Posts by Andy Gates 143 publicly visible posts • joined 10 May 2007
"Earth has stopped warming" is flat wrong, though. That's not a skeptic position, that's a political one. Similar non-factual political opinions run to Lysenkoism and "rain follows the plow", so, yeah, no. Educate that man before he gets promoted anywhere important.
Sysadmin here: three-monitor desk tryptich, couple of lappies in for servicing and the Big Board on the wall showing (mostly) green. I *love* the idea of binning that lot for a dynamic bunch of virtual screens. Windows-in-windows, even. Fly-eye wall of screens? Done. "Hey Cortana, imax this" Vwoosh.
That's harder than you think: *which* Fred Bloggs do these results refer to?
It's also not relevant. Fred might not want his bad business dealings from 2002 being found, but be entirely happy to have his current stuff up.
Of course, as it stands Fred can only get anything enforced if he is prepared to spin up a lawyer, which makes this a right and a rule for the wealthy only.
In 2312 he had "smalls" - a whole clade of little people who worked in deep space for the mass/life-support/ship-size reasons listed here.
Start with 5'6 and 70kg, say. That way you can get some smaller men as well. It's not like the extra mass for a carthorse like me's justifiable!
When I buy a waterproof gadget, the first thing I do is dunk test it. When a salesdroid came into work touting rugged tablets, I drop tested it right in front of him to a delightful squeak.
...now, iphones don't claim to be rugged, but they do claim to be phones, and we know how people handle phones. Vewwy woughly. If Apple want to launch the "dress phone", as pretty and delicate as a dress watch, they're welcome, but if it's a regular phone it oughta survive regular phone abuse.
They're water towers for the sound suppression system - those jets of water that spray over the flame trench, they come from here. By muffling the thunderous acoustic battering of the engine somewhat, they prevent damage to the rocket and the pad.
Also, they're lightning rods.
It's not a cashless underground ... it's just a payment vendor trying to get you to use their product. Competing products will come, and the ticket machines will continue to take regular payment.
No Barclays bank account needed (that would reduce customer potential), just feed the account the way you'd feed any other PAYG. The Pride ones are available (and in black as well as pink, if you're funny about such things).
So, clip the chip out and attach to your fairy wand. :)
" the battery life just isn't acceptable. I wear a Basis, one of the fitness watches, and its battery lasts four or five days. That's already short enough to be a major hassle. "
Charging when you've noticed that it's run out of charge and gah, you wanted to go for a run -- that's a hassle.
Charging every day is ritual, and if it's easy enough (no connectors), it'll be ignored.
And in China, they've just done a vertebra. Invest in titanium sintering, say I.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jenniferhicks/2014/08/19/peking-university-implants-first-3d-printed-vertebra/?utm_campaign=techtwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social
I wouldn't be surprised to see the big orthopaedic centres getting their own fab facility for both practice parts and implantables.
Nope, it'll just crack atmospheric CO2 into 2x CO and O2. As seen in Zubrin's Case For Mars, and in fiction in KSR's Red Mars and recently Weir's The Martian.
http://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/july/nasa-announces-mars-2020-rover-payload-to-explore-the-red-planet-as-never-before/#.U9tpGOOzHgg
Well, the public sector just got a year of patches. A very reasonable £5.5m, too. Given the porosity of the internet, those updates will get public smartly. Getting updates from random sources of course opens the home user to the risk of fake XP updates... fun fun.
My Y2k-sense is tingling. I think more of a whimper than a bang, but I'm ever so glad for the extended support while we grunt through updating our zillion desktops.
Aye. "Just dropping out of the sky" is a thing that quadcopters *do* - they're crashing machines that sometimes fly. Having it close over the racers might have made for some thrilling shots, but you have to leave enough clearance to be safe.
The "magic jib"-ness of a camera drone is sometimes too magical for the safety considerations to be remembered.
"OMG hax" ... sounds weak to me.
If it were properly anonymised (with a route back in case of clinical need) and if it were restricted to real research organisations, I'd be gung-ho for it as a great case of Big Data doing useful things.
If it's sold to Experian or that bloody Meerkat, who jigsaw it back together to deny me a good credit rating or insurance premium because of my last peak flow or my old genetics tests -- that's incredibly sucky. That's a *gross* violation of patient-doctor confidentiality.
We expect the latter. If the intent was the former (Hanlon suggests it was), there's more than communication problems.
"What I don't understand is how can the government can avoid any Data Protection issues here? This secondary use of the data is not consistent with any (implied) consent a patient may have given a doctor."
I'm equally baffled. Here I am slaving in a hospital IT department surrounded by IT governance reminders, and the National bunch are hawking off weakly-anonymised data well in excess of its remit. How on *earth* is that legal?
The Helpline unhelpfully says "It's within the law, don't worry your pretty head". Eesh.
Ostensibly it's a rollercoaster.
It's also mostly a technology demonstrator - Scaled and Virgin have always been clear that they have an SS1 / SS2 / SS3 plan in mind, with each model proving stuff for the next step up. Sky-launched re-entering rocket rollercoaster is preamble for something with beefier engines and actual LEO capacity.
We tackled that with the Clean Air act and its friends. Low-emmissions fuel and a big push to electrify (and gasify) domestic heating.
Should be relatively easy for a more centrally-controlled setup to reproduce. Wrap it in a 5 Year Smog Plan and Chang-e's your bunny.
" I had already been thinking of updating my firewall setup to stop devices like this initiating outbound connections."
...which would have to be done with a bit of finesse, as there's content-delivery services in among the spook-drops and advertising servers. Next thing you know, the baked-in Netflix stops working.
Say you have two infected computers, one on the network and one air-gapped. This allows them to communicate across the gap.
If the payload is stuxy-specific then it could be, say, "dude, have you found the file [checksum]?" "yep" "I'll phone home then". Not much communication is needed to be useful.
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