Posts by David Lucke

@AC - Bail was refused on grounds that Assange has access to finance

The idea of bail is that it is incentive for someone to show up for trial, to get the bail money back. If the bail money in question was not his own, this significantly reduces his incentive, since it would presumably have to be given back to the donaters, so he doesn't get to keep it in any case.

Cue slating the Beeb

People are gonna be wanting someone to blame for this, and the BBC has painted a massive great bullseye on its chest. Given David Cameron's close association with the failed bid, he's certainly going to be looking for a whipping boy, and - oh look! - there one is.

Now might be a good time to get down the bookies and put something on the licence fee going away during this parliament...

Nice dodge there

Bet Ian Huntley wishes he'd thought of this. Very publicly piss of multiple countries, particularly the US, and then you're free to commit any crime you want and you can just claim you're being framed by the CIA / Interpol / etc and everyone will campaign for you to be let off.

Not saying that's what's happening here necessarily, of course. The key is to keep a close watch on the actualy trial, which you can be sure loads of people will be doing.

Title goes here

To be fair, this isn't really a closing door after the horses have bolted situation. There's plenty more horses in that stable, just because 1 or 2 of them have bolted doesn't mean its too late to stop the rest of them.

Tuff-luv case

That does look rather awesome, actually. When I get one (waiting for the next ipad) that'll probably be the case for it. I have to say, I wouldn't get it in that colour though. Anyone else following the links, be sure to view the demo vid, which gives a good explanation of how it works, and also demonstrates a more sober black leather version - you don't have to have bright green...

Finally! People supporting Adobe DRM

Thank god! Finally, people are beginning to support Adobe DRM! Maybe now it will actually be possible to buy a decent selection of non-kindle books in the UK and read them on an iPhone - though I note that despite the article claiming that Stanza now supports Adept DRM, there is no mention of it on the Stanza website.

Incidentally, as usual, the article makes no mention of the only publisher that seems to "get" eBooks, Baen, whose entire catalogue is offered DRM free in multiple formats at generally around $6 a book (or $15 for monthly release bundle of 5-6 books, 3-4 of them new releases), with no region restrictions. Fantasy and Sci-fi only, and their writers include a bunch of Hugo and Nebula winners and New York Times Bestsellers.

(No, I don't work for them - but I've been reading their eBooks for nearly a decade now, whilst cursing the rest of the publishing industry for being rubbish)

Not just keyboard

The differentiator between netbook and tablet isn't just keyboard. Its operating system. And that's cruicial.

If you get a windows netbook, you have access to all the software that runs on windows. Sure it doesn't run too fast, but it runs, and you can control it with pointer and keyboard. That gives you access to a vast number of applications (not apps) that already exists and do useful things.

I would submit that the recent drop in purchases is that the early ones ran Windows XP, which the atom could handle. They didn't become seriously slow until windows 7 became compulsory, because the atom can't handle that. As soon as Intel comes up with an atom that can handle it, expect to see netbook sales pick up again - at least so long as they release one before tablet OS's become directly competetive with Windows/Linux.

Extra data prices not too bad shocker

My initial comment was going to be "but they only let you have 500MB per month!". But if you do the math, if you pay the extra to increase your monthly amount to the 1GB that everyone else offers, its still cheaper than any of them.

Depends...

It really depends on the quantity of stuff that you want to store. You can get more terabytes cheaper on disc than on flash, and that doesn't look like its going to change in the near (<10 years) term. The question is how much you actually need to store. Rather like packing a suitcase, our ability to fill drive space expands to match the available space, or at least it has so far. First larger programs, then volume audio, then video and HD video have been filling up the space as it becomes available. The question is whether this trend will continue. At the moment, there doesn't seem to be any new high volume format on the horizon, so the only thing that could obviously fill that extra space is more of the same, and streaming and DRM are acting to mitigate this.

So, basically, unless we find something new to store, or we start seriously upping the quantity of video we store, hard discs are indeed going to go the way of the dodo in fairly short order. But you should never underestimate the ability of people to store huge amounts of crap.

Oh, and the backup thing? Flash or disc, you will always need backup. Flash may or may not be less vulnerable to randomly stopping working one day, but if you drop your iSlab off a cliff, its gone and it ain't coming back, so you better have a backup.

Good grief, not the reflection one again

This has been stated many, many times before, every damn time the ABL is mentioned, but apparently people are still not seeing it.

Reflective surfaces don't work. At all. Niether does spinning the missile.

The reason is that at the energy levels we are talking about, the reflective surface has to be absolutely perfect. 99% isn't good enough, you a whole bunch of nines (by comparison, a household mirror is 85-90% reflective). Any less than 100% reflectivity results in the mirror (which are not very robust things) being flash-heated, followed by it exploding, at which point the whole power of the laser is free to do its thing. The only way to prevent flash-heating is to cryogenically cool the rear of the mirror, over the vulnerable surface (i.e. the whole missile). Also, the mirror has to be absolutely clean (and cleaning an optically near-perfect mirror without damnaging its reflectivity is a nightmare), since a speck of dust, such as might be thrown up by, say, where the beam impacts will destroy the reflectivity completely.

The ALTB directs its laser using mirrors, but because these are small and internal to the system, they can be kept in vacuum and cryogenically cooled relatively easily. This is not the case for a missile. Mirrors are fragile things, and even if you could somehow afford the expense of coating an entire missile with an optical mirror surface, and cope with the engineering issues involved in cryogenically cooling the whole thing, it would all break on launch.

Oh, and this isn't some lo-tech holding a laser on it for a couple of minutes to heat it up, sort of thing. The whole shot cycle takes less than a second, and you can't spin the missile fast enough to make any appreciable difference. Frankly, I'm dubious that you could spin the thing much at all and still have it steerable, and not break up.

You can't surrender to a helicopter

You CANNOT surrender to an aircraft. Can't be done. Physical impossibility. To accept the surrender you have to take them into custody, and the chopper couldn't land, had no restraints, didn't have enough crew to safely apply the nonexistant restraints, had no ability to take them anywhere even if they could be restrained , had no way of communicating with them, etc, etc, etc. There weren't any nearby troops to take them into custody either, since the nearest troops, the ones these guys were lobbing mortars at (no, Vladimir Plouzhnikov, they were NOT civilians, try learning to read) , were still busy fighting other insurgents.

The only available options were a) kill them, or b) let them go, so they could go back to lobbing mortars tomorrow. The lawyer who advised them to go for "a" was 100% correct, this was entirely legal. As Chris 244 said earlier "Lots of events in both Iraq and Afghanistan are worthy of outrage. This isn't one of them."

Sorted

"If our universities are cranking out so much mediocrity and incompetence, we need to be addressing this. Now."

We are. Haven't you been reading the news? We're making it too expensive for the poor smart kids to get an education, and cancelling all our research.

That should do the trick. A few years of that and the money will be rolling in. You mark my words.

Not so useful in the era of device convergence

The full-size powermat (not this pointless 1 device rest) would have been very tempting a few years ago. Back then, I carried a PDA, mp3 player and phone, and this would have significantly simplified the task of keeping them all charged (assuming they could all have used it). But these days, I have an iPhone that does all of those jobs, and with just 1 cable to keep track of, there's very little incentive to use a powermat.

Well, its a good thing science funding is being slashed, then

No cloud without a silver lining: With the upcoming massive funding cuts in every area of science in the UK, we should soon be able to trust that when our boffins say something, it won't be so that they get funded, because they won't get funded anyway.

That only applies to the ones who've had their funding taken away already, of course, the one or two who still have funding will be hanging onto it all the harder, and won't say a word that might jeapordise it...

I hate having to put a title

Saw an interesting bit in the paper last night, apparently Jack Straw has warned Ed that CCTV and DNA were very popular amongst their core voters, and he shouldn't touch them. Looks like he took the warning to heart.

I'd love to know who these alleged core voters are, though, and why they want to live in a police state.

About time

Nice to see that someone else has finally worked out that being able to take a look at a book before you buy it would be helpful, and would result in more sales. Of course, Baen books, who pioneered ebook sales, have been doing this for over a decade now, letting you read the first quarter of each book before you buy it, and doing very well out of it (because if you are still reading a book by that far in, you WILL buy it).

@ Prag Fest

The initial design of the eurofighter was land based only, and the first orders were already placed when the carriers were first proposed in 98. JSF had been in the works for some years before that as a replacement for Harrier, with early UK involvement. When the new carriers came about, putting JSF on them was pretty much a slam dunk.

That said, when they were looking at catapults, they looked at navalisng the Eurofighter (the other catapult options being F35C, F/A18 or even Rafale), but by this point it would have been pretty much a total redesign. The whole structure would have had to be strengthened to survive catapult launch and arrestor recovery, the airframe would have had to be redesigned to handle the low speeds required, plus the whole thing would need to be immunised to salt corrosion. It would have been almost as expensive as designing a whole new plane.

eBooks too, eh?

Good to hear about the ebooks DRM one too, a little more sanity injected into that situation. Shame they didn't go a little further, I own several hundred dollars worth of drm's ebooks that I can no longer read (and the DeDRM stuff I've tried tends to cut murthering great chunks out of the books), having switched reader (from PDA to iPhone, dedicated readers suck).

@ alex dekker 1

Android is a "serious player", with the zillions of handsets sold, etc. But Android isn't Linux, because of this whole dispute. If they resolve this dispute and reintegrate it, then it will be Linux again, but if not then it will be something that was built *from* Linux, but isn't anymore. Granted, right now they're practically identical, but if they don't get reintegrated, then they are likely to diverge further over time, eventually becoming very different things indeed.

AIP not a threat to first world? You may want to rethink that.

There have been a number of occasions on naval exercises over the last few years where the Americans have been seriously embarassed by aip subs sneaking through carrier groups and "killing" their carriers. Active sonar from escort ships and helicopters can certainly make it tough to achieve, but its not a magic bullet solution to the problem. It has to be done by people who are well trained in how to use it, and who are taking the threat seriously, and even then can be bloody hard to get right, particularly in the littoral environment (near the coastline), where it is easy for subs to hide. Incidentally, its not like dipping sonar is a new tech or anything, its been around for decades, which means naval tacticians have had decades to work out how to get around it.

Stealth would be handy

Its all very well saying we should be buying cheaper kit from the states, but what if the states isn't willing to sell? They won't sell anyone the raptor because they don't trust anyone else with proper stealth, and even JSF may well come to us with broken stealth (there was a big uproar about that a few years back, don't know whether they ended up getting the full stealth package after all). But the bottom line is that it sounds like having the domestic ability to have stealth withhout having to ask the americans permission, given they seem likely to say no, seems like a good move.

Incidentally, if the coalition ended up killing Trident and replacing it with a cheaper deterrent, a stealth bomber seems like the only alternative plausible deterrent. Whether that's an argument for or against keeping Taranis depends on whether you reckon Trident will or should be cancelled, and whether the presence of an alternative makes such a cancellation more likely or not. But JeffUK's point that building stuff on spec instead of depending on the MOD to spot a requirement before its too late to fill it from scratch is well taken.

@Bruce Hoult - actually there's been plenty of runaway freezing

Whilst you're quite correct that the runaway heating panic was a very obvious bunch of rubbish, due to the historical periods that have been much warmer than we are currently, runaway cooling is very well estabished as an actual problem. They're called ice ages. And they're very scary indeed.

Recent research into growth patterns suggests that the onset of an ice age is very fast indeed, going from a slight bobble downwards in temperature to ice sheets covering Europe in well under a decade. Drivers for it are not well understood, but people are looking at the very, very long period of low sunspot activity in the sun that we are currently going through, indicative of low solar output, and getting rather nervous. Ice ages have been fairly regular occurances throughout history, and we're rather overdue for another.

Still, should be good for a laugh watching the politicians all reversing themseves and screaming for more co2 to be put into the atmosphere asap, as the glaciers bear down on whitehall...

iPhone data transfer blues

The pain of getting files from a computer onto an iWhatever such that they can be accessed by a particular app is a familiar issue, common to every app that needs to do that. Apple's security sandboxing, combined with the fact that there is no built in wired way to get data from computer to device means every app has to either roll their own wireless connection to a custom server on the host, or, as people are increasingly begining to do, use cloud storage such as Dropbox. Its completely insane, and one of the main barriers to serious apps on the platform, though it looks like Apple is slowly beginning to cotton to this with the iPad, and is beginning to make some provision for it.

Hopefully later iOS revisions will improve matters. In the meantime, this isn't something to really hold against any given app, since its Apple's fault, not the app's developers.

UK?

Of course, this is completely useless for anyone who doesn't live in the States, since you can't buy any ebooks from them from overseas. Stupid geographical publishing contracts.

Batman Returns...

demonstrated the sort of stuff you could do with this. Anyone remember the bit where the Penguin's lackeys install a doohickey in the batmobile that lets him control it from an arcade driving game? The key, of course, was their being able to get access to the car in the first place, despite its high tech unfolding armour that was supposed to prevent sabotage. Sadly, modern civilian cars are not so well protected...

Mother called cops, eh? You know this how?

I'm not sure why everyone is assuming that it was the mother that called the cops - article just says that the officer was called to a domestic disturbance. I've been assuming that the kid's tantrum was so extreme that the neighbours called the cops.

@ Matt Bryant

"Oh, did someone at the back point out that a fleshy in an armed Cesna could probably do 90% of the Pred missions for less cost?"

No they coudn't. One of the main points of UAVs is their hugely long loiter time, which they achieve by not having a pilot who gets tired, and has various life support requirements that are heavy (and thus use up more fuel to carry, reducing loiter time). If we ignore the loiter time, it might be cheaper, until the cessna gets shot down. It doesn't matter if a predator gets shot down, but if the cessna goes down, you're down a pilot as well. Predator losses don't come with a human cost. Although given how much it costs to train a pilot, the dollar cost isn't going to be much cheaper from losing a fleshy pilot either.

Birth control that works

Trying to reduce the number of births purely by pushing birth control on people is about as effective as trying to stop drug use by making it illegal. The best you can do that way is to cut it down a bit. You have to get them to stop wanting to do it. No one's found a really good way of doing that for drugs, but the solution for birth rates has been known for years, its very simple, and its something people want anyway: high standard of living.

Its a simple pattern, found everywhere in the world (note that, say, british citizens on minimum wage may not reckon they have a high standard of living, and they probably don't compared to other, better off, citizens, but their standard of living is still hugely higher than, say, your average Somalian, or 80%+ of China or India). The non-imigrant population of every 1st world country in the world is dropping like a stone.

There are many interlocking reasons behind this, including but not limited to: the high expense of raising a child in a rich country, people in general and women in particular having other things to do with their lives, people not having children until later in life because of a multitude of other reasons, very low rates of infant mortality removing the need to have many children to guarentee survival of some (takes a while for the culture to catch up with the physical fact), and bunches of others.

The solution is clear, though. Industrialise as fast as possible, go high tech as fast as possible, educate (general literacy, etc), introduce female emancipation if not already present, wait a generation, and watch the birth rate plummet. Its not a quick fix. But its the only one that is guarenteed to work.

RE: hard drive 160 -> 120 -> 160

A couple of people have commented about the weirdness of shrinking the max hard drive, then increasing it again. It gets a lot less confusing when you look at the form factors involved. The original 160gb ipod classic was about a centimeter in depth. With the next generation, it suddenly shrank to about half that. My guess would be that they wanted to make the case smaller, and that 120gb was the largest hard drive they could buy (at least without raising unit prices too much) to fit in it. Since then, hardware has come along, and they can now get 160gb drives to put in them again.

Good luck with the quicksand

Granted, this is early days yet, but I've never really been convinced of the fundamental practicalities of this sort of thing, even if they can fix the basic stuff, like batteries that only last a few hours. The current version is all very well for marching about carrying heavy loads, but in the field, you need to be able to jump forward, back, up, down, sideways, dive onto the ground, get up quickly, low crawl, roll over - a heinlein suit can do this stuff, but what we're seeing here can't do anything except walk, run, and maybe jump forward and up. How about scrambling up out of a ditch, or climbing over a low wall? Basically, if you can't run a standard assault course in it, its not going to be of any use in combat.

For that matter, sheer ground weight is going to be an issue. Once you've got the exoskeleton itself, and a bunch of batteries, then hung some armour off it, a backpack full of kit, weapons and ammo, you've got to be looking at something at least approaching a third to a half of a ton (more if you're talking about a full-on heinlein suit). But all of that weight is going to be directed through the same size feet, so the grounds pressure is gonna be tripled at least. Which means you're goning to have trouble with soft ground, and you'll sink knee deep in mud in nothing flat, whilst lighter troops run straight over it, and you can forget about house clearance. You may possibly be ok in modern, well built buildings, but in the flimsy 3rd world buildings that our troops seem to be spending most their time in right now, you'll be punching holes in the floor with every step - not that you'll be taking too many steps when you've got your feet stuck in the floor boards - collapsing stairs as you try and climb up them, and with several guys, quite possibly collapsing the whole floor...

Didn't break when I dropped it

I've got a first gen iphone, which I've dropped several times onto concrete from a height of about a meter. Screen was fine in each case. I later managed to step on the glass face (it was in the pocket of a pair of trousers on the floor, and yes that was damn stupid), and that did crack it, but the screen is otherwise working fine, and I've been using it for about 3 months since then with no problems. Come to think of it, I did the same thing with a Motorola Razr a couple of years back, with identical results.

As other posters have said, it looks like its a case of how it falls, and how lucky you are. Seems to me to be no more breakable than any other phone.

Money Split?

Didn't see anything here on revenue split between Microsoft and ISVs, or publishing cost. That's gonna be pretty crucial in getting developer buy in. Apple seems to have set the standard with a flat 30/70 split. Is Microsoft planning the same?

Capacitive screens and overheating

If you're looking for a smartphone with a resistive screen, you're I supect you're going to be SOL, pretty much all the new ones are going capacitive these days. I think there are some WinMo ones that are still going resistive, but as a concept it seems to be dying.

@Ian 11

Regarding the heat issues, Several of my colleagues have 3Gs's (I'm still stuck on my "ancient" 2G) , and are reporting no heat problems whatsoever. I can't help but think that this is either being blown out of all proportion, or that the've had a bad batch of batteries somewhere. DOes anyone have any hard numbers for how many people are reporting this?