Actually, it's one device with multiple roles.

The generic HID device allows you to define multiple endpoints in the *same* device, thus one HID-compliant device can be both the mouse and the keyboard.

The HID device I'm typing on right now is also my mouse - according to Windows 7, it's one device that sits in both the Keyboard and Mouse categories.

There's a lot of them around - it just tells the OS that it's both. Windows normally enumerates it saying "HID-compliant device" if it says anything and doesn't actually say whether it thinks it's a keyboard or mouse.

The USB device pretends to be the user typing on a keyboard

So it can do anything the user can, as long as it doesn't need to know anything the user knows.

In other words, it can do anything the user might be able to do without a password. If you already know the target operating system (or have a list of target operating systems), then it can issue suitable keyboard commands to upload interesting information, or download a program to do interesting things.

Ok, your device only has user privileges, but for a lot of attacks that may be enough.

Which leads to the question - should you be worried?

I'd say that unless you're doing something particularly secret and juicy, I doubt it as the attack is pretty expensive - and if the mark tosses the freebie into the bin, notices something odd and pops the lid, or even simply uses it on a system that doesn't contain the stuff you're trying to get, then it fails.

Cool idea though - hats off to PJRC and/or Atmel for the very-subtle marketing ploy.

Yes, I do fly.

However, I also know that aviation is a tiny source of CO2 and has made greater improvements in efficiency over the last ten-fifteen years than anything else.

The aviation industry is also putting quite of lot of their *own* money into low and zero net-CO2 emissions research.

Air travel is being used a beating horse - and it's not even a notable source of CO2 (approx. 2-3% of the world output in 2006/2007)

I also know that politicians taking money away from actual research and instead handing it out to householders is going to make the situation worse.

Now if the FIT money went to research and test plants, maybe we'd have more than one solution ready soon.

Large wind plants, large number of solar PV installations *should not be subsidised*. They must stand or fall on their own merits. It's pretty clear that they'll fall.

If we want to reduce our CO2 output, then the *only* currently viable method of baseload generation is nuclear fission.

If we don't like that idea for whatever reason, then we should be spending that money on research and test plants to find an alternative.

Instead, we're pumping money into white elephants.

Erm, going solar PV *is* burying your head in the sand

Tackling the issue means *tackling* the *issue*, not throwing other people's money into a pit.

We'll start assuming that man-released CO2 is going to cause enough climate change worth worrying about.

So, what do we do about this?

- Reduce usage of energy by improving efficiency of everything we do. Start with the big consumers which are heating and transport.

- Reduce the amount of carbon emitted by our energy generation systems, *full lifecycle*. Note that big plants of a given type are considerably more efficient than small plants, require less materials to manufacture than a lot of small plants with the same total output.

Now, does it make sense to push domestic solar PV using massive subsidies? What will that do?

- Note that Solar PV does not generate at night, and has the least output during winter. Those are the times when we use the most energy for heating and lighting, and that cannot be changed.

Aside form that, Solar PV has a pretty poor energy budget for full lifecycle - that's why it still costs so much. It's energy-intensive to make, impossible to repair*, has a relatively low output and is very difficult (maybe impossible) to recycle at the end of lifetime.

In a domestic situation it's even worse because it's in hard to access and easily damaged location. When a builder knocks a brick out of your chimney or drops a tool and smashes a tile, he'll fix it and it won't cost him much. If he smashes a PV panel, replacing it will cost him a fortune - so he'll charge you accordingly for any roof work, or maybe outright refuse to do it.

*When a cell dies in a PV array, it can't be replaced and it turns from being a generator to a resistor, radically affecting the rest of the panel. You can either leave the panel generating a lot less than it used to, or replace the whole panel.

I hate you then

You're not being environmentally friendly, you're stealing money from me, my family and everyone I know.

You're making electricity more expensive, making electric runabouts less economically viable.

You're putting more people into fuel poverty, spreading further misery around the country.

And you're doing that while thinking you're full of unicorns and rainbows.

The worst part is that it's not even your fault - it is the logical thing to do given the utter insanity of the Labour government that set this lunacy up, and the fatal lack of vision of the Coalition not to kill it with fire.

@Handle - Both are metered, both are subsidised to slightly different degrees.

It's a truly heinous scheme, even if you do want to force generation away from fossil fuels.

By paying the 43.3p for all generation, plus 3.1p on anything exported, this means that the 'real cost' of PV electricity is truly astounding.

Let's say that on average you use 90% of the generation and export 10%.

This means you'll get 43.3p generation plus 0.31p export tariff, a total of 43.61p per mean generated kWh.

You're only putting 0.1 kWh onto the Grid, which means *everyone else* is paying you an astounding 436.1p per Grid kWh.

Now the other way of looking at it is to say that you are part of the grid. That way, you are being paid between 43.3p and 46.4p per kWh, depending on how much you export.

Eitehr way, could you afford to pay that much for your electricity?

A year?

I give it six months, if that.

Regardless of how good the NFC protection itself gets, the underlying concept is flawed anyway.

Any person could take your NFC card/device and use it without any form of authentication whatsoever as many times as they like before the chip is either cancelled automatically or you realise that it's missing.

On top of that, an unscrupulous card reader can charge your card simply by walking past.

Even a scruplulous one can charge your card by accident because your card was too close to the reader when they turn it on.

So while any individual attack might not cost much, attacking becomes trivial and effectively risk-free to the attacker.

I do wonder who eats the cost of a reversed RFID transaction. (Obviously the consumer does eventually in terms of higher prices/bank charges)

I thought everybody had this in their house already?

It's called a Building Management System (BMS)

I have a BMS in my home that controls all those things - PIR occupancy sensors, light sensors, the TV remote can adjust the lights and heating, and there's touchscreens around if the remote is lost down the sofa.

Plus some spare capacity for some fun christmas lights when I get around to it.

(I don't have atuomatic doors because I don't want them)

Of course, my job is to design and commission these systems - we drive lights, blinds, SmartGlass-style windows, video projectors, projection screens and interface to HVAC among other things.

The reason you don't have this yourself is probably down to the cost of the expertise to design and commission these systems. They are extremely powerful and flexible, so it takes a while to learn both waht they'll do and how to make them do it.

@Mattyod?: Erm, no.

Landing page: "Can I store a cookie?"

User: No

All other pages: "Is there a landing page cookie? If yes, store my cookie/modify landing page cookie. Otherwise do nothing."

That's not exactly rocket science, is it?

The law is phrased as "Covering your face so you cannot be identified"

So yes, it covers all of the above.

It doesn't cover everywhere or everywhen - I forget the specifics, but it's actually a simple extension of rules that exist in all European countries.

Try getting a passport in any European country without showing your face.

@copsewood: No, there damn well isn't.

You know this if you'd actually read the study you linked to, rather than just the conclusion page.

That study is actually saying "We might be able to build enough pumped storage if we used every single possible location in the Scottish Highlands"

It completely ignores the environmental cost of doing so, the local outrage (you want to do WHAT to the loch?) and greatly simplifies the massive additional north-south interconnect infrastructure it would need, and the monetary costs of building everything.

In other words, it's a typical short study done by postgrads.

It's interesting, and I hope the guys who wrote it got good marks because they do deserve them - but it should not be considered the general 'green light' that you appear to think it is.

Except that relies on *knowing* it's doing that.

Everyone who already owns (rents?) a Leaf did not know that.

Everyone who doesn't read El Reg or Seattle Wireless still does not know that.

Do you see the problem yet?

Sarah, you're probably right.

I'll freely agree that many women who do want children don't want to achieve them through deception, especially deception liable to result in single parenthood.

I'll even give you the upgrade to Most.

However, that's *still* not all.

Several of my sister's friends* and certainly my cousin-in-law's husband's** 'bit on the side' got a baby through deception. Their motives vary, but are roughly based upon the idea that either the father or the state will be forced into providing financial support for the child and the mother.

*She's in a bad crowd. It's tough trying to get her out of it before something goes badly wrong.

** He's a turd, and she was a muppet. She's finally learnt from the mistake, and it does appear that he hasn't.

WP7 does not sync to Outlook

I know that sounds surprising, but it doesn't! At all!

It can only sync to Windows Live or a *new* Exchange server.

So if you're not running a newest-edition Exchange server and don't want to hand over all your data to Windows Live, you simply can't use a Windows Phone.

Android and WM6.x however can sync direct to Outlook.

The people I know who tried out a WP7 device said that the hardware was great - but the lack of basic contact-management functionality meant that it was simply not fit-for-purpose, so they took it back and got an Android instead.

Analysis fail there

Nokia's big problem was that they'd gone with Option 2 several times - ditch the old, make a new thing. Everybody should be using this new thing!

Roll on six months - again, ditch the old, make a new thing. Everybody should be using this new thing!

Elop then repeated that, but this time saying "Our old things are crap, we have to buy a new thing from somebody else"

That kind of tactic is a sure-fire way to alienate the customer and 3rd-party developer base, for one simple reason:

I want to be able to use the stuff on my current phone on my next phone!

Back in the day, that meant being able to copy my contacts, ringtones and wallpaper onto the new one. On a smartphone that means being able to do all the above, *plus* copy my daft games and useful apps onto the new one.

So if I'm forced to lose everything except my contacts even by staying with the same phone manufacturer, then I might as well consider *all* smartphones and go for whatever I think is prettiest and *most likely to be able to keep everything next time*.

It's a really, really, really bad way of saying that you can't have a 'perfect' filter*.

So any RF transmission that is nominally at 400 MHz and 10MHz wide, actually does transmit power at 380MHz and 420MHz.

How much depends on how good your filtering is.

*Theoretically you could have a perfect filter, but it would take the signal an infinite length of time to traverse and require an infinite number of components. Apparently that's not desirable.

Except that Plastic required some kind of proof of ID

Originally a signature, and then a PIN - both of which were something the legitimate owner of the card was more likely to be able to correctly enter than an arbitrary attacker.

PayWave however can be drained by any attacker who takes the RFID unit (card or phone) - or can get *close* to someone who has one with the charging doodad.

Oyster works through most people's wallets and pockets. So does this system.

However, Oyster readers are neither portable nor useful to most attackers - while PayWave readers are both.

Aside from the obvious theft of the card, a 'dodgy' retailer can trivially wave the reader around to collect money from anybody in range.

In Elop's shoes?

He dropped the platform that had more users than any other, according to Gartner Research.

That's clearly insane, end of story - it ensures that Nokia don't sell a significant number of smartphone handsets for an entire year. Feature phone and dumbphone shouldn't be affected directly, though there may be some crossover.

Yes, Nokia probably did need quite radical changes to the organisation - it should have meant examining what Nokia had, and deciding which of the existing assets to keep and which to wind down.

Instead, Elop threw away all the software R&D that Nokia had, their 3rd-party developer base (many of whom have gone to Android), and bought in something else that either has a terrible track record or no track record at all*.

Either way, he bet the entire company on a single horse, owned by another company who will survive pretty much unscathed if that horse dies.

*Depending on whether you consider WP7 to have anything to do with WM6.x or not.

Yeah, there are those other costs

All of which except the congestion charge and road tax apply to both vehicles.

I'd still have to insure it and to service it either way.

Tyre cost is irrelevant as I've not actually needed to replace any tyres on my rust-bucket in five years, so I'd expect these to last at least that long. (The odd puncture repair job, but that'd happen to anything)

Insurance is an unknown - I'd guess insuring a brand-new vehicle to be more expensive than an older one, but that is a guess as the vehicles are in very different classes.

Servicing the Renault is not going to be cheaper - I can take an infernal combustion engine to any garage I like, while this Renault would have to go to the dealership - and probably a specific one.

That takes the cost of a simple service way, way up, so the 'simpler' Renault service may well be more expensive! (And maybe it's not even simpler?)

As to the brand-new/second hand comparison - this makes perfect sense. This vehicle would not be the first vehicle in a houehold, and it's aimed at 'greenies'. What's greener - buying a brand-new vehicle for your second 'commuter car', or buying a second-hand vehicle?

The rust-bucket is clearly greener on the manufacture argument, so the new one has to be green (which actually means cheap) enough to run to outweigh the materials cost.

However, if you're in the congestion charge zone daily, you have a good argument.

So that's the only place on Earth that'd I'd ever expect to see this vehicle.

No catch, RGB to CMY is a solved problem.

You can get a reasonable approximation by using Cyan = Not Red, Magenta = Not Green, Yellow = Not Blue.

The better algorithms take account of the particular bandwidth of each of the specific CMY filters in use.

You'll find the algorithm in your printer driver. Even the really good ones are trivial to process.

That's even before you realise that almost all the imagery this is intended to be used with is stored in CMYK format already, as that's what was used to make the 'real' book!

Actually, Part P didn't require you to do that.

It is permissable to do the work yourself and pay a council jobsworth to inspect it.

I think it costs about £500 for the inspection, which consists of them taking the front off one or two sockets then ticking the box. If you're unlucky, they'll ask to see your design docs. Rare that'll happen as most don't understand them anyway.

Likewise, it's perfect for conference calls.

Unlike the other 'out-of-office' conference systems, it's not a really, really expensive phone call when outside Europe/US and it works pretty much everywhere, with a text-only fallback if your hotel internet is rubbish.

On top of that, you can bounce a file to everyone so they can look at the thing you're talking about.

We have MS Communicator, but it's utterly rubbish and barely used, mostly because it only works inside the corporate network. I don't know why that is, and it's not worth anybody's time to work out if that's for a good reason or not.

Otherwise known as "The trust has no ****ing clue what protecting data means"

A password-protected laptop means precisely ZERO protection, as all an attacker needs is a copy of Knoppix or other bootable CD and bingo - everything on that laptop is theirs.

That's assuming of course that the attacker don't have the expertise to take the hard drive out of the laptop and plug it into another computer.

I expect that practically everyone reading this forum has done one or both of these to recover data from a damaged Windows installation!

The fact that so many Government departments insist on saying "but the laptop was password protected!" is 100% proof that they have no clue whatsoever and the CEOs, COOs and CTOs of those departments all need to be fired on the spot for complete and utter abject incompetence.*

Of course, they'll continue to screw this up so royally until the Information Commissioner assigns some personal consequences to these upper managers.

*No, I don't think I used to many superlatives there.

That 3rd party made the phone operating system

In many cases that OS was then customised to the requirements of the mobile phone network.

Either way, Google/MS/Apple provided necessary parts of the mobile telephony system to the mobile telephone network.

That's a very cut-and-dried Contractor status - they made something for the network at the request of the network and were paid by the network for it. (With-SIM mobiles are always subsidised by the network to some extent.)

Obviously in the specific case of 'SIM-free' phones that wouldn't apply.

WTF is "Ethical" population control?

There's only two ways - compulsory sterilisation* or mass-murder.

Ok, three ways - you could use forced abortions, though there's a lot of people who'd call that mass-murder.

I'm guessing by 'ethical', you mean "Ask people nicely to only have 1 child". China has already proven that doesn't work without large penalties for breaking the edict.

And we're back to compulsory sterilisation.

Have you had the snip or a long-term (>5 years) contraceptive implant? If not - go do it. Then convince everybody you have ever met to do the same - without threatening to murder or imprison them.

If you can do that, then we'll take your lunatic idea seriously.

*Doesn't matter whether you mean reversible or permanent, it's still compulsory.

You didn't read the post, did you?

Max to zero windspeed does indeed tend to be fairly gentle.

However max to zero *output* can happen very rapidly - the wind gets *too strong* so the plant *shuts down* to protect itself.

Wind gently rising. Plant increases in output. At some point the windspeed exceeds the maximum rating of the turbines and they shut themselves down.

Turbine shutdown is very fast because if it isn't, the plant can be badly damaged and in worst-case you can even get large pieces of turbine flying across the countryside!

- There's video of failed shutdowns around YouTube somewhere. Don't have YouTube access from here, but should be easy to find.

Of course it means they don't work. Please do some research into how the National Grid works.

Coal, Gas and Nuclear plants cannot ramp production very fast (50% output to maximum). Gas and some kinds of Nuclear take tens of minutes, Coal and older kinds of Nuclear tends to take half an hour or longer. Certain kinds of Hydro can start up from 'hot standby' in a few seconds, but they can't be left in hot standy for very long, keep up that level of production and don't have a large capacity compared to Coal/Gas/Nuclear.

Wind is *highly* variable - it can even go from 'maximum output' to 'zero output' in tens of seconds, possibly faster: the windspeed exceeds maximum rating, so the turbines automatically feather and shut down.

So, let's examine your proposition:

Wind is producing 60% of the UK's needs by running at 100% plate rating across the whole country (actually impossible for many reasons, but let's roll with it). Coal/Gas are at 'cold shutdown' (not burning any fuel).

Windspeed rises in some regions and large blocks of turbines shut down. Coal/Gas has to be started from cold - but this takes several hours!

So Country-wide blackouts occur. Parts of the National Grid may be damaged, and many non-resettable big trips drop open to protect generation plants and distribution. The whole system is down for a long time (even days) as repairs and manual resets are carried out.

So we have to keep the Coal and Gas plants 'hot' - burning their fuel to maintain temperature and synchronisation - even when they're not producing any electricity.

Now windspeed rises and blocks of turbines look on the verge of shut down. Gas plant is ramped up, followed by coal plant. Depending on how good we are at predicting that shutdown, we either get brownout or partial blackout for minutes or tens of minutes, or we burn a lot of fuel ramping the Gas/Coal plant for no reason as the turbines don't shut down or shut down later than expected.

Either way, you simply don't save much CO2 but you end up with a *very* unstable National Grid.

That's even before you consider the cost of having 'other plants' with at least the generating capacity of all the wind turbines in the country put together - as there are many days where there's no wind nationwide, on those days you've got to produce it somehow. Or go dark - and going dark is very, very bad for the Grid, and even worse for homes, business and hospitals. (Hospitals will start up their diesel generators and *hope* they've got enough fuel to cope.)

On top of that, the Greens are also pushing for greater electrification of transport - trains and plug-in electric vehicles. If that occurs, then electricity demand will greatly increase - and we're on the edge of capacity already.

Basically, small amounts of wind generation are annoying for the Grid (it's expensive power and hard to balance as it can ramp down at any moment), and large amounts would make the Grid highly unstable.