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User: mikael

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  1. Re:What's the storage density? on Metal-Free 'Rhubarb' Battery Could Store Renewable Grid Energy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The research paper is here: ma.ecsdl.org/content/MA2013-02/16/1688.full.pdf

    There are some papers on liquid metal batteries here: www.ambri.com/.../Chemical_Reviews_LMB.pdf

    The problem with any of these systems is that the cost of the raw materials themselves are subject to speculation by the currency markets and investment traders. So the minute, some magic energy storage chemical comes on the market, it is going to become as valuable as gold, and the manufacturing companies are going to be bought up and controlled.

  2. Re:All the news that matters on US Customs Destroys Virtuoso's Flutes Because They Were "Agricultural Items" · · Score: 1

    I think it is more the Khagra beetle, and the Khagra Reed (Phragmites Karka). The beetle likes grain plants as much as reeds.

  3. Re:Saw this earlier on US Customs Destroys Virtuoso's Flutes Because They Were "Agricultural Items" · · Score: 1

    There were 11 neys and 2 kawalas which were made of bamboo. Bamboo can't be imported into the USA unless it has been fumigated by a certain process (T404-d) to kill the Khapra beetle (cabinet beetle) upon arrival at the port of entry.

    This beetle has been found 100 times in imports in 2011 compared to three to six times a decade ago:

    https://help.cbp.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/1359/~/importing-bamboo-into-the-us

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khapra_beetle

  4. Re:Great on Japan To Create a Nuclear Meltdown · · Score: 1

    There is a theory that electric current actually runs between the protons and neutrons of the nucleus of an atom and that this could minimized through bombardment by sub-atomic particles like neutrinos and muons.

  5. Re:victory against science on Anti-GMO Activists Win Victory On Hawaiian Island · · Score: 1

    If growing healthy food is going to done more efficiently, it's going to have require higher crop yields while requiring less oil-based fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Growing crops that have a temporary resistance to pests that quickly adapt through natural evolution isn't the way forward.

  6. Re:Leave censorship to the customer on The UK's Internet Porn Filter and Fighting Censorship Creep · · Score: 1

    And before those games came out, British TV was always playing wartime and post-war movies like "Battle of Britain". Those were just as violent, if not more. Wartime movies would show innocent civilians being hurt, like someone taking a cab through English countryside roads, only to be shot at by a fighter plane.

  7. Re:One question for Linda on The UK's Internet Porn Filter and Fighting Censorship Creep · · Score: 1

    "Linda" is probably working in a call-center somewhere in India.

  8. Re:NSA DID IT! on Linux Distributions Storing Wi-Fi Passwords In Plain Text · · Score: 1

    Everyone knows they were just: 00000000

  9. Re:OpenBSD on Backdoor Discovered In Netgear and Linkys Routers · · Score: 1

    But if you want to use your mobile phone with your own wifi router, you still have to give the phone the user password, which then ends up being backed up on some server elsewhere, if it isn't snaffled by some Google wi-fi surveillance vehicle.

  10. Re:Filter on 100-Year-Old Photo Negatives Discovered In Antarctica · · Score: 1

    It's called Silver Nitrate on a glass plate. No electronic timers, electric circuits, auto-flash, matrix-weighting, zoom, auto-stabilization, JPEG compression, white-balance, macro-mode, red-eye mode, auto-timer, auto-upload available. Just place the plate in the wooden-box, remove the lens cap, wait 15 seconds, then cover the cap again. Then take the plates to the dark room and develop them.

  11. Re:PDX on 100-Year-Old Photo Negatives Discovered In Antarctica · · Score: 1

    Fifteen years ago, I used to do my file backups using burnable CD's (and some software like Nero). About five years later, the external CD burner stopped working, and it was hit and miss as to whether any other PC drive would read those "unclosed" disks.

    I've got old image files in AtariPaint format (the cartridge for the Atari 400/800) - they seem to be unreadable, and that's just 30 years ago.

  12. Re:Not cans on Coca-Cola Reserves a Massive Range of MAC Addresses · · Score: 2

    They were those Susan B Anthony dollars. The problem was that so many things like newspapers were sold using mechanical spring type vending machines that only accepted quarters, nickels and dimes, and not one dollar coins. Not even laundrette washing machines or electronic vending machines accepted them. So you could get rid of the spare change by buying a newspaper or a snack but not those coins. Not even supermarkets would want to exchange them. They needed the quarters to give customers change.

  13. Re:Not cans on Coca-Cola Reserves a Massive Range of MAC Addresses · · Score: 1

    I've seen one or two vending machines that accepts payment in the form of a SMS message - the cost of sending the message pays for the drink. A few seconds later, the machine acknowledges the message, and you get to make your choice. Though there is only one number to call and each machine has a unique letter code.

  14. Even worse, the minute you switch your smartphone off, it will decide that it needs to "auto-update". Thereby bricking, scrambling and wiping off any data you may have had on your phone, particularly hotel booking numbers, itenaries and other information.

  15. Re:Hmmm on Dual_EC_DRBG Backdoor: a Proof of Concept · · Score: 1

    With certain file encryption algorithms, they asked that the salt and/or hashed password were tacked on at the end of the file. That sped up decryption enough that their resources could decrypt the file, but not so much that anyone else could figure out it was compromised.

  16. Re:Bad article on How To Change U.S. Laws To Promote Robotics · · Score: 1

    Third, the main reason consumer robotics hasn't taken off is because the devices don't work very well. None of the robotic vacuums are very good vacuum cleaners. Even the expensive Willow Robotics robot the article mentions isn't capable of doing very much. Progress is being made, but slowly.

    Perhaps a turtle is the wrong shape for a powerful vacuum cleaner, but the perfect shape to covertly fiim turtles underwater.

    A better shape for a powerful vacuum cleaner would be a python. Some homes had a centralized vacuum cleaning system with the suction fan and collection bin in the basement, Then the home owner just had to connect up a hose to a wall socket in a particular room. If that were replaced by a snake like robot with some vision recognition, it might be even better.

  17. Re:who benefits on How To Change U.S. Laws To Promote Robotics · · Score: 2

    Technically, your programmable washing machine and spin-dryer are robots. Maybe even the toaster, oven and microwave. A sewing machine with downloadable patterns comes close. They do have moving parts, but all the dangerous bits are usually hidden away.

  18. Re:Once Again on Jade Rabbit Spotted By American Eagle (LRO) · · Score: 1

    Stereoscopic images are even better - especially when viewed using those polarized filter or shutter glasses:

    http://lcni.uoregon.edu/~dow/Marks_photos/stereo_pairs/Apollo_moon/Stereo_pairs_of_moon.html

  19. Re:Once Again on Jade Rabbit Spotted By American Eagle (LRO) · · Score: 1

    Then the Western powers signed "The Lima Declaration of 1975" and gave away 30% of our manufacturing capability in order to keep OPEC happy.

  20. Re:Code. on Intel Releases 5,000 Pages of Open-Source Haswell Documentation · · Score: 1

    Put a hardware driver author in front of a documentation pack and a compiler, and tell him to write a driver, and he'll tell you to fuck off.

    Put a hardware driver author in front of many working examples of device, with debug-level access, with example source (that he can't just copy due to licensing), errata, a direct line to cooperative hardware engineers AND this documentation and he'll start.

    You don't want a hardware driver author, you want a technical writer. They will have the experience to draw pretty diagrams, organize and lay-out information clearly. A hardware engineer would just give you a list of register blocks, what each register did, and expected values. That gives you a more or less horizontal view of the hardware level, what pixel formats that textures, color, depth and stencil attachments can theoretically use. Then it's during testing that you find that some oddball reversed eleven and a half bit texture format doesn't work with some prime number bit sized framebuffer format because nobody thought they would ever be used together, until somebody decided to port Tetchy Squirrels to their smartwatch.

  21. Re:Dear Nvidia... on Intel Releases 5,000 Pages of Open-Source Haswell Documentation · · Score: 1

    It's not the code that is kept secret from the patent trolls, executable code can always be disassembled, precompiled shaders can be disassembled - usually there's even a free disassembler thrown in with most development kits. The secret bits are the comments; explanations of techniques, todos, for-the-future, optimize this, that will be done in the next cycle. It's enough to mention two buzzwords together in one line, and the patent-trolls will be jumping up and down shout patent violation and wanting payment. It will be up to the company to disprove that violation. Just think of pairs of keywords: "shadows" and "stencils" or "floating-point" and "image-buffers".

  22. Re:subcontractors? on The Japanese Mob Is Hiring Homeless People To Clean Up Fukushima · · Score: 1

    They offer to give the homeless food and shelter, but these bills end up costing more than the homeless earn, so they end up in debt. Now the homeless are realizing they are better off on the street that at Fukushima.

  23. Re:Obvious, but worth restating. on Not All Bugs Are Random · · Score: 1

    If you are designing an API, there are dozens of different error codes (invalid value, invalid enumator, run out of memory, invalid handle). Sometimes one bad input could generate three or more errors. But it is the specification which states which error takes priority.
    To make sure everything works as expected, you do all sorts of things:

    Positive testing - making sure things do what they are supposed to do. You look up all the input parameters, work out which combinations are critical and need to be tested together.

    Negative testing - making sure things handle incorrect input. Test every single wrong input one at a time, then move onto pairs of wrong input, and finally all inputs bad.

    Then there are random code and data tests, which just generate random streams of commands. These can pick out things. That method was used to test network device drivers. You just blasted the poor device with a random stream of packets of all values and sizes, and investigate whenever something goes wrong. Unfortunately, randomly generated code usually ends up more like the entry of an obfuscated coding competition.

    Getting real-world data is the best test, especially when it is multi-threaded, then all sorts of weird stuff can appear.
    The

  24. Re:Really on Microsoft's Ticking Time Bomb Is Windows XP · · Score: 1

    I'd imagine they are running animation or CAD applications like Maya or PTC Creo Parametric for the design of cars and aeroplanes. In which case the purchase of the hardware is factored into the budget of the project. The PC's have to be officially approved by the software vendor for support reasons. So you then have to make a purchase of a several thousand PC's to make sure everything remains consistent for the engineers.

  25. Re:Fedora Linux Question on Have a Privacy-Invasion Wishlist? Peruse NSA's Top Secret Catalog · · Score: 1

    Where do you start explaining? You have a huge stack of software going from the GUI applications with plugins at the top, going all the way down to the NIC device drivers and firmware at the bottom. You can easily inspect network device drivers, they don't do much except read and write data out to ring buffers, but even then they had some issue with automatic scattering of data via virtual memory (an optimization that kernel security people didn't like). You can add hardware firewalls to your system, but then this article says they can be tunneled through.

    Some PC hardware even has a wake-up feature using magic packets. The network card remains powered up even though the rest of the PC is powered down:
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake-on-LAN

    You can disable all the server applications that open listening ports on your PC, but it's easy enough for hackers to tunnel network traffic through essential procotols like Ping and DHCP via a remote proxy server. Since the BIOS itself can be rewritten, any built-in system monitoring software could be compromised as well (game PC motherboards have a hardware based network traffic monitoring overlay that shows upload/download times).

    Malware doesn't even need to be any particularly sophisticated. There are dozens of Linux applications that allow you to set up your own server for personal data (your video library available across the Internet) and are script controlled. It only takes one mis configured variable such as the root directory and anyone can take control of your PC. Even if an application is clean and has no bugs, the availabilty of a plugin service, allows anyone to write malware.