Not quite the right sort of structure, perhaps? neural nets are all heavily interconnected, whereas these things are massively parallel but there's not so much communication between each little processing pipeline until the very end.
Cell was marketed as a general purpose CPU, though. These things are not. Cell needed a whole new rack of skills and tools that didn't really exist before its release, the new Kepler stuff builds upon existing tools and skillsets. Far as I can tell, your existing CUDA and shader programs can be ported across to the new hardware just fine, and will work that little bit better without you ever needing to know about the new features.
It isn't quite Apples and Oranges, but it isn't far off.
Sure, that sort of intensity wouldn't do an organic retina much good but, y'know, it isn't projecting on to one of those. The non-light sensitive bits of your eye are made of sterner stuff that the retina, too.
There are plenty of other bits of the eye that can be damaged, and it would be a bit crap for a device that is intended to replace your sight to become useless after a couple of weeks because it gave you cataracts.
Is it not a matter of them using conventional orbits, but having a fairly sparse constellation? Presumably any given point on the Earth's surface can see these satellites at one time or another, but only certain bits of the planet can actually guarantee sufficient coverage for a positioning system to work?
This makes more sense if the Beidou-1 satellites are involved too, given that they are in geostationary orbits.
"Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce"
Ahh, facilitating copyright infringement and hoping idiots hand over money in return? One wonders how Rakuten managed to get so much money in the first place.
Not looking forward to this bubble breaking; idiocy like this is not going to do any favours to genuinely worthwhile startups in the near future.
Re: If these wavelengths can hardly penetrate anything...
"For outside sure , its probably a non starter. But for across a room there should be an issue."
If you're only doing cross-room stuff, then modern 60ghz+ radio stuff would be absolutely fine, no? I thought the article was about longer ranged outdoor transmissions, which are a rather more tricky prospect. Indoors stuff though... I'd want to use radio, because my house is full of things which are opaque to visible, near and far infrared light. Some sort of IR strobe that bounces a signal off the walls sounds like it would just cause all sorts of crazy multipath degraded signals.
"Doesn't have to be a laser. Non lased light can do the job just as well using fast switched LEDs."
Oh sure; RONJA uses LEDs. That doesn't mean you'd want to stick your head under the rain hood, or peer at the emitter with a pair of binoculars to see if it is turned on.
Re: If these wavelengths can hardly penetrate anything...
Cloud, rain, fog, smog, dust clouds, flocks of birds etc causing intermittent or continuing communications problems. Also people and wildlife damaging their eyesight by looking into the beam. Limited range. Problems with opaque material building up on the emitter, requiring it to be cleaned periodically.
Do a search for Free Space Optical networking, and for a nice open-sourcey example, RONJA. Basically, its only useful when you can't use wired or radio networking, and that's a fairly limited market these days.
Re: "I thought that all 'jet' engines had supersonic airflow in the combustion chamber"
There's supersonic flow out of the chamber, but with the exception of scramjets there's no supersonic flow into it. The output of the compression stage of a turbojet or ramjet or whatever is high pressure subsonic air. Its that high pressure that stops any sort of blowback.
If we assume the cost of building, launching and running your average new sattelite is going to be in the same ballpark as building, launching and running a repair and refuel spacecraft (which is a generous assumption) there are still two big arguments against it:
1. Trying to dock with a defunct sattelite risks both the sattelite and the repair craft, and an accident produces huge clouds of debris which will endanger other spacecraft for many years to come.
2. A new sattelite is likely to use significantly fancier technology than its n-year old predecessor, and will therefore be rather more useful.
With that sort of risk/reward tradeoff, I don't see anyone running repair missions any time soon, not until we've managed another generation or two of ever cheaper launch vehicles at the very least.
What makes you think that there won't be trials of autonomous security systems?
"Here we demonstrate the 'three bears' automatic intruder control system. As you can see, without resort to human control, it can terminate an interloper without spilling any blood, and move the body several miles out of town and bury it leaving minimally distrubed soil. Next up, the 'white wash' forensic-grade cleaning robot..."
"Cloud Services", eh? I'm totally certain that searching for such a phrase on the internet search engine of your choice will totally return entirely useful results about Microsoft's products. Having an identifier with limited ambiguity is a good thing; why is it that the MS branding folk don't seem to understand that?
Still, its a hell of a lot less irritating than 'dot net'.
If your car accepts standard AC, you can charge it anywhere regardless of the availability of charging equipment. You could just nail a suitable plug onto the end of a standard domestic power lead or industrial 3phase outlet... this is pretty much how basic home charging is done on most e-vehicles anyway.
Making the charger optional makes life easier for everyone, except the sorts of people who get angry about power sockets.
Perhaps some kind soul should suggest to the engineers of the security question system that they don't allow freeform responses and instead allow the user to choose one of a number of possible answers.
This makes it much harder for them to forget, or to accidentally enter something that isn't a colour for their favourite colour and best of all reduces the attack surface of the security question handling service by removing the need to handle naked user supplied text!
Re: "We can put Men on the Moon, you must be able to deal with this!"
Can we? Bit more of the past tense there, chief.
Besides, it is a perfectly cromulent answer. I believe it is entirely possible that investing a couple of hundred billion pounds into a censorship infrastructure might yield something that worked okay.
"everybody else along the tissue/organ supply chain rakes in the big bucks"
To be fair, you can't just scoop the spare vitals out of a cooling body, bung em in a jiffy bag and mail them to hopeful soul on dialysis or whatever. There's a fair number of highly trained folk involved and a decent amount of very specialised equipment to boot.
I presume you are talking about the US medical system. This is what you get when you're so deathly afraid of 'socialism' and the government taxing you and spending money on your fellow citizens.
That has never stopped any MP. They will only consider the advice of their advisors when it matches what they think needs to be done in order to be re-elected.
It hasn't stopped any unelected civil servants either, who will either ignore the advice of advisors that goes against their current plans, or will simply search for advisors who share their worldview and appoint them to suitable QUANGOs.
Does the average daily mail reader care what a techy has to say? Evidence would suggest not. So appointing such people to positions of responsibility will either never happen, or be a meaningless gesture to the rest of us.
"HUMINT is the most important aspect of counter terrorism, not COMINT"
QFT, etc.
I think all the people actually involved know this already. Problem is, HUMINT is difficult and dangerous, whereas mass automated surveillance is positively safe and trivial... you can see why they'd prefer passive spying. The fact that a serious surveillance program also increases the power and budget of the agencies involved is just a bonus.
I must confess a certain amount of bafflement that the counterterrorists are so unhappy about the bad guys using a communications system that involves high power radio transmitters with unique IDs using infrastructure to which the government could trivially get access to.
I note there is nothing of interest in the history you posted, assuming it is true. Perhaps you'd be less keen to share anything about a history of mental illness, or surgery following an unfortunate intimate vacuum cleaner accident, or perhaps the results of a blood test that came back positive for something communicable and unpleasant?
The article, if you bothered to read it, involved a psychological evaluation which presumably falls into the category of things you might not want the world to know.
If you cannot comprehend why someone might be unhappy at personal, private information being released into the wild by an organisation they have to trust, perhaps you should not comment on articles about such?
I must confess I've no idea what the current point release of the "lets release products with no business model and no plans to ever generate revenue beyond advertising" school of business is, but it seems to work... witness Instagram.
Trying to turn a profit from something that contains so much redistributed copyright material though? Bit of a legal minefield there. I assume Google managed it with Youtube, so maybe it isn't impossible.
Re: "I disagree that the man did not want to gain anything"
I'd put my grammar nazi hat on, but I'll let the use of "preclude" slide for now.
One might download a copy of some code in order to study it for further vulnerabilities. One cannot do that with a list of credit card numbers; they are readily useable for fraud but have no other particular use outside of purchases by their legitimate owner. That doesn't preclude (note usage) a 'good intentions' defence however... given the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' thing, so long as you don't have a whole load of searches from your IP address for things like 'selling credit card numbers' or 'credit card fraud for dummies' you might well find that you are merely punished for computer misuse.
"The sentance may well have been disproportionate in the original case but the guy chose to take the risk, got burned and now has a criminal record because of it."
Sentance, you say? Are you the OP? Any, I'm not disputing that he committed a crime and I don't object to him being punished for it. Presumably the number of downvotes suggests that the there are a handful of commentards who cannot read or comprehend this, despite me saying it 3 times so far.
Original sentence (note spelling) was a bit harsh. We agree on that. New sentence a bit more sensible. We agree on that. In fact, it doesn't matter even if we disagreed, because the Judge clearly feels the same way as I do about the issue. What Mr. Mangham could have done with the code, and how Facebook felt about the whole issue is quite irrelevant.
Re: "I disagree that the man did not want to gain anything"
Read, comprehend, post, please. I did not say that he did not want to gain anything. I did not say he was innocent, I did not say that he had not broken the law, and I did not say that he did not deserve to be punished.
"He stole the source code for the site"
He *copied* the source code for the site, with the intention of using it to point out security flaws. There is no indication he intended to sell it or distribute it, or threaten to do so in order to extort money from Facebook.
"Holding onto the source code for weeks without disclosing the bug is what caused facebook to be so agressive in court."
No, they were justifiably upset because he backdoored them. The fact he sat on the code for so long indicates that he was in no rush to do anything with it, good or bad; this implies a certain amount of laziness or simply a casual attitude, not someone out for money or fame at any cost.
Your comparison with muggers and car thieves is rather daft. I don't recall hearing of any martial arts instructors assaulting strangers in the street and then offering to sell them lessons in order to prevent it happening again, which is the closest analogy to the sort of activities this guy was engaging in.
Sure, he broken the law and will be punished appropriately. But you'll note there's that word 'appropriately' there. He did not engage in theft, fraud or extortion, and should not be punished as if he had.
Sure, but fusion reactions produce so very, very many of them that the odds are good that some will be detected. Supernova 1987A was 168000 light years away, and despite the phenomally small likelihood of a neutrino from there intersecting a terrestrial neutrino detector, we saw maybe 2 dozen of them.
Have a think about the density of neutrino emission that implies.
At the times when solar flux is plentiful, there's demand for aircon precisely during the times at which solar cells are most effective. This applies to gloomier latitudes as much as it applies to the Sahara.
I'll bet that daytime grid load exceeds nighttime, too, so solar is available at the point at which it is most useful... pretty stark comparison to wind power there.
What else could release that much energy in one go?
I assume also that any demolition project that will generate shockwaves of equal or greater magntitude will be refused permission. Any heavy goods vehicle that crashes will result in the immediate and permanant ban of anything larger than long wheel base vans within a 200 mile radius of the incident.
And don't get me started on fireworks. The lifeboat station near where I grew up used this utterly irresponsible devices called 'maroons' to alert staff, and those things could easily generate a bang that might rattle single glazing nearby... I'm assuming in future that the RNLI will be severely reprimanded, and refused leave to do anything other than have a guy stand outside the lifeboat station and shout 'guys? time to go!'.
I sincerely hope that the UK doesn't get into the retrospective law enforcement game.
We already have laws and regulations in place to extract money from Vodaphone, but dear old Dave saw to it that we did not. The Indians did not, and decided that they'd just change the rules to suit their needs.
People already share photos with masses of metadata embedded in them; witness the guy who got busted recently due to his iPhone storing ownership details and GPS coordinates in a photo's exif table.
Conspiracies aren't needed when people are just plain daft.
"Some of the most brilliant programmers I know have no academic qualifications whatsoever "
These people are unusual, though; they're particularly gifted, and most of the rest of us are simply not like that. I know a number of competent coders with no academic experience, but by and large they've tended to flounder when taken very far out of their comfort zone. The programming world is not short of esoteric concepts that are either unintuitive, difficult to learn, or both.
Anyway, I digress.
"I, for one, do not want to watch the same thing happen to British IT businesses"
Did the textile mills go bust due to lack of skilled technical staff, or because they became uneconomical? Modern day code mills have been moving to China and India and the like for ages, and teaching our schoolchildren how to grind out HTML and PHP is not necessarily going to do them any favours, and I don't hold out much faith that more complex programming languages or techniques would be taught at any school.
Hurrrrgh. What an awful web2.0ism. I shall forgive you just this once.
Granting people the means to create things just goes to show that:
1. It is harder than it looks, and
2. There are an awful lot of really talentless people out there.
Sadly, Big Content don't seem to understand (2), and has spent a fair amount of time inflicting the products of those sort of people upon us, without the benefit of the zero overheads that the monkeys on the internet have.
A "democratisation" of stupidity, perhaps. Reality TV is a perfect example.
"We are at the forefront of the fibre revolution..."
Isn't it nice to be able to stand upon the shoulders of giants reap the rewards of being a former state monopoly handed a vast amount of infrastructure on a plate.
Well, given Starck's experience in rendering a useful everyday object pretty but quite unusable, I'd say you should all expect some sort of shiny mobile communications device which when picked up with a bare hand loses all signal reception because you've shorted the antenna to ground.
"Due to not having received up to date information governance training..."
maybe they actually meant "Due to living under a rock for the last 5 years (or possibly longer) the employee had not heard of the dozens of incidents whereby an idiot taking work home lost confidential data."
or, being a little more charitable, "Due to a critical mass of bureacracy, we have been unable to send a trust-wide email say "oh come on guys, stop losing unencrypted stuff""
There is no excuse for this these days. Ignorance didn't really suffice back in the day either.
Because it might have broken due to some flaw that might exist in the next generation of satellites too? Because it would be a shame to just abandon a multi billion Euro investment because they couldn't be bothered to press the right reboot button? Because there may be valuable science associated with diagnosing what went wrong that could inform the design of future satellites?
Just because something is living on borrowed time, doesn't mean that doing the bare minimum to try and keep it going is a stupid idea. You may feel the same way in a couple of decades.
Re: "two planets, one closer to the star and one more distant."
Well, probably. But there's always the possibility that they're in the same orbit, at each other's L3 point, sorta thing. Or they might have crazy eccentric orbits, or maybe orbits that might not even share the same orbital plane.
but this particular item is a fairly specialist bit of kit (an enormous synchronous motor). Most industrial motor applications (excluding robotic and CNC axis positioning servos) presumably just use boring old 3-phase async AC motors which don't even need normal magnets, let alone rare earth ones. We're not quite out of the rare earth woods yet.
Cos its in the competion spec. It does have a slightly greater degree of versatility than a big wheeled tractor, especially when it comes to moving or positioning unwieldy vehicles or driving in inconvenient spaces. Doesn't need to be humanoid though.
And yes, a human robot would already be well adapted to spaces and systems designed for human use. Nonetheless, something with tracks that can climb stairs and a poker that can push buttons and a chainsaw that can deal with less tractable obstacles will be able to get most of the places a human can, and could be built by any competent engineering team. The android, conversely, requires massive amount of engineering skill in both construction and control software and the resulting costs will be hugely higher.
"They can no longer rely on delivering poor service for big money and get away with it"
Oh really.
Anyone notice a sudden dip in the share price of Capita following this announcement? Anyone? No?
Hint: this means that charging big bucks for third rate tripe is still a perfectly valid business practise, and is nicely facilitated by by th Government who can't or won't do anything better.
The Japanese would be the last people on earth to accept a system that exposed them to that sort of unpleasantness.
The hand-vein scanner is optical and contact free; it is effectively just shining a light through your hand and capturing an image of the result. You just wave your hand in an imaging box and wait for it to identify you. It could conceivably work without using any data from the fingers either, making it not only contact free but robust to a fair bit of external damage.
I'll bet that severed hands whether the blood has clotted or drained out would simply not work because they wouldn't transmit light correctly. Freshly severed and tourniqued hands might, but at that point it is easier to frogmarch someone to a cashpoint and demand they give you money or you'll chop their hand off.
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1314 posts • joined Wednesday 20th June 2007 09:00 GMT
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Re: So many cores!
Not quite the right sort of structure, perhaps? neural nets are all heavily interconnected, whereas these things are massively parallel but there's not so much communication between each little processing pipeline until the very end.
Re: People said the Cell was hard to program
Cell was marketed as a general purpose CPU, though. These things are not. Cell needed a whole new rack of skills and tools that didn't really exist before its release, the new Kepler stuff builds upon existing tools and skillsets. Far as I can tell, your existing CUDA and shader programs can be ported across to the new hardware just fine, and will work that little bit better without you ever needing to know about the new features.
It isn't quite Apples and Oranges, but it isn't far off.
Re: 10mW/mm^2?
Sure, that sort of intensity wouldn't do an organic retina much good but, y'know, it isn't projecting on to one of those. The non-light sensitive bits of your eye are made of sterner stuff that the retina, too.
There are plenty of other bits of the eye that can be damaged, and it would be a bit crap for a device that is intended to replace your sight to become useless after a couple of weeks because it gave you cataracts.
Re: How localised coverage?
Is it not a matter of them using conventional orbits, but having a fairly sparse constellation? Presumably any given point on the Earth's surface can see these satellites at one time or another, but only certain bits of the planet can actually guarantee sufficient coverage for a positioning system to work?
This makes more sense if the Beidou-1 satellites are involved too, given that they are in geostationary orbits.
"Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce"
Ahh, facilitating copyright infringement and hoping idiots hand over money in return? One wonders how Rakuten managed to get so much money in the first place.
Not looking forward to this bubble breaking; idiocy like this is not going to do any favours to genuinely worthwhile startups in the near future.
Re: If these wavelengths can hardly penetrate anything...
"For outside sure , its probably a non starter. But for across a room there should be an issue."
If you're only doing cross-room stuff, then modern 60ghz+ radio stuff would be absolutely fine, no? I thought the article was about longer ranged outdoor transmissions, which are a rather more tricky prospect. Indoors stuff though... I'd want to use radio, because my house is full of things which are opaque to visible, near and far infrared light. Some sort of IR strobe that bounces a signal off the walls sounds like it would just cause all sorts of crazy multipath degraded signals.
"Doesn't have to be a laser. Non lased light can do the job just as well using fast switched LEDs."
Oh sure; RONJA uses LEDs. That doesn't mean you'd want to stick your head under the rain hood, or peer at the emitter with a pair of binoculars to see if it is turned on.
Re: If these wavelengths can hardly penetrate anything...
Cloud, rain, fog, smog, dust clouds, flocks of birds etc causing intermittent or continuing communications problems. Also people and wildlife damaging their eyesight by looking into the beam. Limited range. Problems with opaque material building up on the emitter, requiring it to be cleaned periodically.
Do a search for Free Space Optical networking, and for a nice open-sourcey example, RONJA. Basically, its only useful when you can't use wired or radio networking, and that's a fairly limited market these days.
Get with times, granddad
The world has moved on. Crysis hasn't been the benchmark for a few years now.
Re: "I thought that all 'jet' engines had supersonic airflow in the combustion chamber"
There's supersonic flow out of the chamber, but with the exception of scramjets there's no supersonic flow into it. The output of the compression stage of a turbojet or ramjet or whatever is high pressure subsonic air. Its that high pressure that stops any sort of blowback.
Re: "assuming Linux ever supports touch in a usable fashion"
I hear that "Android" linux distro supports touch reasonably well these days.
Re: recycle
If we assume the cost of building, launching and running your average new sattelite is going to be in the same ballpark as building, launching and running a repair and refuel spacecraft (which is a generous assumption) there are still two big arguments against it:
1. Trying to dock with a defunct sattelite risks both the sattelite and the repair craft, and an accident produces huge clouds of debris which will endanger other spacecraft for many years to come.
2. A new sattelite is likely to use significantly fancier technology than its n-year old predecessor, and will therefore be rather more useful.
With that sort of risk/reward tradeoff, I don't see anyone running repair missions any time soon, not until we've managed another generation or two of ever cheaper launch vehicles at the very least.
Re: dum dum dum
What makes you think that there won't be trials of autonomous security systems?
"Here we demonstrate the 'three bears' automatic intruder control system. As you can see, without resort to human control, it can terminate an interloper without spilling any blood, and move the body several miles out of town and bury it leaving minimally distrubed soil. Next up, the 'white wash' forensic-grade cleaning robot..."
In other news, usefulness of a dotcom domain increases 2000-fold!
Domain names that are unambiguously domain names when spoken for the win.
On the value of code names
"Cloud Services", eh? I'm totally certain that searching for such a phrase on the internet search engine of your choice will totally return entirely useful results about Microsoft's products. Having an identifier with limited ambiguity is a good thing; why is it that the MS branding folk don't seem to understand that?
Still, its a hell of a lot less irritating than 'dot net'.
Re: dick?!
Ahh, the clbuttic mistake of simple text substitution. But no-one ever learns; it is still out there and in common use.
Re: "rather than just pushing ONLY DC"
If your car accepts standard AC, you can charge it anywhere regardless of the availability of charging equipment. You could just nail a suitable plug onto the end of a standard domestic power lead or industrial 3phase outlet... this is pretty much how basic home charging is done on most e-vehicles anyway.
Making the charger optional makes life easier for everyone, except the sorts of people who get angry about power sockets.
Good point
Perhaps some kind soul should suggest to the engineers of the security question system that they don't allow freeform responses and instead allow the user to choose one of a number of possible answers.
This makes it much harder for them to forget, or to accidentally enter something that isn't a colour for their favourite colour and best of all reduces the attack surface of the security question handling service by removing the need to handle naked user supplied text!
Sounds like a win-win to me.
Re: "We can put Men on the Moon, you must be able to deal with this!"
Can we? Bit more of the past tense there, chief.
Besides, it is a perfectly cromulent answer. I believe it is entirely possible that investing a couple of hundred billion pounds into a censorship infrastructure might yield something that worked okay.
"everybody else along the tissue/organ supply chain rakes in the big bucks"
To be fair, you can't just scoop the spare vitals out of a cooling body, bung em in a jiffy bag and mail them to hopeful soul on dialysis or whatever. There's a fair number of highly trained folk involved and a decent amount of very specialised equipment to boot.
I presume you are talking about the US medical system. This is what you get when you're so deathly afraid of 'socialism' and the government taxing you and spending money on your fellow citizens.
Re: "fewer plausible excuses"
That has never stopped any MP. They will only consider the advice of their advisors when it matches what they think needs to be done in order to be re-elected.
It hasn't stopped any unelected civil servants either, who will either ignore the advice of advisors that goes against their current plans, or will simply search for advisors who share their worldview and appoint them to suitable QUANGOs.
Does the average daily mail reader care what a techy has to say? Evidence would suggest not. So appointing such people to positions of responsibility will either never happen, or be a meaningless gesture to the rest of us.
This post has been deleted by its author
"HUMINT is the most important aspect of counter terrorism, not COMINT"
QFT, etc.
I think all the people actually involved know this already. Problem is, HUMINT is difficult and dangerous, whereas mass automated surveillance is positively safe and trivial... you can see why they'd prefer passive spying. The fact that a serious surveillance program also increases the power and budget of the agencies involved is just a bonus.
I must confess a certain amount of bafflement that the counterterrorists are so unhappy about the bad guys using a communications system that involves high power radio transmitters with unique IDs using infrastructure to which the government could trivially get access to.
Re: "I don't care..."
Gosh, well aren't you a brave anonymous coward.
I note there is nothing of interest in the history you posted, assuming it is true. Perhaps you'd be less keen to share anything about a history of mental illness, or surgery following an unfortunate intimate vacuum cleaner accident, or perhaps the results of a blood test that came back positive for something communicable and unpleasant?
The article, if you bothered to read it, involved a psychological evaluation which presumably falls into the category of things you might not want the world to know.
If you cannot comprehend why someone might be unhappy at personal, private information being released into the wild by an organisation they have to trust, perhaps you should not comment on articles about such?
You just don't understand web2.x
I must confess I've no idea what the current point release of the "lets release products with no business model and no plans to ever generate revenue beyond advertising" school of business is, but it seems to work... witness Instagram.
Trying to turn a profit from something that contains so much redistributed copyright material though? Bit of a legal minefield there. I assume Google managed it with Youtube, so maybe it isn't impossible.
Re: "I disagree that the man did not want to gain anything"
I'd put my grammar nazi hat on, but I'll let the use of "preclude" slide for now.
One might download a copy of some code in order to study it for further vulnerabilities. One cannot do that with a list of credit card numbers; they are readily useable for fraud but have no other particular use outside of purchases by their legitimate owner. That doesn't preclude (note usage) a 'good intentions' defence however... given the whole 'innocent until proven guilty' thing, so long as you don't have a whole load of searches from your IP address for things like 'selling credit card numbers' or 'credit card fraud for dummies' you might well find that you are merely punished for computer misuse.
"The sentance may well have been disproportionate in the original case but the guy chose to take the risk, got burned and now has a criminal record because of it."
Sentance, you say? Are you the OP? Any, I'm not disputing that he committed a crime and I don't object to him being punished for it. Presumably the number of downvotes suggests that the there are a handful of commentards who cannot read or comprehend this, despite me saying it 3 times so far.
Original sentence (note spelling) was a bit harsh. We agree on that. New sentence a bit more sensible. We agree on that. In fact, it doesn't matter even if we disagreed, because the Judge clearly feels the same way as I do about the issue. What Mr. Mangham could have done with the code, and how Facebook felt about the whole issue is quite irrelevant.
Re: "I disagree that the man did not want to gain anything"
Read, comprehend, post, please. I did not say that he did not want to gain anything. I did not say he was innocent, I did not say that he had not broken the law, and I did not say that he did not deserve to be punished.
"He stole the source code for the site"
He *copied* the source code for the site, with the intention of using it to point out security flaws. There is no indication he intended to sell it or distribute it, or threaten to do so in order to extort money from Facebook.
"Holding onto the source code for weeks without disclosing the bug is what caused facebook to be so agressive in court."
No, they were justifiably upset because he backdoored them. The fact he sat on the code for so long indicates that he was in no rush to do anything with it, good or bad; this implies a certain amount of laziness or simply a casual attitude, not someone out for money or fame at any cost.
Re: He was still guilty.
Your comparison with muggers and car thieves is rather daft. I don't recall hearing of any martial arts instructors assaulting strangers in the street and then offering to sell them lessons in order to prevent it happening again, which is the closest analogy to the sort of activities this guy was engaging in.
Sure, he broken the law and will be punished appropriately. But you'll note there's that word 'appropriately' there. He did not engage in theft, fraud or extortion, and should not be punished as if he had.
Sure, but fusion reactions produce so very, very many of them that the odds are good that some will be detected. Supernova 1987A was 168000 light years away, and despite the phenomally small likelihood of a neutrino from there intersecting a terrestrial neutrino detector, we saw maybe 2 dozen of them.
Have a think about the density of neutrino emission that implies.
Todays lesson: adjectives!
Glacial: of, or pertaining to a glacier. Therefore, ice from a glacier is glacial.
Re: "One thing is loses when sending power over large distances"
Trickier to build HVDC links across the Med than it is to build them overland.
Bear in mind that
At the times when solar flux is plentiful, there's demand for aircon precisely during the times at which solar cells are most effective. This applies to gloomier latitudes as much as it applies to the Sahara.
I'll bet that daytime grid load exceeds nighttime, too, so solar is available at the point at which it is most useful... pretty stark comparison to wind power there.
What else could release that much energy in one go?
I assume also that any demolition project that will generate shockwaves of equal or greater magntitude will be refused permission. Any heavy goods vehicle that crashes will result in the immediate and permanant ban of anything larger than long wheel base vans within a 200 mile radius of the incident.
And don't get me started on fireworks. The lifeboat station near where I grew up used this utterly irresponsible devices called 'maroons' to alert staff, and those things could easily generate a bang that might rattle single glazing nearby... I'm assuming in future that the RNLI will be severely reprimanded, and refused leave to do anything other than have a guy stand outside the lifeboat station and shout 'guys? time to go!'.
Formally public?
But informally, just a gentlemanly agreement and a promise of cash in hand, I presume?
Re: Outstanding
I sincerely hope that the UK doesn't get into the retrospective law enforcement game.
We already have laws and regulations in place to extract money from Vodaphone, but dear old Dave saw to it that we did not. The Indians did not, and decided that they'd just change the rules to suit their needs.
So... battery life?
The Sonim devices always had excellent battery life. How's this one measure up?
Wrong hat.
People already share photos with masses of metadata embedded in them; witness the guy who got busted recently due to his iPhone storing ownership details and GPS coordinates in a photo's exif table.
Conspiracies aren't needed when people are just plain daft.
"Some of the most brilliant programmers I know have no academic qualifications whatsoever "
These people are unusual, though; they're particularly gifted, and most of the rest of us are simply not like that. I know a number of competent coders with no academic experience, but by and large they've tended to flounder when taken very far out of their comfort zone. The programming world is not short of esoteric concepts that are either unintuitive, difficult to learn, or both.
Anyway, I digress.
"I, for one, do not want to watch the same thing happen to British IT businesses"
Did the textile mills go bust due to lack of skilled technical staff, or because they became uneconomical? Modern day code mills have been moving to China and India and the like for ages, and teaching our schoolchildren how to grind out HTML and PHP is not necessarily going to do them any favours, and I don't hold out much faith that more complex programming languages or techniques would be taught at any school.
"democratised content creation"
Hurrrrgh. What an awful web2.0ism. I shall forgive you just this once.
Granting people the means to create things just goes to show that:
1. It is harder than it looks, and
2. There are an awful lot of really talentless people out there.
Sadly, Big Content don't seem to understand (2), and has spent a fair amount of time inflicting the products of those sort of people upon us, without the benefit of the zero overheads that the monkeys on the internet have.
A "democratisation" of stupidity, perhaps. Reality TV is a perfect example.
"We are at the forefront of the fibre revolution..."
Isn't it nice to be able to
stand upon the shoulders of giantsreap the rewards of being a former state monopoly handed a vast amount of infrastructure on a plate.Re: avant garde design; zero usefulness.
Well, given Starck's experience in rendering a useful everyday object pretty but quite unusable, I'd say you should all expect some sort of shiny mobile communications device which when picked up with a bare hand loses all signal reception because you've shorted the antenna to ground.
Re: DOES ANBODY UNDERSTAND THIS
If you can't resist troll feeding, please at least concentrate on funny trolls. This guy is just dull.
"Due to not having received up to date information governance training..."
maybe they actually meant "Due to living under a rock for the last 5 years (or possibly longer) the employee had not heard of the dozens of incidents whereby an idiot taking work home lost confidential data."
or, being a little more charitable, "Due to a critical mass of bureacracy, we have been unable to send a trust-wide email say "oh come on guys, stop losing unencrypted stuff""
There is no excuse for this these days. Ignorance didn't really suffice back in the day either.
Well, it isn't a live action remake, but...
This would seem to be a terrible spectre of things to come:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jafd97yJFOI
Re: so ?
Because it might have broken due to some flaw that might exist in the next generation of satellites too? Because it would be a shame to just abandon a multi billion Euro investment because they couldn't be bothered to press the right reboot button? Because there may be valuable science associated with diagnosing what went wrong that could inform the design of future satellites?
Just because something is living on borrowed time, doesn't mean that doing the bare minimum to try and keep it going is a stupid idea. You may feel the same way in a couple of decades.
Re: "two planets, one closer to the star and one more distant."
Well, probably. But there's always the possibility that they're in the same orbit, at each other's L3 point, sorta thing. Or they might have crazy eccentric orbits, or maybe orbits that might not even share the same orbital plane.
"a robot voice which said 'teamp0ison'."
I'm intrigued; how was the '0' pronounced?
Maybe I'm just being daft,
but this particular item is a fairly specialist bit of kit (an enormous synchronous motor). Most industrial motor applications (excluding robotic and CNC axis positioning servos) presumably just use boring old 3-phase async AC motors which don't even need normal magnets, let alone rare earth ones. We're not quite out of the rare earth woods yet.
Re: "Why build a robot to drive a car?"
Cos its in the competion spec. It does have a slightly greater degree of versatility than a big wheeled tractor, especially when it comes to moving or positioning unwieldy vehicles or driving in inconvenient spaces. Doesn't need to be humanoid though.
And yes, a human robot would already be well adapted to spaces and systems designed for human use. Nonetheless, something with tracks that can climb stairs and a poker that can push buttons and a chainsaw that can deal with less tractable obstacles will be able to get most of the places a human can, and could be built by any competent engineering team. The android, conversely, requires massive amount of engineering skill in both construction and control software and the resulting costs will be hugely higher.
"They can no longer rely on delivering poor service for big money and get away with it"
Oh really.
Anyone notice a sudden dip in the share price of Capita following this announcement? Anyone? No?
Hint: this means that charging big bucks for third rate tripe is still a perfectly valid business practise, and is nicely facilitated by by th Government who can't or won't do anything better.
Not at all
The Japanese would be the last people on earth to accept a system that exposed them to that sort of unpleasantness.
The hand-vein scanner is optical and contact free; it is effectively just shining a light through your hand and capturing an image of the result. You just wave your hand in an imaging box and wait for it to identify you. It could conceivably work without using any data from the fingers either, making it not only contact free but robust to a fair bit of external damage.
I'll bet that severed hands whether the blood has clotted or drained out would simply not work because they wouldn't transmit light correctly. Freshly severed and tourniqued hands might, but at that point it is easier to frogmarch someone to a cashpoint and demand they give you money or you'll chop their hand off.
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