Re: Although i profoundly dislike the death penalty...
A dislike is not enough. The death penalty is utterly wrong, simply because miscarriages of justice - which are intrinsically unavoidable - can never, never, never be corrected.
Posts by harmjschoonhoven
737 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Sep 2012
Vizio coughs up $2.2m after its smart TVs spied on millions of families
Trump hits control-Z on cybersecurity order: No reason given for delay
Tuesday 31st January 2017 23:30 GMT 
Re: hold the heads of federal agencies accountable for managing their cyber risk
Sites like https://www.cia.gov/kids-page?
Baird is the word: Netflix's grandaddy gets bronze London landmark
Monday 30th January 2017 15:41 GMT
Re: system lines
The vertical TV scanfrequency is derived by dividing the horizontal scanfrequency by 405= 3x3x3x3x5, 525= 3x5x5x7, 625= 5x5x5x5 resp. 1125= 3x3x5x5x5. Reason was that frequency dividers using valves (tubes) could only handle small odd numbers (R.A. Alexander, The Life and Works of Alan Dower Blumlein, the inventor of stereo, Ch. 5 EMI and the Television Commission) in contrast to transistor-dividers (TTL) which which prefer division by powers of 2.
BTW, the first fully electronic television principle was put forward by Alan Archibald Campbell-Swindon during is address to the Röntgen Society in 1911.
Devonians try to drive Dartmoor whisky plan onto rocks
Trump's FBI boss, Attorney General picks reckon your encryption's getting backdoored
Wednesday 25th January 2017 01:48 GMT
Just saying
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I don't care what your eyeballs tell you. Alternative fact is, we've locked up your files
Boffins ready to demo 1.44 petabit-per-second fibre cables
Monday 23rd January 2017 07:01 GMT
Re: Impressive but ...
The shipping container full of micro SD cards is NOT a unit of bandwidth as it has the dimension of bytes, not bytes/second.
So how fast has a container full of micro SD cards to move to match the 1.44 peta-bit/s fiber? A standard shipping container can hold about 10^8 µSD cards with say 32 GByte each. That is 25600 Petabits/container. Optical signal travel at 200000 km/s. Thus the container has to move at 11.25 km/s (40500 km/h) to match the new optical fiber. That is more than 11.186 km/s, the escape velocity from Earth.
Dodgy Dutch developer built backdoors into thousands of sites
Wednesday 18th January 2017 12:30 GMT
@Anonymous Coward who lived in the Netherlands for a few years
Of course corruption exists in a country with Rotterdam, the largest habour in Europe where cocaine is smuggled with assistence of corrupt borderpolice and Aalsmeer the largest flower auction in the world, which is infiltered by the Italian mafia.
But it is unfair to say that the Dutch policeforce as such is corrupt.
Flight 666 lands safely in HEL on Friday the 13th
Monday 16th January 2017 01:58 GMT
Friday XIII
"This is the Friday the Thirteenth Club, meeting in Paris in 1930 to dance underneath a ladder and carry open umbrellas indoors. Being a rational reader of Nature, you surely applaud this contemptuous attitude towards superstition, so you won't be at all concerned by the following sinister tale. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new calendar to replace the old Julian system, whose inaccuracies had made Easter slip slowly through the seasons. To bring the festivals back to their old positions, ten days disappeared from October 1582. Some people thought the days were being stolen from them. But rebuilding and resetting the calendar had a more subtle effect. The Gregorian cycle of 400 years contains exactly 20,871 weeks, and hidden in the calendar's machinery is a bias towards certain days of the week landing on certain dates in the month. The 13th is more likely to be a Friday than any other day (Brown, B. H. Amer. Math. Monthly 40, 607; 1933). Bernard Yallop now points out that with a personal computer it is possible to look for such peculiarities "without resorting to mathematics" (Spectrum October, 66; 1998). His table shows for example that there are 688 Friday-the-thirteenths every 400 years, but only 684 Thursdays; and a month (like a week) is most likely to begin on a Sunday. Did the Friday the Thirteenth Club know of their good fortune in having these extra opportunities to carouse? I only hope they didn't meet a sticky end before finding out."
Stephen Battersby, Nature, Vol 396, 12 November 1998, page 113
Now that's a Blue Screen of Death: Windows 10 told me to jump off a cliff
Weaky-leaks: Furious fans roast Assange in web interview from hell
Thursday 12th January 2017 13:55 GMT
Re: Can we not just let him go to the Galápagos islands with no internet?
Too late. The use of the Internet has become so wide-spread that even people who generally look to escape "reality" for awhile in such a far-flung destination as Galapagos are constantly asking: Do the Galapagos Islands have internet? The simple answer: Yes.
Microsoft's Blue Screen of Death dead in latest Windows 10 preview
Hackers could turn your smart meter into a bomb and blow your family to smithereens – new claim
Apple sued by parents of girl killed by driver 'distracted by FaceTime'
Flight simulator sets fire to airport
Saturday 31st December 2016 13:52 GMT
Re: Magnet man
That is called the Pauli effect after Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (1900 - 1958). The most famous example is that of a chandelier in a lecture room at a German university which dropped down on the day Pauli passed the town by rail.
BTW For me Pauli is famous for the article Relativitätstheorie first published in 1921 (to put all young physics students to shame, as it is the complete and lucid recap of the (special and general) theory of relativity, published under that title by Pergamon Student Editions (241 pages).
Prez Obama expels 35 Russian spies over election meddling
How Google.org stole the Christmas Spirit
2016 just got a tiny bit longer. Gee, thanks, time lords
Friday 23rd December 2016 16:58 GMT
Love it.
Here we are only allowed to set off firework(bomb)s between 18:00 CET 2016-12-31 and 02:00 CET 2017-01-01. Not that anybody is paying any attention to that, but the extra second may be quite handy.
BTW. Scheduling the transition from 'wintertime' to 'summertime' v.v. has been a problem in broadcasting ever since the transmissions went 7/24.
Stupid law of the week: South Carolina wants anti-porno chips in PCs that cost $20 to disable
'I told him to cut it out' – Obama is convinced Putin's hackers swung the election for Trump
Earth days are getting longer – by 1.8 milliseconds per century
Friday 9th December 2016 11:17 GMT
Earth rotational energy
is 2.137 1036 erg and is proportional to the square of the angular velocity. A slowdown of 1.8 ms/day per century is a relative decrease of 0.5 10-10 in angular velocity per year, releasing 8.5 1026 erg/year.
World electricity production from all energy sources was (in 2014) 22433 TWh or 8 1026 erg/year.
Note that the rise in seawater level slows the eath's rotation, but does - in first approximation - not change the rotational energy.
Chernobyl cover-up: Giant shield rolled over nuclear reactor remains
Friday 2nd December 2016 01:28 GMT
Re: Sellafield
The official Sellafield history is Windscale 1957, Anatomy of a Nuclear Accident by the eminent Lorna Arnold.
San Francisco's sinking luxury Millennium Tower: Tilt spotted FROM SPACE
Sunday 27th November 2016 14:57 GMT
Re: Welcome to the club
But the Dutch know how to build on soft soil. The Royal Palace in Amsterdam was built as a town hall between 1648 and 1665 on 13659 wooden piles. It is still erect and in perfect condition standing on that same wooden piles (minus two, taken out for inspection) protected by groundwater.
Controlling groundwater levels is essential in the Netherlands, especially in the parts that are below sea level. For that they have elected councils with a tradition going back to the 13th Century.
LAKE OF frozen WATER THE SIZE OF NEW MEXICO FOUND ON MARS – NASA
Wednesday 23rd November 2016 14:49 GMT
Re: Wow
B-52's are still flying (*) in anger.
(*) 27 minute War College podcast. North Korea sets off a nuclear bomb and how does the U.S. respond? The Pentagon sends a 65-year-old airplane to buzz Korean airspace. It wouldn't make a lot of sense if the warplane wasn't the B-52 bomber. Designed in the aftermath of World War Two, obsolete nearly before the last one rolled off the line in 1961 - the Stratofortress may remain in the air for another 25 years.
Hackers electrocute selves in quest to turn secure doors inside out
Wednesday 23rd November 2016 01:30 GMT
Re: Several pieces of equipment melted
At Los Alamos National Laboratory they have explosively pumped flux compression generators, devices used to generate a high-power electromagnetic pulse by compressing magnetic flux using high explosives. EPFCGs are intended to selfdestruct.
User needed 40-minute lesson in turning it off and turning it on again
Saturday 19th November 2016 15:17 GMT
Re: The power switch is ALWAYS at the back of the computer
From A.N. Walker The UNIX™ Environment (1984): Unix can stop in three ways: out of control, in panic, or under user control. Out-of-control stops are caused either by catastrophic hardware failure, or by catastrophic bugs in Kernel (rare), or by idiotic user behaviour (such as switching off the power).
Fake election news meltdown vortex sucks in Google
Tuesday 15th November 2016 01:20 GMT 
I for me
trust the Prophecies* of our good old friend Nostradamus. According to Google he both predicted that Hillary and Donald would win the US elections ....
* If you go to the Utrecht University Library you can ask for it. You may read it, but you can not take it out because it is a pre-1800 book.
Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals
Sunday 13th November 2016 00:32 GMT
Re: Madness!
I hope they still sell Greek Fire, Poison Arrows & Scorpion Bombs: Biological and Chemical Warfare in the Ancient World, Pdf here.
Scorpion bombs were used in naval warfare. Throw a couple of thin eathware pots with a scorpion inside at a hostile trireme and wait for the effect.
China passes new Cybersecurity Law – you have seven months to comply if you wanna do biz in Middle Kingdom
Tuesday 8th November 2016 18:37 GMT
Re: bribery in China
China has never had a formal privatisation programme. Instead, as Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California, writes in China's Crony Capitalism, decentralising the rights of control over state property without clarifying the rights of ownership gave those who rule maximum advantage to extract wealth from society. Rights of control have been separated from rights of ownership in China - and where ownership is uncertain, control is key.
With clinical precision, Mr Pei explains how corruption operates at every level, perverting each branch of the party-state and subverting the political authority of the regime. The party cannot mitigate, let alone eradicate, "crony capitalism" because, since 1989, it has been "the very foundations of the regime's monopoly of power", the author argues. The conclusion, he believes, is that far from saving the regime, President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption drive may accelerate its demise by creating divisions within the ruling elite even as it reinforces strong popular resentment of corruption. (Cit, from The Economist)
China's Crony Capitalism: The Dynamics of Regime Decay. By Minxin Pei. Harvard University Press.
'Extra-supermoon' to appear next week
CERN also has a particle decelerator – and it’s trying to break physics
Monday 7th November 2016 19:08 GMT
Re: Next question...
Experiments to answer the question Does antimatter fall down? were proposed in A Catching Trap for All Antiproton Seasons. The question is simple and relevant. The experiment is very difficult to perform. Electrostatic forces will dominate over gravity for falling antiprotons and antihydrogen, which is electrically neutral, is harder to make and handle.
Computer forensics defuses FBI's Clinton email 'bombshell'
Sunday 6th November 2016 01:53 GMT
Re: I sense political meddling.
@080 http://www.talkingaboutpolitics.com/crooks-and-fools/
Sitting in a century old steakhouse staring out at the Brooklyn Bridge thirty years ago Hank Greenburg (the pollster not the baseball player) explained an election that could only happen in the grubby circus of New York politics: Given a choice between a Crook and a Fool, he said, voters take the Crook. His theory was simple: You can predict what a Crook will do but you never know what a Fool may do.
America has one month to stop the FBI getting its global license to hack
Monday 31st October 2016 21:46 GMT
Re: anywhere in the world
Is the U.S. at war? Sorry, that's classified.
Rosa Brooks, a former Pentagon staffer and author of "How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon," argues that U.S. citizens and lawmakers should shake off fears of appearing unpatriotic to challenge the U.S.'s unchecked, unilateral and covert military activities abroad. If that doesn't happen soon, the United States may have to pay for the dangerous example it's setting for powers like Russia and China.
Aussie trams equivalent to 30 skateboarding rhinos
LinkedIn, Dropbox hack suspect named as Yevgeniy Nikulin by US prosecutors
DeepMind boffins are trying to help robots escape The Matrix and learn for themselves in the real world
Sunday 23rd October 2016 21:06 GMT
There was once a German professor
who had trained his dog to recognize slides with geometric figures. He toured from town to town to show the clever dog. Until one day the lamp of the projector failed and the dog still made the right barks; he was trained on the sounds the slides made when they were put in the projector. Something simular happened when neural networks were first used to train driverless cars. The side of the road was recognized not by the curb, but by green grass and the car refused to cross a bridge.
'Doubly unacceptable' Swiss vegan forces his way into the army
Democralypse Now? US election first battle in new age of cyberwarfare
Tuesday 18th October 2016 14:50 GMT 
Since 2006
there is ongoing criticism of attempts to introduce electronic voting in the Netherlands. The most recent vote, the non-binding referendum on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement, was all done by red pencil on paper (at least by the 32.2 % of the electorate that turned up to vote). BTW, there are indications that some initiators of this referendum were more than inspired by Russia.
For an update on electronic voting see http://wijvertrouwenstemcomputersniet.nl (in Dutch).
US reactor breaks fusion record – then runs out of cash and shuts down
Tuesday 18th October 2016 01:21 GMT
We should not forget
the Huemul Project an Argentine effort to develop a fusion power device known as the Thermotron which also supposedly failed by lack of funds.
Nuke plant has been hacked, says Atomic Energy Agency director
Tuesday 11th October 2016 16:55 GMT
Re: What a very substandard article this is
Watch a chilling interview with survivors of the armed attack on South Africa's nuclear plant at Pelindaba that holds enough fuel for a dozen atomic bombs. Even just the first few minutes will give you a new appreciation of the risk we face.
With thanks to http://nuclearrisk.org/ for providing the link.
Edinburgh University to flog its supercomputer for £0.0369 per core hour
Rosetta spacecraft set for smash landing
Friday 30th September 2016 11:33 GMT
Live stream
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHPPToSNdik now playing
Elon Musk: I'm gonna turn Mars into a $10bn death-dealing interplanetary gas station
Samsung: And for my next trick – exploding WASHING MACHINES
Thursday 29th September 2016 16:58 GMT 
The real thing
One of my uncles ran an industrial washing service for 5* hotels etc. with rows of ~4 meter long W/Ms (and an in-house steam engine). They were switched on by pressing 2 buttons simultaneously at either end of the device by two men to prevent it chopping off a finger. Of course my uncle frequently found one of the buttons taped down.
Turing, Hauser, Sinclair – haunt computing's Cambridge A-team stamping ground
High rear end winds cause F-35A ground engine fire
Monday 26th September 2016 17:06 GMT
Re: Any chances of a youtube viddie showing us the awesome pyrotechnics?
I can only help you with a video of a Rolls Royce A380 Blade Off Test. The action starts at 4 min.
Lethal 4-hour-erection-causing spiders spill out of bunch of ASDA bananas
Wednesday 21st September 2016 15:34 GMT
Bah,
with spiders or without spiders, bananas are radioactive !!
Salesforce Einstein: Enterprise AI breakthrough, or CRM Clippy?
BOFH: The case of the suspicious red icon
Friday 16th September 2016 23:51 GMT
It is the olde story
"There are three different kinds of brains users, the one understands things unassisted, the other understands things when shown by others, the third understands neither alone nor with the explanations of others. The first kind is most excellent, the second is also excellent, but the third is useless." Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe (1513), Cap. XXI.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
