@Seacook - you're no RF engineer.

(For the record, neither am I but I know a few)

The tighter your filter, the longer it takes for the signal to get through and the higher the attenuation.

The tighter filter also tends to skew the signal more, thus more noise.

Higher attentuation means you need more powerful amplifiers and more sensitive detectors - meaning more noise.

More noise means it's harder to extract the useful data from it and may even make it unusable in places where it would be ok with a less-tight filter.

Given that GPS is a tiny and time-critical signal that's already dealing with a very high noise floor, what do you think they should do?

There is a reason why filters are the way they are, and if the leaked info is true then Lightsquared should never get FCC certification - and would not even get seriously considered in Europe!

I'm not surprised the CEO is pissed off though - that kind of data shouldn't be leaked before the FCC finally tell Lightsquared to go back to the drawing board.

It also probably means that they won't get much more funding, so said drawing boards may be unaffordable.

Yes indeed, which is why I think he's rather daft

He goes on about a "sea of sameness" which the Nokia phone will presumably be better than.

Yet it is almost impossible to tell the difference between HTC, Nokia, LG etc Windows Phone 7 devices. From more than a couple of feet away they are indistinguishable.

This is by design - Microsoft deliberately chose to tie all WP7 devices to a very tight hardware spec and the prevent any carrier or manufacturer from customising it.

There are good reasons for that, and it's a perfectly reasonable idea that could easily work as it means the phone manufacturers and carriers can't screw it up with added tat, as they have previously done with Symbian, Android et al.

Go to www.windowsphone.com and compare the phones. Can you tell the difference? Would you recognise any of those phones if the big label next to it were covered up?

So why is the Nokia marketing drone banging on about 'sameness' being a bad thing?

Windows Mobile is also the worst phonecall maker I know

I've found it to be truly horrible at the business of phonecall making, yet pretty good at the email, and other 'smart' side of things.

Not tried WP7, and won't because of my experience of WM6.x and other Windows CE-based devices (some of them came with a thingy for pressing the rest button. How confident is that!)

My wife has a pretty cheap Android (Acer Liquid Express), and she seems quite happy using it - didn't ask me much, she mostly just tells me to stop playing with her phone and to give it back...

It's really rather good - only thing she's complained about is the battery life because her previous was a classic Nokia, bck when phones had over a week of battery...

MS have previously said that WM6.x is stll around for 'business customers', yet there are no new devices running it, and very few older devices still in production so that's clearly incorrect.

WP7 drops the ball anyway for all the reasons you gave, so my next business phone is almost certainly going to be an Android.

Sure you can! This is economics!

Who said it had to make sense, be useful as a prediction or bear more than a passing resemblance to reality?

More seriously, the global economy might be reducing demand by some amount, but the supply side still can't even keep up with that, raising prices and thus reducing demand even further.

For example, I was in the market for a new NAS array this quarter, but the HDD shortages and associated price increases have meant that I've put it off for a while because I can't afford it at the inflated price.

Under 'normal' supply conditions I would have bought that set of disks, despite the ongoing global economic situation.

Clearly, any BOFH who can find a way of waiting until HDD prices come back down is going to do so - perhaps by applying some compression/dedupe technology or by scaling back a planned project.

Those anti-icing systems you talk about? They are already fitted.

The pitots etc have very powerful heaters in them, and in this case they did in fact clear the blockage on one of them roughly two minutes after they first iced up.

Sometimes the heating can't cope, sometimes it fails, that's pretty rare and why they do have several independent units of each instrument.

The thing I find the most upsetting?

It really sounds like if the pilots done *nothing at all*, just re-engage the autopilot once the instrument deiced, the plane would have been ok and everyone would have survived.

Maybe it really is time to take the pilots out of the front seat.

Climate science itself may not be a religion, but it's being used as one

Climate science is in its infancy - we don't have models that predict, we don't really understand the variables and we don't even know what the variables actually are.

This is all perfectly understandable as it's a rather big system with lots of inputs and truly chaotic.

Unfortunately certain groups have grabbed it and shaken it to bits, forcing indefensible results. In some cases they're even jumping to the completely indefensible conclusion that human action is not just a notable input, but the primary driving force!

- One could accept that human action is a notable input, however as we don't have any reliable models one cannot progress from that statement to a defensible conclusion.

It's an assumption either way, nothing more - thus the positions along the lines of "human CO2 emissions are warming the planet" is a religion.

Aside from that, even those groups that have come to the conclusion that human CO2 emissions are significantly warming the planet are pushing many 'solutions' that would clearly make things worse or have known dangerous effects. (Eg higher % of wind > more standby gas plants > more gas burned > more CO2 from building and burning)

Seriously, if you genuinely believe that human action is damaging the planet then clearly the most efficacious change would be for couples to have fewer babies. In general that appears to involve educating and empowering women.

One less child has a bigger effect than any other single behavioural change.

I've not heard of any Green group helping with that.

They do mean radius, but the mass depends on the density

This one was found by occlusion, so we only know the approx. radius but nothing about what it's made of.

If it's mostly gaseous, then the density will be much lower than Earth and the 'surface' gravity may not be much higher than Earth.

On the other hand, surface pressure would be considerably higher so still not exactly healthy to be out in.

The really interesting results will come later, once we're able to analyse the light and work out rough composition - for example, if there is free oxygen then it's a pretty good bet there's life!

Not that we could pop over for a visit or even give them a 'phone call - 1200 year ping time is a bit of a bummer.

They've already got an Atomic Vector Plotter

The laser rig they used to measure the effect is pretty much exactly that.

I checked my local PC World for sub-meson brains, it turns out that they don't sell them and I'm not supposed to go there again.

They're already got them.

These battery packs all have a fuse in them that's supposed to open in the case of a dead short.

Lithium-ion chemistry has several 'vent with flame' failure modes, so there's also charge controller chips inside to ensure the cells are never overcharged.

Sometimes, those safety devices fail.

And icon.

I agree with you - I just don't like the styling.

That isn't to say it's bad, just not my mug of coffee.

- Also, it is just me or is the "People" tile in the top-right screenshot in the article rather uncanny valley?

The woman with half-a-beard kinda freaked me out...

El Reg has a "Be evil if it's funny" policy.

Didn't you read the tagline yet?

Zmodem, you genuinely have no idea what you're talking about.

(Originally I thought you were a troll, but you kept at it long enough...)

Here's an idea, why don't you build a small one?

All you need is a small electric motor and a bike dynamo (or two small electric motors).

Connect their shafts together and connect their terminals together.

Now start the contraption spinning - if you can't turn it, try crossing over the terminal connections.

You will find that it stops very quickly, and that you *cannot* keep it spinning without something external - such as your hand.

Now, put your thinking cap on - here's the science bit:

When the dynamo is spun, it converts rotational kinetic energy into electrical energy and heat. Let's say 90% is electricity and 10% heat (it's usually more like 60-80%)

So now we've got 90% of the original energy.

Feed that into the motor. That turns electrical energy into rotational kinetic energy and heat. Again, let's say 90% kinetic and 10% heat.

So one cycle and we have 90%*90% = 81% of the original energy.

Another cycle, we have 66%, then 53%, 43%, 35%, 28%...

Pretty soon there isn't enough electrical energy to turn the shaft, and it stops. It's all turned into heat.

Now, let's say you use superconducting materials, amazing magnets and superb bearings, giving you 99.9999999% cycle efficiency. It will *still* stop - it'll just take a bit longer.

This is all before you try to power anything at all.

Severn Barrage

That was proposed, costs and generation capacity worked out.

Trouble is, it wouldn't have generated all that much and would have totally destroyed the estuary as a wildlife habitat.

Turns out that almost all tidal is basically a non-starter assuming you like coastal wildlife.

Tidal on a very small scale works, but we're talking about ponds the size of a yacht marina, with max drops about two-three metres.

Useful? Maybe. Profitable? Probably not. Significant to the energy mix? Definitely not.

Tungsten is already back!

Look for Tungsten Halogen - all the warm goodness of a white-hot filament, coupled with much longer life and a higher efficacy* than those old GLS lamps.

In some cases, Tungsten Halogen is actually more efficacious than LED, as many LED light sources have really poor drive electronics** and optics.

* Light-source "efficiency" (Wi/Wo) is hard to measure and not very useful. The common term is "Efficacy", usually measured as: (Useful lumens out) / (Watts put in).

For some reason very few of the energy-efficient light source manufacturers make these figures available.

- Do not believe the name-plate rating on an LED fitting, that's almost always the rating of the diode(s) used and not the power consumed by the entire lamp.

** The PSUs in a lot of domestic (and industrial!) LED lights are very poor - some actually dissipate double the diode power.

Even the good ones draw a lot more current than the rating might suggest, as it's drawn in 'bursts' rather than continuously like resistive loads.

- Household supplies must be getting rather nasty with harmonics these days as almost everything uses a switch-mode PSU. Excluding the oven, I've only got about 250W of resistive load in my house these days. Less than my computer alone...

@Paul E. You are correct.

The "Big Red Button" used for such events has never actually started the lights, and is rarely connected to anything at all. At most, it sounds a buzzer by radio control.

There is a technician watching/listening who presses the actual Big Red Button, which in most cases is actually small and black. Sometimes it's not even a button - keyswitches and even touchscreens are quite popular for semi-permanent installs.

This is because you can't trust minor celebrities to *not* hit the Big Red Button until the right moment. Show a celebrity a Big Red Button and they'll hit it immediately!

- To be fair, most people find Big Red Buttons utterly irresistible.

(Obviously, it's not because it would be a pain to install a button, wire it into the system, test, re-test and test it again and finally discover that some scrote has 'accidentally' unplugged it when you try to use it. Not at all.)

For example, next time you watch the National Lottery Draws, watch the person standing next to the machine. You'll notice that they actually press a little black button on the machine shortly after the Big Red Button is pressed by the host. They don't even bother trying to hide it now.

That said, the whole point of such events is the press coverage for the sponsors, so they're doing rather well.

One should expect a significant improvement

After all, he's going from a tired, well over 500 charge/discharge cycles battery (almost 1000 cycles if he got it near launch) to a brand-new sub-10 cycles battery.*

If nothing else changed, that alone would give you around a 25% increase in battery life - these kinds of cell are generally rated for 80% capacity after 500 cycles.

You'll get the same improvement if you swap the battery in any other smartphone after two or three years of heavy usage.

If it doesn't, then something is quite badly wrong - either they've put a smaller battery in there, the phone is drawing more power, or the battery is faulty.

My guess is that Apple made a mistake in handling multi-core in the low-power environment and either spin both all the time or fluffed concurrency.

The issues on older phones may well be user colouring - someone's mentioned battery life so the user tests and finds that it doesn't last like it did when new, they've put this new firmware on it, ergo it's the new firmware.

Or it could just be an old battery. Easy test - replace the battery. Oh yeah...

(*Assuming he used it instead of, I dunno, putting it in a shrine and praying to it.)

Such a shame to see someone so taken in by the hype

A 5kW PV system can only generate that 5kW in perfect conditions - that is, direct strong sunlight on a cloudless day with the panels in perfect physical and electrical condition.

In all situations the PV cells start to get dirty and dusty (within days) and degrade (over several years), so there are no 5kW installations that generate 5kW regularly.

In Europe and most of the USA and Canada, we have clouds, rain and snow, and short days with long nights.

In a real life you will never get anything like 5kW mean daytime power output from a 5kW nominal installation.

You may wish to do some research into the actual, real-life output of such a system - not just when first installed, but several years down the line.

I checked, and no, you cannot sync with Outlook.

It turns out that you can sync contacts with Exchange (humble pie duly eaten), but *not* with Outlook.

Basically, you can only sync to a 'cloud', and it is completely impossible to sync contacts with a locally connected computer.

A rather foolish decision in my opinion, given that the top two (iOS and Android) allow you to do both.

@Rob Dobs

I'm having a hard time working out if you're being deliberately obtuse, or just don't understand anything you're talking about.

General Relativity is as proven as it is possible to be - the fact your GPS works, the way Mercury orbits the sun and the way particles accelerate to a high percentage of c in the Large Hadron Collider all match that theory *exactly*.

It is also known that it doesn't work at very small scales - relativity just doesn't match the way electrons and other subatomic particles behave inside an atom.

So if you want to replace Einstein's Relativity, then you have to replace it with something that has *exactly the same results* at the scales from atomic to solar system because we *know* it's right for those scales, because when you put in the numbers and compare to measured reality, it's *correct*.

At the moment, nobody has such an alternative. When somebody comes up with one it will be very exciting!

Secondly, pretty much everything you've written is either a misunderstanding or due to fuzzy and indeed circular thinking in places.

BTW, the 'dust in the way' hypothesis was brought up more than a century ago, and is again simple to disprove:

When light hits the dust, it will slowly warm up, and start to glow (ref. the incandescent lightbulb). Given enough time it will get to an equilibrium temperature as it loses heat at the same rate it gains it.

As we are giving this dust an infinite amount of time, it will already be at the equilibrium temperature. As we are illuminating it with an infinite number of stars, it will be at the average star surface temperature. Thus the dust in the way will be as bright as an average star.

One way to account for that would be to postulate that more dust is continually being created from nothing - except that doesn't match what we actually see when we look through our telescopes, and is therefore wrong.

Entropy is known to increase in all closed systems we've observed. It's rather odd as it's the only scientific theory that defines the direction of time.

Stars 'burn' fuel. They turn Hydrogen into Helium, releasing energy, and when they run out of hydrogen they continue with other elements. It turns out that when they get to iron they're stuffed because fusing iron absorbs energy. So the nuclear fire stops burning and they slowly cool down.

Turning iron back into hydrogen in a closed system would mean decreasing the entropy of that system, thus infinite power.

If you can find a closed system where entropy decreases then congratulations, you've found a perpetual motion machine, which is an infinite power source and we don't have to worry about oil, gas or indeed any fuel ever again.

- Hint, even the US Patent Office won't accept patents for such machines without a working example.

Finally, in science "Theory" means it's proven to be true beyond reasonable doubt within a given range of conditions. "Hypothesis" describes an idea that may or may not be true.

Right now, we have different sets of theories for subatomic and the large, and the crossover in the middle is a bit fuzzy. It seems rather unlikely that really is the final answer, and so we are looking for a better set of theories.

That Higgs Boson thing is investigating that - whether we find it, and exactly how it behaves if we do find it will decide which of our current 'next generation' hypotheses are right, or if none of them are.

@Manu T - Thanks, I missed that press release.

And blimey - are they genuinely that insane?

Windows Mobile is the worst pile of shit I've ever had the misfortune to encounter, and as far as I can tell it's been dropped completely by all the phone manufacturers, and not used for any new designs at all.

So much for 'corporate' use.

Choice of corporate phone now seems to be a toss-up between Blackberry and Android, pretty much depending on whether you want to let RIM inside your firewall or not.

'Minor' irritations cause far more annoyance than you might think.

For example, try putting a small pea in your shoe next time you go out for the day. That's pretty minor, yes?

Equally, try putting a bit of stickytape over the part of your current phone that shows the signal strength. I suspect you'll find it a bit annoying, especially as there's plenty of space to show the information.

Rather like the regular "The action could not be completed for an unknown reason" errors that pop up on Windows Mobile 6 whenever it's lost signal.

In other words, all the sync methods I need are missing.

I don't keep phone numbers in GMail or Hotmail, because the phone I have is owned by my employer and the numbers in my phone are clients.

I keep them in my phone and sync to the corporate contacts server (Exchange in this case), like every corporate user.

Like every sane employee I do *not* put work stuff on Facebook, Twitter etc, and do not want my work phone to have anything to do with either of them.

So if this review is anything to go by, Windows Phone 7 cannot be used in the coporate market.

That's a fairly odd decision - perhaps there is enough demand for personal phones, however it feels a bit weird for Microsoft to reject the only market that ever took Windows Mobile on board.

The Universe cannot be infinite and eternal

This is quite easy to prove:

Look up at night. You will notice that the sky is dark.

If the Universe were infinite and eternal then no matter which direction you looked, you would be looking directly at the surface of a star.

Thus the night sky could not be dark, it would have to be bright, and therefore, the universe cannot be both infinite in size and eternal.

This thought experiment has the following results:

1) The universe could be infinite in size if it is not eternal, as the light from the distant stars might not have reached us yet.

2) The universe could also be finite and eternal, as then there are only a finite number of stars.

By using other thought experiments we can prove the universe cannot be finite and eternal, by use of gravity (everything would have collapsed together) and entropy (the stars would have gone out).

That leaves 1) - Infinite but not eternal. This doesn't seem to make sense as it requires an infinitely large thing to have been created at a defined moment in the past.

Incidentally, the reason we think dark matter exists is because we think Einstein's theory of gravitation is right - Remember that Newton's theory is identical to Einstein's at low spacial curvature, eg around a planet-sized mass and at a long distance from a star.

Einstein's theory precisely matches the behaviour of every atomic particle observed in our solar system - it is therefore known to be right.

However, it's also known to be inaccurate at subatomic scales - there is no religious reverence for Einstein's theory.

The Standard Model seems to handle subatomic really well, but again doesn't quite work at larger scales.

So, there are already a lot of scientists trying to find a better description of reality - that's what scientists do!

So why did the author not mention that?

Entering a PIN from time to time is really the only thing that limits the fun a miscreant can have with an NFC.

The entire article avoids the critical point:

It really doesn't matter if the card to terminal link is utterly perfect, as all a miscreant requires is the card itself. No hidden knowledge (PIN/signature), and no biometric.

That's less secure than my El Reg forum account!

Pay-by-wave does not require any authorisation whatsoever from the cardholder.

Repeat after me: The card is *not* the account holder. The card can only veto a transaction, fundamentally it *cannot* authorise anything whatsoever.

Quite simply, we cannot ever trust NFC. It's even worse than "Cardholder Not Present" transactions made over the phone and we all know how often those are abused by fraudsters.

- And in fact, it increases my exposure to mugging. I can control my financial exposure to mugging events by carrying more or less cash depending on what I'm doing and where I'm going. Not possible with these cards except by not having one at all.

There is proof of how MS have already failed.

Windows Mobile is a shoddy turd, only made barely usable by HTC Sense and Opera Mini.

It fails miserably at being a phone, and isn't very good as a doorstop either.

Anyone who has used Windows Mobile hates it.

The 'stock' Windows Mobile is completely unusable - a Start menu has no place on a phone.

This is why Microsoft have tried really hard to separate their newest phoneOOS from the old brand.

If they don't manage that, then the Windows Phone will die.

Sent from ny Windows Mobile POS.

That used to be true. It isn't now.

Modern PV cells genuinely can generate a lot more energy than used to make and install them.

However, they aren't a viable alternative to large centralised power stations, and won't be for several years, if not decades.

First of all, the National Grid was never designed for such a large number of generation plants and would need to be substantially rebuilt to cope - pretty much every substation would need to be replaced.

Secondly, for the foreseeable future neither wind nor PV are nowhere near economically viable, requiring a *massive* subsidy in the form of price fixing - I'm pretty pretty sure the PV one is much higher in % terms than any subsidy ever paid for any generation scheme.

After the recent round of price rises, UK domestic customers currently pay roughly 9-10p per kWh.

Thus the generation company must be being paid considerably less than that, and I would estimate that the recent mean spot price for electricity is around 4-6p. These figures aren't published though, so who knows? Ofgem have proposed forcing publication of this, which might help the politicians see how stupid the FIT scheme is.

The FITs for both Wind and Solar PV are thus clearly a significant cause of electricity price rises, and thus fuel poverty in the UK.

The current FITs were a bad idea when made, and a worse idea now. It's pretty much the most regressive 'tax' possible - if you own property and can afford the up-front cost, you are being subsidised by those who don't and can't.

Insulin pumps are NOT implanted.

They are a 'beltpack' which contains the insulin, pump, batteries and control electronics. It then delivers the insulin dose via a canula needle.

That's one reason why this is so unforgivable.

An optical link similar to TOSLINK would give higher data rates than 900MHz radio and with trivial covers (black tape!) would require a proposed attacker to have physical access to the beltpack.

But no, they went for radio and forgot that radio means you must assume *everybody* is an attacker, and that the attacker *will* listen in on all communications.

The worst part is that it doesn't even take the attacker to be malicious. 900MHz is an ISM band, thus is used by any number of other devices. What if one of them happened to send data your device interpreted as "Inject lots", after a 'proper' controller did the handshake?

You can't possibly test your device against every single 900MHz ISM device. You can't even test against all the other 900MHz devices that are likely to be in a hospital, let alone anywhere else.

Filed December 2005

Prior art by the dozens, possibly hundreds. A lot in Windows Mobile and Windows CE.

Android may or may not have prior art as well - I forget when that started shipping.

It's past time for "the 99%" to go and shut down the USPTO, they are clearly not fit for purpose and are doing far more damage to the US economy than Wall Street ever could. It is however unclear from the outside as to whether the abject failure is primarily caused by leglislative failure or incompetence, but there is clearly a lot of both.

There are a lot of companies that simply don't have anything to do with the US market because of stupid patents like this - getting patents thrown out as b******s costs too much, so why bother trying to develop/build/sell anything there?

Sure, the big corporations will because they can already hang patent lawyer oblivion over each other.

Unfortunately big corps don't create many local jobs or do much innovation, they tend to buy innovation from elsewhere and export jobs to other countries.

True, hydro and "Clean Coal" are subsidised as well.

Old nuke was subsidised by the MoD (hence Government) because they wanted the interesting things particular types of nuke create.

However, nothing goes as far as the insanely high prices forced upon the energy companies by legislation* for Solar and Wind - 30-45p/kWh is nuts. That price would put most of the country into fuel poverty and make electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles permanently unaffordable.

Oddly, new nuke and gas are the only ones that aren't obviously being subsidised at the moment.

*cos it's not taxation or subsidy if the Govenment don't do it directly. Or so they seem to think.

Why would that repeatedly add an hour?

I could udnerstand it jumping to a nearby timezone and then back.

However, receiving a "cell timezone is X" should never be capable of pushing the phone into the middle of next week.

- Seriously, that did happen to it. Usually I spotted it and reset back to the right time before it got more than five or six hours ahead. It got so crazy last year's GMT that I had to put it in Airplane mode overnight when abroad to ensure the clock would be right in the morning.

And this was with the 'auto update clock' option turned off.

So yes, MASSIVE bug, and only possible if the writer doesn't understand basic features of a mobile telephony device - namely that it moves!

I am dreading the end of the month.

@Destroy All Monsters

Do you enjoy paying over the odds and giving companies unreasonably large profit margins?

'Normal' pricing means that prices tend to fall in 'real terms', with margins staying roughly the same - each manufacturer will drop their prices when they can, to undercut the competition in their market and capture more customers.

Cartels allow prices to rise while margins greatly increase - it allows the suppliers to increase their prices without the risk of losing significant numbers of customers.