Posts by Paul Kinsler

Re: These theories are all over the place!

try:

E^2 = p^2 c^ + m^2 c^4

and you might be on to something... (but unfortunately not a gravitational something)

Re: You should never let a company cut your rate

It's nice to be indispensable, because it means you can easily stand up to such tactics. However, there are lots of less-indispensable workers who might well find that a refusal to take the cut would result in termination. They have to make a more difficult judgement call, make a choice, and hope. Taking (only) a 10% hit, and then hoping to later jump ship might look like the best option.

you could vote for the tunes you wanted to hear!

Since phones these days are qute smart, maybe someone should invent a protocol so that your phone gets to play its own(ers) preferred on-hold music/ radio play/ news reports/ whatever while waiting.

Also, maybe there's a new ElReg colum here - not "On Call", but "On Hold" :-)

Re: force the user to update the even the default unique credentials

Some devices already have buttons to re/connect to the wifi. It might be easier to set (eg) a double-press to allow net-based admin login access for the next 15 minutes, which would cut down the attack window by a considerable fraction. Many users should easily understand "double-click for admin"; whereas many (most?) clearly cannot be bothered with password changing, and mandating stuff will not change that.

Not perfect, but might be more consumer friendly than mandatory ban-hammers. Comments?

There was ONE exception, [...] deaf [ish] due to an explosion,

If true, I might guess it was because his damaged hearing had been rendered incompatible with the compression tricks of MP3 (which are only designed for normal hearing).

Re: If so, where is the center of the universe?

Consider the surface of a ball (note the surface only, not the volume contained within it).

Q1) Whereabouts on that surface would (or could) you put a marker that says "centre"?[1]

Q2) Would everyone agree about the location of that central point?[2]

[1] Anywhere

[2] Probably not. Why should they?

Re: only be noted by a handful of technical journals.

FWIW, I read an obituary in the Guardian (iirc), and a search on "bob taylor" + obit suggests other mainstream news sources also carried them.

From the abstract: "condensate whose dispersion features a region of negative mass"

AJ is correct, although here they are claiming a hydrodynamic version of the effect; but there seem to be a fair number of (admittedly unsurprising) approximations to get to the hydrodynamic model, so perhaps "hydrodynamic-like" version might be a better phrase.

This is essentially a dynamic effect: i.e. if you wobble the condensate in the right way it reacts as if it has negative mass - but given a long continuous push, it will not. In fact very mearly all "negative" mass/poisson-ratio/ permittivity/ refractive-index/ etc claims are of this dynamic type.

Small mirrors?

A 60kW laser hitting a drone covered with 98% reflectivity mirrors would still heat the target at a rate of 1.2kW. That still might be enough to adversely affect the drone.

"where grants drives physics"

You do know we only want the grants so we can do more physics, don't you.

..and criminals get away with murder using

Presumably this will be sort of a first-pass over cctv evidence: any obvious guns will be found quickly by the system, and those sections checked straight away; and if necessary the whole tape could be looked by eye as presently.

incorrect information

Presumably you just add a correction, which would superceed (but not delete) the bad info...

"The internal combustion engine" [...] is designed to use fossil fuels

Actually, it's designed to burn hydrocarbons, the fact that we mostly get those hydrocarbons from fossil sources is a side issue.

Re: Household loads are becoming increasingly non-linear

Note that the single phase meters tested showed "no deviation beyond the specification could be observed; no influence of interference due to interfering or distorted voltage, and no influence caused by interfering currents were observed"

Re: Is this the same recommendation engine that recommends ...

It's like a conspiracy, I tell you.

Re: Laying people off is expensive - redundancy payments etc

Laying people off need not be expensive, if you've been careful[1] to not offer more than the statutory minimum redundancy payment. Presumably IBM do pay more, however.

[1] other adjectives may apply.

Re: my old Zaurus

Shocking - abandoned in a drawer!?

I still use my SL5500 as an alarm clock (I like the little chirp noise, and I can use the calendar to set as many weird waking up time as I like, eg a whole weeks worth of different times at one sitting).

Also I installed Opie on my Yoga for an awsome[1] Giant Zaurus Experience.

[1] May not be as awesome as all that, and probably not worth the time spent on source-tweakage necessary to get it to build given all the bitrot, but anyway...

Re: Rotherhithe

You should have got off at Canada Water, especially given its less than a 5min walk from Rotherhithe station anyway. Nice big ticket hall, some seats, cafe was probably open, and the adjacent shiny library opens at 8, I think.

Re: You could have a PhD and thirty years experience researching the subject

I don't have quite thirty years yet, but I do have a PhD, and I keep an eye on the rss feeds for several electromagnetism-related wikipedia pages. Mostly the changes are benign, or random vandalism which is reverted by bot, or dealt with by somebody else, so the net workload is almost vanishingly small, ... unless I have a burst of enthusiasm for improving something.

However, I dare say it might be different if I were to take an interest in more controversial subjects.

Re: The problem only occurs there because the Kuga was never designed to run upside down.

And isn't reported in Australia because it gets blamed on bushfires instead. :-)

Re: I believe Giraffes are a unit of time.

Well of course they are - just divide the GSL by the speed of light c to convert to time.

Re: All new science buildings seem to need an atrium.

Having spent quite a lot of time in science buildings over the years (mostly physics ones), I can testify (IME) to the slightly-grim corridor-heavy scruffiness of almost all of them; although occasionally you get lucky and might get a brief period of generic 90's office, or a superficial refurb where they paint the walls white, add a few extra lights, and change the floor covering. In general, some evidence that the architect actually thought people might be working there at some point would be nice, although slightly more reliable-than-average lifts are also appreciated.

Re: The problem with mandating a CO detector in every property is ... where is it to be sited ?

Well, when I bought mine, I tried reading the little instruction booklet which came with it.

IIRC, height & proximity to the likely source seemed to be the important factor.

Re: Technomagic

Or, "any sufficiently primitive Magic is indistinguishable from Technology".

pink?

Probably "green" was chosen so "green screen OD", with its longer colour name, and the rhyme, wouldn't be as snappy to say as "blue screen OD".

It's a nice marketing trick, which may even work if they can just stop Windows crashing as not-infrequently as it apparently does atm.

Re: I dread the Bladerunner sequel.

But what if it's a Lego-based Bladerunner sequel?.

Re: Is there really an ...

If so, they didn't put a lot of thought into their acronym.

They chose the wrong song.

Once upon a time one of my friends tried to psych me out with four hours of harpsichord music while playing World in Flames (or similar). He claimed that it was just that he liked harpsichord music, but even after all this time I'm still not convinced.

Re: Helicopter carried on an open flight deck ?

Perhaps the helicopter is not intended to /stay/ landed on it for any length of time?

Re: following it up with a comment from the Librarian!

We are always interested to hear more about the works of Dmitry Alexandrovich Gromov.

Re: Lightnings! For about thirty seconds until they were out of fuel.

Perhaps Canberras then?

Re: And the bullshit keeps rolling on

Science almost always /isn't/ the stuff which make it into science press releases - do not confuse media reports of science with the real thing.

Feel free to peruse some open-access real-science at e.g.

http://iopscience.iop.org/journal/1367-2630

https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/home.cfm

https://journals.aps.org/prx/

Re: When you can guarantee me that my data won't get pilfered by hackers ...

I think that even with the best will in the world that guarantee will never happen.

More practically, there should be defined compensation to be paid by each entity using the data, to each person whose data it is, in the event of a breach and or/leak and/or misuse.

Then we will be able to be sure there will be real incentive for the data to be handled correctly, and so have a reasonable hope that it /will/ be handled correctly... but if not, compensation will be paid. Perhaps 10k per record over tens of millions of patients might concentrate the mind a bit.

Re: "Look, I can do stuff with it over the Internet" as if that's a good thing.

Well, to be fair, I might well have bought several sorts of mostly pointless iot-like objects by now, if only for the entertainment value of mucking about with it over the net ... ... ... except for the fact that I manifestly couldn't trust them, what with the various "communicate with manufacturer's servers", security problems, no proper patching, not open source, obscure control protocols, and other fun features they have.

Re: if you can't comprehend enforcing a patent then you don't get one.

It seems to me you could also use this as a test to determine whether humans (or indeed anything else) should be able to patent things. Is this the intent of your criterion, or are you just trying to discriminate against things that might be called AI's? :-)

It seemed clear from the article that the prof was just thinking ahead, since from the third-last paragraph: "The idea of computers achieving legal personhood status is a long way away, he acknowledges". So it doesn't seem likely that he was thinking about contemporary so-called "AI" systems, which is the ones you seem to be objecting to in this context.

Re: Autopilot on an aircraft is seen as an aid to the pilot, ...

I think "autopilot" is likely to be taken to mean "pilots itself in most ordinary circumstances".

What might count as a perfectly adequate set-and-(partly)-forget autopilot for an aeroplane, allowing a pilot to take care of other tasks whilst being prepared to take back control is hopelessly inadequate for coping with the complexities of ground/road traffic: aeroplanes have a much reduced traffic density to care about, and aren't confined to bendy roads with intersections, multifarious obstructions to vision, and so on. A road-traffic autopilot needs to be vastly more sophisticated than one for air-traffic to achieve the same "pilots itself in most ordinary circumstances" ability.

Re: So why download an app whose it's main purpose is to gather data?

Just because they are ok with the collection with one sort of data (signal strength/ network performance or whatever) does not mean they are necessarily happy with the collection of other data - e.g. their use of games or social media apps.

That said, I've no idea what the data collection was or is in this case - just making a distinction which may be helpful here.

Re: I can't see what the Android angle is

"The hackers used a discrete event simulator (DES) and a handful of Samsung phones to test their work" ... presumably android ones, since that's what the majority of Samsung smartphones are?

Re: The crew cancelled a ground proximity warning,

They might consider themselves lucky they got to cancel it.

I recall that the ground proximity warning was the last thing that the pilots of Air NZ flight 901 that crashed into Mt Erebus heard. That was the result of a coordinate input error also, if I recall correctly (albeit a somewhat more complicated one).

actual evidence for anything being a "gateway"?

Just because there are many dubious and/or overblown "gateway" claims, typically being somewhat doom-laden, does not mean there are no "gateway" like scenarios which actually occur.

Notably, I might recast a common, and largely uncontentious narrative of the form "inspirational teacher in year X led me to do Y" as a "gateway experience in year X led me to do Y" - the actual events haven't altered, just the language used.

Further, there could easily be competing analyses of a situation, with A claiming that there is no significant gateway effect since very few in its presence went further, while B might be able to point out that the posited "gateway" was crucial in the progression of those susceptible individuals.

It seems to me that the existence of a "gateway" does not demand that everyone walks on through it; and evidence for or against a claimed gateway effect needs to look at the specific situation. But I don't think that it's an unreasonable thing to hypothesize that one /might/ occur in a novel situation, as is done here.