Posts by Misha Gale

@Steve

You are clearly just an agent of the lizard people, astroturfing to discredit me and my shocking revelations

Beware of journos bearing notebooks

When I was a kid, I attended the (in)famous Summerhill School, which was often visited by documentary filmmakers, journalists and similar. Shortly before I started, Cutting Edge made a doco called "Summerhill at 70" which was going to be a serious examination of progressive education and a celebration of the schools seventieth anniversary.

What was made was a tabloid style hatchet job, involving some highly creative editing.

One of many things I therefore learnt at Summerhilll was to be very careful around any kind of meeja - never do or say anything that can be easily taken out of context.

Prof Dawkins has learnt a valuable life lesson. It's a shame he didn't get to learn it as a child.

Rule #2

Thou shalt not ask for an IT angle

Fsck 'em

Wouldn't it be easier to just kill them all now? Then no one would have to adopt them!

"Death solves all problems. No more dog, no more problem"

-- Uncle Joe Stalin

P.S. @Nick: How about "You are the weakest link, goodbye."

We need a cartel!

Can't we just get all the major players to chip in some cash? The businesses/ISPs which will benefit from laying fibre can pay for it.

Or, we allow openreach to do what the government did with 3G licences. If they can sell access to the new fibre, they have an incentive to invest. They could even sell the access before they start work to provide the working capital.

Backhaul?

FTTH is long overdue and much needed, but I suspect we'd need more infrastructure changes than just laying fibre cables. If most UK homes and businesses start seeing speeds of 50-100Mbit/s, which would be quite possible, then streaming video from the BBC will be a dream, but won't we have a bottleneck for traffic overseas? I'm not a networking expert, but I would expect we'd need a major investment in undersea cables, satellite links etc to service all the extra capacity. Are BT going to fund that as well?

@Luther

Sorry to break this to you mate, but the Japanese have been able to get a rocket into earth orbit for quite a while now. See, they've got a space agency, and the main thing space agencies do is put rockets into space. Otherwise, they'd just be an airforce (Japan has one of those too, by the way).

I can't really see how sending a rover to the moon really confers any military advantage to anyone myself, unless we actually start fighting wars over the moons vast reserves of err, rocks. Seems to me Japan is doing it for the exact same reasons that the US and Russia did back in the day: China is going to the moon, so Japan has to go too.

Homo Sapiens vs. Robo Sapiens

I'm not going to get into whether humans or robots are better to send into space for scientific or exploration missions, but surely if we are serious about establishing off-world colonies, we are going to have to actually send people into space eventually?

Ok, maybe putting actual people on Mars won't accomplish anything Spirit & Opportunity couldn't, but it will teach us a lot about how to safely send folks to another planet,and, more importantly, bring them back again.

Re: Ninja

Oh dear oh dear. The 5PPEHT was invented by Pai Mei, who is Chinese and "hate[s] fucking japs". Ninjas are from Japan. I don't think Pai Mei would teach his technique to any Ninjas, even if he did teach it to Uma Thurman for some reason.

</extreme pedantry>

re: 1856

"making money by undermining a trial by publishing his findings for the defence when that information could be prejudicial"

Eh? This trial was years ago - do you know of somewhere this information was published while the trial was still ongoing? If so, links please.

Or is there some principal of jurisprudence I'm unaware of that states that an expert witness can't publish his/her findings even after a verdict has been returned?

@Dave

You misunderstand, this whole Kings X improvement was a plan dreamed up by northen monkeys to further punish hardworking Londoners with years of roadworks and delays around one of the cities most important transport hubs.

Don't believe me? Mark my words, by the time the line opens it will turn out that the new high speeds are not feasible anyway, and they'll be throttled back for health and safety reasons (c.f. tilting trains)

Puiblic vs private networks

I'd say it's pretty simple to figure out whether it's a public network or not actually. For one thing, public networks have SSIDs like "STARBUCKS" or "BRIGHTONFREEWIFI", rather than "NETGEAR" or "31SMITHSTREET". But more importantly, if there is a large free WiFi network in your city you'd probably know about it. And there aren't any in the UK that I know of. If you are in a residential street, the networks are probably private. If you are sitting in Starbucks it's probably public. Apply a little common sense, it's not rocket science.

Ok, if you are a non-technical person it's easy to make a mistake, but for a professional to claim "I didn't know" would be a bit much.

Re: I'm no expert but

Sorry John, the vino has let you down. Storm doesn't spread directly host-to-host but by old fashioned email. So all it is likely to DoS are mailservers. Granted, if it drags down all the mailservers on the net it will stop spreading, but this won't be much comfort.

Seriously though, researchers have been saying for years that AV companies need to move away from signatures. I can recall reading in this very organ an article advocating a whitelist approach rather than blacklisting known virii some years ago. Now we have polymorphic malware in the wild, and if the technique becomes widespread and sophisticated then conventional AV will be basically useless.

Software failures will kill is all!

To all the people convinced that we're all going to be killed by BSOD-ing autopilots: Just because Word crashes 3 times a day, the same does not apply to safety critical real-time applications. The reason general purpose software is crappy is because testing gets relegated to an "if we have time" activity and the EULAs all disclaim responsibility for damage to life and limb.

On the other hand, control systems for the big robot arm with the rotating knives in factories, for some reason, is held to a rather higher standard. They have failsafes and redundancies, and extensive, properly structured test strategies. This is why the computers in nuclear power plants, commercial airliners, advanced military blowing-stuff-up devices and viral research labs haven't killed us all yet.

It is also the reason why using off-the-shelf operating systems in ruddy great warships is a bad idea, as Mr Page has pointed out previously.

Oh, and I can't even drive a land based car, but I still want my bloody flying car!