They will have to in future

If the law is changed so that explicit consent by both sender and recipient is required, that removes Phorm from a grey zone and puts it well and truly on the illegal side of the line.

Note also that either sender or recipient (depending on where you view it from) is not necessarily a customer of the ISP doing the interception. Note further that it may very well be a big company with deep pockets, and very unhappy that its customers communications are being made available to its competitors, even if only in the form of targeted advertisements.

(I'm aware that many readers including myself regarded Phorm's past activities as already on the wrong side of that line, but they're moving the line much further in our direction! )

Goodbye Phorm, at least from the UK. And good riddance.

All drives are prototypes!

Every drive you buy today is a prototype, in that it has not been tested for as long as you hope it will last. They do accelerated ageing tests (run them hot, or alternately too hot and too cold, shake them, power them up and down every ten minutes ...), but that cannot fully substitute for the passage of several real years. By the time you and the manufacturer know it's reliable, it's also obsolete.

I had a batch of PCs with same-batch Samsung Spinpoint drives. After three of those drives turned into bricks at power-up, with no prior warning signs from SMART, I replaced the other four pre-emptively. I don't hold this against Samsung, because I have experienced or heard of bad-batch problems with every other make of hard drives. However, it was my first brush with sudden-brick failure. All my previous failures in the SMART era either gave advance warning through SMART, or were recoverable using ddrescue.

Seems plausible

Seems plausible. The PAYE deadlines are long gone. The last week of the last tax year ended on Friday, for weekly reporting by employers. The last month ended on Thursday. There's nothing I'm aware of which has a deadline for filing on 5th April - it's more a date when one has to finalize one's financial actions, for reporting on 2010-11 tax returns due in months to come.

If the upgrading causes someone a delay reporting on the first week of 2011-12, there are probably few knock-on consequences, and no problems with nodding through a deadline extension.

Thinking about this, it's also a good justification for an April 5 end of tax year compared to December 31. If this is the quietest time, it's also normal working days rather than bank holidays. Cheaper for getting the upgrades done! But because of Easter, "First Tuesday in March" (say) would be even more sensible.

Flawed software design?

What's so hard to design software so it can handle multiple input devices and methods, and/or switch mode if a mouse and/or keyboard is available rather than just a touch-screen? With a bit of luck convertible touch-screen netbook-replacements will catch on, and software that doesn't work appropriately will die in favour of software that does.

Nothing wrong with this hardware design (though it's a bit pricey).

I'm sure there's space in the marketplace for a purely passive non-dock (i.e. a stand) with a wireless keyboard and mouse. However, that's rather less convenient if you do want to use a keyboard while you're on the move, as opposed to just at one or two locations (say office and home) in which case you'd buy two keyboards and mice and carry just the tablet around.

A big difference

There's a big difference between retrieving a properly sealed radioactive source, and trying to tame a huge radioactive mess of unknown proportions and composition.

You'd know what to do if one of your sources was dropped, and there's no realistic scenario in which you'd end up accidentally ingesting it. You're not going "off the map". Whereas for those brave Fukushima workers, treading on a submerged sharp object or getting trapped by shifting submerged debris could be fatal. (There have already been radiation burns inflicted by "hot" water on the *outside* of their protection suits, one doesn't want to think about a wound getting bathed in it).

Hmmm ... about as dangerous as dealing with sewage? If you mean dealing with sewage down a partially-collapsed sewer, that may be a fair-ish comparison. You've heard of antibiotic-resistant septicaemia, Weill's disease, cornered rats, and working under tons of crumbling masonry? Even so, I think I'd choose the sewer over Fukushima at present.

Not true about solar

"Those exist because things like Solar and Wind require massive subsidies to break even. Look at the feed-in tariffs - 3 to 4 times what you're paying for your electricity, with a payback period of approx. 10 years at that massively subsidised rate. Without that subsidy Solar and Wind power dies on its arse."

Maybe true for solar in the UK at present, but certainly not globally. Solar PV is market-competitive today in Arizona. As the technology advances, it'll come to dominate in all places with high insolation and low cloud cover. In Europe, it'll start in Spain, or we'll put our solar power stations in the Sahara and build VHVDC transmission lines. (If the natives can ever attain political stability, that is! )

BTW nuclear electricity is also 3-4 times more expensive than burning coal, if you ignore or deny the cost of global warming caused by CO2 emissions. So, solar is competitive with nuclear even in the UK. However, before the world can approach 100% solar, there's also a big overnight energy storage problem to be solved.

The holy grail of Solar power is a high-efficiency panel material that can be produced in a continuous process, like paper or plastic sheet, rather than by laboriously slicing up ingots of crystalline semiconductor. At that point vast economies of scale kick in on the production and deployment fronts. Such panels do already exist, but so far require very scarce elements (notably Tellurium) so cannot scale up to square miles . Better ones in the labs.

Wind power probably is a dead end.

No easy answer??

"if these other designs are so safe, why aren't we using them already?"

We are using them already. (The old ones haven't yet been decommissioned, for economic reasons.)

"if you were sure of this old design, and you're sure of this new design, what's the difference in actual safety?"

"Passive cooling". That the new designs don't require electric pumps to be continuously powered, in order to avoid a melt-down. The old design assumed that a days-long power outage couldn't happen. The new ones don't make that faulty assumption.

Is this too hard for the man on the Clapham Omnibus? Probably not. The average journalist? Well, that IS a hard question!

Indeed - very dangerous

The ability to transmit as little as one bit backwards in time leads to such a dramatic increase in computability, that meatware would almost certainly be obsolete a few seconds later. IT might also be able to bootstrap ITself even if one didn't allow any direct control or sensing of the closed timelike information path by a computer.

What happens thereafter depends on whether IT has any use for the rest of the planet / solar system / universe.

Possibly, IT has already happened, and IT cares about us inferior creatures. Atheists beware.

Compared to fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels are not harmless. Petrol, for example, contains a few percent benzene, a dangerous and lifetime-cumulative carcinogen. Every time you catch a whiff of petrol at a filling station, that's a little more benzene causing transcription errors in your DNA for the rest of your life. That ultrafine-particle soot coming out of a diesel is little better. Coal is full of polycyclic aromatics and tars, not unlike that which a cigarette smoker inhales. And when oil refineries encounter an earthquake or other serious accident, carcinogenic combustion products are vented to the atmosphere in uncounted tons.

That's without mentioning global warming.

You probably know of someone who died of anthropogenic cancer. You can't tell if it was induced by the oil industry, atomic bomb testing, Chernobyl, some other human activity, or natural causes. Cancer rates are increasing, but that's to be expected, as other fatal illnesses become curable and the population ages. Nevertheless, some part of that increase must reflect the poisons that we are putting into our ecosphere.

Life cannot ever be risk-free. The risk attached to using oil products seems acceptable (ignoring global warming). Nuclear power? I feel this article is very premature - let's see what it looks like a year from now. And let's make damn sure that any future nuclear plants are *intrinsically* safe. If anything knocks out the power grid and all the backup systems, I want to know that the reactors can just sit there for the next few months without exploding or catching fire. Which this deply flawed 1960s design couldn't, and hasn't. Nowhere on the planet is earthquake-proof (witness New Madrid). They're just much less likely in the UK than in Japan. Ditto tsunamis.

Occasionally poisoning many square miles with radiation for decades or centuries to come isn't acceptable to me. Although there again, if you find out what the levels of chemical contaminants are like near the site of a Victorian municipal coal gas works or ironworks ... someone who did that today would be jailed.

Pad not needed

It's got a USB port. Buy a mouse to connect at your desk when you're doing serious typing. Maybe a better keyboard and USB hub as well. The rest of the time, touch the screen.

I'm assuming Android supports a mouse and extra keyboard. Anyway, if I buy one, It'll be to run a Linux more like Ubuntu or Fedora. This is the design I've wanted for ages.

Libel?

Well, the 20% of the time they get it wrong should create plenty of work for libel lawyers!

I expect the "re-write in the style of ..." computer program is not far off. Just feed it a novel by (say) Charkes Dickens to train it, and off you go.

Fedora?

If you are into self-patched kernels, then shouldn't you be running Fedora not RHEL as your base? (Or a non-Red-Hat distro such as Ubuntu).

RHEL (and Centos) are about long-term stability. If it works today, you can be pretty sure it'll work in five years time, with little maintenance other than applying the security updates. People who want RHEL to be more like Ubuntu don't get this. They'd be better off switching to a distribution more to their taste, rather than complaining. Linux is NOT a Windoze monoculture!

Cube of speed

Drag goes up as a higher power of speed than the square. AAIR the cube, at sensible road speeds, although any power law is an approximation to a complicated function that depends on several variables including vehicle shape and ambient temperature. (The drag curve goes almost vertical close to the sound barrier :-)

There's a second significant fuel saving. When traffic is dense, a lower maximum limit reduces the tendency of traffic to bunch up and then to suddenly slow to a crawl (requiring waste of energy in braking). That's why the variable speed limits on the M25 are a good thing on the green front.

Dinosaurs not actually extinct, just evolved onwards.

Neither Crocodiles nor Coelacanths are dinosaurs.

However, Dinosaurs did not become completely extinct as we are taught. The big and land-bound ones did. Small flying ones survived. We know their descendants today as birds. So you might argue that humans do, in fact, still share the planet with dinosaurs.

I've never investigated whether there is any good reason for designating birds as a separate branch of the tree of life to dinosaurs. Obviously, they are distinguished by feathers, and in the case of almost all modern species, the lack of teeth. But there are fossils of link species, with feathers and teeth, pre-flight and flying.

For some value of "Lives on" that I don't recognise

Microsoft have never understood security, nor "doing the right thing" (aka real engineering).

NT 3.5 was a halfway decent operating system. But this is Microsoft we're talking about. A place where both security and engineering take a distant third place to Marketing.

The graphics wasn't fast enough, so they ripped holes in the O/S's security architecture to produce NT 4.0. What they did thereafter in the guise of Windows 2000 and Windows XP doesn't bear thinking about. They made such a mess of it that it was completely beyond repair after XP, and they had to start over.

Hence ... Vista.

VMS does not live on at Microsoft in any shape or form. It was being horribly tortured from day one, and crossed the line from life to zombiehood well before Windows 2000.

Thunbnailing *is* a sort of autorun

Automatically generating thumbnails is a restricted sort of autorun - it runs an executable, possibly containing known bugs, on input files under the control of an attacker. It's therefore an unsafe thing to do by default. Unsafe, but useful.

There may be sane half-way houses. Refuse to thumbnail any removeable device. Refuse to thumbnail any NTFS oir FAT filesystem. Refuse to thumbnail any file not owned by the user. Absolutely refuse to thumbnail if the user is root.

The trouble is that most non-root users are going to open a file with a reader to see what it is, even if the system doesn't automatically thumbnail it for them. Also they can unknowingly download an attack vector off the internet without involving a removeable device. Their web-browser is probably far more of a danger!

At the end of the day, at least on Linux your user is an unprivileged account. (Also just about possible on Windows, but very many users do everything with Administrator privilege on their own PC, whereas you have to be actively perverse to do that on Linux)

And ...

3. Don't buy anything branded Sony. Not a console, not a PC, not a television, not a CD, not a battery, nothing.

4. Let Sony know you are boycotting everything Sony, and why.

I will buy nothing with the Sony brand on it for the rest of my life.

If you aren't completely outraged by Sony, just imagine that you'd bought (say) a Ferrari. Imagine that three years after you bought it, when you took it in to be serviced, Ferrari "upgraded" it so it couldn't be driven outside the UK, nor on any road not authorized by Ferrari. Imagine that a smart guy told you how to get around this artificial restriction. Imagine Ferrari then retalliated by suing him, and anyone else who passed on this know-how.

Couldn't happen? Think they'd get sued into the ground? Think they'd never sell another car?

This is what Sony did to the people who used to run Linux on their Playstation (and they seem to have gotten away with it)

already happened ....

... several times ....

Troll?

Or clueless?

If it had been just a credit-card-sized passport, I'd not have been concerned. It was the Stasi-style database of everything that a secret policeman might want to know about everyone, complete with huge fines for failing to inform them every time you changed anything, that finally turned the UK against them, after the man on the Clapham Omnibus finally saw through the veneer of misleading statements and out-and-out lies that ministers were spouting.

lt wasn't just the security services that were going to have access. It was over 100,000 government employees. Of course, not a single one of them could conceivably be bribed to make unauthorized searches, to make unauthorized changes, or to copy the whole database onto a Terabyte of pocket USB disk.

I expect that for any idiot who did buy himself into this crock of shite, all their data is already in the hands of organised crime, identity thieves, bunny-boiling exes, etc. and the data-destruction operation now taking place has purely symbolic value to them. Serve them right. (Except for the air-side staff who were given the unenviable choice - give up your privacy or give up your job. Now. )

I recognise that I've had a narrow escape, and will vote for whoever offers the greatest chance of keeping Labour out at the next election, based on this single issue. Compared to the total destruction of my privacy, mere destruction of the NHS and UK higher education pales into insignificance. Yes, I will remember the ID database, four years hence. Thank you for killing it. Here's my vote.

Beter tased than dead

If the alternative is a bullet, then it's surely better to be tased.

I doubt there's any difference in the actual electronics between a taser intended for wildlife and one intended for people. In fact the smaller the animal, the higher the voltage needed to induce any particular current in it. An electro-shock device that incapacitates a human might kill an elk, not the other way around. I read somewhere that a truck battery (24V) can be lethal to an elephant. However, I would guess that a taser is current- or charge- limited, so as to work the same whether it's made a low- or a higher-resistance contact with its target.

Is flash-point relevant?

I don't think the flash-point is relevant to supersonic combustion. Isn't it the velocity of propagation of combustion that matters? If that's slower than the incoming air, the flame will blow out.

Alkanes (propane, butane, etc. ) have quite a low maximum flame propagation velocity. (Sub-sonic? )

Molecules with C=C double bonds have a higher one, as do some C-H-N compounds.

I'd expect that if you were willing to countenance a special fuel rather than a standard aviation fuel, then it would be something containing double bonds, or nitrogen, or both. It would somewhat inevitably have explosive tendencies if it leaked.

Grammar aside ...

Is the one paramecium that leaves twice the size of the two that entered?

Supernovae do matter

It's not healthy for our sort of life to be within a hundred light-years of a supernova. When galaxies collide, it triggers the formation of new stars. The heavy ones live fast and exit as a supernova. This might well matter a lot to our distant descendants ... or more realistically, mean that our sort of life on dry land is unlikely to evolve or survive in a cosmologically-recently-collided galaxy.

Betelgeuse, the red giant in Orion, is just about far enough away to be safe (~400 light years). Good thing too, since there is a fair chance it'll go supernova within a few thousand years. Statistically, the incidence of mass extinction events in the fossil record and the probable incidence of dangerously close supernovae are similar.

If you think supernovae are bad, read up about gamma-ray bursters, and pray that whatever gives rise to these events, there isn't one of it it about to go bang in this galaxy!

Probably not

Firstly, it is very unlikely that a pathogen will cause complete extinction of bees. Much more likely it's the bee equivalent of the Black Death. Some bee colonies will survive the infection. The epidemic will run its course and (newly resistant) wild bee populations will bounce back.

The situation with the honeybee is more worrying, because it's a domesticated insect. Its evolution has been guided by mankind for milennia, towards large colony size and docility. In the process, a lot of genetic diversity may have been lost. There's a similar risk with cows. There aren't any Aurochs left. The cow is extinct as a wild species.

Secondly in the nightmare scenario that I'm wrong, many crops don't depend on bees. Wheat, Rice, Maize, Sorghum are all (wind-pollinated) grasses. There are self-fertile varieties of many flowering crops, and I'm sure that we could breed more self-fertile varieties if there were an urgent need to do so. I'd expect humans and their crop plants to survive. (I'm not trying to downplay the consequences. It would be a mass extinction event for many flowering plants and every animal species that depended exclusively on those plants.)

Is there any evidence that the pathogen in question arose because of human activities, rather than by random mutation? If not, aren't we just looking at a natural chaotic process called evolution?