Posts by Steve X

Ofcom forced to publish tests on dodgy radio kit

How many?

Bear in mind that ham operators worldwide generally have access to small bits of spectrum scattered all over the bands, squeezed between the other legitimate users of those bands. Anything which interferes with ham radio has the potential to interfere with everything else, which includes leisure services like TV & FM radio, emergency services, and other professional users.

It's Ofcom's job to ensure fair treatment for *all* users, which of course it hasn't done since it was turned into the government's spectrum pimp.

As with any other law, once the people charged with enforcing it sell out, lots of other unscrupulous folks will jump on the bandwagon and start abusing it because they know they won't be censured. Just because ham users are in a minority doesn't mean that their concerns can be ignored. That way lies tyranny, or anarchy.

Middle England chokes on Nice Baps

Whatever you want in your sandwich

There's a Bap for that

Praying for meltdown: The media and the nukes

Patterns

> Check the dates for other major earthquakes and you get a similar pattern.

Check the dates when there *weren't* eathquakes, I bet you get the same pattern. Correlation != cause.

You're easily astonished

> Astonishingly, i can't find any evidence to say that they can't.

If this astonishes you then you clearly have no scientific background or knowledge whatsover. That is known as the 'argument from ignorance", which says "I can't prove it's false, so it must be true". It's been known for at least 400 years, since John Locke at least. It's a favourite tool of propagandists who can't marshall real arguments.

So far no-one has ever been able to produce proof that earthquakes can be created by man, and certainly not by HAARP. There are hundreds of quakes every week, and no correlations with other events that could count as proof.

fusion torus at a positive energy budget,

But didn't they have to use deuterium, which poisoned the reactor so badly that it was only viable because they were about to decomission it (JET@Culham, IIRC)?

Agreed that, if they can make it work, it would be excellent news.

context?

"...ten thousand dead and rising, fifteen thousand missing and rising."

And not a single one attributable to the Fukushima nuclear incident.

Just to give this a bit of context.

Printed press was as bad

Every time the Telegraph mentioned calming information it was credited to a named expert from a reputable organization. Every doom & gloom piece was credited simply as "experts say", which says a lot for the relative credibility of their "sources".

Labour MP debuts fondleslab-assisted Parliament oratory

fondleslabian

Which I read as "fondles labian".

I knew that these debates were boring, but, really....

The Professionals set to abseil into cinema

Scottish and shouty?

Does it have to be Scottish? What about James Nesbitt? Belfast & shouty could work...Just don't let them put some american-accented celeb in as Bodie or Doyle.

<--- well, what else could I use?

Fukushima scaremongers becoming increasingly desperate

"concentration of a radioactive substance"

This says nothing except that the bit of soil analysed is radioactive. It might have been radioactive for 40 years, maybe since the construction of the reactor?

Unless they do a comparative analysis for several elements they won't be able to work out if this is related to the Fukushima incident or not, and so until then this is just further scaremongering.

Without knowing?

So you missed the bit in the official report where it said they'd ignored the warnings from their dosimeters, which they assumed to be faulty? They knew, seems that they either were too daft to react, or (more likely in my view) none wanted to be the first one to run. Which is also daft.

caesium

> NOWHERE is the damn article

Well, apart from the paragraphs on page two, starting with:

"There wouldn't be a lot of point in doing so in the case of radio-caesium, as nobody has ever been able to show that this isotope has any health consequences at all: huge amounts were emitted from Chernobyl, but no discernible illnesses have resulted."

iPad 2 tougher than iPad 1. True

Despite being 27 per cent thinner,

Shouldn't that be "because" it's 27% thinner?

Thinner glass flexes better.

Curiosity kills 3D Cameron cams

Nice to see

Good that at least some NASA engineers understand the problems of feature creep.

Anyway, given that nothing on Mars moves much, surely Curiosity can get stereo photos simply by aiming the camera sideways,taking a shot, rolling 6" along, and taking another one?

Capitalism killed the Martians, suggests Hugo Chavez

mammon

Not "a" mammon, just mammon. Material weath as evil. Filthy lucre, etc. It's something biblical, moneylenders in the temple, and all that.

or socialism

After a few million years, decaying red tape would create a lot of dust.

cold?

Or uniformly warm, depending on how you look at it.

<---- Mines the half-full one

Fukushima's toxic legacy: Ignorance and fear

It's not all bad news

Found this in the Belfast Telegraph (at the end of a reasonably sane article on the situation):

"The earthquake and tsunami that ripped through north-eastern Japan 11 days ago has led to lots of stories of stoicism and pulling together. But not in every case. Police say that the disaster crippled a bank's security mechanisms, and left a safe wide open. That allowed someone to walk off with 40 million yen, about £300,000. The tsunami washed over the Shinkin Bank, and police said that between the wave's power and the ensuing power outages, the vault came open."

Somebody said "failsafe", or was that "safe FAIL" ?

water contamination

> contamination of water in Tokyo (not simply Fukushima), is twice the legal limit.

This is something I'm curious about. Most big cities get their water from large reservoirs, from where water is treated, stored, and pumped. A week or so seems like a very short time for contamination in any quantity to have reached the reservoirs, dissolved, made it to the outlets and thence to Tokyo, especially given that the releases were minor and of short-lived elements. I'm not a hydraulic engineer, so I'm open to correction of course.

Does anyone know what particular contamination has been detected, and whether Tokyo water is regularly tested for radioactive contamination anyway? i.e. could this be from sources other than Fukushima (which would raise other concerns, of course), and could it have been ongoing before the quake?

WTP?

Even so, Piglet would probably have a better interpretation of Fukushima than Eeyore...

Edinburgh?

I think you might mean Aberdeen ("granite city"), but your point is valid nonetheless.

South West Trains puts squeeze on commuters

Normal airline seats

in economy are 17" - 18" *plus armrests* which in a row of three adds another 6 inches or so to the overall space.

Fukushima: Situation improving all the time

@Will 30

There is a difference between radioactive contamination, and radiation.

The ground within the site is not highly radioactive.

The fuel rods in the storage pools are highly radioactive, that's why they're in the spent fuel pools. Anyone approaching them too closely would be irradiated.

In order to contaminate the site, or the ocean, physical material would need to be spread from the fuel rods onto the ground. So far there is no indication of that having happened. Any vented material has been in the form of quickly-dissipated steam, containing short half-life elements, which had produced short-lived spikes in contamination around the site. Not *of* the site.

So, entering and working on the site is not harmful. People are doing it. Dangling over the spent fuel pools to take a gander at the fuel rods would be suicidally stupid.

That, of course, would be the case even were the reactors operating normally.

Shortage of food and aid

Shortages which are a direct consqeuence of the media scaremongering and (non-Japan) government cowardice, which are preventing people from bringing much needed, and available, aid into the area.

Say again?

"The ground around the reactors are undeniably highly radioactive"

What makes you think so? There's been no leakage or spillage of highly radioactive material, and in general the surroundings of a reactor have to be kept very clean so that people can work there. I've seen no suggestions that any of the reactor surroundings have significant levels of radioactivity.

Woman fingers ex in 15-foot strip pole theft mystery

of course they would

Lap-dancer lambasts laptop-losing lover, labels lad liable...

It's Friday :)

Fukushima one week on: Situation 'stable', says IAEA

0.6m

If this is a multi-kilovolt overhead connection to the grid, as it surely must be, then a week isn't that long to get pylons and cables in and erected, especially given that they would be working through tsunami debris.

They'll also want to be damn sure that it works first time and continues to do so for months. It would be embarassing to switch all the cooling pumps over to it, only for it to a pop a fuse an hour later.

Boffins build copper-crunching laptop cooler

Steam?

Roll on the latest '70s comeback - the Teasmade laptop.

Fukushima on Thursday: Prospects starting to look good

Figures

According to Wikipedia, Fukushima Unit 1 was designed for peak ground acceleration of 0.18g. According the the USGS website the peak acceleration at siesmic stations around Fukushima varied from 0.3g to 0.6g. I'd say that confortably fits the definition of "hugely exceeded ". The tsunami wave topped the sea wall that was supposed to protect the generators, so that certainly "exceeded" the design parameters, whether that was a "huge" excess is somewhat academic at present.

12Mb/sec to a mobile telephone, but is it a new generation?

Why?

A 2GB cap on a 12Mbit/s link is what, about 25 minutes of use? Even without the cap, is this really useful?

It reminds me of those adds for razors, each company adds more blades for an even smoother shaving experience, until we end up with them trying to justify why a 12-blade razor is actually any better than one with a only 10 blades. It's just silly marketing numbers.

Does anyone really need more than 1or 2 Mbit/s at most from a phone?

Kentucky man denies drunk driving, blames blow job

over-21 check

I got asked for ID in the US a few years back when I ordered wine in a restaurant. I was ~45 at the time. Still not sure if I should have been flattered, or if the waiter really needed a Specsavers trip...

NASA's Glory climate-data sat crashes into Pacific on launch

Mishap Investigation Board

So the MiB do exist...

IT job seekers can't smell spell

casual dress

I'd say it always pays to turn up *slightly* overdressed for an interview. If you know that jeans & T-shirt is normal day wear then arriving in a shirt & tie, perhaps no jacket, and with polished shoes (equivalent situation applies for female candidates, of course) at least shows that you:

a) Can make an effort when you want to.

b) Would probably be safe to send to talk to an important customer.

which are two pretty important skills in any candidate I'd want to hire. As always, it's first impressions that count. If your interviewer likes polished shoes, then trainers get you off to a bad start. Few people *don't* like polished shoes, so no harm done to go upscale a little.

No need to go the full three-piece suit with bowler, FT & brolly, of course, unless you're looking for a job with a bonus^H^H^H^Hank.

Ex-PM blocked Steve Jobs knighthood

Apple

The New Labour of the computer world, all image above substance, and a burning ambition for power for it's own sake.

GM declares Ampera e-car 'production ready'

Tarmac

Meh! Who needs tarmac? :)

Seriously, though, that's not quite the same thing. There's a world of difference between paying a basic level of tax to fund infrastructure that we could never realistically manage individually, and subsiding individual purchases as a way to influence behaviour.

Of course it used to be simpler, in the days where anyone owning a car paid a Road Fund licence, which paid for the roads. Once it became clear that total income from road users was 10x the money actually spend on the roads that model became untenable, though...

Brits will get £5000 of that paid by the government?

Means "Brits will get £5000 of that paid by other British taxpayers", i.e. this is what the VAT hike pays for.

When will people realize that governments have no money of their own. All they can ever do is redistribute our money. Personally I'd prefer to keep my money & redistribute it as I want.

Polyglot 419 scammers target German and Welsh speakers

relaxen

UND WATCHEN DER BLINKENLIGHTS

Nissan readies ultra-low CO2 petrol engine for Micra

MPG and CO2

The two figures are directly related, the more km you get per litre, the fewer g of CO2 you'll emit per km.

Burning petrol gives you about 2300g of CO2 per litre, so if my maths are correct 95g CO2 per km works out at about 4.13l/100km, or just under 70MPG.

oops

I meant "dropping by 5 - 10 g per year"

Already happening in France

The CO2 bands are dropping by 5-10 mg per year.

What sealed Nokia's fate?

N95 (8GB)

If that was the high point I pity those with other phones. I'm just waiting for my N95 to die again, now it's out of warranty, so I can have an excuse to replace it. Nice idea, crap execution.

DEC: The best of systems, the worst of systems

You could never tell what might be hanging off the Unibus

Nice cue, and since no-one else has mentioned "Always mount a scratch monkey" yet...

http://edp.org/monkey.htm

36-bit

> I cannot get my head *why* anyone would think a data word that was *not* a power of 2 would be a good idea.

Because 6 bits is enough for A-Z, numbers, and a few stray control characters, and 36 bits gave you an acceptable level of precision in decimal numbers. so IBM were happy to work in multiples of 6. That became 'standard' for a long time.

Ah, the days when 64K was a lot of RAM, and you had the fun of RAD50 encoding as well...

PDP 11/34

Have to agree, that was *the* PDP, but I disagree about the VAX. Maybe not so simple, but clean and elegant. Macro32 was a joy to program in, what wouldn't I give for a MOVC5 occasionally :)

Nova? Can't comment, closest I got to DG was "Soul of a New Machine".

For a real flamewar, though, you'll have to go to OSes. Nothing compares to VMS, which was perhaps the last real OS to be *designed*, rather than to have simply evolved from a hacked prototype...

<nomex on>

SINTRAN

I remember SINTRAN! I remember where I used it, but can't remember what for!! Quirky command line syntax, as I recall.

Anyone want to start a George III thread? :)

Three jailed for phone box thievery

No.

> So, because you disagree with something, it should be taken away from the rest of us?

Not what I said at all. What I said was that just because you think you have a right to something doesn't make it a fundamental human right. Life, liberty, freedom from injustice, *those* are fundamental human rights. Not the "You've no right to lock me up, I only stole the dosh 'coz I was traumatized when my Human Right to get a puppy for Christmas was violated. It's all the fault of society." claptrap that the courts buy all too often.

My problem is with the courts who implement the law, not with the entirely sound justification behind the law itself. Sadly the poor reputation of those courts has tarnished the concept.

Re: Yuman Rites

There are many fundamental human rights which should, of course, be lauded and protected. What pisses of many people (and not just DM readers) is the abuse of that concept by overliberal courts who cheapen the concept into irrelevance with rulings about the "human right" to watch TV, vote from jail, fart in public, etc. Current interpretation of the human rights act has turned it into a tossers charter which protects "rights" which *I* certainly don't want as a right (and I define myself as a human). Save the facepalm for the courts who've created this situation.

Ford Focus 2011

PS

German for HorsePower, almost the same as HP. Sort of "metric horsepower" as defined by the German DIN.

1 HP = 1.014PS = 745.7W

Since this is El Reg I'd have expected something more along the lines of "can pull the skin off 9.7M rice puddings", though.

Gadgets

The purpose of a driving test is to check that you can drive. If you start to depend on gadgets to control the car & drive properly, it's time to take the bus. Being unable to parallel park is a test failure, and should always be.

I have a current-model Mondeo. Great car, but the gadgets are less than perfect. The parking beepers are over-sensitve, getting to max beep when you're still a foot away from an obstacle, yet they can't detect a high kerb or a drop. The rain-detecting wipers sometimes don't trigger in light rain if the drops haven't hit the sensor, but sometimes trigger when you don't want it, smearing dirt across the screen. The auto headlights come on too soon, and turn off too late.

And, of course, when you get used to them you have to remember that they aren't there when driving a hire car, or your wife's car. Reverse waiting for the beep & /crunch/.

Will this parallel park gadget check for a child behind the car? Or spot a tyre-slashing bottle in the gutter? Or just make drivers so lazy that they pay even less attention to the road around them than they do already?

Anonymous hack showed password re-use becoming endemic

post-its

Why go to the trouble of generating complex random passwords if you're then going to store them all on the same electronic post-it? How long until someone cracks that and gets all your passwords at once?