Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

What is money? A rabid free marketeer puts his foot in lots of notes

Re: cash is not the only money

As a thought experiment, run a hypothetical economy on bitcoins. If you need to increase the money supply above the fixed (and decreasing) rate at which new ones are created, your only recourse is to (somehow) increase the value of a bitcoin.

Any good or service that you could buy with one bitcoin now costs less than one bitcoin, and it had nothing at all to do with improvements in the production of that good or rendering of that service. Hence deflation.

Goldbugs and bitcoin pumpers want this to happen because they hold gold or bitcoins, and they think it will make them rich.

Hyundai i30 Turbo: Softly, softly, catchee Audi

Re: Fuel economy

This Hyundai has ~35% more power than the UK-spec BMW 118i

It seems that the 118i is a different beast in different markets, so the Australian market review I dug up of it is perhaps not fully representative of the UK model since it has a slightly larger engine, although the power is the same. Regardless, the Australian magazine review returned fuel consumption on a combined test cycle slightly better than this review of this Hyundai, but critically it was 70% greater than BMW's claim. As we say here, croikey.

Re: Hmmm

Managed to get 35 mpg from a 3.7L V6 yesterday.

Highway, naturally...

Re: Euro Styling

Or 2011, as is the case for this car.

Fuel economy

You never got close to the rated fuel consumption because it's a turbo. This is not exclusive to Hyundai; unless you keep them off boost they all do that. Burning 40% more fuel than the quoted rating is pretty much par for the course from modern turbocharged "economy" cars.

And these days with peak torque arriving below 2k RPM, you can pretty much never keep them off boost.

It is surprisingly porky for a small hatch though, at almost 1400kg.

I was GOOGLE for a MINUTE, claims quick-witted dude

Coincidentally

Goldeneye is on TV right now

Indianapolis man paints his ball every day – for FORTY YEARS

Re: Darwin Awards Equivalant

Who would have imagined that an article about a guy painting a baseball would cause the comments section to erupt like this. Climate change wasn't even mentioned once!

Oz propaganda lists 'alternative music, environmentalism' as TERROR THREATS

Re: Alternative music?

Alternative music on Triple J? Not for about 15 years...

Oh, and not agreeing with me doesn't make them any less crazy.

You're right you know. Whether anyone agrees with you has absolutely no bearing on whether what you say is correct.

Blighty's Bloodhound 1,000mph rocket car unveiled ahead of record attempt

Re: All very well, but . . .

Probably pretty well on NOx though!

VW’s case of NOxious emissions: a tale of SMOKE and MIRRORS?

Re: 'Greater Good', or emissions trading

I wouldn't start counting the chickens just yet. From my understanding VW passed all the tests that they needed to. If this is the case then the US authorities won't be able to fine them a single cent

Believe it or not, cheating the test is covered in the legislation!

PEAK FONDLESLAB: Fewer people will use tablets next year – claim

Re: Fewer people saying "fondleslab"?

Isn't that a phondleslab?

Re: Fewer people saying "fondleslab"?

Here, and Bill Bailey!

South Australia gears-up for driverless cars

Re: In keeping with tradition....

Perhaps a new support category for driverless cars at the Clipsal 500?

China launches 'pollution-free' rocket

Liquid rocket engines tend to be run fuel rich for a number of reasons. Performance is one of them - you get better efficiency by not burning cleanly, since the efficiency is inversely proportional to the molecular weight of the exhaust products. Lots of CO and H2 in the exhaust of a hydrocarbon burning rocket by design.

Volkswagen used software to CHEAT on AIR POLLUTION tests, alleges US gov

Re: One surprise...

People want good running cars, not cars that shake and rattle when they roll.

People shouldn't have been buying diesels then!

How green is your ROCKET FUEL?

Well its abbreviation is HAN (or at least, what it's based on). And it's a monopropellent. So, err... it's used in SOLO...

Deluded Aussie geeks hail Turnbull's elevation to prime minister

Indeed. I'm also not entirely optimistic about the future. The remaining coalition ministry will be largely the same bunch they were yesterday, and the opposition's also a shambles, but at least Tony's gone.

And he didn't even make it to One Term Tony.

Confession: I was a teenage computer virus writer

"Did your PC crash a lot in the 90s? Yes, sorry about that"

You worked for Microsoft?

Look! Up in the sky! It's letters on a plane read with a 250MP camera

Re: With what lens and what atmospheric conditions?

Even Canon's EF-S lenses battle to focus above 8Mpixel resolution at the edges of the field of view.

Which one(s)?

'Walter Mitty' IT manager admits to buying gun on dark web

Re: Surprised it doesn't happen more often

Don't forget the scams. You might think you're buying a handgun, or a few grams of cocaine, but what turns up in the mail might not be what you were expecting.

Re: Not surprising

That's a large hidden compartment!

The remote control from HELL: Driverless cars slam on brakes for LASER POINTER

Re: Anti-spoofing

What I was thinking when I mentioned encoding was some sort of shifting, timestamped cryptographic signature, which I think would make difficult to replay?

Or does that still not get around a replay attack? I'm definitely not an expert here.

Anti-spoofing

I can imagine that one way to avoid being spoofed in this way is to encode your own LIDAR pulses, possibly also using a variable frequency, so that you can filter out the spurious echos from signals that you know you just sent.

Seagate layoffs : 1,000 heads to be laid under the axe

2%?

What does Seagate do with 50,000 employees?

Drunk Japanese warrior cuffed after NINJA STRIKE on shop robot

...What's on earth is going on here?

I don't even understand it well enough to decide whether I should be frightened or not.

And that scares me.

SPACE WHISKY: Astro malt pongs of 'rubber and smoked fish'

Re: How much whiskey did they send up there?

Getting into the spirit of the comments, they sent no whiskey up there!

Spaniard trousers €60,000 bank error, proceeds directly to jail

Re: Sh...

He probably generated a good deal of bad publicity.

If I'd been screwed around by a bank for ten years, I don't know how I'd react, but I'd be pretty frustrated too.

Feeling sweary? Don't tell Google Docs

Re: Answer

I would guess that it is to stop someone suing google for $100billion for distress, offense and personal harm due to saying the word Phucket and it translating to fuck it.

I wonder how much speech recognition should be expected to compensate for the complete mispronunciation of words though?

Canned laughter for Canadians selling cans of air at $15 a pop

It might have been a laugh...

...until they started making the scammy health claims in the sixth paragraph.

I guess it's still a laugh for them.

FORKING BitcoinXT: Is it really a coup or just more crypto-FUD?

Re: Biiiiig speculative play

For bank transfers that's simply not true. There are numerous examples of people receiving funds electronically, which were sent accidentally and to which they weren't entitled, and then getting into serious trouble when they withdrew and spent the money. If I fat-finger the account number or BSB when transferring funds electronically (fortunately to date I haven't managed to do this), and it ends up going to a location that doesn't exist, the transfer will eventually fail. There's no way to make it unspendable in this situation. If I instead accidentally send it to someone who does exist, my bank and their bank can at least attempt to sort it out. I've never done this so I couldn't tell you how it would go.

The situation with bitcoin is quite different. If you mis-enter the address but it is still valid, even if nobody owns it, then the amount is lost forever. Calculating the private key for a wallet from its address is, by design, effectively impossible. If someone works out how to do that then the system collapses too. Anyway regardless of how likely this is, if it happens there is absolutely no recourse. Incidentally there are numerous novelty "burn" wallets out there (e.g. 1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE) which effectively destroy any amounts sent to them. If instead you send it to the wrong person you'll only get it back if 1) you know who you sent it to and 2) they're nice enough to return it.

Also my bank is far less likely to accidentally send my money to the wrong place, or destroy it, as has happened numerous times with various poorly written pieces of bitcoin-related software.

Re: Biiiiig speculative play

I forgot a really big one:

If you send the money to the wrong address (either by accident or thanks to a bug in whichever poorly-tested software you're using), you'll never see it again.

Re: What's always puzzled me is, where are the fraudsters?

For alt-coin fraudsters look up "Alex Green" (Ryan Kennedy) and Josh Garza (and his brother Carlos).

Or anyone associated with a cloud mining operation...

Re: Biiiiig speculative play

I don't even agree that it's practical.

The network can handle fewer than three transactions per second. If everyone in the world was using it, they might be able to make one transaction in their lifetime.

There's no guarantee that your transaction will be included in the next block.

It effectively got DOSed recently by flooding the network with thousands of tiny transactions with fees large enough not to be ignored. It cost the person who did it only a few hundred dollars to do so.

The network's energy consumption is on the order of hundreds of kilowatt-hours per transaction, and the miner subsidy is between $5 and $10 per transaction (although this tracks the exchange rate).

To use it you either need to download and synchronise the blockchain (currently 40GB+ and several days), or trust some anonymous third party with your money.

It's certainly good at teaching libertarians (the US sub-species thereof) and anarcho-capitalists exactly why we have banking regulations though.

Re: Unsurprisingly, it seems someone has

I'd assume that the blockchain growth is exponential based on increasing numbers of users/miners/transactions

It's pretty much only the number of transactions that governs the growth. It does look vaguely exponential, but that's only because the network hasn't consistently hit the block size limit yet.

Wasn't there also an earlier El Reg article noting some limit on bitcoin transactions per second?

It can theoretically handle about seven transactions per second, but in practice (i.e. real-world transactions) the limit's about 2.7/s with the current 1MB blocks. Many of the big Chinese miners use a soft limit of ~750kB, which brings that down to 2/s. There is no guarantee that any particular transaction will be included in a block, and some miners don't even bother to include any transactions in their blocks.

I also wonder if the '~10 minutes for a transaction to process' figure that I've seen will grow over time too?

The mining rate of one block every ten minutes is hard coded (other cryptocurrencies have different rates). The network periodically adjusts the difficulty of the cryptographic hashing that "secures" it, such that regardless of the total hashrate of the network, the time between blocks averages out to ten minutes. Because it's all probabilistic, in practice there are occasionally periods of less than one minute and greater than an hour between blocks.

French woman gets €800 a month for electromagnetic-field 'disability'

Re: Despite dispute over the very existence of the syndrome

I'm no arachnophile but I believe that the lady spiders are generally the larger ones.

On the prowl for a snackmate perhaps?

Re: KU the pedants

It's not the satellites that I'm worried about. It's the emissions from all those bloody pigeons! Only I'm really worried that my tinfoil hat won't stop Coo band radiation...

You need to remember to degauss the carrier frequency pigeons.

Twenty years since Windows 95, and we still love our Start buttons

Re: The question of why the public accepted a substantial user interface change

Windows 95 behaves like a desktop OS.

Windows 8 behaves like a tablet OS ported to the desktop.

FBI probed SciFi author Ray Bradbury for plot to glum-down America

Re: Jesus

Good luck to anybody trying to pigeonhole El Reg!

They've got something here for everyone to complain about.

Big trouble in big China: Crashing economy in Middle Kingdom body slams US tech stocks

Re: Rule 48

I was going to write some nonsense about the "rules of the internet", but it turns out the internet can't agree on what rule 48 is.

Auto erotica bonk shocker: ja das ist gut, say 56% of Germans

Re: Lay by

F@@k Trucks

Believable

If the internet has taught me anything, it's that Germans are up for almost anything.

Antiques in spaaaaace! Retired space shuttles cannibalised for parts

No no, it's Robert Goddard's fault for inventing (depending on your definition) the liquid propellant rocket.

Boffins raise five-week-old fetal human brain in the lab for experimentation

Re: Do vat grown brains dream?

I don't know.

But if it does... What does a brain with no external sensory capability dream about?

Spain triumphs! Fascist anthem hails Spanish badminton champ

Re: Not the First Time

The Austria/Australia mix-up still occurs from time to time too. Not as often as you'd expect mind.

Most of the time it's just a live performer in New Zealand messing up the lyrics.

Testing times as NASA rattles Mississippi with mighty motor burn

And that cloud coming out of the test stand is just steam from the water dumped in by the deluge system.

"The combined thrust will be sufficient to lift 70 metric tonnes"

Tonne is already metric!

If you're a seppo it can be a "metric ton", but even that's awful.

Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+: 4K-positive fun for ... vloggers?!

“Next is now has just got bigger”

Forget vacuous, what about just plain nonsensical?