Posts by Sorry that handle is already taken.

The roots go deep: Kill Adobe Flash, kill it everywhere, bod says

Re: Flash Bang Wallop What a Picture!

To lose Zombo.com would be tragic.

Jeep drivers can be HACKED to DEATH: All you need is the car's IP address

"If there's a shiny new Jeep Cherokee sitting in your driveway..."

...my condolences.

Bill Hicks: 25 years on from the cult comedian's big break

Is it just comedy, or every field of endeavour, in which you having heard of someone is the sole criterion for their consideration as "revered"?

Roll up, roll up, for the Meta35: The hybrid snapper's data dumpster

Re: I wonder

Don't forget more expensive. Photographic film production enjoyed huge economies of scale and that benefit simply doesn't exist any more. "Peak film" occurred just over 15 years ago(!) and quickly fell off a cliff. Production today is down about 99% since then.

It'll also depend on which particular film you're after. You'll probably find that options are severely limited these days.

It's possible that there will come a time beyond which there will be insufficient demand for colour 35mm film to keep even a single factory running at a profit, but I'm not that pessimistic. Even if it does disappear, black and white will probably last a lot longer because it's far easier to process without expensive automation.

Your gadget batteries endanger planes, says Boeing

The issue is bulk shipping...

...as I thought was made clear by the article.

So you as a passenger with a small number of batteries, each in a different device, are completely unaffected. The company that wants to air-freight a pallet of tablets is presumably also unaffected, although that might be pushing it.

You Musk be joking: Tesla's zero to 60MPH in 2.8 SECONDS is literally 'ludicrous'

Re: One wonders ...

I'd expect the Model S to acquit itself quite well at the track, given its amusingly low C of G and gigantic tyres.

I suspect you'd be having too much fun to notice how badly you're running down the batteries though. Fortunately, Tesla's putting a charging point ten minutes up the road from my nearest race track.

Now to just go out and buy that Model S...

Toyota recalls 625,000 hybrids: Software bug kills engines dead with THERMAL OVERLOAD

Re: If only

...that's what they've got TRD for.

I was under the impression that eunuchs were better lovers because of their staying power, so they'd presumably be reasonably popular at an orgy. Perhaps not the best analogy if that's true.

Anyway I've ridden in several examples of the current and previous generation standard Prius and it's definitely not the car for me, however not everyone wants the same driving experience I do. Nobody thought to tell the taxi drivers around here what can and can't be done with a Prius though.

Re: If only

Not sure if Nissan's going to "work over" a car for Toyota.

Hackers sell 79,267 Cloudminr accounts for ONE Bitcoin

Amusingly

As if the scamminess of cloud mining wasn't enough, many of those upstanding citizens who tried to buy the list got scammed themselves. It's scams all the way down in bitcoinia.

Nissan Juke Nismo RS: Family hot-hatch SUV that looks a bit like Darth Vader's hat

Re: Tut tut

Except in this case "sporty" is a lie.

Nismo?

Nismo is ostensibly the motorsport division of Nissan.

Not any more, I guess.

What do you MEAN, 'Click on the thing which looks like a Mondrian?'

Re: Knowledge != Knowledge

It's not just cabbies. All across society people have instant access, via their smartphones to almost the sum total of the knowledge of the human race but it doesn't seem to be helping much.

Possibly relevant?

No wonder you're confusing people

Your "burger button" is obviously a liquorice allsort.

Wikipedia: YES! we’ve SAVED the INTERNET again!

Re: Teenaged*

Andrew could easily have looked it up on Wikipedia.

Looking forward to getting Windows 10 the day it ships? Yeah, about that...

I don't know what Microsoft plans for W10 but how are you supposed to perform a clean install offline if they don't provide an image?

I can't imagine Microsoft would be crazy enough to make W10 un-dual-bootable. Or maybe they are, who knows.

If the free upgrade to W10 doesn't disable W7's existing activation (as I understand previous upgrade programs haven't), then conceivably a dual boot setup is not going to be an issue at least.

LG's six-sided battery to take smart watches into new timezones

Re: "not a symmetrical hexagon, sadly"

The funny thing is that the one the model is holding is symmetrical, but irregular.

Subaru Outback Lineartronic: The thinking person’s 4x4

Being a Subaru the engines are boxers. Not better or worse, but different

Subaru's current 3.6L "EZ" flat-6 can boast the same power output and fuel consumption as the competition's 3.5L DOHC V6 engines from ten years ago!

I hear the "FA" engine in the BRZ/86 is a huge improvement over the old "EJ" family though.

GM's cheaper-than-Tesla 'leccy car tested at batt-powered data centre

If we extend your logic, if everyone buys an electric car then no-one pays for the fuel taxes so no-one pays for the roads that are needed to drive all these overweight electric vehicles on.

I don't know about the UK but up here in Australia, fuel excise goes straight into consolidated revenue. It's not a road funding system.

Bitcoin, schmitcoin. Let's play piggyback on the blockchain

Re: Shits and Giggles

Miners aren't obliged to include outstanding transactions in a block, and they're not processed in any order. Some miners simply mine empty blocks. To increase the chance of (but not guarantee!) being included in a block, a transaction needs to have a fee attached to it. More complex transactions require larger fees. So attacking the network costs money.

The good news is that there have been a couple of unilateral "stress tests" on bitcoin in the last couple of months. The most recent one demonstrated that it costs about €500 to bring the system to its knees for several hours, long enough to knock it out for an entire business day somewhere in the world. So not a system that any serious company's going to rely on.

There's a network of "nodes" that aren't miners but do relay transactions. You could probably harm that network by sending a ridiculous number of fee-less transactions. They won't get included in a block so they'll just fill up the memory of all of the nodes. I think the fact nobody's bothered with this or an attack along the lines of the above "stress test" says a lot for how seriously it's taken outside the echo chamber.

Context

Mike Hearn, one of the core developers of the software underpinning Bitcoin, predicts that the number of transactions will exceed the network’s current capacity in winter 2016.

When you put this statement in context - that the current rate limit of bitcoin is about 160 transactions per minute - you can see that bitcoin is unlikely to achieve anything useful. Most individual payment processing companies do orders of magnitude more than that. Visa alone is capable of dealing with almost 3.5 million transactions in the same period of time, without using several dollars/pounds/euros/whatever worth of electricity per transaction in the "mining" process that verifies bitcoin's transactions. Hopefully it's clear that increasing the size of a block by a factor of 8 or 20 is not going to change a thing. Bitcoin would need 20 gigabyte blocks to match the capacity of a single financial services company.

To use bitcoin you need to have a local copy of the complete blockchain, which increases in size every time a block is added. It just passed 36GB, which is a 10GB increase in since the beginning of this year.

Bitcoin and its blockchain are simply not practical technology.

DEATH by VEGETABLES: Woman charged with killing boyf using carrots. And peas

Re: EVERYTHING* can be bought in a can

I believe it's surströmming that's banned from hand luggage.

Hákarl sounds worse than surströmming, but at least it's not under pressure.

Anakin Skywalker chased by cops, crashes podracer into tree

Shame...

...that he only retired after the movie wrapped.

Buy with your head, drive with your heart: Alfa Romeo 4C Coupe

Re: Alfa

It won't rust, but in a collision the carbon fibre will delaminate and spray little carbon needles over everything. Also, it may eventually micro-crack from vibration. Is it really suitable as a structural material for road going vehicles?

This isn't the first CFRP tubbed vehicle on the road.

Also, I suspect that if you hit something hard enough to cause the CFRP to shatter in the way you describe, that might low on your list of worries.

Alfa

They always used to say on Top Gear that you haven't been a real car enthusiast until you've owned an Alfa. Up here in Australia, owning (or having owned) an Alfa generally isn't a badge of honour.

But I'd have this one in a heartbeat. And it won't rust to boot!

20 years ago this week, Microsoft just about killed Australian PC manufacturing

Re: Wangaratta *snigger*

The g in Wangaratta is hard, fortunately.

I had one of these Australian Osbornes in my yoof. AMD Am386DX/DXL-40 with "4MB" of RAM (in reality the motherboard's 640KB cache + 3MB of SIMMs), later upgraded to "8MB" at great expense.

Oddly, when booted from cold it would take far longer to load games (e.g. Syndicate) than it would if rebooted after it had been on for a while.

E3 2015 in a nutshell: Hurry up Hoth, and plenty to Unravel

Re: Bethesda uses paid actors

It certainly sounded awkward in the stream.

Vauxhall VXR8: You know when you've been tangoed

Re: Chevy SS

Looks pretty much like a normal Impala from the outside.

Can't say I see the resemblance. Also they're completely different vehicles on completely different platforms.

Re: Aussie cars FTW!

Only interesting GM cars over here since the demise of the big RWD Opels (which Holdens are derived from)

The Opel link ended when the VE was launched in 2006 on a brand new platform.

Re: GTR

The GT-R's power:weight is only 2.5% higher than that of the glorified Commodore, but they're not even close when it comes to capabilities and performance.

Sadly the price difference is even larger here, because Australia Tax.

Re: Aussie cars FTW!

Are you sure the Sierra XR8 was an Australian design? Sierras were never sold here. The 2L turbo ones that were built here for racing were the best in the world, but very different to dropping some asthmatic American V8 into one.

We do have a Falcon XR8.

The GT-R's had a bit more thought than "let's throw a supercharger at a taxi" put into it.

But I can't imagine many people are cross shopping the two...

Microsoft finally finishes its PowerPC emulator

Re: Truly, it's as if man has become GOD

As if Minecraft wasn't already inefficient enough!

The Martian: Matt Damon sciences the sh*t out of the red planet

Christ on a bendy bus

Imagine Modern Family's Phil Dunphy – a bottomless reservoir of Dad jokes and cheesiness – as an astronaut and you'll get the picture.

That... sounds fucking awful?

Belgium trolls France with bonkers new commemorative coin

Re: Being Belgian, plucky and all...

I would like to add the comment that barely a few weeks after the French climbed on their high chevaux and protested about our coin, they starded off in ze general direction of the US in a replica sailboat to commemorate their involvement in fighting the plucky Americans wanting independence.

And, of course, getting their derrieres duly kicked as they always do.

The French helped the Americans gain independence you silly git.

Chips can kill: Official

Re: Acrylamide toxicity is nothing new

Acrylamide warnings seem to hit the mainstream press every five years or so, and they don't seem to have differed very much over the last few cycles.

Caterham 270S: The automotive equivalent of crack

Re: It's good to see Caterham thinks of the passenger...

Sorry guys. I was trying to be funny but I'm not even sure where the hell it was going.

Of course I'd jump at the opportunity to drive one of these! While my own car is slightly faster in a straight line and slightly cheaper it's never going to be as nice to throw around the track.

Re: It's good to see Caterham thinks of the passenger...

A 100kW 1.6L is a nice motor?

Soon your car won't let you drink. But it won't care if you're on the phone

Re: Calibration?

I'll tell you why: to get unroadworthy vehicles off the road before they turn into deathtraps.

So why the hell didn't quantitative easing produce HUGE inflation?

So when are interest rates going to rise? And why doesn't one of the high street banks break away from the ridiculous Bank of England base rate?

(Very simplistically,) retail banks operate on the spread between their deposit and borrowing rates. If they raise the former, they have to raise the latter otherwise they go out of business.

And they also go out of business if they alone raise their rates because everyone takes their borrowing business elsewhere.

Life in prison not appealing to Silk Road boss Ross Ulbricht – appeal filed

Re: I would love to know

Well, to be fair to Dratel:

1) The evidence was incontrovertible

2) His client hobbled his own defence by simply claiming it wasn't him in spite of the evidence

Re: He doesn't want life in prison? Shocker.

So what legitimate personal uses are there for cyanide?

ISIS command post obliterated after 'moron' jihadi snaps a selfie, says US Air Force

That's fortunate for Australia considering we seem to all be pirates. Phew!

Bethesda all out for 'Fallout 4', fallout for global productivity foretold in countdown

"Australia refused to give it an age-rating certificate."

It's worth noting that the Australian censors settled down once the "morphine" in pre-release builds was renamed Med-X to bring it in line with the rest of the fictional drugs in the game.

Third Pirate Bay founder freed from clink, vows to fight domain seizure

Google/youtube etc will take down links to copyrighted material when asked. I'm not sure that TPB would !

Indeed. In its earlier days TPB actively taunted copyright holders, especially those who sent C&D letters.

Re: They should

IANAL, but I'm sure intent is quite important.

Android Bitcoin wallet Blockchain was briefly borked

Re: Who, in their right mind ...

1) Early adopters who haven't cashed out yet

2) Libertarians/Anarcho-Capitalists (these guys are hilarious, especially the ones hanging out for the imminent collapse of the USD, and who seem to believe that there's still going to be an internet to allow bitcoin to work when this happens)

3) Bagholders who failed to get rich quick (but did help the early adopters get rich)

4) Drug users

5) Criminals

.

For everything else, there's Mastercard or whatever.

Re: So this

I know! this would never happen with cash! Cash has never been sent to the wrong place by error has it! Same with BACS, there have never been BACS errors at all!

Oh wait...

My bank's mobile app sends my money to the wrong place with no recourse all the time.

Oh wait...

Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV: The new common-as-muck hybrid

Re: "If you make lots of short journeys then it makes sense..."

I think you'll find using palm oil is a less green option than running a coal-burning traction engine.

Sure, but as explained, palm oil was used only as an example. It wasn't the point of the question.