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And then there's this sort of evidence that we're more like 300 years off (or 4300)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/volatile/Niemitz-1997.pdf

This is more about printers, mostly colour printers I believe, but it is a related technology as far as I know.

• EFF's Yellow Dots Mystery Instructable
• Investigating Machine Identification Code Technology in Color Laser Printers
• Seeing Yellow

About EURion constellation and bank notes:

• EURion constellation
• Software Detection of Currency
• The EURion Constellation (PDF)

This is more about printers, mostly colour printers I believe, but it is a related technology as far as I know.

• EFF's Yellow Dots Mystery Instructable
• Investigating Machine Identification Code Technology in Color Laser Printers
• Seeing Yellow

About EURion constellation and bank notes:

• EURion constellation
• Software Detection of Currency
• The EURion Constellation (PDF)

You might already get this a lot, but you should take a good long look at Dasher, a novel form of text input that's suitable either as a short-term or permanent replacement for the keyboard. It can be used with a variety of different input devices, basically anything that points. This includes mice, trackpads, trackballs, styli, nibs, nubs, and even IR eye movement tracking (Dr. Hawking's preferred method).

I'm a keyboard junkie and even I have to admit Dasher is pretty badass. It's like Tetris, only instead of accumulating points you write things.

Hawking's 2002 paper made a similar claim with reference to Godel's Theorem. This particular position was originally proposed by a Benedictine Professor Priest, Stanley Jaki, back in the 60s.

I'm sorry, but 5p per year per household *is* miniscule - there's no denying that. 5p x population seems like a lot, but then you need to divide it by the population again to see that 5p per year really is just that - 5p. If there were a quadrillion people in the world, then we can make 5p x quadrillion sound like a stupid sum - that doesn't mean it counts. It's all proportional to the much bigger energy drainers.

Talking about such trivial energy wastage as though it's important is doing the damage in my opinion, because it's giving the wrong priorities (by a giant margin in this case). If we were to get electric cars even *1* minute sooner for everbody that would be the equivalent of perhaps years of using a standby feature.

I suggest reading this, not for me to my prove point, but simply because it's really an interesting read anyway:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ps/1.112.pdf

Here's some choice quotes:

"The result of this lack of meaningful numbers and facts? We are inundated with a flood of crazy innumerate codswallop. The BBC doles out advice on how we can do our bit to save the planet - for example - switch off your mobile phone charger when it's not in use; if anyone objects that mobile phone chargers are not actually our number one form of energy consumption, the mantra - every little helps - is wheeled out."

"Companies also contribute to the daily codswallop as they tell us how wonderful they are, or how they can help us "do our bit." BP's website, for example, celebrates the reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution they hope to achieve by changing the paint used for painting BP's ships. Does anyone fall for this? Surely everyone will guess that it's not the exterior paint job, it's the stuff inside the tanker that deserves attention, if society's CO2 emissions are to be significantly cut?"

"Modern phone chargers, when left plugged in with no phone attached, use about half a watt.......... about 0.01 kWh per day. ...... the BBC's advice, always unplug the phone charger, could potentially reduce their energy consumption by one hundredth of one percent (if only they would do it). Every little helps! I don't think so. Obsessively switching off the phone-charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon."

These folks have something which is easier to control.

They've been working themselves up to this for a while now, and it appears that the lead-in propaganda campaign has heated up. I can't believe that I haven't seen another post discussing this yet. It fits perfectly with TFA/TFS. Two words.

Trusted Computing.

Here is a paper by Ross Anderson on some of what implementing Trusted Computing will mean.

This had better be nipped before implementation or there won't be another chance. The internet is a tool with more than one use, just as with nearly any tool. While the internet has tremendous power to empower, inform, and enrich, it also has tremendous power to monitor, control, and suppress if Trusted Computing is allowed to be implemented.

Strat

This draft standard smooths out Unix Time around the moment of a leap second:

    http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/utc-sls/

-paul

See "UTC with Smoothed Leap Seconds (UTC-SLS)"

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/time/utc-sls/

-paul

There's a Paul Dourish article kicking around the explores how ubicomp research often parallels sci-fi: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/tmp/puc-scifi-draft.pdf That we'd end up developing things we perceived as futuristic and cool when we were young is kinda obvious when you think about it.

But the most spelled-out format would be "the ninth day of August in the Year of our Lord two thousand and ten." So 9 Aug 2010 (NATO standard) is logical.

No, the military standard is NATO DTG, which is DDHHMMz MMM YY -- which is even harder to parse than the usual US convention. I, personally, prefer the ISO 8601 DTG, strictly in decreasing order of precedence.

You can have a look here:
http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk/

I've used it in the past. It's a bit hard to use, but the results are decent.

What you have to realize is that you will need to have _very_ clean recordings,
or else the recognition rate will suffer greatly.

Gödel's theorem does not apply to the universe (be it infinite or finite), it applies to physics which uses arithmetics and natural numbers.

There is quite interesting Stephen Hawking lecture "Gödel and the end of physics".

Van Eck phreaking is not a fantasy. It may rarely be a practice risk, but it is a real technique. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/pet2004-fpd.pdf http://jya.com/emr.pdf Warning pdfs

"Trusted Computing" aka TC/TCG/LaGrande/NGSCB/Longhorn/Palladium/TCPA is one of the greatest threats to freedom and anonymity ever known. Read the FAQ.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html

This is what the administration is talking about implementing. This will give the government a frightening amount of control & power over the internet and communications. This isn't some card you carry around, it's built right into the CPU and gives the government total control over your computer *and any information in it*.

It will control what gets published on the 'net and even provides the ability to remove all instances of a document from any computer that connects to the 'net and retroactively "unpublish" anything the government (and it's friends) don't like. No more WikiLeaks.

Once fully implemented, unless the computer you use has this chip enabled & linked to an identity, your ISP's routers won't let you connect. It will allow control over what software may be installed. Forget linux and other F/OSS software and systems getting certified, at least at costs (in both financial terms and in freedom/security) an F/OSS project could reasonably afford or tolerate.

This is a wet-dream for governments wanting to control people & information, and their multinational corporate friends.

Strat

A "sweeping" mobile input method always reminds me of Dasher. I guess one reason why it doesn't get all the attention is that it must be tuned to a particular corpus of text, so it's not immediately usable like something qwerty-based.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

The law doesn't care.

Stop thinking about your Wifi device. You emit a lot of information without knowing about it anyway. Read about TEMPEST.

Some people even believe that just cause they have swapped CRTs with LCDs, they are not vulnerable. They are usually wrong.

There are way many things that are private to you, but that anyone can collect on a mass scale and raise hairs. Like the time period during which your home's lights are on, and when they are off, the contents of your trash, what type of car you use, what colors/types of clothes you wear, etc. just by noticing you in public. Not all such information may be useful or cost-worthy to use today, but it's all information that says something about you.

The "tamper-protected circuit" is yet another attempt to bring about trusted computing, the idea that while you physically own a computer, there are parts of it that if accessed in non-approved ways, stop working. It's the only real way to implement unbreakable DRM... or at least, it makes the target the hardware, which can be much more difficult to crack than a software implementation. Think encrypted RAM with the key stored in such a "tamper-protected" chip, gooped up with epoxy and a self-destruct mechanism if it detects an attempt at physical access. They're just framing the idea in a different way; the result is the same.

If this ever actually took off, it could split the internet in two, between open and "trusted". Avoid these things like the plague, and refuse any hardware or software that uses them.

If you've got a full meal ahead of you, have a read of The Mind of God by Paul Davies or Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship by John Polkinghorne (Physics).

With a bit less time, for a snack, nibble on the short article Creation and Evolution not Creation or Evolution by R J Berry (Geneticist) and you should start to have a few ideas for conversation with biscuits.

I can type faster on T9 than I can type on my iPhone.

Same here - and my old phone had a slide-out keyboard, a virtual keyboard *and* a 'PhonePad' keyboard (essentially the old ABC, DEF, etc. + T9 + numeric, easily switched); I can definitely type faster on the T9 'phonepad' virtual keyboard than I can even with the slide-out keyboard. Perhaps because I can easily hold the phone with one hand while tapping with the other (instead of needing both hands to type on the slide-out keyboard).. but I rather think that T9 is actually pretty efficient. Add a reasonably-decent grammar check and things like 'on' vs 'no' and 'good' vs 'home' are no longer an issue either.

I've tried a bunch of other input methods back then (windows mobile phone - there's easily a dozen almost completely different on-screen input methods), and other than Dasher ( http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/djw30/dasher/ - stand-alone app ) for special case use (e.g. users with limited dexterity), I couldn't find any that were as easy to work with as the ABC/T9/numeric phone pad.
( Quikwriting, by Ken Perlin - yes, of the procedural noise fame, was okay-ish to work with, but ultimately a lot of the tap-and-slide methods were too strenuous )

A full size keyboard resting on a desk simply doesn't translate so well to tiny little slide-out keyboards and even tinier on-screen keyboards, it seems; at least for me.

"...the tuition fee for UK/EU students studying for their first undergraduate degree is £3,290 per year for all courses..."

And importantly, it's not required that students applying to do computer science courses at university should take this A-level. In fact, many universities will recommend doing extra maths (if possible) instead.

The best universities even advise against it -- for instance, Trinity College Cambridge say it's acceptable only as a fourth subject (most people do three or four A-levels).

That is to say, physicists, statisticians, and real mathematical modellers.

I can't speak for most of the people on the enquiry panel, but Prof. Huppert is a professor at the University of Cambridge's Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (you know, the place where Newton, Dirac, Hawking et al were), specifically looking at geophysics and fluid dynamics. He is the "author and co-author of approximately 220 papers discussing applied mathematics, crystal growth, fluid mechanics, geology, geophysics, oceanography, meteorology and science in general, with a total of over 7600 citations". Nothing to do with renewable energy sources or those other things you brought up.

If that doesn't count as a suitable qualification in being a physicist or mathematical modeller, I think you're going to be waiting a long time for the CRU to be exonerated - but then, that's the whole point - anyone who says they were right must be biased and therefore also wrong.

Ok, this is probably posted in anger, but seriously - look some of the other people up if you want, and find some better-qualified experts.

Nuclear power by design goes in the direction of more secret governement, more corporation power, thighter police state, tighter control over citizens, and more empowering of an "elite" class who controls resources and people. Nuclear power is good for the big fat cats, the militaro-industrial complex, the weapons manufacturers, the corrupt politicians, and so on.

I've come across this attitude quite a lot.
Nuclear isn't bad because of nuclear.
Nuclear is bad because of the Sins of Mankind.
At the same time some other little toy energy source is is redemption that will forgive our sins.

Everything is good for the big fat cats.
Building a trillion or so solar pannels is fantastic for the big fat cats and the militaro-industrial complex.

This isn't about energy sources. This is disatisfaction with how the world is linked up with some kind of belief that if you wear a rainbow shawl and have a little 500 watt wind turbine on your roof then somehow all the real problems will go away.

Also my feeling, although I'd like to have it backed by detailed studies, tells me that nuclear energy is in fact unnecessary and that most if not all of the energy needs of humanity could be provided for through renewable energy, at an economical cost, and this could have been done for a long time. From this article [spiegel.de] about Thermal Solar Power:

Not really.
Read this:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf

It runs through all the options, first in a "what if we ignore the cost and how realistic it is(like lining the entire coast with tital/wave generators or drilling thousands of thermal boreholes or covering half the country in solar pannels)" and then adds them all up to show how much energy we could get. Then it runs through again with realistic estimates from research institutes etc which take into account things like price.

I've seen a lot of very very impractical shit about renewables, there's a lovely little one that does the rounds now and then where they draw a few little squares on the world map and claim that that's the area you'd need to cover.

Of course when you check the math it turns out they've made some insane assumptions like 100% effecient pannels and a superconducting world grid with no energy loss etc etc etc and they never even mention that it would cost several times the entire worlds GNP to build.

Or they talk in the first paragraph about the latest top of the line high effeciency extremely expensive pannels which gather 50% of the energy that hits them and then start talking about solar thermal without mentioning how abysmal it is.
(gross conversion efficiency comes out at about 2.6% for new solar thermal plants)

Actually, sugar is food for the yeast in bread.

People have been storing electrical energy using water for a long time (over a century). The basic idea is the same, but in the case of water and hydroelectric dams, the solution is easier (you just run the turbines as pumps, putting water into the resevoir instead of letting it drain out). According to the wikipedia article on Pumped-storage hydroelectricity :

In 2009 the United States had 21.5 GW of pumped storage generating capacity, accounting for 2.5% of baseload generating capacity. PHS generated (net) -6288 GWh of energy in 2008 ...

In 2007 the EU had 38.3 GW net capacity of pumped storage out of a total of 140 GW of hydropower and representing 5% of total net electrical capacity in the EU.

And, yes, people have considered using pumped-storage hydroelectric to even out the variation in wind power.

I myself doubt that compressed air storage would ever amount to more than a fraction of pumped hydro-electric storage, but it might be useful in very dry or very flat regions.

Since touch typing on virtual keyboards is impossible and hence one must be looking at the screen at all times, why not just replace them with a more efficient method such as Dasher? The only downsides I can think of is need for a language-specific predictive model (though it could learn from the user and still be more effective than a virtual keyboard) and lack of support for chording, which could make text entry even more efficient.

I already posted this in my own thread, and don't want to spam, but you should check out work that has been done integrating Dasher with a gazetracker:

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/SpecialNeeds.html

Oh, it's already been done. 20 words per minute, no less.

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/SpecialNeeds.html

Wouldn't it be a lot faster and cheaper to integrate eye-tracking technology into Dasher?

http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/

Banks should make some haste an move to EMV. SmartCards cannot be skimmed. Smartcard can be cracked, but usually that's for cheap smartcards with some old and proprietary encryption method. EMV is much safer. There are currently some ways to abuse EMV , but it currently requires a stolen card and a man in the middle attack that puts the criminal at much greater risk than skimming

Read:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf

that isn't really going to help.

Read the sections on wind and how much it could generate assuming we ignore all cost constraints:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf

Just chapter 11 will do http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_68.shtml, or even just page 71 http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_71.shtml.

Summary: Gadgets and other devices on standby consume a tiny fraction of that consumed by heating, lighting, transport and other activities. The major energy savings come from better insulation, more efficient transportation, and just doing less. Whatever we do has to be on a big scale, and renewables/efficiency savings alone (for the UK), means a _lot_ of turbines/panels.

The rest of the book is well worth reading though, it brings what many of these debates lack - meaningful numbers in context, such as http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_64.shtml. The website is http://www.withouthotair.com/

Just chapter 11 will do http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_68.shtml, or even just page 71 http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_71.shtml.

Summary: Gadgets and other devices on standby consume a tiny fraction of that consumed by heating, lighting, transport and other activities. The major energy savings come from better insulation, more efficient transportation, and just doing less. Whatever we do has to be on a big scale, and renewables/efficiency savings alone (for the UK), means a _lot_ of turbines/panels.

The rest of the book is well worth reading though, it brings what many of these debates lack - meaningful numbers in context, such as http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_64.shtml. The website is http://www.withouthotair.com/

Just chapter 11 will do http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_68.shtml, or even just page 71 http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c11/page_71.shtml.

Summary: Gadgets and other devices on standby consume a tiny fraction of that consumed by heating, lighting, transport and other activities. The major energy savings come from better insulation, more efficient transportation, and just doing less. Whatever we do has to be on a big scale, and renewables/efficiency savings alone (for the UK), means a _lot_ of turbines/panels.

The rest of the book is well worth reading though, it brings what many of these debates lack - meaningful numbers in context, such as http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c10/page_64.shtml. The website is http://www.withouthotair.com/

Read this. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf

Seriously. Actually read it. It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.

I quote the whole parent to note that there's no summary at all. Good thing it's not posted by an AC otherwise I would think it's attempt at exploiting slashdotters. "Seriously" you should at least summarize what the hell it is you're posting.

Read this.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/sewtha.pdf

Seriously.
Actually read it.
It looks at all the options in a realistic manner.

The correctness of a system is a boolean attribute. The correctness of software with no specification has no meaning. Most software is an approximation of its specification with lots of holes in it. An implementation's quality (with regards to its resemblance to its specification) is a function of the resources spent on it. I started playing with the excellent proof assistant Isabelle http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/hvg/Isabelle/ before I realized how difficult it was to render even the simplest proof. I no longer write software because existing proof systems are too unwieldy and the impossibility of proving/disproving system behavior using general-purpose languages is just too depressing.

Not to mention that, if you actually look at the physics, it is not possible to supply all our current energy needs entirely through solar and wind (renewable) power. So we will always have to have another source to supplement it like nuclear or cleaned up fossil fuels.

The link in TFA is broken.

Here is the original paper:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/Papers/fc10vbvsecurecode.pdf

Prof. Andy Fabian's (of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge and president of the Royal Astronomical Society) entertaining lecture on this very topic, entitled Serendipity's Guide to the Galaxy is available on-line in a range of formats.. Enjoy!

I wonder why they didn't try something like Dasher. This uses simple two-axis control to choose letters as they fly by. I would think this kind of method would be better than having to train for each individual letter.

I can see why it annoys you when the main Google index does this, but I thought that was the point of Google Scholar. In hte Scholar preferences you can set your organization and Google Scholar will then route you through your institution's authentication and link resolver systems which will provide access to the content your institution has paid for.

It not the point of Google Scholar, unless your married to the idea that all research must be paywalled. I do not know the statistics, but it appears the paywalled sites are losing ground fast, with lots of quality new research being freely available. Perhaps the younger generation of researches "get it" when it comes to the internet and information distribution - a major reason to do research in the first place. Definition of Scholar: "a learned person". Fortunately for those of us who are learned, and more importantly, for those of us who want to learn, the paywalled gatekeepers to scholarly articles are quickly being replaced worldwide, much to their disgust.

In a few months time when code porting (to new library versions) is complete, a Linux-based demo of ProFORMA should be released.

I s there any open source software that can generate a 3D model from photos? As far as I can see the source code of proforma is closed. http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202/my_papers/BMVC09/

Breeder. Reactors.

If that fails, Energy Amplifier (it uses Thorium, and you can even burn waste with it).

someone else linked http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/pet2004-fpd.pdf which gives some countermeasures.

In summary firsly use a LCD screen, this pretty much eliminates emmisions from the display itself but the link to the display is still be an issue. Countermeasures against link snooping can include messing with foreground and background colours, adding noise or best of all using an encrypted (e.g. HDCP) digital link.

Actually, the same site that PDF came from says the biggest source from LCDs is the video cable, especially if the signal is all digital. This would be an improvement over a CRT because the CRT will shares the video cable problem.

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/emsec/softtempest-faq.html
My experience so far has been that with LCDs, the video cable is the most significant source of radiated information leakage. Where an analogue video cable (with 15-pin VGA connector) is used, low-pass filtered fonts have the same benefits as with CRTs. Where a purely digital video cable is used (DVI-D, laptop-internal displays with FPD/LVDS links, etc.) only the last step, namely randomizing the least-significant bits, should be implemented.

Where the video signal is entirely encoded in digital form, the low-pass filtered step will not have the desired effect. In fact, it can actually increase the differences between the signal generated by individual characters, and thereby make automatic radio character recognition more reliable.

I suspect there is already an encrypted standard for digital monitor signals so implementing that, even if you have a leaky connection, should probably thwart most attempts to intercept. Then considering that the video images during voting are fairly static, you could probably set up extra circuitry where you don't have to continually transmit the entire screen ever x times a second, just what changes, and only when it changes. Or you could even transmit parts of the screen out of order.

But just switching to LCD and focusing on securing the connection would be an improvement over CRT.