Posts by The Indomitable Gall 1631 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
" I can understand the outrage at spying on your own citizens but blabbing to all and sundry about how the US spies on China and Russia, etc?"
As that "etc" is every effing country on the face of the planet, and as that includes me, I'd say he was in the right. I am not an intelligence target. I am not a fundamentalist of any philosophy. I am not a politician. I have access to no sensitive documentation. Why are you lumping my personal correspondence in with Chinese stack secrets?!?
Something I remember hearing when these police über-databases were first mooted:
The retention of fingerprint data had increased over the preceding years, with innocent people, bystanders, etc stored. "Nothing to hide, nothing to fear."
This gave rise to two problems:
First up, fingerprinting isn't as accurate as most people believe, and one of the strengths of the old fingerprint database was that by only having criminals on it increased the accuracy, because the only people on it were ones likely to commit crimes (recidivism rates). Retaining non-criminal prints led to increased false matches.
Secondly, it turned out that the police used the fingerprint database as a list of suspects. As they weren't allowed to keep data on people charged-but-released, they had been considering anyone in the old database as "a criminal who hadn't been caught yet". They kept this attitude up after they started retaining non-criminal, non-suspect prints, and there were stories in the press about people who would get harassed after local crimes with no link to the crime or the victim other than living in the area... and being in the fingerprint database. Now imagine you have your house broken into: the police take you and your significant other's prints to eliminate them from the forensic search... and keep them on record. They never find the guy who did it, but every couple of years the police come knocking on your door because there's been a burglary in your neighbourhood and because they have no leads, they go mining the fingerprint database for "criminals who haven't been caught yet"....
The two lessons that should have been taken from that are that:
1) indiscriminate retention decreases the signal-to-noise ratio and increases the risk of false positives and (crucially) reduces the number of genuine positives.
2) the police always abuse databases.
But instead of tackling the root problem of the abuse, they just mitigated the symptoms slightly by reducing the set of innocent bystanders that are incorrectly identified by the police as "criminals who haven't been caught yet"....
I spent yesterday visiting a research orchard and sampling multiple varieties of citrus fruit. By the end of it, I smelt more like a fruit than an animal, but that was more down to the juice and the oils -- and not just because of the juice running down my fingers: when you tear open a citrus fruit, you generate lots of aerosols from the oils in the skin, and if you burst a segment (rather than eating it whole), you aerosolise juice, too. Spend long enough in a mist of lemon aerosols, and the mozzies probably can't smell you at all....
A study a few years back addressed the "drinking water staves off hunger" myth (which we all knew was untrue from experience anyway) and showed that the stomach can detect the difference between "empty" water and food. They then went on to investigate the quantity of solid matter that needs to be suspended in the water for the body to detect it as food, and determined a very fast shelf between the body's distinction between "food" and "not food". As I recall it, the conclusion was that having meals bulked out with water (thick sauces and soups, stews ets) would trigger a "full" response in fewer calories than equivalent meals with a lower water content, but thin soups, soft drinks etc would supply calories but would not be recognised as "food" and would therefore not reduce your appetite.
Hence also why posh restaurants prefer thin soups and consommées as starters, and potato soup is a lunchtime pub meal.
I have had meal-replacement shakes a couple of times in the past (not on diet grounds, but instead due to having dental work carried out shortly before lunchtime and not being able to chew) and the solid content is definitely enough to trigger the "full" response. From the description of this crud, it sounds solid enough by miles....
@I ain't Spartacus:
"Like you can't buy baby milk in Hong Kong....But anyway, that's why capitalism works."
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here... Is this a "breast is best" angle, and you're praising the market shortage of totally unnecessary formula feed as the "invisible hand" promoting child health?
The meer existence of baby milk is proof that capitalism is all about conning people into buying stuff they don't need.
@Turtle,
I'm sure an electric Zeppelin would be possible, but it would most likely be pure DC, using Li ion batteries. I suppose you could do a submarine style diesel-electric, but then you'd be best using AC motors on the propellors, rather than running it through a regulator and losing electrical efficiency....
You used to be able to request manual search of film cans to avoid "fogging" due to airport x-rays, but due to improvements in both emulsion and scanner tech, that's not a problem any more. But the fogging was always debated as to whether it was real or imagined. Perhaps the old stories of badly fogged film weren't down to security X-rays at all, but massive in-flight gamma exposure...?
@Gordon 10
"No proof of course but lots of hosties in their 40's, 50's and 60's have developed lots of nasty cancers that friends in their peer group have not."
The biggest problem with the historical data is that there's no similar environment to compare with to eliminate the effects of passive smoking....
Asbestos was also the heat-shield material of choice for the US spaceshuttles, which is probably why souvenir hunters were warned off scavenging the wreckage of the Columbia.
"The right application" still has to account for the consequences of catastrophic failure.
If an asbestos-insulated pipe freezes, what happens to the asbestos? Even if the actual breakage does raise any dust, replacing the pipe becomes a much more delicate (read "expensive") process.
Depends on what you mean by stopping. Take kevlar -- it's a fibrous material that doesn't break easily, so it holds onto the bullet, slowing it down and spreading the impact on the surface of the body. If the bullet has enough momentum, it may pierce the kevlar, but the majority of its energy is spent and it's not going to liquidise your flesh on impact.
Graphene sheets used as a kevlar replacement would be lighter and more flexible for the same amount of impact reduction. But faaaaaaaaaaaaar more expensive.
I'm afraid Dr "Centre of the Universe" is the construct of the professional fanfic authors that have been doing the writing since the programme was restarted, rather than the actors in place.
I once read an author saying that he never let himself write a character he liked, because that always ended up with them becoming an unrealistic central focal point of absolutely everything.
Quad erat demonstradem.
" It doesnt make me happy to have my games locked down so I cant sell a bad one, but thats why I dont buy a new one unless I have seen it in person and tried it out. "
...and this is my one and only complaint about Steam. With solid DRM in place, why the hell can't I try everything before I buy it? It's not even just a matter of "do I like this game?" -- it's also the eternal question of "will it run on my machine???"....
"You know what I would LOVE to see? the movie industry suing someone for downloading a film, and that someone comes to court with receipts for purchased copies of everything they downloaded."
Retaining the receipts for all those DVDs...? That would have to be someone with extreme OCD... possibly to the point of not being considered legally competent.
@toof4st
" But, you only get a choice of taking a quick weekend city break in Birmingham. If you live in London. Near Euston. "
Which leads to the big problem -- the HS2 will only take people from Birmingham to London. Most people travelling the other way will be on their return leg. The HS2 is going to increase the drain of money from "elsewhere" to London.
As stated elsewhere: the bacteria in shit is the bacteria in the human that produced it. Excrement is a vector for spreading a disease that's already present in the population. Sending people with cholera or dysentery into space would be a bad idea. But screening and quarantining will result in a safe population....
"The thing is psychological profiles are a summation of expected and socially acceptable reactions based on previous experiences observed in others. There are no profiles for what to expect when a group who has been exposed to modern civilization is suddenly cut off from that civilization."
There have been a few people who've tried it, though, marooning themselves on desert islands with nothing but a camcorder for company. However, most of the time, they restrict themselves to a year. There was an experiment that was stuck a bunch of folk in a mock-up space capsule for a few years to simulate Mars-length cabin fever. I can't remember how long for or whether they've finished yet....
Human excrement is also of rather low value as a fertiliser due to the way humans have evolved to eat cooked food, thereby stripping most of the nutritional value out of anything passing through the gut. On a space ship, you might get a more productive fertiliser from the skin cells caught by the air filters....
Because "true believer" is a term that Stan Lee dreamed up to refer to the readers of his comics during his time as editor-in-chief at Marvel. So as a "true believer", he's just making do with whatever crap he can get his hands on until such time as he manages to nab the Spiderman license.
The Spanish article refers to "him" frequently, says "trasvesti" (not a false friends) and "dressed as a woman, with breasts (he was operated on). So it would appear that yes, he was "just airbagged" and yes, it is still acceptable to refer to him as him. (Although there is no mention of whether or not he wants to become a she in the long term.)
"should copies of films start turning up online without credits.. etc.. then would they then be deemed legal copies?"
No, and this leads to a point that Andrew maybe doesn't push as much as he could.
Orphan work legislation will very rarely have any effect on works owned by the "big guys" as anything with any major success is likely to be easily researched, so is still well protected.
It's us "little guys" with our videos that aren't notable enough for an IMDB entry or a Wikipedia page that produce stuff that can't be traced.
The big guys would have blocked the legislation if it reduced their protection rather than ours.
There's another theory that says classical statues are modestly endowed because of the self-consciousness of the patron. Do you want a statue in your home that has a bigger one than you? There have been documented cases of sculptures in the classical style being "reduced" for this very reason.
(Of course, this goes hand in hand with the observation that most men of average size believe they are smaller than average because foreshortening makes your own penis look short when you look down at it, compared to seeing another man's when he's naked and standing a modest distance away from you.)
More to the point, it's a survey. Ask a conscious question, get a conscious answer. People will always rank on the variables when they're consciously ranking. Gaze analysis, skin galvanisation (for arousal) etc are much more objective ratings.
The problem is that woman aren't turned on by grey polygonads, so there is no objective measure to be made here.
Yeah, Thatcher's "liberalisation" of the markets has left the majority of the country still connected to a single operator that is still considered monopolistic to the point that it has to be forced by law to charge MORE than its competitors in order not to be seen to be unfairly leveraging its monopoly.
Think about that. Next year is the china anniversary of BT Plc, and after two decades in a "competitive market" it will still constitute a monopoly. The absolute success of privatisation.
"The world needs ditch-diggers too - far more than those constrained to the role by their intellectual ability."
Google "conservation tourism" -- intellectual people often pay to go away and dig ditches for a couple of weeks.
One of the core ideas of early (ie. pre-Soviet) communism was that people would be happier with a bit of variety in their lives than becoming increasingly efficient at a single specific task.
So most of the time, the local doc's in his surgery, but come harvest time, he's out there bailing hay like the best of them. Just like in a traditional community. Hence "communism".
The other thing is that once you start drink, the impaired judgement not only has a direct effect on your ability to drive, it has the indirect effect of making it easier to say "another wee half won't kill anyone."
Famous last words.
Sunshine was an excellent spectacle, and a great attempt to revive the "endeavour sci-fi" genre, but two problems:
A) it was fairly light on the "human nature" side of things -- the baddie in Sunshine wasn't much of a clear analogy of anything. To be fair, a lot of endeavour sci-fi is lacking in this respect, and often they do descended into chase movies in a metal box.
B) the only reason we left the cinema impressed with it was the sheer scale and spectacle of it. I loved it. I said to a friend how much I loved it. He criticised the ending. I realised he was right. The film was really well crafted, and it perfectly generated willful suspension of disbelief, which excuses a really nonsensical ending only as far as "good entertainment", but not to the point where it can be considered "excellent sci-fi"....
The problem with muscle memory is it makes dictionary attacks possible.
Simple solution: learn to program in an obscure, outdated programming language. New muscle memory, but unlikely to be in the attackers' dictionary lists.
Z80 assembler anyone? A mathematical expression in FORTH?
@JDK
""The rest of the successful business world" rely on attracting investors and partners precisely so they are operating at lower risk."
Yes, but investors and partners share the risk and also the reward. Any discount in the Kickstarter price over retail really doesn't account for the high risk of nothing ever appearing.
The aerogel would be in addition to all the original mass for the food. The goal of storing cr@p is to refill the gaps left by taking the food out.
On a side point, can anyone explain to me how aerogels manage to work as radiation shielding? I just can't get my head round how an ultra-low density solid could possibly stop anything.... But then again, I'm just a Computer Science grad....
@The BigYin
"If you don't like the price the market sets, you do not have the right to interfere in said market and create artificial barriers (e.g. region locks) to try and get the price you want (which is what the RIAA, BPI et al try and do)."
Region locks and regional licensing aren't there to stop me and you getting stuff at the "price the market sets", because the price we pay correlates very closely with the cost of production. Region locks allow the producers to make extra money by selling in regions where the price we pay wouldn't be viable.
Because "the market" is very different for people on a nice 20k+ a year wage and the poor sods who make our trainers for £1 a day.
Please please please don't believe that the price they pay for Spiderman Umpteen is the true value of Spiderman Umpteen. Maybe it's crap overhyped blockbuster sh!te, but it's still an expensive production. If there was no region locking and no ability to block parallel import of IP works, it wouldn't mean a reduction in film prices, it would mean an increase, because American film studios would not be able to afford to sell at the street price for Ougadougou the world over, so they'd be restricting their market to North America and Europe, and they'd have to make all their profits here.
(Of course, loosing out on Spiderman Umpteen might be good for developing countries as they could instead build their own film industries and stop exporting their cash to rich US conglomerates, but that's a different issue.)
And going back to "market forces", if you're not willing to pay, you're not forced into buying. That's the consumer's prerogative. The producer offers, the consumer accepts or rejects. Part of what they offer is the DRM, region locking etc, and that is the producer's prerogative.
But nobody seriously describes IP infringement as a legitimate "market force".
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