Posts by JeffyPooh

For the love of gawd...

...tidy up that wiring. :-)

The Native Population on 2012 DA14

It's simply loaded with proto-people, according to that guy in Sri Lanka.

It's not "The End of The World As We Know It"™

My PVR is made by EchoStar (Dish). You push the button and it skips ahead about 29 or 30 seconds at a time. So you get to see each and every commercial; for about 800 milliseconds each. Perfect.

99% of the time the ads are obviously the same old boring underarm deodorant ads, so I keep pressing Fwd. But if I happen to spot (for example) a 4Matic Mercedes driving across a frozen lake, then I'll press the 10s Back button to find the beginning of the ad and I'll watch it; perhaps even twice. Volkswagen ads are also typically worth watching.

I save time. I'm not bored. I still see the ads for products and services that I might actually be interested in. Win-win-win.

No downside, unless you're thick.

How about an Arduino and a laptop?

Maybe a Raspberry Pi with a handful of accessories.

"...and the 'ambitious' user interface design."

You spelled 'rubbish' incorrectly.

It's not just that I don't want Win 8 in my life, it's that I'm going to actively avoid it. Maybe Win 10 will return to normal programming.

Kaspersky Lab - well deserved failure

Their 'Confidence/Competence Ratio'™ slightly exceeds unity (dangerous territory). This sort of embarrassing failure at Kaspersky Labs was perfectly *inevitable* (and still is).

Cost of wind turbines

The next obvious step is to have the Chinese start manufacturing the wind turbines; that should drop the price by about 75%. It would also reveal the out-of-order approach... ...The Chinese would burn coal like mad to power the massive windmill factories.

Obviously humans need to stop burning coal....now. A new nuke plant takes 20 years from conception to power-up. Natural gas is the *obvious* transitional fuel for the next 30+ years; starting *now*.

Rip off

What happened to the missing $2.65?

Remember the Sony Li-ion batteries with the internal short circuits?

Deja vu?

Maybe Samsung's code review would help Apple fix a few of their stupid bugs

Posted from my imperfect iPhone.

"Oldest Working Computer" - stop on exception

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer

Any of the elderly (*human*) "computers" still "working"?

Better concept follows...

Hat. Brimmed with small, physically small, high power IR LEDs. The LEDs are invisible to the naked eye, they look like beads. To a solid state camera, they're overwhelming. Flash the LEDs on-off at a rate that will confound the autoexposure time constant (on the order of 500 ms, need to experiment). Camera will be blinded enough that facial recognition would have a chance.

Side benefit is all the security camera folks being driven insane. Rentacops running through the malls, looking for someone with a flaming hat.

Eating ~14 cans (169g) of tuna at 0.5ppm Hg = eating one CFL Bulb (~1mg of Hg)

Yummy.

Make the Trap-Door function a lot slower

Make the trap-door function a lot more computationally intensive, so that it requires N seconds to execute on today's hardware. N is chosen to be not very noticeable to the users (maybe 2 or 3 seconds), but enough to massively slow down the dictionary attacks (by orders of magnitude) for a few years.

It might be as simple as repeating the existing trap-door function X times, where X can be incremented (decimal place moved) every few years to keep the timing at several seconds.

The so-called "triangulation" algorithm is not as sophisticated as you might think

My iPhone uses cell phone tower "triangulation" for the short time before the alternate methods (wifi database, and then GPS) kick-in.

The so-called "triangulation" algorithm consistently picks the *exact same location* (never varies). This initial location fix appears to be some sort of very primitive mathematical average of the location three nearest cell towers. The algorithm obviously does not use signal strength - if it did, then one would expect some inevitable variation based on random conditions (seasonal, multi-path, you name it). The location never varies. It's a simple and stupid-as-a-tree-stump algorithm.

I suspect that if I built a house on that exact location, then I might find myself in the same sort of situation as Mr Dobson.

He has my sympathy. PS: I like the sign idea.

Ford pre-approval works how?

"Ford also insists that it must approve any application that wants to integrate with one of its cars before the software is submitted to the respective mobile app stores."

How on Earth will this be enforced? Especially with Android. Smells like a meaningless statement.

I've bought one already...

I've bought one already, but it turned out to be only 888.1784197 TB due to the usual 1000/1024 marketing confusion.

"First, you'll need a fridge..."

Fail - I think (assuming that you intend to install the 1.0 PB array inside the fridge for cooling). A typical "fridge" would probably be overpowered by (on the order of) ~200 watts heat source inside; leaving only the fantastic insulation to melt your expensive array. You'd have much better cooling if you left the fridge door open.

"...unlikely to be something most non-techie users could pull off..."

"The hack is unlikely to be something most non-techie users could pull off as it requires knowledge of WinDbg."

FAIL. Once the inevitable tool is released, then the average non-techie user follows the instructions and goes "click-click". It's ignoring history (e.g. cracking smart cards, ripping DVDs) to think otherwise.

Hopefully they'll be sent to a prison with regular Movie Nights...

...and a string vocational/educational program including Audio-Visual training - especially Movie Projector Operator, Videography, and Video Editing skill sets.

"...damped by gravity..." ???

Damping implies some sort of friction or loss. The radiated acoustical energy from the string into the air is almost certainly the primary damping agent. Air pressure on the ISS is held to a normal, Earth-like value - no difference.

If gravity causes damping, it must be a strange tertiary effect. The physical mechanism from gravity to damping is not obvious.

Anyone know?