Posts by Neil Barnes

El Reg Quid-A-Day Nosh Posse back on the bacon

Re: Rice

Rice from Aldi is 40p/kilo and about 75g seems the right serving for one.

Bread flour is £1.10 for 1.5 kilos, of which 500g will make an 800g loaf with about fifteen slices per loaf - maybe three or four day's worth. That's proper sourdough bread, which is a damn sight better for you and tastes a lot better than the Chorleywood Process predigested pap from most places. It just takes a little time and effort.

So the rice comes out at around 3p/serving and bread at about 9p/serving... cheaper flours are available, but the bread isn't as good and it doesn't save down to 3p/serving.

Potatoes were only significant in last week's diet because Anita found some sell-by reduced...

The amazing .uk domain: Less .co and loads more whalesong

Re: Finally catching up?

@Benchops: British Leyland went bust years ago, so there was no competition.

Stephen Hawking: The creation of true AI could be the 'greatest event in human history'

I was noodling on the idea of AI a few days ago

And came to the conclusion that it's unlikely to prove useful for one simple reason: how do you reward an AI?

I strongly suspect that one could build an AI that is e.g. better at discrimination, or route planning, or spelling, or grammar than a human. Hell, I've built one that can tell if words that don't exist are correctly spelt... things that need sensible decisions are not *that* hard, in some cases.

But if you had a human-level intelligence - or even a Sun reader level intelligence - living in a 19 inch rack, what's its motivation for getting out of virtual bed in the morning? Even if it's got only a handful of neurons, all life with a brain seems to want more than mere existence; it obeys the triggers of instinct but it seeks new stimuli. And the higher the intelligence, the more it seeks (watch a puppy or a baby human starting to explore its environment) to expand, and if it can't expand, to sulk.

What is there for they 19" rack? I can't help feeling something as smart as a human, but without drives and/or the abilty to satisfy those drives, is just going to sit there and sulk - or go catatonic.

Classified LOHAN payload is four-eyed beast

Re: Today is not a day to mention bacon.

Thank you.

That's very kind of you.

Today is not a day to mention bacon.

Tomorrow you may mention bacon.

Thank you.

Quid-a-day Reg nosh posse chap faces starvation diet

Re: It's a gas, gas, gas!

@Ledswinger: You are Le Pétomane and I claim my five pounds!

Re: energy...

A fair point, which has been discussed a little. Lester's been doing his cooking outside, but I suspect few of us are able to measure/calculate the energy costs accurately - I know I can't.

I am using a pressure cooker for the pulses which keeps it down a bit - ten to twenty minutes cooking rather than an hour or two.

Re: you may not starve as much as you think @Neil Barnes

Yeah, we've budgeted just 150g * 4 = 600g rice for the two of us for the week. No rice on Tuesday.

Re: you may not starve as much as you think

I did my calculation for the rice (and the beans, too) on the dry weight, on the grounds I didn't stop to weigh my 'delicious' cooked foods...

Creating your golden statue of Nicolas Cage finally possible

Cool

But I'd rather have chocolate, particularly this week!

Early! Do! Not! Track! Adopter! Yahoo! Says! It's! Rubbish, Bins! It!

Re: re: "Right now, when a consumer puts Do Not Track in the header, we don't know what they mean"

Exactly.

The clue's in the name, folks.

The advertising industry really have shot themselves in the foot, over the last few years. They have become more and more obtrusive and intrusive, to the extent where much of TV and Radio and almost all of the Web is unusable without taking precautions to avoid having adverts forced down your throat.

The argument of 'targeted adverts' is I suspect rather specious: my feeling (though I don't have an MBA so I can't prove this) is that the vast majority of people spend most of their time buying the things they've always bought: if they bought cornflakes last week they're unlikely to change brand unless they seem another flavour on the shelf at tuppence cheaper. The six page spread in the local freebie newspaper is unlikely to change their mind, I feel, and nor is targeted advertising - because who searches for or gossips in their email about their brand of cornflakes, or washing powder, or potato, or all the other things we all buy all the time?

As for big ticket items - don't most people up and think "I'd like a new car/computer/fondleslab/antique guitar/house" and then start looking around for it, actively seeking comparisons and reviews? How many times have you seen an advert for a house and thought, hmm, must go out and buy one? And how often having bought such an item are you bombarded with adverts to buy another? Somewhat too late, one might think...

So, it's straight forward. If it says Do Not Track it's because we do not want to be tracked; we don't want 'targeted' adverts and ideally we don't want adverts at all. We all pay our ISPs for our carrier service, and I see no reason why we should pay to carry your mindworms.

/rant

The Reg Quid-a-Day Nosh challenge: What's the point, exactly?

For what it's worth...

I've had dengue fever - which, like malaria, is carried by mosquitos, but for which there is neither cure nor preventative.

It was just as much fun as Lester's bout of malaria; except the cycle is faster. From delirium to fever to sweating buckets - I was losing a couple of kilos a day - in twenty-four hours. The bout itself kept me in bed for a week, unable to fly home (from Rio to the UK) for three weeks, and off work another two or three months.

I was not alone - that single outbreak affected about a hundred thousand people to one extent or another. The good news is that we're now all immune to that variant of the virus - but not to the remaining three variants, one of which is haemorrhagic, and often a killer.

So given that things that stop malaria tend to help reduce dengue too, I'm in this to help get malaria down. Then we can think about dengue... there are some things which should have the same status as smallpox - i.e. extinct in the wild - and malaria and dengue are two of them.

The quid-a-day nosh challenge: Anyone fancy this fungus I found?

Thereby starving to death...

265 Calories from the noodles

92 Calories from the soup

So about 15% of the daily requirement...

Marauding quid-a-day nosh hack menaces teepee hippie villages

Re: Tarka dhal

Is that made from otters?

Re: Excellent article!

In Brian Aldiss' 'Hothouse World' the protagonists carve their way into an enormous caterpillar (?) which is slowly travelling from the earth to the moon. They basically expect to eat their way through their spaceship...

Oddly enough, very little SF deals with the problem of the poo...

Re: What to do with leftovers?

:)

My comment was a genuine quote from a bloke doorstepped by a news crew when Jackson's closed down...

What to do with leftovers?

Drop an egg in it and fry it without mercy!

C'mon Lester, surely you knew that?

p.s. @Scott: It's just not the same since Jackson's of Piccadilly closed. One has to slum it now in Fortnum's...

p.p.s @nsld: no, it's in a jar.

FCC seeks $48K fine from mobile phone-jamming driver

Just wondering...

Was he using the jammer hands-free?

Firefox, is that you? Version 29 looks rather like a certain shiny rival

Re: Hate it already

You are not alone. Exactly the same arguments are going to apply to this as apply to the W8/Unity changes - things worked as they were: change them if you will, but leave the option to return to a familiar UI.

I don't have any great problems with Chrome, and in some ways I found it better than FF - except that NoScript or Adblock (can't remember which) didn't have working equivalents when I last looked. I don't want a browser tied to an advert-pusher, thanks.

A real pot-boiler kicks off Reg man's quid-a-day nosh challenge

Re: Free food

So, tonight, Wal's taking me to the Indian, tomorrow Jon will take me to the Chinese, then Jilla will treat me to a pizza...

Sorted!

The rotters at work

Have bought a cake and keep offering me slices. I don't think it's in the spirit of the thing!

Microsoft forms 'Special Projects' black ops team

Internet-disseminating baboons?

Oh, that would the users, then.

Curiosity considers first dig into Windjana, the sands(tone) of Mars

Would you say that's a vaguely pyramid-shaped rock?

The one with the inky-black hole in it?

Does no-one read Stanley G. Weinbaum these days? If you look closely, Tweel is probably waiting beside it.

Quid-a-day Reg nosh posse chap fears for his waistline

If I'd remembered to weigh mine before I slung them in the pressure cooker (but after soaking) I could have told you... there seem to be plenty of them in the curry, though. Could be lefts for lunch tomorrow!

NASA spots 'new' star just 7.2 light years away

Brown dwarf?

By those images, it's blue...

El Reg posse prepares for quid-a-day nosh challenge

Re: There is an error in the spreadsheet

No error in E23 - 300g of a 500g pack is 0.6!

Besides, the plan has moved on from there...

Re: It always surprises me

It surprised me too. I did a lot of searching to see where I could get variety, cheaply - I had expected, for example, to get vegetables from my usual market stall who usually have lots of 'all these veggies in the tub for a quid' but this week everything seems to have increased to thirty bob.

Aldi turned up trumps on the veggies, milk, and eggs; well under half the price of the market. Some beans were from my local Turkish/Indian/Chinese supermarket but surprisingly Waitrose had the cheapest black beans. And the bacon was hideously expensive compared to what is available, but it's good free range bacon, properly cured, and *not* 20% water. I have to have some standards! The butcher did offer me pig's trotters which might have made more sense, but there are SPB traditions to be upheld.

My intent here is not to prove it can be done; it is to see how it can be done while still making a range of flavours and textures - hence different beans and a lot of spices. I can't enumerate those; they're all from the cupboard and we tend to buy in large quantities of which I will be using a tiny fraction. Jam is from last year's garden and woodland fruits, so there's just the sugar cost - and I make low sugar jam as I'm diabetic. And the slow-grown sourdough bread is not only better for me but it tastes a damn sight better than the sliced flannel that has been wished on this country since the Chorleywood process was invented. I could have used a cheaper flour but the taste and texture would have suffered.

Brain surgery? Would sir care for a CHOC-ICE with that?

Re: "all outsourcing is cock"

These are traditional cases - but even so are not necessarily better than doing it in-house even if cheaper on a monthly basis.

Who would you rather have on security? Someone who has a permanent job and a pension, sickpay and holiday and the other employees rights, a stake in the company? Or someone having to do two jobs for eighteen hours a day because he's on minimum salary and no job security?

Tales from the Internet World Cup: ICANN tell nothing will change

Amanhã...

It's Brazilian Portuguese for 'mañana' but without the same biting sense of urgency.

Ubuntu 14.04 LTS: Great changes, but sssh don't mention the...

Re: Three questions

My thanks, Mr Wibble.

Three questions

Does it have:

(a) Multiple workspaces?

(b) An easy way to differentiate running programs on the left-hand bar?

(c) A hierarchical menu system as opposed to a need to search or pin favourites?

Absent those, it doesn't fit my use case. I'll give it a try in a virtual machine, probably, but the original Unity pushed me to Cinnamon and Mint and I haven't yet seen a reason to return.

Fancy joining Reg hack on quid-a-day challenge?

Bacon is a vitamin

Lester, me and the missus are in. With added diabetes... you have mail.

Red-faced LOHAN team 'fesses up in blown SPEARS fuse fiasco

<cough cough>

The original SPEARS board had lots of pretty lights to tell you if the fuse (and everything else) was ok!

Samsung files patent for ear-mounted Google Glass competitor

There's no doubt

The user will still look like a Borg wannabe (or just an idiot).

A black box for your SUITCASE: Now your lost luggage can phone home – quite literally

Kiev airport, ten years ago...

Nice lady in big green hat approaches, with clipboard.

"Mr Barnes? I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you don't need to wait here for your luggage any longer... the bad news is it will be here tomorrow."

Oddly enough, that's the only time my luggage hasn't arrived at the same time as me in thirty years of wombling all around the world, including a lot of the less salubrious places at times of crisis with chaps throwing bullets around.

Ancient Earth asteroid strike that dwarfed dinosaur killer still felt today

Re: Fascinating

Probably time to get a new hat, then.

Solar-powered aircraft unveiled for round-the-world flight

Re: Bah!

Seated in this hi-tech chair

This bog that cost a million bucks

Gravity is a myth my friends

The earth sucks!

Electronic kit low on juice? SPIT ON IT

How much power?

1mW = 1 milliwatt

1uW = 1 microwatt, if your keyboard lacks mu (μ)

UFO, cosmic ray or flasher? NASA rules on Curiosity curiosity

Re: Small meteorite strike

And they can triangulate using the other camera's image... oh, wait...

European Court of Justice rips up Data Retention Directive

And further

!= "now remove all previously garnered details".

Drone 'hacked' to take out triathlete

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

You are correct - talking is always the first approach. There have been cases where talking has resulted in abuse.

The rules are there to maintain air safety and I (as a paraglider pilot) have to follow them just as much as a 787 pilot or a model aircraft pilot.

There seems to be an assumption that quads are not aircraft and not subject to the rules - this is not the case.

Re: Occam's Razor

A citation, Mr AC, please?

*Everything* in the air - powered planes, commercial, gliders, paragliders, kites, balloons, model aircraft - in UK airspace is covered by the ANO. There are specific exemptions, but whether the pilot is on the ground or on the plane is immaterial.

Re: Occam's Razor

I don't see why anything to which 167 applies is not also affected by 166, in particular:

166(2) - must be reasonably satisfied the flight can be safely made

166(3) - visual contact with the aircraft at all times

166(5) - not use for aerial work with CAA permit

As you say, most small quads aren't going to be 7kg but I can see that some might get that big. If they are shooting images in the expectation of sale or in the course of the controller's business then they're being used for 'aerial work' and the permit is required, plus the distance from people regulations apply.

There are also other rules that apply to minimum height and clearance.

These are the UK rules; they won't apply outside the UK except on UK registered planes, which these aren't, but most countries have very similar harmonised regulations.

Re: I've said it before and I'll say it again

See my quote of the ANO above to see how many rules the operators are in general breaking. We need to point out to the authorities when such rules are broken.

Re: Occam's Razor

Checking on, your small radio controlled helicopter *is*...

From part 22, ANO, CAP393, sections 166 and 167

Small unmanned aircraft

166 (1) A person must not cause or permit any article or animal (whether or not attached to a parachute) to be dropped from a small unmanned aircraft so as to endanger persons or property.

(2) The person in charge of a small unmanned aircraft may only fly the aircraft if reasonably satisfied that the flight can safely be made.

(3) The person in charge of a small unmanned aircraft must maintain direct, unaided visual contact with the aircraft sufficient to monitor its flight path in relation to other aircraft, persons, vehicles, vessels and structures for the purpose of avoiding collisions.

(4) The person in charge of a small unmanned aircraft which has a mass of more than 7kg excluding its fuel but including any articles or equipment installed in or attached to the aircraft at the commencement of its flight, must not fly the aircraft:

(a) in Class A, C, D or E airspace unless the permission of the appropriate air traffic control unit has been obtained;

(b) within an aerodrome traffic zone during the notified hours of watch of the air traffic control unit (if any) at that aerodrome unless the permission of any such air traffic control unit has been obtained; or

(c) at a height of more than 400 feet above the surface unless it is flying in airspace described in sub-paragraph (a) or (b) and in accordance with the requirements for that airspace.

(5) The person in charge of a small unmanned aircraft must not fly the aircraft for the purposes of aerial work except in accordance with a permission granted by the CAA.

Small unmanned surveillance aircraft

167 (1) The person in charge of a small unmanned surveillance aircraft must not fly the aircraft in any of the circumstances described in paragraph (2) except in accordance with a permission issued by the CAA.

(2) The circumstances referred to in paragraph (1) are:

(a) over or within 150 metres of any congested area;

(b) over or within 150 metres of an organised open-air assembly of more than 1,000 persons;

(c) within 50 metres of any vessel, vehicle or structure which is not under the control of the person in charge of the aircraft; or

(d) subject to paragraphs (3) and (4), within 50 metres of any person.

(3) Subject to paragraph (4), during take-off or landing, a small unmanned surveillance aircraft must not be flown within 30 metres of any person.

(4) Paragraphs (2)(d) and (3) do not apply to the person in charge of the small unmanned surveillance aircraft or a person under the control of the person in charge of the aircraft.

(5) In this article ‘a small unmanned surveillance aircraft’ means a small unmanned aircraft which is equipped to undertake any form of surveillance or data acquisition.

The use of quadcopters and other drones is clearly covered by the ANO and in many cases the flights made are in contravention of these rules - presenting a clear danger both to people on the ground and other pilots.

Re: Occam's Razor

If such a thing were to happen here, presumably the drone would count as and be constrained by the same rules as any other aircraft (i.e. the Air Navigation Order) - particularly with regard to height-above-ground and proximity to people, as well as maintaining the security of control - and the operator subject to the same fines, confiscations, and other punishments.

VAT's all folks: Telecoms and services tax to be set at consumer's homeland rate

Re: What has the EU been smoking?

Indeed it is, but the poor have to spend *everything*. The rich have a lot of discretionary spending.

Nonetheless, and much as I hate sales taxes, there's a lot to be said for the proposal (made here, I believe) of doing away with company tax completely and putting it all on VAT paid in the country of purchase. The purchaser pays either way, and it does away with opportunistic tax avoidance by moving artificial IP around to a cheap company tax locale.

Why ever leave home? Amazon wants to turn your kitchen into a shop

Re: Competition is healthy

Dear Amazon AI - stop delivering food. Start delivering toilet paper.

Re: Computer says no

Thank you Steven R, saved me the bother of looking it up. Have an 'up'.

Organic food: Pricey, not particularly healthy, won't save you from cancer

Presumably...

The *increase* in certain cancer risks - I haven't read the paper, just the Reg's summary - implies that those increased rates are actually the baseline figures[1], and that something in the agri-chemical cocktail applied to normal food is reducing the cancer risk. That would suggest that research into which is doing what; there seems to a benefit which should be explored.

[1] Unless of course, the chemicals/drugs the Food Association *do* allow are in some way unbeneficial? A few minutes' searching failed to provide a list.