It does genuinely save money

Having worked for a motor insurer in the past and still being slightly in touch with these things, the claims rate for telematic equiped drivers is *much* better than an equivalent book without (i.e. using all of the age, conviction, postcode, car data thats typically used to rate).

the conclusion of the underwriters seems to be that telematics makes people drive more sensibly (go figure) . The other thing telematics boxes often do (as opposed to the phone based software options) is include a couple of highly calibrated accelerometers (sp?) so that in the event of a colision the insurer can reconstruct the impact, this then leads to much better allocation of fault and the ability to better dispute certain personal injury claims.

Insurance is a scarily competative industry and for large parts of the time the under writing elements of insurers will lose money, so yes this should drive down costs as it should result in safer driving and less spurious claims.

My exchange isnt affected...

...apparently. However I've been having exactly the same issues, new BT connection due in just over a week now.

Missing the point of 3d printing...

3d printing is ideal for low volume runs and you can print via services like shapeways.

Having accurate 3d models for a phone case could open up a range of cases that you'd never produce in volume - and I'm thinking work type applications. E.g. a clipboard which has the phone case as part of it to hold it steady, a case with loops to allow it to be held securely by a lanyard, etc...

For some corporates it could also be attractive to be able to design and print their own custom case with logo.

Privacy issue

From a "Police" perspective this would probably require PlusNet to retain a lot more logging information. At present for general network access all they would need to do is log which IP is assigned, under a NAT arrangement they would need to log individual mappings as just knowing someones private IP wouldnt be any use when asked who connected to dodgy site X.

I know there has been a significant uplift in logging over the last few years - but this does feel like it would be another step up.

interesting read accross to Nokia

Given that this has just settled for about 20% of projections, and that quite a bit of analysis on Nokia's recent value has been based upon its patent library.

Ewoks: Battle for Endor

FTW :)

CRB / List99

I've no idea if it will apply to this guy, but a CRB check is just that "a check". As I understand it, the employer then has to determine if any positive disclosure is reason to deny reject the candidate. Its cases like this combined with freedom of information however that then end up with the occassional headlines about "X number of convicted sex offenders working in XXX".

Teachers are subject to list99 which isn't quite the same:

http://www.education.gov.uk/aboutdfe/foi/disclosuresaboutchildrenyoungpeoplefamilies/a00274/how-many-individuals-on-the-sex-offenders-register-are-exempt-from-list-99

Applications

I have wondered about apps myself - I have probably a dozen paid for apps, but I probably use the free ones more. Also having reinstalled my Galaxy S a number of times, I dont always put the same apps back - there are functions I need but not specific apps.

Oddly the major barrier to me changing these days would be does the phone support the 2-3 games that my kids play on the phone, and that could be addressed simply be keeping the old handset and letting them play with that.

The other thing that's suprised me so far is that nobody seems to have considered an "Android Emulator" or compatability layer, you can run one on a PC for development purposes so why couldn't a Win Phone run one locally and allow access to an Android App library. All the code is public domain after all (and it would be an entertaining inversion of WINE). If the app library was that important I can't see this being that hard to do.

drawing conclusions

"It would seem that in one important respect at least, science to date has been predicting a future grimmer than will actually be the case."

This seems a really bold conclusion given the data presented - my guess is that changes like this will be slightly chaotic to the output of the model rather than linear as you suggest.

all that this shows is that a particular part of a model is wrong. Its not until the system as a whole is modeled that you can say what the overall implication is - I'd suspect that it will be extremely dependant upon the layout. At the extreme consider a ring shaped dry area encircling a damper area, this change to assumptions could presumably lead to the damp region being progressively dried out over a period of years. If it then turns out that the "damp" area is where we currently live and grow food thats not a good result.

For what its worth I'm personally of the opinion that most climate models are probably overstating the effects at present, however if you're going to report something like this please think about your conclusions. This shows part of a model is wrong - not what implications are on a systemic level.

grrr

@Mike - yes the paperwhite is the one I'd buy, I've been watching Kindles for the last couple of years and thinking they're just not quite what I need in terms of contrast (albeit the touch is *very* close to my comfort level). The paperwhite looks perfect for what I'd use it for.

" Nevertheless, the update delivers increased performance and new features in spades"

Not wanting to be picky, but you just reviewed this on new (quad-core) hardware, can you justify the "increased performance" part of this statement? How much of the experiance is based on being able to dedicate a core to UI handling without impact on other tasks (not sure if it does that, purely an example of what it might do).

For most people I suspect they wont care as they'll get this with new hardware - but for a review on this site that does seem to be a major unsubstantiated claim.

Thought I'd messed something up over the weekend - reinstalled firefox twice and still wasnt working so removed it.

this is a fantastic policy

First off - the issue of identifying and stopping benefit fraud is completely seperate from how the benefits are applied for or calculated. So put that to one side.

Secondly, I think the argument about what level benefits are paid at is also completely seperate to this policy. There are arguments both ways on that one.

The main point here (as I understand it) is that under the current system if you are on benefits and want to get back into work, you can end up trapped because if you earn a very small amount/work a couple of hours you lose eligability to specific benefits which in total is more than your wage. Hey presto its not worth (or possible) to take the job.

By having a universal benefit you work out a base entitlement and then remove it in a tapered way as people start to earn - so it should be possible for someone on benefits to do say 8-10 hours a week if thats all they can find or as a bridge from long term unemployment.

How is that not a fantastic idea? The economics suddenly become "its always better to have a job"

Please dont confuse either fraud levels or even the level of benfit paid with what this is actually about.

cant buy Rox???

both my kids play Moshi Monsters and love it, its also nice that its a closed garden so they can email their cousins but I dont worry to much about overall exposure. All in all as a parent I think its a really good introduction to online behaviour.

But I think you're kidding yourself that you can't buy Rox, the CD came with a token for 1,000 rox - as far as I can see its typical for other merchandise to also have similar offers. Maybe not an online purchase - but pester power in a supermarket can is probably a better sales channel here (under 10's generally dont have their own credit card and its easier to persuade a parent to buy a "thing").

Not sure I agree with your headline John

Putting to one side the argument about how accurate the loss estimation is (and that the true rate of breachs will be higher as this is just the detected figure), a key figure from this presentation was that total loss to UK Biz was estimated at £5-£10 billion, however this also needs to be set against a total UK spend on IT Security for around £5 Billion.

do you really think we'd eliminate incidents if the whole of the UK doubled their security spend? We'd sure as hell cut the rate, but I'd be quite suprised if it made even a 50% difference to the overall rate of incidents.

Therefore on a simple cost vs benefit basis UK Biz is now probably spending more or less the right amount for the current threat level

The issues at present therefore are:

a) is the money being spent on the right things

b) are the right incentives in place for companies to get it right (e.g. who ultimately bears the costs for identity theft?)

c) do businesses have any meaningful way to assess the value of what they have spent (this again was something that the PWC guys drew attention to).

So, spend more - probably not, but we do need to spend better.

high fixed costs

whats probably killed them is that they are locked into a load of leases with their landlords who

I suspect whats going to happen is that they get wound up, and then the next day a new company opens (having bought the brand from the admin) and then takes leases on about half the shops at about half of what they are currently locked into paying.

Hey presto fixed costs drop by 50% (got to remember that there are plenty of fixed costs other than rent - but its going to be a large factor for them).

Traction

I tried to put ChromeOS onto a netbook for my mum a few weeks ago - as a concept it seemed ideal, all she really wanted was to be able to view the web and manage a few photos. However up until that point I thought it was a distribution - I then found out that its only really maintained as a source tree and that manufacturers are expected to custom build it for each device (i.e. sort out the drivers, etc...) this meant that I couldn't quickly install it and get it working with wireless. Ended up putting Ubuntu 11.10 on instead which worked out of the box and is great for what my mum wants (for reference I'm not generally a Linux person - I've used it plenty of times in the past and compiled the odd kernel but hadn't installed it in at least 5 years, it was purely because it was the most cut down and simple interface I could quickly load onto the hardware.

Anyway back to the point - I appreciate the idea was for Chromebooks, but as its a different concept I do think they could have put some effort into getting people used to the idea by allowing old hardware to be recycled quickly. This would generate the cost advantage which could then lead to familurarity and then down the line people saying "I want a chromebook" I just don't see this happening from a standing start with new hardware thats as expensive as the other options.

Give them a bit of credit

I happen to be a fan of this product - in a theoretical sense its clearly not as strong as a full 2FA solution, however in practical usage for a regular business person there are other factors to keep in mind (for example its not that uncommon for some business people to write down thier pin on a post it note along side their RSA token).

In theory (using specially crafted grids) it is possible to capture a pattern after two observations, in most normal circumstances you'd be looking at probably 3-4 observations.

There is also the point that you don't *have* to deploy the grid on the login screen, it can be deployed as a seperate soft token (phone or laptop app) under these circumstances it becomes full 2FA - but you increase user inconvienance. In reality the chances are that anyone presenting the grid on screen is likely to be replacing just a regular password in which case it is cleary an improvement. This also has the massive benefit that you can soft deploy a token to a user who is nowhere near an office and may have lost their phone (think DR situations here).

So yes it has practical faults - they all do. But as an general theoretical approach it has a lot of legs and for many users may well be more secure in practice against the threats that they are likely to encounter.

Power storage is key

Of all the tech articles its the ones about power storage that I'm most interested in, forget about the nuke/green debate - if we accept that a large part of our current power consumption is going to move from chemical to electric then is the portable or distributed storage of charge that is whats really missing. I strongly suspect that most research is now aimed at home or vehicle based storage - device batteries are for my money at the good enough stage for most people and heavy users can carry a swapable spare.

As far as stuff never making it to market - yup most of these wont, someone will find a reason why production is harder than they thought, or more likely they'll find an even better way to do it. But there is a very clear trend of inovations in this area.

This really does remind me of e-ink, there was a good 5-10 years of that being demonstrated on small scales before there was an real product that used it. Within about 3-4 years kit like the kindle has become truely mass market and costs are still dropping.

Look at todays electric cars, for them to be usable for me they need a range of at least 5-600 miles and a 0-100% recharge of less than 30 minutes (at shorter ranges I can recharge at home, at full range I'm going to be there a while). I do about 20,000 business miles a year and probably have a 400+ mile day at least once every 6 weeks.

This represents a 2-3 times increase in range and somewhere in excess of a 10x decrease in charge time, they also probably need to bring the cost of the power pack itself down by 50-75%. With stuff like this in the lab I'd guess we're reasonably looking at 4-7 years before its usable for my driving pattern.

My money would still be on ultra capacitors as the long term winner even if they dont hit the same power density as batteries. Mainly because they only appear to require carbon in thier construction (which will make them very attractive from an access to raw materials perspective and because they don't seem to have the same fire risks). More to the point, the biggest thing they need to improve is charge time and capacitors seem to rock there.

Just need to hit the "good enough" and "cheap enough" mark and this will suddenly take off.

military applications

To be honest I'd not be to worried about this from a military point of view - in flight guidance is going to be a lot harder than just thrust, I can't see it being any good for use against military jets.

In terms of targetting a civilian airliner I'd have thought it remains a lot simpler and more reliable to get the explosives on board.

In terms of casulties its ground targets that have the high densities - on 9/11 the aircraft was the weapon not the target.

For what its worth I'd be a lot more worried about someone putting together a guided mortar round and a cheap remote controlled helicopter with a laser designator and video feed. In an urban area this could be very worrying.

big difference with the banks

In principle the banks always have "assets" that exceed their obligations - for example if I owe the bank £10k then they have an asset worth £12k+ (by the time you count interest)

This does of course assume that the banks have made a reasonable allowance for bad debts - but this can be modeled and predicted, its how banks have always worked. They have clearly got it wrong in a big way recently - but that is only because it all got a bit over complex.

the difference is that they only hold a certain amount of liquid capital to repay short term withdrawals as they can't demand the loans back instantly. Even in the worst case the depositors ought to get back their cash - its just that they may have to wait for those loans to pay off over a number of years.

This is entirely different from a company spending clients deposits and then hoping that they can create a future revenue line to make up the difference (this being a charitable view of how many such frauds start). Under this model the organisation doesn't have any reasonable expectation of ever being able to honour those debts.

Probably not going to be a popular post - and I don't work for a bank before you ask, but there is a big difference between stupid behaviour and outright fraud

has me worried

apart from the quotes this really does feel plausible, I wonder if there are security people sat in London going "damn" right now.

getting much more mainstream

whole feature on this in the economist last week - some very cool materials and print jobs can be done and they recon its likely to become fairly mainstream in the next few years.

They talk about some cool features such as printing tungsten hip implants with a honeycomb type effect near the edge (rather than solid like a machined version) so that bone can grow into the implant to improve bonding.

Best pic in their article is a chainmail gauntlet that was printed fully assembled!

Guitar certainly looks cool and may or may not sound good - but as a fabrication technique its looking like this is certainly coming.

Actually the vatican is an independant state not part of italy

@amanfromMars 1 - technically its the smallest sovereign country in the world.

PWC survey

I was there yesterday and would agree entirely - I've been going on an off for the last 10 years and its steadily getting less worth it. I now largely use it as a chance to check on roadmaps for solutions that we already have deployed - although with people like MS now absent even thats starting to have a reduced value.

I think I'll move back to attending every two years - and thats now pretty much purely because I like to be able to quiz the PWC guys after they release their security breach survey (which desipite a number of flaws is still one of the more useful trending surveys to use internally when expressing threat trends and competitor practice). Although given that now they are streaming that presentation live I might not even bother for that anymore.

unfortunatly thats how it works....

for an insurer to turn down a claim they have to have some reason - I've worked for a motor insurer in the past and because of the sums involved they would occassionally spend a lot of effort investigating certain claims.

for a lost mobile the most you would reasonably want to spend checking a claim is £60 (above that you're probably costing more money than you save) - which realistically means a couple of hours of someones time in an office and maybe a check on a database.

as far as apple goes I suspect they remove old models to avoid them being dumped and becoming cheap - its how they preserve a premium brand.

About the only solution here would be for the insurance company to talk to apple direct and see if they could hold some back for claims - even then that might not be in Apples interest.

deep packet

a bit of a simplification but "deep packet inspection" = "application content / advanced protcol analysis"

its as opposed to simply reading the basic IP headers

ultracapacitors?

to be honest my money is on advances in ultra capacitor design - as far as I can see the raw materials are extremely cheap (carbon), they charge/discharge extremely rapidly and they can be made in very thin form factors. The only thing holding them back is power density at present, which from my (massively uninformed) position doesn't seem that different to basic battery problems.

The main thing I like about ultra-capacitors is that I can imagine production being very cheap once the processes has been worked on and at the extreme I can imaging every body pannel being both structural and a storage cell at the same time.

whats not to like?