Posts by Adam Foxton

It's about now

they start regretting not pushing harder for a .xxx domain.

As that Britney fan might have said, LEAVE IT ALONE! JUST LEAVE THE INTERNET ALONE! I'M SERIOUS!

Hovertanks on Mars?

Can anyone say Battlezone?

It's the one with "I will be watching the sunrise from Olympus Mons long before NASA takes their first steps on the moon" on the back.

Why not

use that Inductive Table idea? That way you can recharge your phone & remote controls and use near-field comms (or Bluetooth) to connect the phone to your home network (so you can stick more music/movies on it, turn the kettle on without having to stand up, etc)

Or use it to power your wireless game controllers (and I think everyone with these knows how annoying it is when they run out of power just before that final corner or that final headshot!)?

Also, if it's beaming out 2W every few seconds then that's less than 1W of average power. Spread out over a room. Which is vastly less than a mobile phone- which anyone non-New Age accepts are fairly harmless.

So anyway, this could be a good idea if applied to more than just remote controls.

Asimo first?

What about Johnny 5?

*hums "more than a woman", offers fresh OJ not-from-concentrate.*

How about some extended reasoning

If the police can't get into it and they didn't know it existed then it's not important to whoever owns it and can be deleted and fully unrecoverabl-inated.

At least then the content is gone forever- and if they actually have some sort of a case against someone you'd hope it involved more than just the presence of an encrypted file.

It horrifys me that Jaqui et al are so determined to increase the number of prosecutions- apparently to the extent that they'll gladly change the law to let them convict innocent (i.e. not found guilty) people. Rather than requiring that real evidence actually exists.

@AC THAT would be impressive! "You did WHAT? Removed the hard drive?! YOU FOOL! YOU JUST REMOVED MY ABILITY TO DECRYPT IT!"

Doesn't seem too impossible to achieve either...

Great!

Give it 2 weeks for this to filter into parliament and I'll get arrested for having a dual-overclocked-SLIed "password cracking tool".

Impressive tech, though!

@When the do upgrade AC

Yeah, because any *NIX OS runs a higher proportion of XP-compatible apps than Vista. Totally.

Moving to a *NIX would be great, though. As is keeping their existing (presumably working) system working.

@Roger Lancefield

Damnit, you beat me to an awful Ambulance Drivers pun!

Canadian Borders

The Canadians have a border around their apple.

The Canadians are missing (or is that gaining?) the bite out of their apple.

The Canadians have their logo written inside their apple

The Canadians apple is a different shape to Apples' apple.

Still, the main point should be- why did they choose an apple as their logo if not to copy Apple? And why would a tech department want to copy Apple? A design (or prickish self-publicist) department sure but not a tech department.

Good!

No sarcasm-this is A Good Thing. Less environmental screw ups, less noise, an army that's far less tied to the "main" national infrastructure. Plus a great example to point other companies at.

If this is carried out under their normal budget, or even on a reasonable extension of the budget, then is is a fantastic scheme.

Brownian ratchets

They're going to fill the Laptops up with a nice cup of tea?

Fantastic!

It's the one with the Asus Earl Grey's carry-case over the shoulder

Uucking Fseless

With so so many good or good-ish electric cars coming out now (MEV R2 electric version at stoneleigh- over 100mph, 0-60 was respectable but similarly limited range- cost was about £17k IIRC, Tesla Roadster, etc) how can Chrysler get it so wrong?

If someone had worked with Ferrari or Lambourghini 5 years ago to build an electric car the market would look a lot "greener" now than it does with the Prius and this crap attempt at treehugger appeasement. PEOPLE WANT FAST, SLEEK CARS! NOT SOMETHING THAT WAS DESIGNED BY SNEEZING ON A PAGE AND SKETCHING AROUND THE RESULTS!

That is unless it's under £4k or so. If it was that cheap new I'd buy one for running about to work and back- and it would suddenly make a whole lot of sense. 10 miles there, 10 miles back and enough left over for a detour to Tesco.

If only it had been a hydrogen balloon

That could have been the coolest aerial collission EVER. Jetpack versus Airship in a bloody great fireball!

@TeeCee

Or on a similar train of thought, how about an oversized wooden Tardis, a fleet of Daleks or an X-wing or two? Or a big black blanket to block out the stars? 136kg of OHP acetate that when viewed from the correct angle on Earth makes the Moon look like the Death Star? Or even a bloody great mirror?

Honestly, these rich people have no idea how to have fun! I mean they could at least have cored out the aluminium mass and later claimed to have lost a bloody big bolt or formed it into a rude and amusing shape...

@MarkH

The point is that you _CHOOSE_ to let Google see what you search for.

Does this only work on HTTP? Or would it also record SNMP/FTP/Torrents/other such protocols?

To a lawyer:

Does this mean that BT just lost their Common Carrier status and can from tomorrow be fined for every byte of kiddie pr0n/terrorist stuff/"extreme porn"/pirated software that passes through their network? I mean it's not common carrier now, is it?

To all sys admins:

Please enforce the use of HTTPS at the very least on your servers.

@Matt's @Bill - re rock comment

The battery life is where they really get you. Seriously, I had this awesome high-iron-content rock, guaranteed to last pretty much forever. Put a pair of high-capacity double-As in there and a couple of hours later I had a warm rock with two electrolyte-encrusted batteries in it.

Thumbs down from me!

A more on-topic point- surely anything saying "Radio" is now pretty old-hat? You'd have thought IBM would have at least allowed for the idea of using WiFi- but that's microwave frequency radiation rather than radio so a WiFi enabled version wouldn't be covered by their patent!

Crucial choice for the Americans

Stay in the race or drop out completely. Do or do not- there is no try. And other such sayings.

If the Americans want to maintain a presence in space they need to fund it correctly. If they lose their presence in space, they lose a load of cash, knowledge and prestige- but also "gain" a tiny proportion of their GDP to waste on other stuff.

If they fund it correctly, the Americans could- to paraphrase Battlezone's Wilheim Arkin- "watch the sunrise from the olympus mons while Putin plays with his little orbital bottle rockets".

Personally, I'd hope they keep their presence in space (or that the UK/ESA kicks its ass in the next space race- either's good).

Oblique references to world poverty

"Everybody gets one. Except these poor children in Africa. Please, everybody, give generously."

"I'm glad I'm aLIVE to AID these people"

Doesn't sound too good either...

@Ian Chard: Mens rea?

More like Mens Rear- in that no criminal intent means you're not a criminal = MY ARSE. Ignorance has never been a defence, or the RIAA / MPAA wouldn't ever have had a case against most of their victims so far.

This is utterly ridiculous. For a start there's no way the Police should decide what crimes are and are not worth investigating- just a lazy day or a bad hangover and they'd just drop half their workload.

Someone should start tapping DS Murray's phone lines to make sure he's not getting too many hateful calls or telesales people. Such a huge improvement in his phone service would surely make this entirely legal so long as no equipment was damaged?

Evil fuckers, the lot of them.

Vacuum ship

"H2O is lighter than air"... "Cold Steam"

Cold steam is water, which is most definately not lighter than air as the weather is proving quite abley at the moment up here.

I did some calculations on this- and to lift a 100kg man (of which I am a frankly awe-inspiring example) you would need approximately 120m^3. Yes, this is probably less than a standard airship- but you've then got to factor in the mass of the envelope itself. This envelope has to be strong enough to prevent itself from collapsing in on itself- and therein lies the problem. It's a pain in the ass to build a structure that won't collapse in on itself on such huge scales with tiny thicknesses of envelope wall.

Vacuum ships, therefore, only work at extremely large scales (according to my kickass spreadsheet on the subject- yes, I have looked into this before and yes, I clearly have too much time on my hands...) and are still pretty useless even then.

----

A helium ship carrying (or surrounded by) a cardboard (or nice bulletproof Kevlar) cutout of the Battlecruiser from StarCraft would be awesome- even if it was of limited strategic value, just seeing one of those leviathans hovering over you would be enough to strike the fear of God/Allah/other into you.

Turn it into the worlds biggest and slowest UAV so you're not risking personnel and you could even go for a cheap Hydrogen based version!

Strap a few Hellfire missiles to it, a few solar panels on the whole top of the vehicle to keep it energy-self-sufficient for ridiculous lengths of time and build in some sort of UAV-based rearming system for the Hellfire launchers and to re-stock any escaping lift gas et voila! A perfect low-maintainance Shock and Awe weapon capable of wiping out anyone that attacks it.

That's about when DARPA starts looking at building a Yamato Cannon...

@"big database" people

Wouldn't it mean they can use bluetooth to connect to a small webserver on their bluetooth dongle? Like a bluetooth enabled microcontroller webserver on the device- rather than requiring an internet connection.

So running costs are approximately bugger all owing to the tiny power consumption of these devices, setup costs are £20, and so on. So no huge databases and a great source of information. Restaurants with menus being bluetoothed out- ready for automated translation, in text sizes you can read, and so on. Train stations with the timetables available- a bit more involved as you'd need a data-feed of some sort, but that'd hardly be difficult to manage. PIC based webserver w/bluetooth, data feed from station network over a serial link.

Use a standard Bluetooth profile (serial port or PAN or something similar) to send out the data and a huge number of devices could suddenly become even more useful- especially if it was rolled out world-wide.

You'd have to make it read-only (or at least with a physical lock-out) so you'd not be able to stick other information on it...

@Steven

What about the Tesla Roadster? There was also an electric version of the MEV R2 kit-car (Google "LiFeBatt"- it's the orange one) at the Stoneleigh kit-car show this year. Or the Wrightspeed X1, which is a 'leccy Aerial Atom.

All rather nice looking vehicles. But yeah, most of them look like crap.

The big problem wtih 'leccy cars is energy storage- at the moment you can only really get 2 out of 3 from decent range, decent performance and decent cost. The electric R2 conversion, for example- over 100mph top speed, about 5 second 0-60 IIRC and a range of... 35 miles. Perfect for commuting, I guess. It'd make great sense if the trains were any good in the UK for getting around the country.

Anyway, they should have called it the Aygo On Batteries.

"GO" because they can. Just no very far...

@Kanhef

"We need to breathalyse you"

"Can't you take a blood sample"

"Well, if you insist"

*click*

*thud*

*extract*

"Well, he's sober but at least when he comes to and drives off we'll get him for driving without due care and attention due to concussion"

Also, surely it should be called Sauced code?

Remotely operated phones

So they need the phone connected to the network- and ideally in-call- when the Predator is attacking. Some way of making this happen... hmm... hmmm...

So what they need to do is... call the phone. That's the beauty of phones- even if they reject the phone call as it's from a non-whitelisted number or something, it still needs to receive the number and reject it. And naturally it'll not do anything (ringtones etc) while this happens as it'd annoy the owner.

So just call the phone. If you don't get through, deploy the Predator. If you do get through, keep them talking.

And for any sarky comments to follow: their phone will have to connect to a network of some sort- so hack it. By "hack it" I mean "use that mobile-encryption-hacking system El Reg had an article on a while back or DoD equivalent" and just grab the mobile number from the now easy-to-listen-to/read data. Listen in, translate to get any useful intel out of the call/text, find 'em, bomb 'em.

Finding is easy enough- pass a Predator over where you think they are equipped with some sort of aerial. Or even 3 of them flying in formation, all equipped with aerials. Triangulate from that then drop 3x as many bombs!

Worst case scenario, they take the battery out of the phone and none of your remote trickery will work.

Even better, have your troops phone them up asking to order a Pizza. It'll piss them off, and hopefully will encourage some of them to leave to get proper non-terrorist jobs.

@A J Stiles

They don't. It'll either go through a generator with some sort of variable gearbox or- more likely- have some sort of electrical trickery applied to it- for example having it rectified to DC then pulsed into a transformer at a precise number of pulses a second. That way it doesn't matter how fast the windmill turns- whatever happens, it works just fine.

Similar bits of electrical trickery (or "electrickery") will be employed to make sure it's the correct voltage.

On a different note, how come they couldn't just stay until the water level dropped a bit? In their website photo they clearly show it sat on a beach so it can't have any trouble getting over slightly damp land. Okay it'll slow them down a bit but technology has improved so much in 40 years you'd hope the Greenbird could comfortably overtake the current record holder even with that handicap!

Wind powered cars will suck as much as electric cars until the battery technology really improves- at which point petrol will be worth a lot less. Build a 300 mile range, 100mph top speed, under 10-sec 0-60 (easy with series-wound motors) 5-seater that's on sale at a few tens of thousands of pounds and people will rush out to buy it. I certainly would!

Possible update?

Datamatrix style 2D barcodes embedded in road signs- maybe only visible to IR cameras or suchlike. Should contain location and unique-sign-identifier number. Maybe even a standardised text version of the sign's contents.

The camera can then estimate speed, improve GPS (with a known fixed location to work with you can make GPS more accurate in a similar manner to DGPS), and so on. Entirely passive, so no expensive power cables/solar panels (or potential for vehicle-tracking) and it'd make it far easier for digital-vision systems to find where they're going. Even better, it'd work in crowded urban environments (unlike GPS, which seems to fall over exactly when you least want it to...).

And it could be used to get cars to warn Paedophile passengers to stay away from these areas (maybe between certain times like school leaving times) to stop them being tempted or falsely accused.

Easy enough to do, green, helps nerds AND repels paedophiles? Truely a fantastic solution!

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This is likely to descend into a horrendous RFID-vehicle-trackers-under-every-sign "Big Chaffeur" system of road-surveilance.

On the obligatory green front, completely redoing every sign in the UK does really seem like the most sensible solution to global warming...

So what about

someone who fires two rockets at the same plane? Or number of drones + 1 rockets, anyway. Like one of those anti-air tracer-ammo-equipped guns you see on the news?

Still, seems a pretty good idea if they're just having rockets shot at them one-at-a-time.

@"Bloody Stupid Johnston" AC

I'm guessing you're drunk or not much of a user of English.

Your style of writing makes English look chaotic; correctly written and punctuated English is very structured.

Surely a true IT-o-phile would be starting a campaign to have everything structured with a similar layout to C, or to encourage the use of boolean algebraic expressions in modern language? The second example would, at least, eliminate any need for "one or the other or both" and other such clumsy sentences- you could simplify it to "one xor the other".

The rules of English are not hard to follow. Equally, it's not neccesary to follow these rules in a large number of situations. For example, starting a sentence with "And" is normally accepted.

Mixing up Effect and Affect, however, should be a criminal offence and should be punishable by death. Painful firey-death, hence the icon.

@lIsRT

You mean like 3D printers? Like the ones that have been out for years and are even mentioned in the article?

Apologies for the sarcasm.

And yeah, they're awesome! Wish I had one at home...

@Drawing is wrong

If you're correct, and they have decent forward propulsion, this could work very well- a spinning disc that works as an aerofoil would provide lift while also providing massive stability thanks to the gyroscopic effect. The back rotor would provide a further stabalising system, meaning that when travelling at a constant speed this would probably be a good, stable platform.

So you've got a quick, highly stable VTOL platform. Sounds exactly what the DOD would be interested in!

I wonder what its radar profile would be like?

Icarus?

“We have existed in isolation. Pure. Disconnected. Alone. Stagnant. We have become our own shadows. We can become more if we join with you, yessss.”

What's with the shades? My vision is augmented.

@Mark_T

"even optical glass is pretty much opaque to it." Which would make it a bloody awful defence- it'd be absorbing all that UV light, heat up and crack.

The problem here is they're thinking about it as a single beam. They'd be better off with a number of slightly less impressively-sized lasers. Like a truck-back-full of 10W diodes, all firing up fibres. These fibres would then be aimed so that the emergent laser light was concentrated on a single spot (i.e. on the shell, which the on-board sensors would track in all 3 dimensions) using a bucketload of servos or some other type of actuator.

This would have the benefit of saving anyone stood in front of them (troops fixing it in the event of firing) or behind them (big buildings, planes). Also means you'd need a bloody huge projectile to make a significant dent in the power of it as so many elements were actually doing the firing. A 10W laser is only a couple of cm x a couple of cm x a couple of cm, and a truck is a couple of meters each direction. So 1000 elements wouldn't be horrendously hard, and 10000 wouldn't seem impossible. Even with the other equipment (radar, cooling, etc).

Assume that Boeing have access to more powerful semiconductor lasers than you or I, and suddenly it all becomes very possible. And the lack of any high-power light anywhere except the focus point means you've not got any problems of melting mirrors or lenses.

Another advantage would be that due to the low mass actually being shifted per fibre-end, you'd be able to target it far more quickly and efficiently than you could with a massive monolithic laser. You could concievably even scan CRT-style over the area the enemy shells are passing through, illuminating them and focussing for a few seconds on anything that's reflective.

Plus with power and targetting like that you could probably create 3D holograms like this (http://blog.intuitymedialab.eu/2008/04/30/three-dimensional-images-in-the-air/) with a decent resolution. Just imagine being some random islamic terrorist in Iraq seeing some ethereal image of Allah, God or an Angel appearing in the sky. Or seeing "good guy"/"western" troops being preceeded by glowing galloping horses who tear through the terrorists' friends. You'd probably need more elements to manage a decent resolution, refresh rate and power rating, but this is Boeing working for the US military- it's not like they'll have a lack of trucks or funds!

That, and you could put on a helluva light show at the end of the night...

Data being stored?

Will it store the actual website visited, or just that your IP address visited that website? If it's storing more than just the details of "this connection between these devices openned between these times" then surely it's not "maintaining the system" so much as "upgrading to echelons' big brother"?

Also, while I can just about condone storing details of the connections' establishment/closing times on a pseudo-anonymous IP by IP basis (i.e. they've got to ask the ISPs to get it resolved to a physical address/location, leaving a paper trail for the courts to follow if neccesary), if it's any further than that it's actually surveilance gone mad.

I wonder if the Internet could break away and become its own country...

Not AC because, well, it'll not make a difference.

Griffin Mobile Processors, Apu graphics chips

Anyone else think AMD have been watching too many cartoons?!

New slogans:

AMD- Our new chips are Kwik-er than the oppositions'!

AMD- Griffin isn't as s-Lois as our competitors for getting to market.

Undoubtedly there are more puns to come

Surely no problem?

MS doesn't actually use ISO 29500 either- just some bastardised version of it.

So what's the problem? Create an ISO 29500 reader/writer based on the standard and then sue MS off the planet after they claim Office 2007/2008 is "ISO 29500 compliant" or OOXML compliant.

Alternatively, if you can't support a standard without breaching various patents or using copyrighted code surely either (a) the code becomes freely available (i.e. the setting of a standard by the author removes their right to keep it secret or even make money off it- it's a standard; people are SUPPOSED to use standards.) or (b) no-one but MS uses the standard and everyone else uses ODF. If everyone (especially people like Adobe) used ODF over ISO 29500 or OOXML then MS would have no choice but to bow to popular demand.

Adobe in particular would be useful allies thanks to the widespread use of the PDF doc format.

Option (c), of course, is to implement ISO 29500 wherever possible. Everywhere. And still keep MS somewhat out of the loop as their own office app isn't standards-compliant. And businesses like Standards.

I wonder if you could get a company to lose their ISO 9000 certification etc if they didn't know (and hence couldn't quantify, qualify or audit) exactly _how_ they were storing their data, or what other metadata was being stored along with their data?

Legality? More to the point, Morality?

What if all your pics were on there? For example, if your other copies had broken and you needed to retrieve them.

Surely this is blackmail, or selling under false pretences? Even if they said "this service may be withdrawn later" you'd have expected some sort of warning to let you retrieve all your files!

Cnuts.

Boris rhyme

Bore Us? No, he doesn't manage that...

Corus? No, they make steel pipes and the like.

Whore us [out]? No, that's Brown...

This sucks

I'd suggest moving to another country, but can't think of one off the top of my head that won't be full of the same sort of crap in a few short years.

@Charles

It's a bloody classic! By all means come out with a "C21-luedo" but you shouldn't screw up a classic.

And to answer your title, in another 20 years it'll seem hopelessly outdated rather than just "classic" or "old".

Finally, if you were going to create a decent modern one then CSI is an entirely unsuitable model as you'd make the game 100x more complex. Adn you'd lose your hearing every so often. On the upside, there would be killer robots.

Must.... Resist.... Temptation.....

No, you know what, I know a bit of that language. I'm off to start a legacy-systems consultancy firm called the Lords of Cobol!

It's the ones with the viper pilot badge on it.

User verification

Pretty much everyone's got a mobile, right?

And banks know your mobile number (they certainly know mine)?

Why not have the bank's systems text/email/automated-phone-call you for any non-standing-order transactions, say, over £10 or any outside the last city they verified your location in? That way you can buy your breakfast/lunch/dinner, a magazine to read on the bus or whatever else you need day-to-day without the extra verification, but still maintain protection against any more serious fraud.

Again it's not perfect, but it's an extra step. Even as an optional system, it'd help people in fraud-prone areas to help limit their losses.