Posts by Allan George Dyer 2547 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2009
First time I visited the USA, there was no official to hand my departure card to as I transferred from a domestic to int'l flight to leave. Eventually, airline staff said they'd pass it on. If they didn't, will this facial recognition get me arrested for overstaying 20-odd years?
@Kevin McMurtrie - "Nobody is forcing anyone to use any blacklist."
Well, most users are unaware of what blacklists their ISP or IT team is using. Most ISPs would refuse to give details to ordinary customers because of "security". Maybe the customers would approve, but it isn't fully-informed consent.
@Dick Kennedy - "Really? This really happened?"
Yes, of course it did, many, many times. It's trick number 17 in the Luddite Conspiracy Manual, which is secretly delivered to believers fighting the encroachment of evil technology. Each copy is painstakingly illuminated by a secret order of monks. You haven't heard of them? That's how secret they are.
A carefully planned application of an appropriate amount of heat under controlled and supervised conditions, versus gung-ho chucking on any amount of fuel, igniting it and being shocked at the result.
It's not just the folk of CT that could learn something, the latter approach does appear to be prevalent at many levels in the USA.
@dieve - "(e.g. just pumping some water to the roof)"
That depends on how high and strong your roof is. If you have a 7kW rack that you want 15 minutes of emergency power for, then that's 6.3MJ. You would need to raise 1 tonne of water 630 metres to store that.
You could design in a saltwater crater lake for your volcano lair, but I don't know what you'd do with the sharks when there's a power outage.
Huh, don't believe it. I'm perfectly sane.
Seriously, why does John McAfee still get tagged as an antivirus guy? He resigned from McAfee Associates in 1994, so that's a quarter century. As for making people crazy, he was pretty unstable all along, from the accounts of him pulling out his gun during business meetings.
@Brad Ackerman - "Designing the Enigma to never encrypt a letter as itself is a boneheaded move"
It was a design feature that allowed the same device to be used to encrypt and decrypt. Without it, you'd need two devices, or a much more complex device. I suppose the flaw was not understanding the enemy's cryptanalysis capability and how the weakness could be exploited. If they had, they could have compensated by strengthening the system in other ways, which they did, to some extent.
@Michael H.F. Wilkinson - "Donning my tinfoil hat: this might be a decoy, without any back doors"
Isn't inserting a back door, or searching for one, a bit of a waste of time when they've also released Bombe code?
[wanders off shaking head sadly, to get coat]
Unless it's a double-bluff!
[exits quickly]
@eldakka - "Who defines criminal nature? Which countries laws are used as the basis of this? Who chooses that?"
Where I sit, currently just outside the Great Firewall, those questions are a big concern. A few years ago, inside the Great Firewall, corruption led to the tainted baby formula scandal and babies were dying of malnutrition because melamine was added to milk powder so it passed the testing. People who spoke out were arrested for the criminal offence of spreading rumours. At the moment, I enjoy free speech; soon the local lawmakers will vote on making disrespecting the National Anthem a jailable offence. Do not complacently think that your liberal democracy is immune... China has recently pressured airlines into changing how they refer to destinations in Taiwan, China's economic might is growing, and businesses make... business decisions.
I have been very impressed with Jacinda Ardern's response, and I hope she can follow through on tightening gun control. Australia's gun control laws made it very difficult for the gunman to get the weapons for the attack in his own country.
@Mark 85 - "The only sure way to tell is require the Boeing board to fly on the plane."
Amendment to flight safety regulations for all commercial flights: Two first-class seats must be reserved and occupied by a Board Member of the aircraft manufacturer, and a Board Member of the airline.
M7S - 'as a relatively non-techie, I can be confident that there is no way that at any stage in the future the door lock is able to copy my key. No "footprint" is left'
Why would you be confident of that? How about a lock that accepts a Yale-type key and, instead of having pins split at different places to match up with the barrel, it electronically measures the key and the embedded processor compares that to the authorised key's measurements. From the outside, it could look identical to a Yale-type lock. This would be marketed to property-owners who need to change their locks frequently, e.g. for student accommodation: "Don't change the locks, issue a new key and update the lock electronically!"
Then, criminals get hold of these adaptable locks. One night, you come home and find your key doesn't work. When you leave to find a locksmith, the criminal approaches, removes the fake front door with adaptable lock that was covering your real front door and uses the duplicate key cut from the measurements taken by the adaptable lock and transmitted wirelessly to his key-cutter.
But the SCSI cables were either ribbon cables wide enough to drive a car along, or cylindrical and thick enough to act as a main support cable for your local suspension bridge, but less flexible. USB-C pales i comparison.
@Spoobistle - "we know that the existing systems of protein and nucleic acid metabolism must have been optimal at the point of life's origin"
Optimal or just lucky? There might be a large number of viable alternate metabolisms, each with a tiny chance of arising in the primordial soup, but the first one to arise and reach the replication stage, wins.
@Robert Helpmann?? - "It’s not that there are so many craters there, it’s that there are so many geologists there"
You mean it's like crop circles? Bored geologists are wandering out after a night down the pub and casually digging a fake 20km crater beneath the ice in Greenland? A lot more plausible than this Chicken Little "rocks from the sky" theory.
@Six - "I suspect that UK BS1363 sockets may have been adopted but not ring circuits."
HK uses ring circuits. The "intended for use on radials" doesn't make sense: no sane wiring authority would adopt pin sizes that matched BS1363, but chang the plug and cable sizes. The body of the plug looks too small, so wouldn't meet the requirements for preventing small fingers underneath, and the flex looks smaller than 13A rated. Why have 13A-rated pins in a lower-rated circuit standard?
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