiliser

A lot of fertiliser is generated with no CO2 or energy input. This is by the traditional use of crop rotation with legumes which have nodules that generate Nitrogen via bacteria in root nodules (rhizobia and their ilk)

My missus is in the business of breeding better bugs to make nitrogen fixation more efficient over a wider range of soil types and harvesting cycles. At present this is by use of legumes, but the research is to make this happen directly on the 'money crops' without needing a legume crop intermediary.

In practical terms today, unless the farmers have totally abandoned crop rotation, a lot of fertiliser will be generated by legume crops without CO2 or energy input.

It's evidence innit?

The DNA match is used for two purposes.

Firstly to identify possible suspects based on a DNA match between a crime scene sample and record stored elsewhere. This use simply says to the investigators that so-and so should be investigated as a possible suspect in a case. They will then get lots of other evidence to make a case. Usually this will be more than enough to prosecute without any reference to the DNA match.

The only problem here is that they may have a number of matches using LCN techniques so the investigator's workload increases.

The second use is where the DNA match itself is presented as primary evidence. This has many difficulties and it is unlikely a purely DNA prosecution would succeed. The defense could raise all sorts of arguments related to possible cross-contamination, statistical likelyhood etc. etc.

DNA is evidence, no dispute. What is in dispute is what weight it has in a prosecution (or defense) case. What is in particular dispute here is LCN as opposed to full sample DNA.

I am pretty certain that LCN will be mostly used for screening and supplementary evidence purposes while full profile DNA will be used for the same purposes but may also be used as a lead item of evidence. If DNA evidence is used that way I don't see a problem.

@ Andrew Simmons - Regurgitator

O.K. You have a bunch of URLs and you also say any opposition to your point of view needs a peer reviewed paper and an invitation to Oslo.

What *precisely* do you have to add to the discussion on global warming (aka climate change)? i.e. Peer reviewed papers, published articles in Nature, that sort of thing.

What scientific contribution do you make?

Myself? No papers, no peer review, but at least the humility to acknowledge that.

Rusty Labour Market Economics

Once a long while ago I worked as a Labour Market Economy computer modeler. The pay was good and so were the free lunches. While I disdained actually learning economics I did pick up on some of the basics. First: There are three classes of employment - Employed, Unemployed, and Not in Workforce. People move between each possible state with relative ease.

Governments boost employment by moving people out of unemployment into employment, or shifting them out of Not In Workforce to one of the other two. Overall it doesn't cost Governments much as they already either pay unemployment benefit or numerous subsidies to Not In Workforce people ( pensioners, Mums etc). In fact boosting employment is a net benefit to Governments due to new tax income and less outgoings.

So first point is that there is a resilience in the Labour pool that can start working as required. This happened quite visibly in WWI and WWII when lots of women moved from Not In Workforce to employed at the local munitions factory or in land work.

The second effect in WWII was increase in productivity. People worked harder and longer for the same money. The was de-facto an increase in workforce. This latter effect goes some way to negating the broken window theories.

Now Al "Weatherman" Gore is saying that by going to alternative energy we boost employment. He also seems to be creating the atmosphere (no pun intended) of a war against climate change. It may well be he is right about the jobs. They will appear and the people to fill them will sprout like dragons teeth.

How to pay for these jobs? Obviously taxes like you would never believe on all 'traditional' energy sources (borrowing from overseas appears unlikely)

What is the likely effect of this? Simply look at any recent major wars. Governments will break-even or make a profit. Employment will be boosted (at the expense of unemployment and NIW). We personally will have less disposable income as we are paying for new jobs. After a while other jobs will cease to exist because we aren't buying the goods any more, prices will fall, recession will start and at the end of 5 years we will throw out the existing Government, stop the war and try and resume as normal.

-OR-

Someone could invent cheap ways to make energy so that it makes sense to buy cheap energy rather than expensive energy. Not by up-pricing existing energy but by make new cheap energy. Almost a win-win situation except for the inflationary effect of lots of spare cash not being spent on energy (you win some you lose some).

What Gore should really be doing is following my mantra

"I'm not Green I'm Cheap"

And making abundant low cost energy for the masses.

GPL the DNA / fingerprint base

This whole fingerprint DNA thing is rather one sided. The authorities have copies of DNA and fingerprints of a rapidly increasing percentage of the population, mostly of the criminal kind but more and more of the unfortunate 'collateral damage' of investigations as well as immigrants, visitors, etc.

So basically 'they' have you where they want you, a neat index entry in their database to have and to hold till your death do you part. 'They' have exclusive control of this information due to their various privacy acts. So the power model is 100% to 'they' and 0% to anyone else.

Now imagine a radical proposal. Take away 'their' exclusive hold on people. Make the DNA and fingerprint database a public item. Everyone who has had to submit to the the fingerprint / DNA profile held by the authorities should immediately (anonymously) publish their own copy.

The effect is that 'they' no longer hold an exclusive private copy of how to ID you, and 50 million other people now have the same information (adjust for country of origin). This immediately devalues the secret information that 'they' hold. Anyone can now reproduce your fingerprints. Given relatively trivial technology, anyone can now reproduce your DNA.

Does this help the bad guys? Probably not. Conviction based on DNA or fingerprints alone is almost certainly unsafe. Bad guys will always be convicted on more substantial evidence.

Does this help Joe public? Yes. DNA and fingerprints are a major intrusion on living a private life with 'the system' keeping unnecessary tabs on you and open to abuse when someone gets a bright idea on what else to do with your DNA samples. If you publish, you devalue the stuff they are so keen to keep. If enough people do it, perhaps they will stop and go back to a kindlier, gentler age where most people are presumed innocent and there is no need for the state to intrusively monitor the entire populace.

Does this mean you will be convicted of a crime you didn't commit because some pratt used your DNA/fingerprint ID? No. Convictions (at present) require substantive non DNA and non fingerprint evidence.

The real worry is if DNA and fingerprints becomes the exclusive property of 'the authorities' and you can be convicted solely on DNA or fingerprint evidence. Then you only have to worry about who, working for the authorities, has it in for you. History shows this sort of arrangement *will* produce bad outcomes.

5% overall isn't that bad

5% ethanol in petrol is not that hard to do and could probably be done with waste plant feedstock rather than growing the stuff specifically.

For Diesel, quite a lot of it is already single digit percentage biodiesel. This is because with the new low sulphur diesel they need to provide a bit extra lubrication and the best way to do that is to blend in biodiesel. Here in Oz biodiesel is not made of plants at all - it's a tallow based process made from rendered animal remains - pigs, horses, cats etc.

Next time you tank up, Put a Pussy in your Peugeot.

Slash Flash

I've been plagued for years by bad flash apps. Usually pretentious and/or annoying, but almost always buggy.

Flash just isn't stable. Even without vulnerabilities it has memory leaks, and resource leaks that case the flash player to crash after a few minutes to a few hours.

Mix that with the usual Godawful programming and you get your web browser zooming up to 100% CPU because of some crappy ad that the site you visit has inserted/had inserted.

The solution - at least for firefox users - is the wonderful flash blocker FlashBlock (natch). Now I get nice neat rectangles where otherwise there would be some annoyingly animated ad zooming across the screen to block what I am reading. In the event I actually want to see the flash I simply click on the placeholder and voila! Technicolor excrescence to met my hearts last desire.

Bloody Aussies! They nicked our Pavlova - now they are nicking our infernal machines

The self-same thing was invented and executed (pun intended) in New Zealand around 25-30 years ago.

In that case the bloke chained himself in a frame with 22 rifle and arranged a timer delay triggered by when he pulled a plug out of the wall. He then spent a significant amount of time unable to move and waiting till the timer triggered.

NZ has always been an unrecognised leader in the world - look at how the publicity machine of the Wright Brothers stole rightful recognition from Richard Pierce for the world's first powered manned flight: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pearse

Asterisk is not typical of IP PBX

If you have a look at the architecture and coding you will see that asterisk is not typical of IP PBX software.

Starting with the architecture, it is not designed for large scale business use. It has basic limitations on call volume because it routes all calls through itself either in B2BUA mode with SIP or in translation mode between say a SIP call and a digium adapter.

The whole design of Asterisk started out as a piece of software to handle FXO/FXS cards and do basic PBX stuff for a small office. It has growed somewhat since then and has plug-ins for every possible protocol and service. Its architecture really is not suited to large businesses or for use as a public IP telephony provider.

When you look at the code underneath you can see it has evolved 'like topsy' as well. In some ways I am very surprised that multiple vulnerabilities aren't discovered daily.

Now if you want to get into serious IP PBX, look no further than SER or SIPX-PBX. SER is used in massive commercial deployments, as is SIPXPBX (in commercial form). A break of one of these systems would be much more interesting. Especially SIPXPBX which seems to have very little maintenance and development other than some audio subsystem tweaks.

Probably easier to break is the fork openSER which goes through rapid cycles of development. It is not, to my knowledge used in major commercial deployments.

For the commercial systems, obviously CISCO, but their focus is on their own non-SIP format. Broadcom/Broadsoft is also pretty big in the SIP area and a break of their system would be of interest.

The rest - to my limited understanding - are a hotchpotch of proprietary digital systems eg NEC and Siemens. They sell a lot of kit but whether cracking them is worthwhile is open for discussion.

What about multicast?

Multicast was invented so that people could 'tune' into a 'channel' and receive the same content as everyone else at the same time. The network effect is dramatic.

Only one stream of packets is sent by the the originator. The clients select the 'channel' they want to watch. The network infrastructure (See CISCO) is intelligent enough to route the packets (and copies) to every consumer. What this means is that the network carries the burden of duplicating and distributing a video stream, not the source.

This network content/load management goes all the way to the DSLAM. Effectively every exchange DSLAM only gets one copy of the video and then redistributes it to all clients wanting to watch.

All that is required is to treat the video stream as a broadcast rather than an on-demand video.

When the providers go to individual on-demand scenario the network will immediately fail. There is no duplication of data so the demand will immediately outstrip the capacity of the network to deliver.

if the BBC was serious it would schedule multiple 'channels' and work with IPSs to provide multicast enabled networks.