Posts by E 2

SpaceX Dragon capsule lands in Pacific carrying 12 moustronauts

What about females?

Why only male mice?

Billion-tonne IceCube: Sterile neutrino does not exist

The installation picture at the head of the story reminds me strongly of Deus Ex: Invisible War map located in the antarctic.

Reactive? Serverless? Put to bed? What's next for Java. Speak up, Oracle

C went years between K&R and ANSI, then years more before C99. And C is one of the most dominant langauges. C++ has a similar history (though of course currently the committee seems to have the attention span of a whippet on crystal meth), and it is one of the most dominant languages.

Java people - maybe your lang has reach a plateau of refinement? Not, of course, as refined as C or C++, but adequate to not rewrite the spec yet again?

Simply not credible: The extraordinary verdict against the body that hopes to run the internet

Running ICANN might rival running the IOC in terms of opportunities for graft.

Running ICANN might rival running the IOC in terms of opportunities for graft.

F-35 targeting system laser will be 'almost impossible' to use in UK

Re: Wait until you see the next generation fighter...

A sixteen bit avionics upgrade pack will be available for an additional $240 Trillion.

Re: Ditch the American Crap Planes...

The F35 runs Java? OMFG. I expected C++ at the least and C at best. Or is the code written buy new ugrads working in lowest-bid sweatshops? Can see it now: pilot launches missile, HUD scrolls 100+ lines of exception messages...

Re: @boltar ... None-story

The UK cannot afford to send it's pilots to the USA for training: the F35 cost too much and the pound is in the tank.

Holy Crap! Bloke finishes hand-built CPU project!

BREXIT

This is the level of technology Britain can look forward to after brexit and the break away of Scotland, Wals, and Nothern Ireland, bwhahahaha!

'Leave EU means...' WHAT?! Britons ask Google after results declared

Facepalm indeed.

Lester Haines: RIP

R.I.P. Lester, you were good guy.

Inside Nvidia's Pascal-powered Tesla P100: What's the big deal?

All that page faulting...

Is not faster. It is just more convenient.

When Steve Jobs was away, Apple's designers snuck out a penis-shaped remote control

This story is really reaching

Author must have sore elbow and shoulder from reaching so hard.

Apple's fruitless rootless security broken by code that fits in a tweet

Re: Not clear

@ John Sanders

IIRC North Korea implemented the super root idea a couple years ago in it's state sanctioned Linux distro.

Is not this just another case of Apple stealing an idea from a competitor and claiming credit?

Behold, Microsoft SQL Server on Linux – and a firm screw-you to Oracle

Oooohhhh, a data estate!

Norman Conquest, King Edward, cyber pathogen and illegal gambling all emerge in Apple v FBI

"...the citizenry may be called upon to enforce the justice of the state, not faintly and with lagging steps, but honestly and bravely and with whatever implements and facilities are convenient and at hand."

Drop the reference to Edward. It seems a reasonable statement.

When it is the state that is breaking the laws (privacy, illegal search and seizure, torture) however...

Boffins: There's a ninth planet out there – now we just need to find it

@erikj Re: If Pluto is taken.

You could have planet 9, planet 10, planet 9.5, planet 9.51, etc.

Like sections in some uni physics textbooks.

BT blames 'faulty router' for mega outage. Did they try turning it off and on again?

Re: One f*****g router?

I could be wrong, but if the offending router just started advertising bad routes or forwarding to bad destinations it could break stuff while not actually experiencing a hardware fail.

@Voland's right hand Re: 'Faulty Router'

If you let ISIS handle your routing then you are asking for trouble!

Boffins tentatively fire up grav wave sniffer

Yes, VLA is the wrong thing. I was thinking of the Square Kilometer Array.

Could this tech - sensors positioned very far apart communicating with lasers - be used for an optical telescope with a huge effective mirror diameter? Sort of like how the Very Large array combines radio telescopes across the Earth?

Cunning Greek lizards seek skin-matching rocks

Cunning Greek lizards seek skin-matching rocks

...the better to conceal their Deutsche Marks.

Sena's multi-action camera monster, or Cardo's PackTalk club rider juggernaut?

Re: Fremen 'Stilsuits'

I thot all they drink in Australia is spice beer!

I'm a cyclist and ex-motorcyclist. I have used headphones inside my helmets (both vehicles) but gave them up because they interfered with my ability to hear what is going on around me. I found that hearing was almost as important as seeing.

However when skiing I find helmet-headphones brilliant.

Beware the terrorist drones! For they are coming! Pass new laws!

Do not allow fission or fusion weapons!

Do not allow barrel bombs or high explosives.

Definitely do not allow Russian weaponized smallpox stock.

Discworld fans stake claim to element 117

Re: May I be the 94th to suggest

Bowieum and Ziggium - these are better candidates than mediocre guitarists and writers.

North Korean operating system is a surveillance state's tour de force

Re: A serious question...

I doubt the NorK gov't distributes the source code for their kernel modifications. Given the NorK gov't appears to have implemented super-root level access for the security and tracking code, without the source how is a hacker supposed to subvert the system?

Not to mention the nature and scope of the punishment if caught.

opprc - the "oppress process"?

Chicago cops under fire for astonishingly high dashcam, mic failures

" "I saw a 10-inch floppy drive unit in a storage closet."

It was probably left there because nobody could source 10" floppies to use with it."

More likely nobody knows how to use it.

Let's shut down the internet: Republicans vacate their mind bowels

He's not completely wrong

"We're not talking about closing the Internet. I'm talking about parts of Syria, parts of Iraq, where ISIS is. Now, you could close it."

Unplug the cables that service Iraq and Syria, and drop the routes. Many countries have done this at times to disconnect from the intertubes. Iran did it last time it had a big uprising.

Sure, the evil doers could use dial up to AOL or sneakernet USB sticks into online pats of the world, but they'd have problems with routing via AOL, hard to do point to point IP messaging or telephony via USB stick.

'course they'd just use POTS or fax if we did this.

Just imagine: an ISIS cold-call fax campaign, or cold-call ISIS telemarketing.

Miss Brittany dethroned for posting 'nude' Facebook pics

It's the crotchless jeans are too obvious, right?

Terror, terror everywhere: Call the filter police, there's a madman (or two) in town

The lede pic...

Every time I see the lede pic it makes me think "Planet of the Apes".

AMD sued: Number of Bulldozer cores in its chips is a lie, allegedly

Complete BS law suit. The structure of these chips (1 module = 2 int/logic cores + shared 256 bit FPU and shared decode/cache) was made very plain from word go. This structure was a selling point.

Let caveat emptor prevail: the suit is either malicious or put up by people too negligent to understand what they were buying.

Linus Torvalds fires off angry 'compiler-masturbation' rant

@Def

"*I haven't actually used C in over 15 years, and seriously hope I don't ever have to again. It's a terrible, insecure language that should have been donated to a museum a very long time ago."

C is the minimal no-BS model of a load store machine, which is why all the big kids play with it. All we are really doing is loading registers then doing ops then storing results, regardless of the language used.

You could say all the other languages are just wrappers around C.

If you cannot avoid shooting yourself in the foot, perhaps you should not be allowed to play with guns.

Germans in ‘brains off, just follow orders' hospital data centre gaff

Germans in hospitals.

Just following orders.

Reminds me of something...

Blood-crazy climate mosquitoes set to ground Santa's reindeer

Re: Make your mind up

@Ivan 4

You assume malice.

I don't read all the journal articles (do you?). I was just pointing out there are two things at issue and that they are constantly conflated.

Re: Make your mind up

There are two things:

1) Measurement of CO2 levels and temperature and sea level in the past - going back through several periods of glaciation and of extreme warming - shows a very strong correlation between high CO2 concentration and high temperatures. Nobody disputes this.

2) Modelling the effect _now_ of rising CO2 levels using computers and climate models is not well understood nor are there commonly accepted models (in the sense of, say, Newton's Three Laws, or Gauss's equations, or Special Relativity). So you can tweak the coeffs any way you want.

Number 1 says: if the CO2 levels get too high the temperature will rise a lot, but it does not say when.

Number 2 tries to say when.

Everyone yells about number 2, but they seem to forget about number 1.

Jeez, Fail

Go to Yellowknife in the summer currently - the bugs are so numerous you will be sucked dry in a short time.

It's the white heat of the tech revolution, again!

The author is manufacturing consent, pure and simple.

Internet - DARPA.

Computers - WWII military crypto.

Stealth tech - Pentagon.

Rockets - WWII German gov't.

Space Race - Cold War gov't-gov't competition.

Privately held launch capability - NASA outsourcing.

TV - private enterprise.

TV is *such a win*. Where would we be without it?

AMD chief architect Jim Keller quits chipmaker – again

Re: Mystery?

It would be novel indeed if AMD sold (in volume) a CPU that was competitive in the datacentre!

Atlantis: The DSSD, data centre disk killer rising from the deep

Why not just ditch the SSDs outright?

Canadians taking to spying on their spies

You are all terrorists and if you go to Canada a random minister of the Crown will incarcerate you without charge for an arbitrary period of time, after which Daddy Harper will ship you to Syria to be tortured.

So, was it really the Commies that caused the early 20th Century inequality collapse?

This item should be filed under "editorial".

When did The Register become a political rag?

Where is the technical angle or connection?

This article is just another hack trying to bolster a new orthodoxy.

Prof Hawking cracks riddle of black holes – which may be portals to other universes

Should be "Professor Hawking HYPOTHESIZES"

Re: If the idea's been around for 20 years

You gotta keep in mind, whenever someone like Hawking says something there may be some hack waiting about to turn it into "news".

Re: Plasma Spewing

All the matter and energy falling down the gravitational well is converting potential energy to kinetic energy and heat - that's where the energy comes from. Outside the event horizon, heat and radiation pressure can exceed the gravitation pull. Some of the matter gets hot enough and escapes, and it is very very energetic. Some of the matter gets sucked in. It's only at the event horizon that no escape is possible.

Re: Holey information loss, Batman!

Susskind addressed your issue when he said string theory describes an infinite number of universes - by some metric (he did not explain which one) you get local minima in the space of solutions, he says each minima is a universe. This is a great explanation of string theory because it both demonstrates humans giving names to things they don't understand and also why string theory is useful.

Oh wait...

Re: Cite

Yes but string theories are just elaborate variations on least energy style equation fitting. What kind of theory would you like today? Just vary your parameters a bit and make up a new one.

I think "string theory" was created to maintain a serviceable population of mathematicians and physicists after the cold ended and the need for new doomsday weapons decreased. They started working on solving underdetermined mathematical models - and we all know there are infinite solutions to those.

The string theory work will literally never end.

OLPC heir reveals modular laptop design

So the poor children can waste their money running on the computer upgrade treadmill just like the rich children?