Slashdot Mirror

How about something like this ( PDF! ).

• The national network of number plate recognition cameras which mean almost every journey in the UK is recorded. An IEE Article on the Technology behind the system. This was brought in with no public debate, and no clear controls on access to the data collected.
• My local councillor, posting on Slashdot thought we "have public access to the CCTV pictures" he has since educated himself significantly on the subject, for which I congratulate him - but he was an example of how those responsible for bringing in intrusive schemes can be ignorant of what they were doing.
• The deployment of cameras outside of any democratic oversight / control with those running the cameras ignoring policies agreed by elected representatives
• Convergence of public and private surveillance and databases into a single mammoth system. eg. Petrol stations feeding data to the police on traffic movements, supermarkets installing RFID Radar (Can they read your passport when its in your car, or see what you've bought from other shops as you drive in?), and medical records being potentially made widely available on a new national system.
• I'm worried that the State won't be able to keep data in such a converged system accurate, and I don't like the idea of having all my eggs in one basket - all my interactions with the state (ability to drive (driving licence), travel (passport), move freely (face recognition on CCTV in shops, town centres, railway stations) could be affected by a single error.
• The UK Government will no doubt share all this data with at least the USA and no doubt other states too. Arriving in the USA is an intimidating enough experience enough as it is.

• Individuals should control which groups of people should have what level of access to their medical records.
• Querying the national traffic monitoring system to find out where a car's been should be treated at least as seriously as getting a search warrent for searching a house.
• An individual's interactions with the state should be compartmentalised unless there's a good reason for not doing so eg. restricting a convicted football hooligan from travelling to a competition, or banning a criminal who used a car in the crime for driving.

The new standard calls for 42v not 48.

It looks like there is the Toyota Crown Royal which uses 42v and a "new SUV from GM" that will use 42v as well. Source.

I wonder if the reporting here has been a bit skewed by concerntrating on specific technical safety recommendations. Surely those are just symptoms that may or may not be addressed (and may or may not cause problems even if they aren't), the real compelling question is do NASA have an appropriate degree of safety culture? I know this is probably a less interesting issue for the Slashdot crowd to discuss than technical details but as anyone working in a safety-critical engineering area will appreciate, its really whats at stake here. And IMHE, whilst I appreciate to some it may sound like management wankery, safety culture is both absolutely vital and also damn hard to inculcate in an organisation. Whilst I understand the President was making rash claims about missions to mars, he was really needed here to make some very clear statements and devise policies to encourage NASA to change. It would seem to me if NASA are failing to meet clearly defined 'action points' they certainly haven't a safety culture which bodes ill for the future frankly. Seems in 2003 quite a few people called it correctly ("Experts say NASA's safety culture may be too broken to fix")

Unless this process is perfected before January 2038 in which case I don't want my consciousness running on any computer using the 64 bit Unix time counter.

In 2039, when the bit flips !

see Dates Potentially Causing Problems in Computer Systems (from today to 2100)
Even the 68K Amiga systems run into trouble 8 years after Unix.
.

"Torvalds' recent announcement that, in the future, Linux kernel contributors will have to certify the origins of their code before it can become part of the kernel."

Why?

Why do open source projects have to prove this for each piece of code? Proprietary projects dont have to do this right? But open source projects always have the code available for the world to check over.

Surely Linus should just accept any code and leave it up to any companys who own and IP it may infringe on to chase it up? Thats why we have patents, copyright etc right?

For example, let's say you're Reiser and you figure out an efficient way to do block allocation for large files. If you implement and release that idea in ReiserFS, you could be sued, and I could be sued if I use ReiserFS. The legal penalties are actually worse if you or I knew that the implementation was patent-infringing.

Stallman gave a keynote at the International Conference on Software Engineering in Edinburgh last week on this very subject. He's pushing the EU to disallow software patents. From what he was saying, it sounds like he's given up on the US.

I know it's not free, but it is so good that you will wonder why Calc was ever so mysterious. I am amazed at how convoluted Calculus textbooks have become. Published originally circa 1900 (I apologize but I don't have the book in front of me and I can't recall the exact date), this very small book treats calculus the way it should. Rather than hitting you over the head with a weighty tome, it just explains calculus.

After reading just a few chapters, I actually calculated by hand the calculus results for a typical calculus problem. I was not using the 'chain rule' or any of those short-cut tools, but just only used basic algebra. This was the first time I'd ever done this in my entire life. I've been through Calc 1 & 2 and Multi-Var Calc, and others (for a Math minor)(hehe, I did Calc 1 twice, got an A both times, and still didn't understand it). I learned all the 'rules' but I never understood why I was doing it until I read Silvanus.

I recommend it highly. Martin Gardiner updated the book for it's recent publication to use current notation. Best of all, it's a small book. If you're at all interested in calc, it's worth your time. I would wager it's worth more than several of the 'cinder block' calc textbooks put together.

Ok, and god damn. A bit of research turns of very interesting things. It is amazing to me how things like this can sit out there a fester... all the info is out on the net. This Wired article should not be a surprise. Every night I sit at my computer with a fat pipe connection and try to think of good things to type into google. This one passed me and apparently most of us by;

From the Wired article, this is (as far as I can tell) Joshua Davis sitting in Antwerp, handing three diamonds made via chemical vapor deposition.

Van Royen reluctantly hands the diamonds back. "You have something that nobody else in Antwerp has." he says. "You should be careful - somebody might jump out of the shadows with a mask on." He leans in conspiratorially: "If you want to know how important these diamonds are, talk to Jim Butler with your Navy. He is the man."

Another name. Only mentioned once in the aricle. One of many names. I wanted to know more. A series of google searches. the best one.

Success.

The first one that really catches my interest. a research paper. A quote:

Carbon in the form of diamond, DLC (Diamond Like Carbon), carbon nanotubes and conjugated polymers is attracting increasing interest as an electronic material. This is because carbon possesses some interesting and unique properties. In its diamond form it has good thermal conductivity, high elastic modulus and good wear resistance. It is also possible through doping to turn diamond into a semiconductor leading to the possibility of devices that can operate at temperatures of several hundred degrees. Carbon can also form nanotubes, long tube like structures a few nanometers in diameter that can be conducting or semiconducting. Single walled carbon nanotubes are incredibly strong and posses the thermal conductivity of diamond. Carbon nanotubes are being investigated as interconnects in ICs because they are immune from electromigration. The small diameter of nanotubes is being exploited as thin film emission cathodes: a brush of parallel carbon nanotubes orientated normal to a phosphor display. Carbon nanotube technology is being used to create a supercapacitor - a KilloFarad capacitor the size of a drinks can! Carbon also forms long molecules, these polymers are being investigated as fast switching TFT (Thin Film Transistors) and organic light emitting diodes. Flexible polymer displays are already in production. It is hoped this research will lead to the lowest cost per area display technology.

For god sacks, that is a long quote, please go read the whole thing.

If I thought it couldn't get better, the www proved me wrong.

Our research is focused on understanding and manipulating interface chemistry to control, with atomic precision, interfaces between types of organic and inorganic materials. We refer to this area as "interfacial architecture" because, like an architect designing a building, we are interesting in understanding the physical properties of molecular building-blocks and using this information to design, build, and understand more complex structures with precisely-tailored functional properties. We are especially interested in interfaces that link organic/biological molecules with inorganic materials that are used in microelectronics, such as silicon and diamond.

emphasis mine. He states Jim Butler as a reference. Uh. Not only do we have the future of microprocessor technology, we have a people researching as a method to connect it to living flesh.

1. This article is worthwhile reading:

"The future of computing-new architectures and new technologies"
By Paul Warren (04-Dec-2002)
The worlds of biology and physics both provide massive parallelism that can be exploited to speed up lengthy computations-with profound consequences for both everyday computing and cryptography.

2. Yes, it's been apparent for the last few years that computing is entering a new phase with diversity of computing 'substrates' as one key theme. Ameoba, Java, .NET, CORBA and GRIDs also point to the other theme of distribution and transparency.

The implications are that you should be able to design software that chooses an appropriate substrate for the problem at hand, such as RNA based computing for graph minimisation problems. If you can't afford to have this kind of computing substrate locally, you should be able to pay for the services over the net to someone who offers the raw power - e.g. an IBM style raw computing data centre. This is where computing is a commodity product, and organisations will pay for the appropriate computing power where it demonstrates productivity enhancements (e.g. completing a complex CFD simulation in minutes rather than hours).

Google reckons that "Congenital color vision deficiency overwhelmingly affects more men than women. About 10 million men in the United States (7% of the male population) have a color vision deficiency compared to 0.4% of women. Caucasian men experience the highest prevalence of this disorder." et al.

Try a colour vision deficiency test yourself.

C.f. the overheard conversation in Return to Castle Wolfenstein:

• German 1: "How do ve defuse this thing?"
• German 2: "Cut ze red wire. Or is the ze green? Hold on vhile I get ze manual."
• German 1: "Ach, it doesn't matter, ze all look grey to me anyvay." [BOOM]

It's funny, until you ask the Institute of Electrical Engineers (largely composed of caucasian men) whether they require their members to be able to distinguish wiring colours. Go on, ask them. ;-)