Surely there's more to this than meets the eye?
It seems inconceivable that Apple didn't do their research. Did iCloud register the trademarks? Or are they saying that they didn't need to?
Posts by nyelvmark
588 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2009
iCloud Communications sues Apple for 'irreparable injury' to trademark
IBM demos graphene circuits
Friday 10th June 2011 23:36 GMT 
power consumption might be a problem
Yes, I suspect this is THE problem. As you say, any 2 producible and discernable states can be used to implement a digital logic circuit, but if those states are 'large current flowing' and 'even larger current flowing' then you're certainly not looking at mobile applications, unless the speed advantage is so overwhelming that the net power use for a computation is comparable. It could have applications in supercomputing, and in GPUs, though.
Cabinet Office talks to Facebook & co about new ID system
Friday 10th June 2011 20:01 GMT 
This looks like fun.
So, I go down the Darby and Joan club, chat up some old biddy, buy her a gin and get her to tell me her life story. Then I go home and create a Farcebook account for her (it's not likely she's got one, is it?). Now I go to pensions.gov.uk and ask to get her pension sent to me. ID check? Farcebook innit? Win.
This is such a ludicrous story that I wonder if it isn't being misreported.
Still, FB as "identity assurance service" - Hmm. It makes me even more suspicious of this alleged 'face recognition' system. In discussions on that, I pointed out that working face-recognition AI had yet to be demonstrated, but that the massive database of tagged face-shots that FB threatens to accumulate might make the problem solvable.
But to be an "identity assurance service" you don't actually _need_ the AI. Provided the fee is high enough, a human operator should be able to confirm your identity quite quickly from a current image, if she can instantly call up a number of images that have been tagged as you (even if some of them are actually pot plants, domestic pets, or celebrities). They can also add the new image to your portfolio, so that the more you use them, the better they get.
Nice.
Dragon scoops Expansys into his Marlow den
Reg hack cast adrift as Illuminati Online goes off-line
Friday 10th June 2011 15:26 GMT
I own my own domain
That's absolutely essential if you have a commercial website of any description, because otherwise the name owners have you over a barrel any time they feel like it.
But I use yahoo webmail, because:
1. I don't want to run SMTP and POP3 software on my server - both are insecure.
2. With webmail, all your e-mail archives are in the cloud. You don't have to worry about backing them up, and they're accessible from anywhere. And storage is effectively unlimited.
3. Likewise your contacts.
4. Because your contacts aren't stored locally, you're protected from viral-emails (until somebody finds a way to do this with webmail)
5. If I don't have enough money to renew my domain and hosting this year, I'll still keep the same e-mail address. I guess if yahoo goes tits-up, someone else will take over the domain name.
'Great Reversal' as world's forests stage a comeback
Peeping Tom Mac spyware suspect cuffed
Midlands council laughs at zombie-apocalypse threat
Boris-Bike firm penalised by £5m over system hiccups
Friday 10th June 2011 00:07 GMT
Re: Boris Johnson == Sir Clive Sinclair?
Well, let's see: Boris Johnson is a hack journalist turned politician, so you can't trust anything he says. Clive Sinclair was an immensely successful con artist who, together with his friends at the BBC, managed to persuade a significant portion of the UK public that he was an engineering genius, despite the fact that all his "products" were either vapourware, didn't work reliably enough to be usable, or had nothing like the claimed performance.
I once had a business repairing Sinclair ZX Spectrums. They were made by Thorn-EMI*, and were fairly reliable, except for a single inverter circuit (comprising a single transistor) that generated the +12v and -5v needed for the primitive (and therefore cheap) RAM chips. Failure of this transistor would nearly always cause a failure in at least one of the 8 RAM chips - sometimes all of them. Thorn-EMI finally eliminated this problem in the issue 4 (or was it 5?) circuit board, where the suspect circuit was replaced with an integrated solution.
However, I would occasionally be given an issue 1 Spectrum to repair. These WERE built by Sinclair (or by hobbyists from Sinclair kits). The repair procedure was simple:
1. Open case, disconnect and remove circuit board. Depending on who had built it, this might mean unsoldering some earth links or capacitors added hopefully here and there to try and make the damned thing work.
2. Carefully place the removed circuit board into a nearby furnace or other oubliette.
3. Replace with the most-recent version of circuit-board made by Thorn-EMI.
The Sinclair Spectrum was an enormous, but accidental success. It's engineering quality came from Thorn-EMI, not from Sinclair Research, and was financed from (BBC-promoted) advance sales. Quality came as a result of the success, not the other way around. Every other Sinclair product (remember the Black Watch? or the C5? or the Quantum Lurch?) was an unmitigated disaster in engineering terms, but was presented by the BBC as a British engineering triumph, even to the extent that Sinclair was knighted.
.
If there's a modern giant that is comparable to Sinclair Research, it's Apple corp. Granted, their hardware is much better-engineered than Sinclair's, but their success, like Sinclair's is not actually a function of the quality of their engineering, but rather of the quality of their marketing.
Jeez - if Jobs was British, he'd be Earl of Scotland by now, or something.
*Interestingly, I'm unable to confirm through Google whether my memory is correct, and that it was Thorn-EMI, or one of the other big European millitary-industrial corporations that actually re-engineered the Spectrum. It doesn't really matter, however. It wasn't SR.
Feds seize $15m from scareware monger's Swiss account
Cybercrime figures 'as true as sexual-conquest scores'
Brit censor stamps on The Human Centipede
Thursday 9th June 2011 17:37 GMT
Your logic defeats itself
If the law only forbids possession for purposes of arousal, then you are not forbidden from possessing it, so you have no grounds for spite. You would only have such grounds if you found the material arousing, since you would then be effectively forbidden from possessing it, innit?
Netherlands first European nation to adopt net neutrality
Farting death camels must die to save the world!
Apple: First cult to lead world in semiconductor spending
Microsoft goes bot herder hunting in streets of Russia
Tuesday 7th June 2011 20:27 GMT 
known operators?
>>Ads that name and shame known operators might be a good next step
Would that be like those "known enemy combatants" in Guantanamo Bay? Microsoft would look pretty silly on the wrong end of a defamation case, in a Russian court, against a "known" cyber-scammer against whom they have only indirect and circumstantial evidence.
Unless, of course, they play the Russians at their own game and overbid on the customary wheels-of-jurisprudence-oiling supplementary charge.
Lara Croft returns in next-gen Tomb Raider title
Wednesday 8th June 2011 14:19 GMT
isnt there a way to run directx games under linux?
It's not about DirectX. Many games can use either that or OpenGL. But if it's a game written for Windows, it won't run on Linux.
There's something called WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator). It's an emulator. It probably won't work well enough for games.
Friday 3rd June 2011 19:51 GMT
Bulgarian airbags
Surely you've got it arse-about-face? You're saying that Angelina Jolie was better-endowed than the original toon? I don't think so. That strange Aussie woman who had 2 liferafts attached (news a few weeks ago) is, but I gather that those are filled with gas, rather than the traditional meat.
A real version of the original Lara Croft would have had some difficulty with standing up, never mind performing back-flips.
I still don't know why game reviews at El Reg are classified under hardware, although I can see a slight connection where Lara Croft is concerned.
Java update tackles multiple critical flaws
Wednesday 8th June 2011 13:50 GMT 
Thanks
This PC has always had the Java VM running on it, and I'd always assumed that something-or-other other used it. From this article and from remarks here and elsewhere, I can see that it isn't, so I just uninstalled it. Hopefully it will improve my boot time a tad, too.
One of the voices in my head said "we might want to develop something in Java one day", but the other voices all just looked at it, until it said "I'll get my coat".
Facebook quietly switches on facial recognition tech by default
Wednesday 8th June 2011 11:56 GMT
Oh, and...
There's an implication to the existence of face-recognition ('that is a face') software on cameras which might escape some people:
The first step in face recognition will be precisely this - to determine exactly where in the image the face is. If this step fails, the image will simply be rejected. Therefore, uploading pictures of pot plants or domestic animals tagged as people won't work. The noise you're injecting is easily filtered out. You should use faces, but mis-tag them to create effective noise.
Wednesday 8th June 2011 11:56 GMT
There is some good news
Which is that, up until now, nobody has demonstrated a facial recognition system that actually works.
Just read this paragraph ("Effectiveness") on Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_recognition#Effectiveness
You have to bear in mind that face recognition belongs to the field of human endeavour called 'Artificial Intelligence'. AI is mainly about devising new and creative meanings for the word "success".
The danger is, however, that the problem isn't insoluble as most AI problems are. Given the massive amount of raw data that FB could potentially gather here - billions of face shots each of which has been identified by a human - and the processing power at FB's disposal, they may be able to develop a system with a useful effectiveness. It doesn't have to be 100% right to be useful - spotting 20% of terrorists would be a win. It also doesn't need to be instantaneous - a system which which took 1 day to deliver a verdict would still have its uses.
@Dazzza: The face-recognition software you spoke of in cameras only needs to say 'that is a face, not a tablelamp'. This problem is an order of magnitude simpler than saying 'that is Justin Bieber's face, not Lady Gaga's'. Even so, I bet it would be easy to trick such a camera into focusing on the wrong thing. And what a horrible idea, anyway.
Tuesday 7th June 2011 21:28 GMT 
I had an amusing thought
Step 1: Facebook gather enough images with human-supplied tags (see my earlier post) that they have at least one tagged image of 20% of US citizens and 40% of teenagers.
Step 2: Feeding this massive amount of data into their Bayesian system improves it to the point where they can reliably identify 10% of adult US citizens.
Step 3: ................?
Step 4: 10% of US citizens begin to notice that they can get credit more easily than other folks, that they get waved through at airports, that the highway patrol call them 'sir' instead of 'buddy', etc.
.
Of course, some pedant is going to calculate the processing power needed and demonstrate that it isn't possible, but it would be a laugh, wouldn't it?
Tuesday 7th June 2011 19:26 GMT
Facial recognition software exists
Well, actually, I'm not sure that it does in the most obvious sense - i.e. that it can identify a new photo of a person that's in its database with any very useful accuracy, unless the database is very small. And if it's unknown whether the person is in the database or not, it's even less likely to be accurate.
But face recognition must, I think, work something in the way that Bayesian spam filters do - adjusting the weighting it assigns to various metrics (distance between eyes, shape of ears, skin tone etc) as it is fed more examples.
But the spam filter only gets better when users hit the "spam" or "not spam" buttons. In other words, the input is only useful for learning if each item is tagged by a human being.
So your spook who is looking for a particular terrorist passing in front of a security camera needs to train the system with lots of different pictures tagged This Is Mr X, and lots of pictures tagged This Isn't Mr X. And he needs to do this for every wanted terrorist. Then, at best, the system can examine the people passing its camera and ping when it sees someone that it thinks look like Mr X. At this point, a human operator must look at the image and either confirm (hit spam) or refute (hit not spam). In other words, the system doesn't replace the need for human operators - it probably needs more people.
What the spook actually needs is a vast database of random face shots, each of which has already been tagged for him by a human volunteer. But where can you find millions of people ready to spend some time looking at pictures and tagging them for free?
Microsoft fingered for Nokia's bleak future
Feds turn one in four black-hat hackers into snitches
Intel enlists universities in security wars
Tuesday 7th June 2011 21:49 GMT
...get money for predicting history...
There's nothing wrong with that.
Let's say you have a computer model that purports to model the world climate. You could feed into it all the historical data we have, up to today, and generate predictions for the next 100 years. Then you just need to wait 100 years to test your model.
Alternatively, you could feed all the data into the model except that for the last 100 years, run it, and then compare its 1911 "predictions" to the actual instrument data.
Interesting idea, isn't it? Maybe someone should tell Phil Jones, PhD, about it.
Tory terror changes promise moon on stick
Smart Fortwo Electric Drive e-car
Tuesday 7th June 2011 20:23 GMT
84 mile range
And your test was under what conditions? January or August? - Cabin heating and air conditioning both need power. Day or night? - Headlamps and taillamps need power. Raining or dry? - Windscreen wipers need power.
Oh, and - it's a 2-seater, right? And you measured the range with... how many people?
Aliph Jawbone Era motion sensing Bluetooth headset
Tuesday 7th June 2011 20:22 GMT 
David
I'd be happy to see you using this device when it can drive the car for you while you fumble in the glovebox for the cigar-lighter charger, or look up a name on the phone (yes, even with voice - that takes a lot of concentration) whilst changing lanes on the M4.
Petrolheads, eh? When the only tool you have is horsepower, every problem looks the same - More POWER, Igor!
Germans completely humourless: Official
Tuesday 7th June 2011 14:56 GMT 
Translating humour can be impossible
...particularly where it's based on word play.
I've lived over 10 years abroad, and the British comedy people talk to me about seems, to me, the crudest and unfunniest: Benny Hill, Allo allo, Mr Bean. Of course the last is almost entirely visual, which helps.
Interestingly, I heard recently that Carry On movies were once popular in Hungary - dubbed into Hungarian. For me, nearly all the best humour in those films lies in untranslatable double entendres ("Stuffing, mother?" "...for the lucky ones, yes") and other English wordplay (Ah, infamy! Infamy! They've all got it infamy!), but I guess the best comedy works on many levels.
Belching cattle apocalypse menace sniffed in cowpats
Tuesday 7th June 2011 12:35 GMT
Would it be so hard...
...to measure it directly?
I'm thinking of a sealed room containg a cow or 3, with air pumped in and out, and the methane content of the inlet and outlet gasses measured over a period of a few days.
I presume that some method can be devised to give an instantaneous reading of methane content - or, at worse to capture samples at regular intervals for later analysis.
It needn't be particularly cruel to the cows - you could paint the walls green, or show them soap operas on HDTV, or something.
Transition leaves frustrated corporates locked out of Google Groups
New 'liquid smart metal' can go hard or floppy
Tuesday 7th June 2011 11:55 GMT
But seriously,
I've been trying think of applications.
If the change from rigid to soft also reduces the tensile strength sufficiently that a bar of the material will break, under a stress which it can support in the rigid state, then it's a potential replacement for explosive bolts, for example.
It would also have been an, albeit expensive, candidate for the release mechanism developed for the PARIS project:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/science/paris/
The rather elegant low-tech system finally (and successfully) used:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/03/paris_release_mechanism/
Another thing that occurs to me is collision-mitigation systems, such as crumple zones and (non-Bulgarian) airbags. Now if your engine could instantly change from being a massive lump of solid metal into something as soft as a cuddly toy...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
