Posts by Carrie

LHC rushed back into service at 50% max power

haha!

did anyone else read that as "unprecedentedly pussy particle-punisher" ? hehehehe

Niagara Falls to power next Yahoo! data centre

Complete nonsense

Yahoo wants to look good by saying their data centre is powered by water? Absolutley non-sensical.

All power generated is fed to the grid. From the grid, one gets their power. You actually cannot control who gets what power, unless there is a dedicated power line directly from the Main Output Transformer to your load. I would be extremely skeptical that Yahoo reached a deal with NYPA with a very special dedicated line, since it's pretty much illegal. NYPA are not a regulator so a dedicated line would create a veritable mountain of paperwork.

Nod to David Jones. This headline is just blather.

US mulls clicks for cameraphones

Canada clicks

Canada here - all phones click when you take a pic, and have for years. i've tried turning off the click on my sony ericsson K790 - no go.

Presumably, the reason for targeting PHONES is because anyone knows when a camera is being pointed at them, but phones are not as obvious, duh.

Paris - she may not know the diff btwn a cam and a phone.

Mac malware tide on the rise

.Services, Bitches!

@SkippyBing:

totally.

Hotmail users bitch and moan about new interface

hotmail, really?

people STILL use that piece of shite? Really?

it's only good for spam and signing up for msg boards

having worked for a few smarty-pants companies, one of the more common criteria for dismissing someone's resume is a hotmail address. As one bigwig put it: "Having a hotmail address just shows how stupid you are. We don't want dinosaurs here."

Paris: cuz she definitely has a hotmail address

Feds to collect DNA of every person they arrest

re: Canada

YET.

matter of time, SG. With Hitman Harper in Parliament anything the States will do, he will do.

Sociologists: Studying engineering turns you into a terrorist

Figures...

Typical. The sociologists at my eng'g school went above and beyond to discredit every eng'r and engineering on a whole on a daily basis. (This would be Lakehead U. Known for their forward-thinking ban on Wi-Fi.)

In Canada, we have a National Day of Mourning to remember the people killed at the Montreal Ecole-Polytechnique. They were eng'g and science students, mostly women. On that day, it's customary for the Eng'g Dept to hold a service. In December of 2005, the Sociology Dept asked to speak at the service, and went on to present a 45 minute long harrangue on the evils of eng'g and the war-mongering of all eng'rs.

And this was at an Eng'g memorial service!

Some things never change, eh?

Future of computing safe, thanks to Excel patch

oh come on...

Any Eng'r worth their salt will not use Excel except to double-check a hand calc.

It's ok. Bridges will not fall nor will planes drop from the sky due to an excel fault.

What's 77.1 x 850? Don't ask Excel 2007

Re: This is bad Re: Big trouble

As a nuclear engineer:

No, we don't use Excel except to check hand-calcs. Anything that can't be done by hand is fed into Maple or MatLab, and independently verified by a 3rd party.

As a former engineering student:

The first thing we were taught, and taught, and taught again and again - don't trust the software unless you know the logic. Half of my classes were learning the logic behind the programs. In Canada, engs take a vow - and that vow isn't worth spit if you're relying on unknown assumptions. I can only assume the same standard applies.

Greek mobile wiretap scandal unpicked

erm...

"The mobile phones of about 100 people, whose ranks include journalists and Arabs living in Greece..."

Journalists and Arabs??

What the heck is that supposed to mean?

Are journalists and Arabs so noteworthy as to call them out on their own? That's a weird little bit of insinuation right there...

Paris Hilton released for 'medical reasons'

too bumpy in her rumpy

The girl has herpes. It was all over the news 2 years ago. Wouldn't be surprised if she had a major breakout due to stress.

who knows what else she may have picked up?

NASA chief regrets having unpopular opinion

Political Science

i have to agree with Mr James Basset... It's unfortunate that one's position on "climate change" indicates one's political leanings. ( This has always been the case - politics and science have always been unhappy bedfellows. ) The right questions are not being asked. JB has put forward two excellent questions (above), but I would like to add a third:

Given that the global average temperature of the earth is warming, and assuming that this change is as a result of human activity, what is our path forward? How do we want this question to end? Are we going to assume that with effort we can revert climate data to, say, 1965? 1865? Are we going to arbitrarily chose a "positive zone" of data to which we will work toward? From what I understand, capping carbon output will still allow change to happen exponentially. So really, what are our expectations of our actions?

I am neither political nor have I decided whether I know enough to have an opinion on whether or not Global Warming is the end of the world as we know it, but I would like to be able to see the situation in a light without bias and think on an End Result. I think in properly defining the situation and the expectation, we can move forward without all this political mumbo jumbo. Maybe.

Spitzer stargazers find hot, windy planets

It's NASA, not SI

NASA did the research, hence the ridiculous units.

They're not too good at converting between imperial and SI units... remember the mixup with the Mars satellite that put it in the planet?

D'Oh.