Posts by Charlie Stross

two thoughts

1. Sounds like someone's trolling for grant proposals. As an actual security package this simply won't fly. (Posit a 99.99% success rate. Now posit fitting this to a Boeing 737-400, with 150 seats, flying short-haul, six sectors per day. The plane's going to be carrying 900 passengers daily ... meaning there's a very high probability of a false positive <em>every</em> day. Given the rarity of actual hijackers, you'd need to make the thing better than six-nines accurate, and there's no way a face recognition system's going to do that.)

2. If they ever deploy this, I start traveling with a stick of chewing gum in my hand luggage. Personally I hate the stuff, but as an alternative to blu-tak it ain't bad ...

Not her only lawsuit ...

I believe Bauer is also suing SFWA (the Science Fiction Writers of America -- a non-profit trade body of SF and fantasy writers), and several named individuals, in the same basket of lawsuits.

Further comment would be inappropriate, but speaking purely for myself as a working science fiction writer, I hope her head explodes.

Looks like a relaunch of the Kohjinsha SH1 -- which was rubbish

I had a Kohjinsha SA1 last year, to my regret. (It drank a mug of tea eventually, but that's another matter.) This looks to be a revision of the same machine -- same case, same specification, same OS -- at half the original ($1000) price.

Things you want to know before you try and buy one? The keyboard is nearly the worst I've ever used -- far inferior to the more expensive SH6/SH8 models. The screen is no better than the Eee's (and far inferior to the more expensive SH6 and SH8 models, which sport 1024x600 pixels to the SA5's 800x480).

The SH6 I replaced the SA1 with is a much more civilized machine; slow, but the screen is a delight and the keyboard doesn't feel like they've stuffed a decaying squid under it.

Verdict: assuming I called it right and this is a straight reissue of the SA1, my advice would be "don't touch this with a barge-pole". Wait for the Eee 901, or if you need the disk space and have the money go for an HP MiniNote. This one's a turkey.

Computer Misuse Act

Unless I'm very much mistaken, installing such malware in the UK would leave them open to prosecution under the Computer Misuse Act (1990), viz (to quote the Act):

A person is guilty of an offence if—

(a) he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or data held in any computer;

(b) the access he intends to secure is unauthorised; and

(c) he knows at the time when he causes the computer to perform the function that that is the case.

(2) The intent a person has to have to commit an offence under this section need not be directed at—

(a) any particular program or data;

(b) a program or data of any particular kind; or

(c) a program or data held in any particular computer.

(3) A person guilty of an offence under this section shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for a term not exceeding six months or to a fine not exceeding level 5 on the standard scale or to both.

Am I thick or ...

... What's to stop the security services from asking the police to bug a person of interest if the PoI happens to be an MP, and thus off-limits under the Wilson Doctrine?

Pissed old hack baffled by (not very) new technology

Mach 7.5 sounds a lot more impressive than 2400 metres per second, which is what this is.

It's worth noting that modern tank guns firing APFSHS-DU penetrators routinely achieve 1600 metres per second, that tweaked APFSHS-DU has tested out to 1900 metres per second, and that it's generally agreed that it should be possible to push conventional explosive-driven projectiles to 2000 metres per second in the next generation of guns. So what they've got here is maybe a 15-20% improvement over where the state of the art is with explosive-driven guns at the same level of development.

Meanwhile, did you notice the sparks flying from the underside of the railgun? Serious arcing -- always a problem when you're throwing millions of joules around in under a millisecond -- tends to wreck railguns. And you get arcing when you mix that kind of current with air. Especially damp, salt-laden air (hello, paging the Navy: you are aware that your ships sail on top of seawater which is (a) conductive and (b) tends to splash everywhere? There's a reason naval guns on real warships come with protective caps which are only removed just before firing ...)

Railgun technology isn't new; it's been a hangar queen ever since the Nazis scratched their heads over it in the 1940s. Now DARPA have got it to work about as well as the conventional alternative, in a demo. Nothing to see here, move along ...

Missing the point

The Diamond synchrotron is mostly going to be used by biological and materials science researchers, not physicists or astronomers -- but those are the specialities whose budget is being dipped into to pay for the project. Ditto the other "big science" cost overruns.

What this means is: the physics/astro budget is being used to cross-subsidize other fields, in a manner that will result in 25% funding cuts to physics and astronomy over 3 years, at a time when physics in the UK is *already* in big trouble.

If this isn't fixed, then an entire generation of high energy physics specialists are going to be out of a job -- and once lost, it's very hard to rebuild that kind of academy. (Look at what happened in the USA after the Superconducting Supercollider got axed in the early 1990s ... then consider that the USA still had a whole bunch of other high-energy physics projects and didn't have a major problem recruiting and educating new physicists.)