Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

Astroboffins discover that half of the Milky Way's matter comes from other galaxies

I make it lots, rather than many

Since the distance between galaxies often stretches over many light years

Even the nearest star to our sun is many light years away. Our nearest major galaxy, Andromeda, is ~2.5 million ly away.

Time-rich netizens marshall ballot-stuffing bots against... Radio Times contest

"Internet ballot-stuffing has existed for as long as Rickrolling, if not longer"

The first rickroll occurred only ten years ago.

I would imagine that internet ballot-stuffing has been around for as long as internet opinion polls, which themselves have likely been around for almost as long as the internet itself.

Microsoft ctrl-Zs 'killing' Paint, by which we mean offering naff app through Windows Store

Err...

Wasn't this the case all along?

$30 million below Parity: Ethereum wallet bug fingered in mass heist

Re: Ouch!

Important life lessons are rarely funny

Whoops?

Considering the frequency with which this kind of thing occurs to cryptocurrencies, you (well, I) have to wonder whether half the time it isn't intentional...

Let's harden Internet crypto so quantum computers can't crack it

Re: Not just to protect stored communications

And also if you want your encrypted private correspondence from 2018 to remain private come 2028...

Now your boss can tear you a new Glasshole: Google's techno-specs reborn as biz gear

Six figures

They really sold more than 100,000 of them?!

CoinDash crowdfunding hack further dents trust in crypto-trading world

Re: In a moment of tautological irrefutability

The brief history of cryptocurrency indicates that the probability that XYZ cryptocurrency trading system will fall prey to hackers (or "hackers" as the case may be) tends towards 1 very quickly.

They tend to be set up/run by amateurs, cowboys and/or scammers.

Re: Spoiler alert

It's not too big to fail but is big enough for a lot of incredibly smart people to take it very seriously.

Yeah, those guys are the scammers.

Juicero does to its staff what your hands can do to its overpriced juice sacks

Re: Let me bring you up to speed.

I know you implied it, but you didn't mention the funniest part in that it brings DRM to juice.

In the letter, CEO Jeff Dunn tells Juicero workers that "the current prices of $399 for the Press and $5 to $7 for produce Packs are not a realistic way for us to fulfill our mission at the scale to which we aspire."

No really?

The great phone squeeze wheeze: Getting squidgy with HTC's U11

Re: Heatwave?

Hmm, must be obtusity week at The Reg.

Also the idea of low-mid 30s being a "heatwave"; hahaha.

Heatwave?

The display stood up well outdoors in our heatwave too

What does this statement mean, precisely?

His Muskiness wheels out the Tesla Model 3

Re: It will retail for just $35,000

You think you Aussies have it bad try the Canucks . Prices are so bad that in boarder towns we often have more Canadian shoppers the American. Oh and cars they pay any were from 1-20 percent more than Americans even if the car is made in Canada.

I firmly believe that many companies use international markets are used to subsidise the US market, however I can almost guarantee you that the Canadian situation isn't close. Australia is a unique market; isolated, wealthy and with very little local production. No opportunity to cross the border for better prices. Perfect conditions for gouging.

A high end BMW or Porsche costs almost twice as much here as in the US, for no good reason other than the market will bear it. Unlike a country like Norway, here it has nothing to do with taxation.

When the Australian-designed-and-built Holden Commodore was sold in the US as the Pontiac G8, it cost less than it did here, and unlike a Canadian built car it didn't merely have to sit on a truck for a few hours and cross a shared border to get to its destination.

Re: It will retail for just $35,000

Here in Australia, we are also used to inexplicably paying far too much for imported goods. We call it The Australia Tax.

Unlike (for example) Ze Germans, who take the absolute piss, Tesla's pricing in Australia is (almost) just the US base price, converted to AUD, plus taxes. I would expect the UK pricing to be similar.

Did Tesla kick Gareth's dog?

I understand "not swallowing the hype" but I can hear the author's keyboard from here!

Re: Mass market?

"5lt V8 Mustang.......the handling is agricultural"

I don't think that is the case anymore. But I'm not going to buy one to verify that.

A local rag track tested the V8 Mustang against the Holden Commodore SS (aka Vauxhall VXR8, not a lithe car by any stretch of the imagination.) The Mustang is both lighter and more powerful, but the Commodore still beat it.

nbn™ hits the half-way mark – but has more than half of the job left

I'm in an area serviced by iiNet's own FTTN network, which was upgraded to VDSL2 about three years ago. Like for like, it's cheaper than NBN. If only they'd continued the FTTP roll-out...

An NBN cabinet was installed on my parents' street about a month ago but they won't be able to sign up until September. They can't wait to get off their ~3Mb/s ADSL2+ connection, so what's taking so long?

OMG, dad, you're so embarrassing! Are you P2P file sharing again?

I remember stream ripping from shoutcast 15 years ago. In the end it was fairly pointless compared to other methods of obtaining music, whether legitimate or not. You would end up with a load of stuff you didn't want, and the bitrates were usually worse.

May the excessive force be with you: Chap cuffed after Star Trek v Star Wars row turns bloody

Re: Snowy

Lexx.

No joke icon?

Australian oppn. leader wants to do something about Bitcoin, because terrorism and crypto

Re: It could be worse

About that...

Boffins with frickin' laser beams chase universe's mysterious trihydrogen

Don't panic! The first stars, not the whole universe.

It also doesn't match the description "a hydrogen atom and a positive hydrogen ion combine to recreate trihydrogen and an electron," which itself doesn't make sense.

But I guess the number of electrons balances, at least...

SpaceX halts Intelsat 35e launch twice in a row

Re: "Falcon Heavy should be well over then."

No one's done (or looked at) a fairing more than 1.889x the rockets diameter.

What are the engineering issues behind this limit? Shockwave propagation? Structural soundness of the fairing?

I can't wait to see it fly in late 2015...

Re: some of these savings make it to the customer

SpaceX spent around a billion dollars developing reuse

Which I think is surprisingly (and impressively) little for what they've achieved, when you put it up against some of the other things you can spend a billion dollars on these days.

China pollutes ocean with bloody big rocket

Re: 50% failure rate

Ariane 5 also hasn't had a failure for almost 15 years, with 80 successful launches in a row as of the most recent last week.

Re: How do you say "Oh, CRAP" in Mandarin?

神聖的睾丸

America throws down gauntlet: Accept extra security checks or don't carry laptops on flights

Re: How about if we stop making more terrorists in the first place?

It might take a generation or two, but if the United States gets out of all the counties we should not even be in in the first place, world peace might break out.

A bit late for that, the damage has been done.

'Bio-hacker' embeds public transport ticket under his skin

Re: wasted opportunity

Perhaps, but considering the attitude of most transport officers, they seem to a stick up their arse the size of a 10-foot pole.

Considering the shit they have to deal with, especially in Australia, I'm not at all surprised that some of them are humourless.

Not illegal, just a violation of the user agreement.

Transport authorities understandably take a dim view of people hacking their infrastructure, no matter at what level...

India's Martian MOM clocks up 1,000 days circling the red planet

Re: They're really searching hard for teh codez aren't they?

Que?

SpaceX nails two launches and barge landings in one weekend

Re: " If I'm wrong about getting 2 orbital launches up in less than 3 days, I"

In addition to the simultaneous flight (and rendezvous) of Gemini 6A and 7, the Gemini program included numerous side-by-side launches of the Gemini capsule and the Agena Target Vehicle, which was used for various tests including orbital rendezvous and boosting, throughout 1965-66.

During the Gemini 8, 10, 11 and 12 missions, their respective ATVs were all launched approximately 100 minutes ahead of the Gemini capsule.

Grid fins

The new titanium grid fins replace the previous aluminium items that tended to, ahem, catch fire on re-entry:

http://spaceflight101.com/falcon-9-bulgariasat-1/wp-content/uploads/sites/157/2017/06/bulgariasat-1-launch-9.jpg

I understand the new fins now hold the record for the largest single-piece titanium forging, so that's something.

Re: Doesn't compare.

The CEP for your shirt is pretty large... Get back to us when he hits your open mouth.

Oz senate committee says 'robo-debt' program was 'set up to fail'

Nothing out of the ordinary for this particular government.

Repeatedlty telling us there's a budget emergency while at the same time cutting taxes and continuing to spend billions on frivolities. Federal government debt has doubled in the four years they've been in office.

Then earnestly believing they can lecture the rest of us about fiscal responsibility.

Tesla death smash probe: Neither driver nor autopilot saw the truck

Re: Being human

We used to joke in engineering school that software engineering wasn't real engineering because, with a few (mostly niche) exceptions, you couldn't kill anyone by not doing your job properly.

Then I ended up working in a field in which I can't kill anyone no matter how negligent I am, while increasingly complex and autonomous software is becoming far more widespread in life critical systems. Whoops.

Re: Bleh

But Free markets hate "red tape" .. even though lots of "red tape" is actually safety regs.

And as they say, safety regulations are written in blood.

Anyone who wants to remove them is essentially implying the lives lost were worth nothing.

Re: Bleh

And going from 74mph to 0mph can't be described as "would have been fine".

Deceleration from 74 to 0 mph over that short a distance is also in the "quite possibly dead" category.

NASA's Kepler space telescope finishes its original mission catalog

They'll certainly be close but the orbital period in a two body system is a function of the inverse square root of the sum of the body masses, so "super jupiters" don't need to be as close to their star as the glorified rocks that inhabit the solar system, to have the same period.

Microsoft's new Surface laptop defeats teardown – with glue

Blimey, that URL

https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Microsoft+Surface+Laptop+Teardown/92915?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=PRTD_Surface_Pro5_Laptop_2017&utm_content=PRTD_Surface_Pro5_Laptop_2017+CID_d981c6538c4b7ad40b1a931bdd034f17&utm_source=CampaignMonitor&utm_term=Microsoft%20Surface%20Teardown

Without all the tracking nonsense: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown//92915

You wait ages for a sun, then two come along at once: All stars have twins, say astroboffins

Re: not a new idea

They're not claiming to have come up with the idea of binary or multiple star systems. What they've done is build a statistical model to try to determine how common it is, and the output of the model that assumes it's very common resembles the observed conditions most closely.

Re: They found another sun?

I could only laugh at the 24 Hours of Le Mans commentators going on repeatedly about the "scorching" conditions yesterday. Of high 20s to low 30s Celsius.

Teen texted boyfriend to kill himself. It worked. Will the law change to deal with digital reality?

Re: Clickbait

I should add this isn't a clickbait accusation aimed at The Reg.

Clickbait

Should we add this to the list of things "millennials are killing"?

'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem

...or telling the users they don't want what they need

I've been on the receiving end of this as the user. Last year my workstation was replaced with a considerably less powerful (but no less expensive) laptop. IT spun some insulting BS about it being a big upgrade and weren't much interested in the truth of the matter. Also universal USB docks rather than docking stations were provided so, over the matter of a mere $100, the laptop's expensive GPU sits idle.

I don't take work home with me so the whole exercise has been a waste of everyone's time, the only measurable outcome being that data processing work now takes longer. Frontline IT certainly wasn't responsible for the decision making, but the attitude towards real end user concerns was poor.

So it goes both ways.

Bank of Canada finds flaws with current blockchain solutions

FIFY

Not an option for underpinning payment systems at present

After reusing a rocket, SpaceX tries reusing Dragon capsule for ISS resupply

Re: Delay if delayed

From a comment on Ars:

Besides weather consideration, 48-hour recycle is necessary for Dragon CRS missions because some "late load" cargo items cannot sit in the spacecraft for an extra day and must be replaced.

Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht denied bid for new trial

Re: Sure, that activity is illegal

How are these two things remotely related?

Pentagon trumpets successful mock-ICBM interception test

In the spirit of old internet memes

Star Wars 2: Electric Boondoggleoo