Posts by Tom 7

Those furious gun-toting Aussies were just a glitch. Let's try US drone deliveries, says Wing

Re: Data collection en masse

I look forward to the operators tearing out their own eyes as they catch me sunbathing nude.

Re: Data collection en masse

As a child I could knock a conker off a post around 100yds away with a sling in a couple of shots. Cost me a fortune in marbles practising but now I wonder if I could use conkers to take out drones! They shouldn't cause too much trouble on the way down - the conkers that is!

Re: This should be good

I worked for a bloke who was a submarine captain in WW2 - his description of what it was like to be nearly depthcharged was scary to say the least.

2 to 3 pounds

So that's my kebab order coming by bike still!

'Ridiculous, rubbish, outrageous, complete bollocks': Just some reviews for Amazon's corporate contribution to Blighty's coffers

Re: Please send more tax than our rules say you should.

After I stopped laughing when I read Ayn Rand I thought no-one could really be stupid enough to try anything like that. I was horribly wrong. However it is only a matter of time before even the most hardened Rand fanatic realises that even a badly run state is a lot cheaper and more efficient than any Randian delusion. I just hope we dont get to test it out here.

Re: Tax paid by employees are employees' money, not employer's one.

Cant you read your payslip?

Re: Not really Amazon's fault

CEOs pay has been screwing the shareholders for a while now. Compared with 1977 if CEOs remuneration matched the increase in company values then they would be on about 20% of what they are currently receiving in the UK.

Re: Look a bit closer to home

I believe Hodge herself uses the very same mechanisms she complains about.

World's largest heap of untreated nuclear waste needs more bots to cart around irradiated crap

Re: Re. Re. Zero point

I was under the impression it was more of a safety thing - you dont really want to be working on some wires having isolated the rest of the grid mains to be fried by someone's PV.

I have PV and we frequently have mains power outages here* and it does piss me off that I cant have a cuppa when my PV should be kicking out enough. I have looked into some form of isolation and then using another inverter to start the PV but its surprisingly expensive to do it properly.

You can get stuff for totally off grid working but I've not been able to find any that would work in both situations.

I did work with a civil defence group some years ago and it is surprising just how vulnerable to grid (and hence the country) is to terrorist/enemy attack - correctly implemented renewables make it vastly safer.

*lightning seems to bugger things up a lot but farmers with forklifts seem to take out a lot of cables too.

Re: Holiday at Windscale '74

Even now hoses are falling into old mineshafts that are less than 200 years old and forgotten about. Given that some parts of nukes will still be capable of killing people in millions of years safe waste management could actually use more power than the stations ever generate*. Interestingly this is a charge frequently aimed at wind despite even sea based turbines paying back their CO2 debt in less than 9 months now.

*When I studied nuclear engineering at uni I got concerned about waste and was surprised by the what I would call a brexit like belief that it would be all sorted out later. Given that this stuff will still be capable of wiping out everyone in a city the size of London in 100,000 times longer than the existence of civilisation I do feel a little more attention should be paid to it and the potential cost for future generations.

Re: Holiday at Windscale '74

"But your hideous experiences are not, in themselves, an indictment of nuclear power. Just nuclear power done badly, lazily, ignorantly"

Have you seen governments of late?

Re: How is Sellafield secured against aerial attack?

They would use it as an excuse to release some radioactive gasses as they may have dont during the Chernobyl event, The Guardian printed a map of where the radiation from the reactor was deposited and there was a very suspicious plume in the Cumbria area near Sellafield.

Re: Too much information but ...

The ship based nuclear reactor mentioned earlier would make a mess of any large water navigable city in the wrong hands.

Re: Too much information but ...

Not quite sure why you want to send a nuclear reactor to your enemy - they might just send it back.

Re: Does not compute

No nuclear power is not. It was one of my major courses at Uni and at the time I asked my lecturer about a possible problem and was told it was unlikely to happen. It has since happened more than once and if terrorists were to understand what actually happened its surprisingly easy to make it happen again. You can do it right and prevent it happening but nuclear is already pretty much the most expensive source of electricity without taking into account waste management and this would make it safe from the problem I wont mention it detail would make tit twice as expensive at least.

PV even in the UK, for the price of one nuke, can provide 60GW peak load and provide more power than the nuke would ever deliver and not produce waste some of which will require 2 million years of management.

Offshore wind is already so cheap as to not require any subsidy and land based, should a government be inclined to allow it, would be near half that price - 20% of Sizewell C's price - assuming it is ever completed.

Thorium seems to be put forward as a possible solution but the fact no-one is investing serious money in it suggests there is a problem with it that is not generally known.

That time Windows got blindsided by a ball of plasma, 150 million kilometres away

Re: Sometimes I miss...

I did wonder about trying to patent that gunk that stuck to the rollers. Seemed more stuck than any glue could manage.

Re: Not Just Mice

We made a set of chips once and they all worked perfectly in testing. Once packaged one of them refused to work. Turned out that one had a new component that only worked when it was illuminated. ISTR the demo package had an unpackaged chip and a light bulb to make it work while we sussed out how to get cct to work in the dark along with lots of whistling.

Call-center scammer loses $9m appeal in stunning moment of poetic justice

But Churches are devious enough to know that you cant sue by the time you find out for real there is no afterlife!

I've always felt that the US plea bargaining was not remotely realated to justice

but every cloud has a silver lining.

You better get a wiggle on then: BT said to be mulling switching off UK's copper internets by 2027

Re: Don't forget...

Most remote premises have overhead electricity supplies that fibre can be wound along with relative ease. Or at least it could be 30 years ago before 'health and safety' went mad.

Re: How many connections is that?

A few years ago my local exchange said it was going FTTC and I was delighted. There was an underground box in car park/gravel store that the engineers referred to as the cabinet and connected around a dozen or so local houses. A fibre was laid in the road and ran up to near where this 'cabinet' was. it was just like an above ground cabinet but lower. When the exchange went FTTC I went from 2.4Mb to 2 on a good day and discovered my cabinet was now at the exchange! The village where the exchange was everyone was on 17Mb anyway and I believe only one person 'upgraded' to 70Mb. The council worked with BT/Open Retch and we were promised wireless connections of 30Mb but for some reason the hardware (the fibre I'd seen going in the road) did not exist. Locally we've all gone 4G EE over the last 6 months or so. Today I was walking the dog down a country lane not far from where the fibre I saw going in to discover a new shiny green cabinet sitting on a concrete plinth! Someone I dont know on the council says they've paid a lot of money for this - despite the fact all the locals have got 18 month contracts and are probably not going to be able to convert over - though even if they did want to they'd probably move to the suppler who couldnt supply cos the fibre this cabinet is now connected to 'wasn't really there'.

If Syria pioneered grain processing by watermill in 350BC, the UK in 2019 can do better... right?

Re: Open University

More importantly the government loses out on more taxes in a year on his Soc-Med-ME salary (let alone the extra VAT from his purchases) than it would have cost to educate him.

Nothing to worry about in reality

After all the government just replaced a robot with an unskilled worker.

We asked for your Fitbit horror stories and, oh wow, did you deliver: Readers sync their teeth into 'junk' gizmos

Just give it to someone you hate.

Any one who has a use-case is going to get someone else to do it anyway. If you want to exercise do it and listen to your body. I used to run a lot and then fucking music players came out and people would listen to inspiring music and knacker themselves by the first corner or slow down when a lower tempo track came on and I'd plow into them. Then came those things people put on their cycle handles and they'd veer all over the fucking road trying to set them. And then came the fucking twat-fits who flex their wrists more than the average mouse wielding school boy and three of them on a freindly jog can spend ten minutes blocking the pavement trying to set/read their devices.

The only acceptable use-case for a fit-bit is for drawing dick picks on your local streets.

These people are only pissed off because they're getting some exercise taking them back to the shop or post box.

Robot Rin Tin Tin can rescue you from that collapsed mine shaft

But how will Skippy tell them you're trapped?

Kangaroo voice recognition is not on Google's list!

UK.gov's smart meter cost-benefit analysis for 2019 goes big on cost, easy on the benefits

Re: Don't want. Don't need

I've got PV banging out 3.8KW as we speak. And the immersion is on and when that starts to boil I've got a bucket of blackberries to turn into jam.

Now when a smart meter can advise my home control system there is nice cheap electricity to turn the immersion and storage heaters on (the conservatory is kicking around 30kw into the house at the mo so we wont need those tonite) then I might consider having one.

I'm almost tempted to let them put one in - but only because there is no mobile signal where the current meter is.

You look like a fungi. Got mushroom in your life to build stuff with mycelium computers?

So you get the mycelium to short itself out?

Is this not a bit like dropping solder all over your circuit boards?

Right-click opens up terrifying vistas of reality and Windows 95 user's frightful position therein

Re: Taking the Trash

If you put it in a bin they just drive past. They need to see bags.

Re: Arcane indeed

I used to use a four button puck on tablet for chip layout and the system allowed you to do gestures with various buttons which you could tie to commands - e.g. writing a Z with the blue button would zoom in to the extent of the Z area on the screen and writing it backwards would zoom out etc etc. It was a fantastically powerful thing to use and I found the two button mouse really restrictive to start with. By the time Petzold came out I'd got used to it but recently I wrote some javascript to do the same sort of thing and its incredibly powerful.

Re: Taking the Trash

Plastic stickers?

Re: Taking the Trash

Ours gets picked up around 6am so it goes out the night before. Some days the gulls have opened half the bags and there is rubbish all over the place.

COBOL: Five little letters that if put on a CV would ensure stable income for many a greybeard coder

Re: My first programs were in COBOL

No mention of the elastic band card shuffling process when the deck got past a certain size and any attempt to put the band round it resulted in the stack flinging itself into dark corners of the room, with at least one irretrievably down the back of a radiator or mysteriously getting into the card thin gap between two filing cabinets?

Tut – you wait a lifetime for an interstellar object then two come at once

Re: Occupant of C/2019 Q4 to interstellar ticket agent:

Break out the lemon scented napkins and the hibernation equipment.

MIT boffins turn black up to 11 with carbon nanotubes that absorb 99.995% of light

It will only look like a shadow until someone mistakes it for a shadow and shunts it into next week.

Just what we all needed, lactose-free 'beer' from northern hipsters – it's the Vegan Sorbet Sour

But they are flavoured beers not flavoured water like this is.

All three of the Insiders on Arm64 can now muck about with Windows Subsystem for Linux 2

I've a couple of zeros that only run the desktop when I vnc in to do some management that is a bit easier with a mouse. Bloody useful every now and then.

Astroboffins baffled as black hole at center of Milky Way suddenly a lot hungrier than before

Re: "hungrier than it's ever been"

No - the event horizon is the place where gravity is so strong time stops.

Before Finklestein black holes were often referred to as Frozen Stars because of this. Finklestein solved Einstein's equations from inside the event horizon and for some reason this was interpreted as allowing black holes to exist. But anything that approaches the event horizon will never be seen to cross it to an outside observer.

Re: "hungrier than it's ever been"

If its a black hole how can its mass increase? That would require mass to travel faster than light to cross the event horizon?

Watchdog: Hush-hush UK.gov blew £97m on Brexit wonks from six of the usual suspects

Re: Apt

Na - they're better than that - they write the accounts that make people invest in the company so there's some meat for them when it goes into insolvency,

We never elect competent leaders - we elect charismatic ones. Charisma it the exact opposite of competence.

Re: Small Change

The thing is you cant make shorting the market illegal without making trading illegal. To do that you have to say its illegal to buy anything for less than it was once sold for.

Re: Agreed

Brexit in a nutshell.

MPs would love to hear all about how UK.gov plans to ratchet R&D spend to 3% of GDP

Its quite simple

Keep research funding where it is and massively reduce GDP. Brexit - the gift that keeps giving.

Breaking, literally: Microsoft's fix for CPU-hogging Windows bug wrecks desktop search

So desktop search is the CPU problem.

I'm guessing that its just trying to make massive easily searched databases from massive amounts of data (probably including the massive database) simply takes up a shitload of cycles and moving files really fucks it up.

Not so easy to make a quick getaway when it takes 3 hours to juice up your motor, eh Brits?

In the early 90s you could generate H2 from water with and get 80% of the energy required to do that in a power cell. H2 is easy to store. And if ness could be compressed and used in fuel cells in cars.

And I dare say you could use the O2 produced as well to increase the thermal efficiency of Combined Cycle systems to near 90% so saving massive amounts of gas too.

And as for another form of storage - imagine heating your hot water and storage heaters on the almost free electricity generated when the sun is shining.

If its infeasibly expensive then so is Nuclear. For the same money as a nuke you can install 60GW of solar - near twice the counties needs. It would generate more than the nuke would in their respective lifetimes, Once you have that kind of spare peak load going for effectively free then someone is going to work out how to store it one way or another so its available all the time.

As for fast charging cars its always worth remembering the London Tram Company could change a battery in a couple of minutes in 1910 or something. No reason why cars cant be designed to quickly swap out batteries - apart from people who think that people actually think their car says anything about them.

Geo-boffins drill into dino-killing asteroid crater, discover extinction involves bad smells, chilly weather, no broadband internet...

So the tory dinosaurs are all still brain dead then?