Posts by frank ly

Clarification

"... the passing gravitational waves only moved the mirrors by ..."

As I understand it, it's not that the mirrors are moved/disturbed but that the 'very fabric of space itself' is compressed then expanded along the direction of propogation of the gravitational wave as it passes by. Hence, a single detector arm can't detect a wave passing at right angles to its axis, so they have two detector arms at right angles to each other. (This rasise the question of what happens if a gravitational wave arrives from vertically above.)

If anyone has a more rigorous or correct explanation then please share it.

Storing CC security verification codes

Is this allowed? It shouldn't be.

"... practise good password hygiene and enable two-factor authentication to protect your account ..."

Shouldn't that be ".. OR enable two-factor authentication ..." ?

Just wondering

"... nearly-tamper-proof digital ledger." ... almost impervious to falsification, "

What are the situations/conditions where they can be falsified? Perhaps if the blockchain was under the control of a single entity like a bank or a large corporation?

This is strange

If he was appointed then surely there is a way to get rid of him? An extreme method would be to tell him he's fired and send security guards in to escort him off the premises. Why can't this be done?

That picture

Olive oil wrestling! Has the injunction been lifted?

"He said youngsters may no longer have the desire to own a car, ..."

If everybody is running an Uber service, nobody will need to own a car. Oh, wait a minute.

Why?

Why does a travel agency feel the need to store passport details of its clients for years and years? Are they required to do this by law in japan?

"...two files had been stolen."

Does that mean that the files weren't there anymore or that logs showed they'd been copied to a remote location? Maybe the "clumsy attempts" included not modifying the log files after exfiltration. It would be interesting to know the technical details.

Access control

"Bug hunters must first pass a background check before being permitted to hack the agency's web properties."

Black hats (especially foreign ones) can't pass the background check and so are unable to hack the agency's sites.

A robot that wriggles and jiggles and tickles inside you? What will they do if it won't come back out?

"errant data"

Oh, the irony of using 'errant' data to update a navigation system.

Methodology?

"Anyone who does eyeball the magnificent beast is asked not to approach him "as he will spook away", but rather to call handler Ben Potter, ..."

Does he lie on the ground and pretend to be dead then grab its legs when it comes down to have a look?

"Quod licet Iovi, non licet bovi." is the latin phrase, so he didn't say it in full, he just hinted at it.

Let's keep things as they are

"... has been pushing for greater transparency on the part of the organization, including around the organization's finances.

There has also been some controversy over how the organization disposed of its last remaining blocks of IPv4 addresses, which are worth millions of dollars in the open market."

A strange one

"A further concession will raise the standard for bulk access to medical records to “exceptional and compelling” cases only."

I thought the government were planning to give all our medical records (bulk access) to Google for 'research' purposes?

In what sort of case would the security services want bulk access to medical records? I'd have thought that they'd want access to the records of individuals or small groups in cases of terrorist cell sieges and hostage situations, etc.

Belt and braces

"The information must have been important as he kept that disk for years – just in case."

But not important enough to have two physically separate copies, it seems.

Legal workaround?

I can understand that an author who was desperate/keen to have a paper published would sign the copyright away to Elsevier, etc. However, I'm sure the contactual agreement would not say that they couldn't do any more research in that field again. So, if an author wants any previous papers to be made public, all they'd need to do is "repeat the research" one weekend and produce a very similar (but not identically worded) paper on Monday morning.

Gravity

I'd have thought that the gravitational field at the centre of the earth is zero, assuming a spherical earth. You can only treat a planet as a point source of gravity if you're outside it, or just on the surface. Under the surface, you have to do an integration involving slices of the planet 'above' and 'below' you. At the centre, everything cancels out and you have what is effectively a one body Lagrangian point.

When the first are installed

There will be lots of these meters being monitored and probed by all kinds of tinfoil hat wearing 'concerned citizens' as well as serious and qualified people who could make a reasonable attempt at analysing them. Various internet forums will be full of reports about how they work, what they do and the 'faulty design' aspects that have been noted.

L&G and Sensus have prepared a can of whoop-ass, all set and ready to be opened onto them in the near future.

The heck?

"... and automatically renew a contract at the end of a fixed term without giving notice or withdrawal rights.”

That is amazing, in the sense of amazingly bad. How can anyone think they can get away with that?

My Dropbox is integrated right now

I'm running the Dropbox client for Linux on my machine right now, no bowser used. It runs as a user and synchronises the contents of a folder in my filesystem.

There is a 'Dropbox for Caja' (super-duper full integration, it claims) that asks for Administrator rights but I don't use that one. The one I do use has Dropbox integration options in the context menu. However, it always sets itself to run at startup, so I only run it when I need it and kill its startup setting if I can be bothered. They are sneaky and seem to be getting even more sneaky, with no need or benefit to the user.

Accuracy, Stabilty, Resolution

"Light is around 100,000 times the frequency of microwaves, giving optical clocks much greater accuracy and stability over time: ..."

I'd have thought that the greater frequency gives greater resolution of measurement. Accuracy and stability in the long term would depend on the suceptibility to any external influences and the design of the monitoring equipment as well as the fundamental stability of the oscillating atoms.

Blockchain accounting history?

"... more than 650,000 Bitcoins had gone missing ..."

I may have misunderstood everything I've read about Bitcoin but doesn't the blockchain show all transactions and thus reveal where the Bitcoins have gone to in some way?

Predicting Problems

With all those mirrors, you'd have thought they'd have made a few extra ones and covered the 'delicate' parts of the towers with a reflective surface, precisely for this fault situation.

Workaround

Would it be possible to develop some kind of dongle to sit between the headset and the PC, or an item of driver software to make the game software think that it's connected to an Oculus Rift? There might be some legal problems with selling it as a product but if the design was made open source then there might be quite a few developers who'd be willing to work on it for free.

Stipendous

"... the reported per-post stipend the users receive from the government .."

A stipend is a fixed periodic payment.

I think I see what you did there.

"... his bio page has been wiped clean. If Lowe has been flushed, ..."

Or is it just my sense of potty-humour?

Welcome to the future

"... giving each Estonian a public/private key pair ..."

I wish somebody in the government would give me a public/private key pair. Then I could encrypt my data in the secure knowledge that only I and people who I authorise could access it.

I was wondering why it did what appeared to be a rapid controlled roll through 180 degrees on take off. Does anyone know?