Posts by hammarbtyp 1386 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Nov 2007
"Can we just admit that quantum physics is batshit crazy now ?"
No, what it says is our ability to perceive the real world out there is limited by the paucity of our sensory apparatus.
What we perceive as the "real" world is only a construct we use to make sense of it. It is a bit like a creature living in a 2-d world meeting a 3-d object for the 1st time. It can make measurements, construct mathematical models about the object, but the concept of a 3-d world will always appears "bat-shit" crazy just because it has no way of perceiving what it is actually seeing
In the early PC days, we were all trying to learn about these new-fangled machines, and if you was something cool you wanted to re-create it.
At that time there was a famous virus called cascade which has the fun effect of dropping letters one by one to the bottom of the screen. Of course being inquisitive little blighters we wanted to know how it worked, so developed our own version (without the virus parts of course).
Unfortunately it was left running on a machine where a passing member of IT from their rare ventures from their bunker saw it. He then initiated a full lockdown of the company and quarantining of all machines.
It took about 3 days to find out why and sort out that we were just messing around and as far as we knew there was no virus.
Staying in the current Galileo project would obviously be the preferred option if possible but if the EU are going to make that difficult then from what I've seen the main argument against going down the route of a new unilateral global positioning project is the estimated £5bil cost. Why not get together with a few other trusted, long-standing non-EU allies like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and spread that cost and expertise? Australia has already recently been investing hundreds of millions of dollars in systems to augment GPS so I imagine they would be quite interested in getting more closely involved in an independent system (politics willing).
Good plan...Except
Despite GPS being global, they are designed to provide maximum coverage is certain geographic areas. The original GPS was designed to cover the northern latitudes for missile launches, Glosnas, the Russian subcontinent, Galileo Europe.
Now I know geography is not a big thing with Brexiters, some who think that Australia is just off the Irish coast, but providing a system for such widely separate countries would cost far more in terms of Satellite coverage than the Europe one and likely provide poorer coverage.
2nd point, while Brexiters like to promote the commonwealth as some sort of old boys club(well the white bits anyway), The reality is that these areas are far more closely aligned with the economic areas where they they find themselves. Canada is closely aligned with the US, Australia and New Zealand increasingly look at pacific co-operation. I very much doubt they will be interesting in funding a boondongle just to get the UK out of its Brexit hole
"NASA suspects the natives are hiding behind rocks waiting for lumbering the rover to pass."
"I suspect the natives will be hiding behind rocks, armed with a shotgun, waiting to blast the drone from the sky!"
I think you're getting confused with Mars, Pennsylvania
"Well, the civil service should have been working on this stuff since before the referendum. But Cameron didn't let them as he knew he was going to win."
They were, and basically they were telling everyone the issues were huge. Experts eh, what do they know
The people who are in charge now, were the same people who said how easy it was going to be. You are not suggesting that they were lying are you?
Why not just title this article Capitalism is evil and socialism is great?
The you could just ignore the 100m bodies socialism created in the 20th century while hypocritically avoiding paying tax like most socialists.
Point one - You have absolutely no right what so ever to tell Jeff Bezos what to spend his money on. He was out in the world earning it while you were smoking bongs and watching countdown all day during your worthless media degree.
Point two - Jeff Bezos has created over 500,000 jobs, probably hundreds if not thousands of millionaires, remind me again how many millionaires you and your clown marxist friends have created? None? How many jobs have you created? None?
It is not a question of whether Socialism or Capitalism is evil, it is a question of what should the limits of both. While extreme socialism is considered bad in the form of communism, at what point should we limit Capitalism, through either taxes or legislation.
When a firm and there owner reach a point that they can influence the entire political system to their own interests purely by threatening to withdraw resources, then it is not a good state to be in and some limit should be enforced
Point 1: However rich Jeff is, he is still a citizen and should be beholden to the same restrictions as any citizen. If Jeff decided to create a nuclear arsenal, I think you woulds agree we would have a right to step in. However the bigger question is how much of that wealth Jeff has accumulated should the governments of the world expect to come their way and so to point 2
Point 2: Yes Jeff created many jobs. However those have often come at the expense of many others. It would be more accurate to say Jeff has managed to divert many jobs to amazon. However none of this is done in a vacuum. Amazon would be nothing without the road infrastructure, schooling, telecoms and other public services that Amazon is built on. Therefore it is only fair to expect that Amazon and Jeff pay towards supporting those.
It is not a fact that Jeff is a billionaire that is in question. The issue is whether is there a limit to how much wealth one man can accumulate. If no, then we go down the road of naked capitalism, where the only measure is how much something is worth, and the measure of a man is only how big their bank balance is. That's not a world I wish to live in, thank you very much
I think you will find Russian excesses stretch well past the Bolshevik era. Stalin just could use the full resources of the state where the Czar was limited by the technology and the resources of time.
The revolution did not happen because everything was peace and light at the time you know.
Different masters, same result and all that
Dear Mr Bezo's
Some ideas on what you could do with your money
1. create 183,000 scholarships to allow disadvantaged (probably your employees ) to go to university and create the engineers and doctors of the future
2. Build and repair 183,000 schools and hospitals
3. Build sustainable public transport systems in 183 places where people struggle to get to work
4. Add solar cells to 183000000 houses or public buildings
5. Clean up the pollution in towns like Flint Michigan
Of course none of these are as sexy as adding your name to a giant phallus and launching it into space, but in the end they will have longer lasting effects
But that's your opinion, and you do not possess a crystal ball. Also, we happened to ask the opinion of everyone in the country and the majority disagreed with you. Sorry, it's called democracy!
No, but you can make an informed decision based on the evidence provided and refine that opinion as more information becomes available.
I voted largely the way i did because the leave side provided no viable alternative. Almost 2 years in we still have no viable alternative apart from vague platitudes and infantile threats to take their ball home.
If however despite that, the country gets its free unicorns and all you can eat cake, I will be relieved and big enough to admit that I was mistaken. If on the other hand the economic forecasts by the majority of the non-partisan economists come to pass, will you do the same? Will you admit you made a mistake and campaign to reverse it?
Or will you come up with some lame excuses about conspiracy of remainers or blame Europe for having the temerity of looking after their best interests?
If the latter, you have given up rationality and are in fact just part of a cult desperately batting away reality to try to desperately preserve your world view to preserve your pride and damn the consequences
The person that wrote this article seemed, to me, to have an agenda; basically stated it is, Apple good Google bad!
While I fully accept that it it pretty near impossible for any human to write a completely impartial article, I would like to see at least an attempt at writing one.
You must be new here.
Basically Andrew has had a thing against Google for a long time, and basically he can't stop it spilling over into his 'impartial' phone reviews
Getting to Mach 5 is 20% of the way to orbital speed. For the other 80% you're going to be dragging the air breathing part of the engine as so much dead weight. This is just another Big Idea project, like cargo airships, that looks sexy but doesn't add up.
Well done sir in showing on your back of a fag packet calculation, something that the combined engineering resources of the western world has failed to consider <SARCASM>
Decided that I wanted to get my dad online. Built a PC from him and gave it to him for Christmas.
Came over set it up and showed him how to use it.
Cam back 3 weeks later, and asked whether he had used it "No he said, I didn't want to turn it on in case i broke it"
As far as I know he never used it and 5 years later I found it hidden under a ton of other stuff when clearing his house out
There was also the time when he bought a digital camera even though he had no way of uploading the photos..
Firearms can be used for self-defense, and are used thousands of times each year in the U.S. (search on "gary kleck firearms defense" for studies), while it is difficult to create a use case for drones being useful for self-defense.
As you probably know well this study is controversial and in no way can be considered definitive.
For example this quote
According to Klecks survey more than 50 percent of respondents claim to have reported their defensive gun use to the police. This means we should find at least half of his 2.5 million annual Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) in police reports alone. Instead, the most comprehensive nonpartisan effort to catalog police and media reports on DGUs by The Gun Violence Archive was barely able to find 1,600 in 2014. Where are the remaining 99.94 percent of Kleck’s supposed DGUs hiding?
While I would not dismiss any such study out of hand, when the figures cannot be cross referenced and verified and the sample size is small and biased, it would be naive to take it at face value.
However I would love to see a proper government funded study on gun violence in the US, something the CDC is at present banned from doing for some reason...
As for drones being used for self defence, well I'm sure there is a case to be made for a couple of predator drones to keep all those Mexican Rapists of your well manicured lawns...
"Practically nobody runs VXWorks on x86/AMD64"
Well we do, but I must admit the restrictions were starting to hurt.
In the embedded space ARM is the way forward , but even AMD64 was looking tempting because Intel just don't have much in the low power embedded space., On some products such as their hypervisor windriver did not support AMD.
Being owned by Intel never made a lot of sense and severely restricted what windriver could support in terms of platform
True, to be honest with special effects costs as they are , often it makes more sense to have them as TV series where they can be run at a length which matches their complexity. I was pretty impressed by westworld in that context
I would love to see one of Ian M Banks books put to screen, but I don't think they would translate well
"2001 is real sci-fi: No chance of happening upon a forbidden planet with human breathable air - fashioned by aliens for aliens - rather a big lapse of logic, that."
Well we don't know, since we only have a sample size of 1 to compare.
Mars at some point had a larger proportion of Oxygen in its atmosphere that now, but Oxygen is very reactive and will quickly bond to other chemicals (so the red rust of Mars).
To maintain high oxygen content we need a process to release oxygen from other chemicals. Simple Life does that pretty well in terms of photosynthesis, and there is no reason to believe that if life does exist elsewhere a similar process could not be possible.
Ummm. Perhaps if you load the water supply with the correct hormones
It was sort of tried in the 2nd world war when British troops had there drinks laced with bromide in an attempt to curb their libido.
However as Spike Milligan said ,"I don't think that bromide had any lasting effect, the only way to stop a British soldier feeling randy is to load bromide into a 300lb shell and fire it at him from the waist down."
(Ok, I know it is an urban myth, but the concept remains the same)
well good luck with that...
but
a) The days of the one size fits all application has gone. What people want now is different tools, but better data integration.
b) A UI that wasn't designed by a intern on a window 95 machine would be nice
c) Is there really anything that lotus notes does which could not be replaced with a LAMP stack and a Node.js server at less cost
In the end, despite its power most people only used it as a glorified email client, which it sucked at (even compared to Exchange, which is saying something). Be better off, ditching Notes, create a better exchange (not hard) and call it Note-next-gen or something and provide some sort of import utility
I've been wondering for a while how easy it is to spoof the location data the phones are always sending to Google to see how it impacts the traffic layer on the maps. Want to get a few people off the road in front of you?
It sort of depends how they are doing it. It used to be done via triangulation of cell tower. This would be pretty hard to hack. Now it also uses GPS, but because not everyone had GPS enabled all the time, I assume they use a combination of data and methods.
On the other hand if I could get a button will tells everyone to avoid the M1 on a Friday evening.....
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