Posts by John Sturdy

Re: How about testing it ?

Perhaps because they haven't worked out how to put something like Superfish onto Linux?

I don't know why anyone trusts Lenovo any more.

Re: Spin is the answer

You don't need to stop the rotation to, for example, connect to a supply / refuelling ship; you can either have a section on the axis that turns (relative to the main body of the ship) on bearings, but is stationary as seen from outside; or you can spin the supply ship before docking.

Propellor-head icon, because they'll be good at managing all these rotating and counter-rotating and co-rotating things.

Re: Poor chap

Ian Bunkum Smith?

Yes, I think it's likely Android has been propping Java up for some time now. Unfortunately.

I guess it made sense at the time (in terms of which languages it was easy to get application programmers for) but I wish they'd picked a decent language instead, or just defined the interfaces and told people to call them from whatever they liked.

But back then, SWIG wasn't as good as it is now, and Go hadn't been invented.

That's easy

Just make the login process take 18 years. By the time it completes, you're old enough.

There's hope for us yet!

I'm glad it's not designed to encourage people to write bloatware from the start.

The NSA might even like that

The problem with that is that it gives more information to the NSA, as they look at which users stop using the service when the canary disappears; it'll be a clue as to who wants to hide what.

Re: The compensation culture at work!

The rock clearly is designed with human fallibility in mind: it appears to have suffered little, if any, damage from the collision.

Re: Greatly reassured.

We are all known to the authorities.

About "After that much driving you should be taking at least an hour break anyway."...

Other technical changes (self-driving cars) may render that irrelevant.

Re: Danger

Yes, if it had suitably generic problem-solving algorithms it should spot that the quickest way to get the task done involves taking a little time off the main task, to remove anything that's interfering with the main task.

Re: Security Theatre

I suspect the cops' real interest is in removing sousveillance drones at protests. Only Big Brother will be allowed to film protests.

Re: Wait, what?

Yes, it does look remarkably like a US public official talking some kind of sense.

That she appears to know what source code is is also encouraging.

Liability AND benefit (Applies to everything?)

Although it's a liability when someone else does it, there are all sorts of benefits to being able to customize a camera yourself.

The one that appeals to me is using the steady stream of data with low information density as the carrier for steganography --- thus using surveillance equipment to counter another form of surveillance.

To get a suitable data stream, point the camera so it includes some of the outdoors in its field of view; trees waving in the wind, shadows of clouds moving across the lawn, birds flying past... an empty room might not be good enough in itself. Or maybe a fishtank would do. I wonder whether spies will now start taking an interest in anyone with a webcam showing their aquarium, and wonder what they're hiding?

That being said... being able to reflash it without physical access, or at least a user-settable password, would be appalling. But the OpenWRT instructions make it look like that's not what's happening here.

That's comforting!

Having read "Spycatcher" and seen the level of compartmentalization within an agency (departments were spying on each other because of mistrust of potential moles, without each department spotting that they were being spied on), I had been suspicious that Snowden was an NSA plant, leaking that "we're doing X amount of surveillance" to hide the fact that they were really doing 3X amount of surveillance. But the post 9/11 sharing is more plausible, and makes Snowden more plausible to me. Not that I completely dismiss my earlier idea, to be on the safe side.

Re: I wonder...

It should be able to avoid the holes left where the researches drilled out road sample cores, anyway.

Re: Opportunistic pathogens

For opportunistic pathogens to cause a problem doesn't require suppression of the immune system; it can simply be that something that's harmless in one place is harmful in another. I've recently found this through personal experience, having had shoulder surgery in which one of the incisions happened to pass through a hair follicle, thus pushing propionibacterium acnes (the pathogen that causes acne, but otherwise lives as a harmless commensal in hair follicles) deeper into my body, causing an obvious majorly inflamed area and a risk of arthritis in two years if it got into the joint capsule. The treatment was six weeks of intravenous antibiotics. I normally shake off infections fairly quickly, so it's not as if my immune system was compromised.

(There's an interesting experimental preventative treatment for this problem, by the way: seal the skin with cyanoacrylate, thus gluing the bacteria into place.)

I guess they'll carry quite a range of antibiotics, and a quick google search indicates that crew medical officers are trained to insert IV lines. I don't know what they'd do about the equivalent of a drip chamber in zero-g, but I'm sure someone's found a way round that one.

I'm pretty sure Linux has got a solid enough position that it's not likely to be displaced for a long time; the nearest direction I could see making a sensible challenge would be something that's developed with both real-time response and maximum security in mind from the ground up, rather than backfitted; and maybe a strong emphasis on keeping the footprint small, too. But I suspect people will keep patching the general-purpose project to keep it good enough in these areas to fend off newcomers.