Posts by Eugene Goodrich

The scary bit...

... is that if this is what it looks like when you're safe, imagine what it looks like when you're in trouble.

RE: Hello Kitty assault rifle

While this rifle is mid-sized caliber and carbine length, it isn't select-fire so I don't think it should be called an assault rifle. It's just a rifle, or perhaps a self-loading rifle.

Welcome to America.

Where it's already _exactly like this_.

Delete the files? Is that enough?

If the border patrol is allowed to copy all data on the hard drives, there's nothing to stop them copying data that's no longer files, i.e. the data left around after a file has been deleted.

Seem to me a niche for a new "Google Laptop" with no permanent storage of any kind has just come about.

You are all worry-warts

This thing sniffs terrorist mobile calls, not regular ones. If you don't have a terrorist phone, which sets the T bit on its outbound voice-data packets, you've nothing to worry about.

Trust

I don't think the military will ever accept a weapon that will fire at times and targets they cannot predict.

They're not idiots about things that go boom - not the ones in charge of other peoples' lives, anyway - and they seem to have taken even the rare short circuit or buggy program that throws lead or drops steel with extreme concern.

To tell them the new small arms their troops walk around with might spontaneously shoot things a soldier's subconscious (a thing we do not yet fully understand) considers threatening seems quite unlikely to be well-received if they intend to continue fielding soldiers in groups of more than one and in places where there are non-targets.

So I'm not worried.

'Course, if I see a borg-troop, I'm going to make myself quite scarce.

Look forward to them losing the video

Recorders seem to conk out, or data gets corrupted or lost, when the people with the recording devices are accused of doing bad things.

I'm keen to see whether this effect can break out of anecdoteville and into statistic significdom.

Get back to me when it's happened.

I hear production of cellulosic ethanol and 90%-efficiency solar cells and MEMs data storage are due to be released in just a few months, too.

Hard drive failures are not canonical

Hard drive manufacturers do not agree with their customers in many cases about what constitutes a failure.

Specifically, there are a number of things that customers might be willing to call a "partial failure" that the manufacturers do not count against MTBF.

So I can't take anyone else's claims of MTBF or hard drive failure anecdotes as useful data, because I don't know what they're saying a "failure" or "still works" means.

Women all want only two things...

The first is one thing.

the second is the opposite.

Glad to see the current state of research is up on this.

"Is NASDAQ being unkind?"

Nasdaq laid the rules and punishment out a long time ago. If anything, NASDAQ is being "fair". (A four-letter word that begins with "F"...)

Where is the line?

Where is the line between a religion and a cult?

I'm not calling anything in particular a religion or a cult. I'm not sticking up for or condemning any organization or group, despite having my own membership and likes/dislikes. But I have thought about this, and I can't produce an answer.

A religion is...?

A cult is...?

It seems to me this is similar to the whole "what is marriage" thing we here in The States are struggling with. There are multiple definitions, and the government gives things to people who are married, and therefore has a horse in the race of defining marriage, even though it's not clear it should. (It's not clear it shouldn't, either.)

There are two definitions I can come up with.

The first, my own thinking (although perhaps not novel), is that a religion is anything calling itself a religion that happens to be true. So we just have to prove the existence of God*, go talk to him, ask him some questions, and we'll have that sorted out. (*Or Allah, or multiple gods, or whatever other higher powers are supposed to exist by the calling-itself-a-religion in question.)

The second is something I heard a long time ago: the difference between a cult and a religion is the size of its membership.

Please, someone, put forth some superior definitions.

Dilemma

It's a dilemma: does Congress show behavior that will encourage companies to in the future help the government do shady things in the name of security (which the government has said it wants to do), or behavior that will encourage companies in the future to obey the law?

I know to most normal people this does not seem difficult. That's because we normal people aren't elected officials in high positions.

Options

DARPA may want hypersonic aircraft for observation despite having ICBMs and satellites so they have options. I think we have seen (repeatedly, now) that satellites are not guaranteed to be around long if the right kind of hostilities break out.

Thanks for specifying the order size!

I'm tired of everyone saying "an order of magnitude". Since I work with computers (duh), a common order of magnitude is 2. Another common order is 1024. Only a _very_ few of our computers at work have precisely 10 fingers or 10 toes (they've seen a lot of accidents at the mill), so assuming "an order of magnitude" means 10 is a stretch.

So when I see someone write "magnitude 10", that's a nice change. It means I don't have to guess what the writer meant, and then try to do math based on my guess of some other nerd's mental image.

'Merkin phones, and nothing about the article and the termination fee

Goldstein has a good description of the way things are around here. I would only add, from my neck of the woods (kind of the Seattlish area), the following:

* finding someone without a cellphone (as we call them, even though they don't use cell networks as such anymore) is difficult. Basically they have to be over 70 years old, under 12, or homeless, else they have a cellphone.

* most cellphone "plans" include free long distance calling anywhere in the country, anytime; the minutes get used up like normal but there's no extra fee for the long distance aspect. Also, most plans don't consume minutes outside of business hours, more or less. The carriers seem to be like banks: they charge you a monthly fee for whatever it is you're doing, and they make some extra on the side for incidentals if you want to use the newest (to them; not necessarily to the world) fun tricks or you make a mistake and call more during the days on weekdays than your plan provides.

* nobody I know thinks of their "minutes" as payment to place a call, or payment to receive a call. We all think of it as payment to talk on the phone. And we have a choice about that: if we can't afford to talk for some reason until the end of the month, we restrict our placement _and answering_ (and/or duration) of calls. But Goldstein explained that everyone just gets a plan with enough minutes to hopefully cover things.

* around here you really can have good luck not getting any solicitation calls, even without a do-not-call list. I've gone five or so years without one such call. I wouldn't be surprised if if floods once it ever starts to rain, though. Then I would have to make a hobby of asking solicitors for their identifying information, and telling them not to call me back, ever again, and keeping this in a spreadsheet so if they did I could get money from them; I think even a second call after being told off gets them some heavy fine. I don't know but I sure hope the fine goes to me! :)

* our payment system is not perfect. The subscription model definitely causes some complaining, but it's not the end of the world, and it has been slowly improving, not worsening.

* our phones seem to suck worse than European phones, due to carrier pressure to suck, apparently. There are exceptions to this, depending on what you want to do with your phone. And we got the iPhone first, dintwe? ;)

@All: why the bunched panties?

So it's some pathetic patent. We should all just find our comfy chairs, grab a lager (think I'll do that right this moment, actually), and watch how the courts treat this.

The USPTO may be "broken" in that it allows such crap in the first place, but it's backed by the judicial system which sorts things out laboriously, expensively, slowly (step by step), and with an unpredictable but slowly-adjusting-to-modern-technological-advances mien. So it's not really broken after all, is it? ;)

I hope the patent holder ends up having to pay Apple's lawyering fees.

Price?

I think there's a bit more Reg angle to be had in looking at the relative cost of SSL certificates that are the "normal" kind vs the ones with this "extended verification". I had a look at the price list and figured out immediately the primary problem this technology was meant to solve!

(P.S. The Extended Verification SSL certificates advert over the article was priceless. :)

Personal choice

My best guess from the story is that the police showed up and _probably_ (and here I admit I am speculating) told the man that they were placing him under arrest, and to put his hands on his head, or behind his hairy naked flabby love handles, or to lay down on the ground (mind the gravel) or somesuch, and the man did not comply.

If the man resisted in a manner that caused the police to fear for their safety (i.e. being punched, kicked, or so forth - things that can actually cause injury when one thinks about it) then what are the options available to the police? And who made the decision that the man should resist like this?

Now, I haven't seen the video, so I don't know for sure that the guy wasn't already either obeying the police's orders, or trying his best to do so. I only have what the article says, which is (English parsing ambiguities notwithstanding) that the man was violently resisting arrest.

*cough* Auditing *cough*

>>>[Milwaukee-based WE Energies' vice president of customer service] Shafer testified that it would be "difficult, if not impossible" to uncover all the instances of misuse.<<<

Excellent audit trail.

>>>A[n unnamed] spokesman said the company has safeguards in place to clamp down on the practice. He declined to name them.<<<

I'm sorry, I have to run and fix my BSometer. It just broke.

In other news...

... a Judge in another municipality wrote a secret ruling on a postcard and mailed it to himself. He's now claiming that someone must have reached into his mail slot, taken the postcard, copied it, and put it back where it was. That's the most likely explanation for how it ended up in the hands of a local news station.

Immigration, paranoia, etc..

Part of the "paranoid" issue here is that there's a fine place for people to come into the country: the border crossings. These are where border agents would have the opportunity to check things like whether the person crossing has a trunk full of explosive or has been in the country previously and killed someone with a spork.

It is my understanding, also, that these crossing points can be found on maps.

So any sort of a fence and rounding-up of people crossing at nonstandard locations can be seen as encouragement for people who want to cross to do so at the proper, manned, marked locations - the border crossings.

If the border crossings are unsatisfactory for the people who would like to visit or take up residence in the United States, that is not a fence problem.

A good interim criticism?

Biofuel from would-be-food cropland is not the only possible production method ever. Is there room around this paper's complaints for something like vat algae production?

I should note that CO2 and food production criticisms leave out the terrorism (or, "terr'ism", as some over here pronounce it) prices. It may be much less militarily expensive for the US to secure and produce ethanol itself. (Although I favor trade with South America, and hope we don't end up having to one day chant "no blood for sugar-cane juice".)

Spit vs. Split

I read it as "split" the first time. But I'm an American and so I wasn't sure if it meant the people were divided on the issue or they were leaving the island like rats from a sinking ship. (Not sure about British language, but in 'Mer'kin English "to split" is a couple-decades-old term for "to exit, run away, leave, evacuate, vamoose, flee, decide that distance is the better part of valor, etc.".)

So I read the article to learn where you could go to not have to be a part of one of these ID Card sorts of thing. I was disappointed. :(

The bomb is a tool.

Like a hammer.

With or without this bomb, or another kind of bomb, war can be debated.

When this bomb gets dropped, it might miss. (Again, like a hammer blow.) Or it might get the job just half done. If it does, there will probably be another one shortly behind it.

That's the genius of modern manufacturing technology, I've been told: once something is invented and tested, you can make more of them.

Regular people can't cope with "percentage likelihoods"

Most people are idiots about any sorts of things that involve a rate, or a relation, or a percentage chance, or a payoff calculation.

They hear that "X is proven better than Y" and they've got to have X. Even if the difference was miniscule. And don't even try asking them what the statistical significance of the study was. ("Small sample size" is when they cut up biscuits and put them on a tray for you to try in the supermarket.)

The Onion said something similar in this one: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29351

I know people don't understand math because they play the lottery.

Don't forget railguns

Make the bullet go fast enough and the people behind it will stop crying that they had to actually move mass toward the target to destroy it.

Re: How do they know what he thought?

They read his mind. On the wall near where he was standing.

Hands up who's seen a windfarm.

Who's actually seen a windfarm - say from 10 miles away? Who's seen one from a couple miles away? Who's stood next to one of these windmills?

They're not perfect in every way, it's true. But I swear they're no jab in the eye like so many people seem to think. (Maybe a trip to a windfarm would show most people.) They also don't tempt the production of nuclear bombs or fund the production of roadside or chest-pack bombs while they're operating.

I think the smart folk would be begging for windmills if they can get and use them. Unless the plan is "don't care how the leccy is produced, as long as it isn't produced 'round here."

The market will solve this

It sounds to me like the courts have provided remedy for the past injustice, and the future "injustice" (to use a term at worst I think other readers will bear with for just a moment) will be sorted out by the labor market for these tech support people.

If IBM feels they are overpaying their tech support folk, they can cut their wages. Then they can see whether the new lower price will get them the quantity and quality of tech support work they want.

The other labor buyers in the market will absorb some of the workers who don't care for the new IBM pay scale. Most of us can just sit back and sip some lager while we watch to see how much "some of the workers" turns out to be. That will be an objective commentary on IBM's claim about compensation relative to market rates, and it might be entertaining to see IBM later react to what they have wrought.

I'm sure they're just working the bugs out...

... of their CDs-in-the-post system.

They're sending through unimportant CDs now to see where they go. Black helicopters actually know right where they all are. For one thing, they'll round up all the mail thieves and once that's done the post will be as good as any physically-secure, carefully-administered, encrypted private network. (They'll also have a good idea of what you make a post envelope to look like so it doesn't get stolen.)

So simple I'm suprised none of you thought of it already, actually. Makes sense that the bright thinkers in charge have got this all sorted out, doesn't it?

Holowhip

"Lister to Red Dwarf; the intruder seems _blissfully_ unaware that we

have a rather sturdy holo-whip in the munitions cabinet, ... "

A weapon so twisted, it can hurt someone who is already dead.

Jatropha not so good

http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKHKG7593720070912

Headline: Toxic jatropha not magic biofuel crop, experts warn

"... it is a labour-intensive crop as each fruit ripens at a different time and needs to be harvested separately.

...

The oil yield of the plant, originating in Africa and still largely a wild species, is less than 2 tonnes per hectare with large swings from year to year.

...

... special facilities [are] needed for crushing jatropha nuts as they [can] produce a toxic vapour."

Not sure how many tonnes are in a gallon...

Humans overriding computers

>>> Would the stupid pilots panic and use the override whent he computer was doing a better job?

I have read fatal aviation accident reports that say this has already happened. The one that comes to mind is a helicopter crash somewhere in Great Britain where city, sea, mountains, and of course clouds are all mixed together. The "visiting" pilot and the old-hand pilot (acting as co-) believed the autopilot had a tendency to cut the corners on its turns, so they manually prevented the start of the turn for some time.

Shortly after that the terrain collision warning sounded very briefly, etc..

Official reviewers' rumor was that this model autopilot did not have any such corner-cutting tendency. I have no idea where the fatal misconception originated. I suppose eventually these misconceptions would be bred out...

Critical thinking, skepticism

We here in the United States have for some time lamented the cessation of teaching of critical thinking in (primary) school. Whether that is just nostalgia, nobody has the double-blind statistical testing to say.

Hollywood showing dramatic stories and describing them as true is an exercise for the thoughtful skeptic, as is any other claim prior to verification.

I happen to be a skeptic most days, so I can give advice on how to translate the text in question:

"Based on a true story" - writers were inspired to create this story after hearing a story that they're pretty sure is true.

"This story is true!" or "Other events are depicted exactly as they happened." - we have written this story to appear convincingly authentic to the kind of person who think our own claims that it is true are satisfactory verification of the matter.

Hitherto-unseen portion of the planet?

Does that mean this is Mercury's backside, then?