Posts by Brewster's Angle Grinder

Re: Not just commercial forensic labs...

Thanks for all your comments. It's good to read the views of someone who knows their shit has experience in the field..

Re: OTT

"Chelasea Elizabeth Manning wasn't Chelsea as a man; before she was she, he was called Bradley Edward Manning"

The joke was her surname is Man[n]-ing.

"it's about politics, which is the opposite of logic."

And most people here are trying to beat politics with logic.

Re: give the transport ship a magnetosphere

Well some of the stuff you need to shield against isn't charged (X-rays and gamma rays) and the Earth has a shit load of shielding -- sufficient for life to survive without a magnetic field.

And the Earth's magnetic field may not be strong, but it extends 10 times the Earth's radius so has plenty of room to "bend" particles round the Earth. (It's much more complicated than bending - plasma physics with induced currents. Urgh.) So a couple of dipole magnets aren't going to do it.

And I don't know what the consequences of a larger field would be on our biology.

Re: The Internet again!

"That was the Christians, because part of the library was also used as a pagan temple."

According to Wikipedia, "There is little consensus on when books in the actual library were destroyed....Ancient and modern sources identify four possible occasions for the partial or complete destruction of the Library of Alexandria: Julius Caesar's fire during his civil war in 48 BC; the attack of Aurelian in AD 270–275; the decree of Coptic Christian pope Theophilus of Alexandria in AD 391; and the Muslim conquest of Egypt in (or after) AD 642".

Re: Have they surveyed other groups?

A survey of Twitter users would certainly make an interesting control group.

"You have to factor in the Mails need to pont the blame at someone foreign."

Much like the comment threads here.

Re: Three problems

They explicitly weren't talking about bitcoin. I don't know the technologies they were evaluating (Etherium and Corda) so I don't know whether they suffer from these problems.

Re: Simple government response...

"[A webpage is] written and hosted outside the US. Company in the US logs in uses page. How much do you charge?"

The first thing would be to determine whether duty was even due. Imagine a lengthy rulebook that determines whether a service is SAAS or something else (e.g. logging into a medical database might not count---since the software is incidental to the service provided---but logging in to Office 365 clearly would). That might push companies into purchasing the end service, rather than buying software and employing locals to provide it.

If duty was due, it could be a flat tariff. But it would more likely be a percentage of the price. That's easy to see if there's a purchase. But if the service was provided internally, from a foreign arm, then accountants would be required to concoct a price -- with plenty of paperwork to support their assertions. Or perhaps companies would switch to free software, and donate to open source devs in foreign lands.

Re: I live in a vacuum!

"I know that rain reflects Radar and seems to slow my microwave linked broadband but maybe someone here knows if mm waves are similarly affected."

My simple rule of thumb is to compare the wavelength of the signal with the thickness of the conductor; EM waves won't be attenuated by anything much smaller than they are (as the conductor is not big enough to set up an opposing wave). The most dramatic example of this is sending radio messages to submarines: where the waves used are thousands of kilometres long.

Re: Rule 1 of Press Releases

I thought Dangermouse always did the driving, not Penfold?

I can understand how prematurely releasing the bombers name harmed the investigation. But what harm came from releasing pictures of bomb fragments? The Guardian's Editorial sums it up nicely. (That's the first time I've ever said that.)

@iglethal

I had the same thought. But a chunk of that year is probably allocated to trying to get the mass down, trying to make it work on the available power, trying to make it fit into the space available, and testing this fragile design. So maybe even the design team will thank you for lifting all those restrictions.

Re: Show me the goods

F12

`display: none`

Fusion is saleable.

That''s why separating the yet-to-demonstrated-as-commercially-viable fusion from the commercially-viably-if-heavily-subsidised fission is important. Fission is "nuclear power" with its toxic legacy of negative PR. It's what causes stars to explode. Fusion is the "wholesome", "harmless" process which makes the sun's shine. The difference is that between a shark and a dolphin. Yes, they both swim in the water (or manipulate the nuclei) and they both have fins, but that's about all they have in common with each other.

Make mine a monopole!

Magnets! They also make you smarter and burn calories. Magnets, they're the solution to everything!

Re: More to this than meets the eye.

No, but all your Brian Katz are belong to us.

Re: Scale to meet demand?

Cf. the British winter and snow ploughs.

It's possible to ask that memory not to be swapped, e.g. because you are going to store passwords. Whether the virus did this is another matter.

@Charles 9

Maybe, then, they need to be forced to provide a software version of ACPI. Or, at least, a common set of low level routines. I don't know what's the right level: provide routines to alter the state of the I2C bus directly, or routines to read and write whole bytes, or routines to read and write chunks of data.

But it doesn't seem beyond the wit of Google to create a reasonable abstraction layer. We would could call it the Android basic input/output system. The problem is political, not technical.

Re: Rooftop delivery

"You don't want Joe from accounts popping up onto the roof on 33rd floor for a parcel and being blown off the building..."

As tragic as it is to lose a human life, I think we can all agree Joe from accounts had it coming.

Re: OK, i'll ask the obvious.

I'd look above at the answers to Thomas K. But basically, the analogy of expanding balloon is crap.

Let's try a different analogy. Suppose you're numbering the lines of a computer program. You don't want to run out of numbers so you make the first one line number 0 and the last one line number 1, and the lines inbetween are 0.25, 0.5 and 0.75. If you need to insert a line between x1=0.25 and x2=0.5 you can always use 0.375 so there is always a line number available. But if you count lines after the insert you will find that instead of x1 and x2 being next to each other, they now have one line apart. And as we carry on editing they might end up with two or three lines between them -- so they're moving apart; they're expanding.

That's closer to what's happening. Space isn't expanding, but extra places are appearing between matter. And, who knows, a quantum theory of gravity may show space is literally being pulled out of the quantum foam.

Re: Phoenix company solution ...

Bonus points if the legislation leaves open-source authors with the liability of fixing their software. (Although figuring out who to sue in a project with lots of contributors could be fun, particularly when the bug arises from interactions between patches.)

"Why don't those clowns at the NSA release the exploits to the companies to fix?"

Maybe that's what TheShadowBrokers are hoping for? They only claim to have 75% of the NSA's exploits. Obviously the NSA want to hang on to the remaining 25%, but they probably don't know which exploits they are.

But perhaps TheShadowBrokers don't even have 75%. Perhaps they have just enough to keep up the illusion and are trying to bluff the NSA into revealing all their exploits. In which case, go Liara!

Re: criminality?

"Would he suggest not-buying antibiotics to pay for more nurses?"

I think he's been doing it the other way round: buying the drugs but increasing the workloads of nurses to the point where patients aren't getting fed or are developing bed sores.

"Or reducing ward hygiene?"

Yup, that seems to have been going on as well.

And we haven't talked about patients on trolleys and the increases in waiting times. (That's probably where it would have ended up: increased waiting times.)

Re: Why would you need a dock?

"A dock adds a lot of convenience. "

£129 worth of convenience?