Posts by Falanx

Researchers trick Tesla into massively breaking the speed limit by sticking a 2-inch piece of electrical tape on a sign

Re: Sigh.

Yes, but let's pretend that what you mean is 25 mph, not 15mph on clear long stretches of road, which is actually what infuriates other drivers.

Hate speech row: Fine or jail anyone who calls people boffins, geeks or eggheads, psychology nerd demands

If you're talking about the relative badness of words...

...and you can't say one of those words, that's the much worse word.

Please don't conflate them.

Guess who's working on a health data-slurping digital tool? Bzzt! Nope, it's the UK Department for Work and Pensions

Re: Consent?

March 2013

F***=off, Google tells its staff: Any mention of nookie now banned from internal files, URLs

Re: With that amount of censorship internally, just imagine how Google Search will end up.

Except cursing hasn't been banned. Only references to Natalie Dormer doing that two handed gesture. Which is about right for the Puritan States. Killing in the Name of is all fine and good, but no bobs or vagene, thank you very much.

(No, Amanfrommars hasn't hijacked this post)

Re-identifying folks from anonymised data will be a crime in the UK

Let's see HMRC lead by example to the required standard, shall we?

Slapping crap bosses just got cheaper: Blighty's Supreme Court nixes tribunal fees

You're right, good gosh, they took the steel chair to them.

Northumbria Uni fined £400K after boffin's bad math gives students a near-killer caffeine high

Not even open to debate.

Caffeine is a carcinogen and toxin. You buy it, it comes shipped to you from a chemical supplier with a MSDS, which they are duty bound to provide, and you are duty bound to read thoroughly. The two de facto chemical suppliers to UK universities are Alfa Aeser and VWR, both of whom shit themselves at the thought of *not* sending you a full paper copy of the relevant paperwork.

MSDS that meet the requirements of CLP and GHS contain a rather fullsome toxicity section, which explains clearly the LD50 of the material in question.

If you aren't capable of reading a MSDS, you shouldn't be in a University research department.

If you ignore the requirement to read a MSDS you shouldn't be in a University research department.

If you don't understand what LD50 means, you shouldn't be in a University research department.

If you can't perform basic arithmetic, you shouldn't be in a University research department.

None of this is even slightly open to debate.

Yeshua fucking Christ.

Happy birthday: Jimbo Wales' sweet 16 Wikipedia fails

Re: Citation needed

"Listing sources for everything is Wikipedia's invention"...

Tell that to every peer-reviewed journal and scientific document since the dawn of fucking time.

MIT brainiacs wrangle 2D graphene into super-strong 3D art homework

Numbers cut from whole cloth

4.6% the density of steel, you quote? As in...0.36gcm^-3, or a third the density of water? Really? Whoever proofread this nonsense might want to do some elementary science classes.

And yet 10 times the strength of that same steel? Which steel? IF sheet, used for car doors at 180MPa, or scifer wire, at 5000MPa? This isn't doing the public opinion of graphene in the eyes of actual scientists much good.

UK.gov was warned of smart meter debacle by Cabinet Office in 2012

It's never been intended to save money

It was nothing more than a remote kill switch for the utilities, which they asked their shareholders, *cough* the Revolving Door of Government, for and were kindly gifted. Nothing like not even having to leave your office to shut off non-payers, *cough* the poor and elderly.

Never ascribe to incompetence what is patently obviously malice from those with fat bank balances to protect.

Britain must send its F-35s to Italy for heavy overhauls, decrees US

Except they can't.

The F35 is a US built plane, that contains a considerable amount of hexavalent chromium. Under the requirements of EU/1907/2006, otherwise known colloquially as REACH, flying an aircraft to another country for maintenance is considered importing an article. An article that contains well over the legal threshold of hexavalent chromium.

This won't end well. But it will end hilariously.

Panicked WH Smith kills website to stop sales of how-to terrorism manuals

Sweet Jesus

A *dentist* told you to use perborate, intraorally? Fuck me. What the hell school has he been trained at? Bioavailable boron is a goddamned carcinogen. A peroxy- compound containing boron, definitely so. There's a reason it's no longer added routinely to washing detergent.

Hypersonic cruise missile scores US$175m DARPA cash

You mean, since they decomissioned the AIM-54C?

Which was a perfectly capable Mach 5 plus guided weapon envelope. Never missed a drone (unsurprising given the CEP of it's warhead), although never used in combat - I guess the Russians never did send fleets of bombers our way.

And that was designed before 1972. I'm fairly certain they could scale it up and update it hugely without effort by comparison to the time of sliderules.

Sorry Nanny, e-cigs have 'no serious side-effects' – researchers

Just so I understand their complete ignorance of epidemiology

This was a metastudy of what exactly?

Two years worth of data on a product that still contains a carcinogen, when it's been very. very well demonstrated over decades and millions of cases, that cancers are extremely time dependent medical conditions, with incubation periods more than capable of being measures in decades.

And the people have the temerity to call themselves medical researchers?

Fans demand 'Lemmium' periodic table tribute

Yes, we do know why.,,,

The nickname came about from his inordinate ability to score loans off friends and never pay them back;

"Lemmy 10 quid..."

Hey, folks. Meet the economics 'genius' behind Jeremy Corbyn

Hari *kiri*, you ignorant git.

And, the term is seppuku

Bloke hits armadillo AND mother-in-law with single 9mm round

Re: Varmint?

They continue to respire in locations adjacent to ignorant hicks?

European Parliament mulls law on use of blood metal in tech

Well, other than it being entirely impossible...

Given that all four metals are heavily recycled and reclaimed, and that under section 1502 of the Ken Dodd, er, Frank-Dodd Act essentially every piece of steel in the world is irredeemably contaminated....

Oh well. When did reality ever get in the way of good legislation?

US authorities round up ILLEGAL DINOSAURS for repatriation

Dinopedant

I'm fairly certain they mean *Tarbosaurus* bataar. Tyrannosaurus was an North American genus.

UK investigators finger emergency beacon for 787 Heathrow fire

Re: Plastic Vs Aluminium

And making additions to that extruded PTFE would be for what reason? As an actual *materials* engineer, not the idiot mechanical engineers we spend all day fixing the screwups of and who are responsible for this 'PTFE is too brittle' nonsense, PTFE extruded insulation is used because of its fireretardence and excellent environmental and electrical performance. PTFE does exist as a *bulk* engineering polymer with lots of different additions, but no-one on earth is going to try to extrude Glacier DU around a gorram piece of nickel-plated copper wire. The reference in WIki is bunk. PTFE has a continuous upper working temperature of about 150 degrees. That's continuous as in, forever.

And, really? Brininging kapton into the conversation to muddy the waters? Kapton is polyimide, a thermosetting polymer not a thermoplastic, with entirely different set of chemical mechanical and environmental properties for PTFE. This is nothing like the issues with kapton insulation, thank you very much.

*Seethes at the general ignorance*

Re: Won't be told

Please RTFR, lithium manganese dioxide batteries are worlds away from lithium ion and lithium polymer batteries...

Are driverless cars the death knell of the motor biz?

So what the author is suggesting is...

...A bus?

Russian boffins race to meteorite crash lake as shard prices go sky-high

Re: 10,000 tons

And it would have to be basically cubic to get anywhere *near* ten thousand tons. It's not sideritic, it's rocky, so it's approximate specific gravity would be a bit over *2*.

Looks like particularly lazy maths. And that's not a novelty, comign from NASA.

Wikipedia's Gibraltar 'moratorium' - how's it going?

Re: Not actually fussed about Gib either way but...

You're welcome. *Clicks*

BYOD is a PITA: Employee devices cost firms £61 a month

I'm unsurprised

Staff purchase equipment that actually meets their needs and it costs more than the old tat corporate IT departments dumped on them, when ten years ago, it was five years out of date. Whodathunkit?

BSkyB to flick switch on network-level smut-'n'-violence filters

Re: Deep breath...

What asshole downvoted this?

Wikileaks reveals Icelandic FBI shenanigans

Re: Well...

I'm sick to the back teeth of the Hanlon's Razor Nuremberg Defence. "They were only being lazy and stupid."

Ignorance and willful stupidity *are* malice. If you can't be f***ed to learn and you can't be f***ed to understand, that's f***ing malice aforethought. Just 'cause it seems more fuzzy and friendly than outright hostility, it's as antisocial as ti comes nonetheless.

Grrrr.

Under cap-and-trade, flying is greener than taking the bus

When they build a 400 seater bus...

...Then the comparison will be apt.

What a bunch of eh-holes.

DoJ to Kim Dotcom: We never asked you to retain files

Pull the other one, DOJ

It's got bells and whistles on

(Can we have a Bastille Day like icon, please?)

Scientists spin carbon nanotube threads on industrial scale

*Which* Steel?

And why do they never release the actual numbers? The last actually released mechanical property figures slipped drastically below the strength of steels above 2*mm* in length. Making them in visible quantities hasn't been a problem for years, the issue lies not with their 'difficult to work with' nature, but their utter sensitivity to thermal vacancy defects, defects that they *cannot* be made without and increase statisticallty with the temperature of manufacture. It is these defects that limit strength and the bigger you make them, the higher the probability of defetcs existing in the structure, a structure that requires perfection to achieve these magnificent strengths.

I'm not saying that the theoretical strength of these materials isn't incredible, but the thing about materials science is not what you hope it will achieve, but what thermodynamics lets you achieve.

I notice that no-one talks very much abotu the explosive strain energy contained in the structure, either. The propogation rate of energy release in these things at failure is about 50% higher than an equivalent mass of *TNT* :-D

AFACT wants ushers to confront pirates

Wow...

There's an 'infomercial' shown, certainly in Cineworld Cinemas around the country that displays in typical cringeworthy 'comedic' style this behaviour to prevent mobile telephones runing movies. YOU'RE NOT MEANT TO USE IT AS AN INSTRUCTIONAL, YOU ASSHOLES.

Boffins spot 7 ALIEN WORLDS right in our galactic backyard

Alfheim, Jotunheim, Asgard...

ROGUE PLANET WITHOUT A SUN spotted in interstellar space

Well, it all began about nine million years ago...

Cybertron?

Wishful thinking?

Climate change threatens to SHRINK FISH AND CHIP SUPPERS

I'm sorry?

It's strange... that all the fish with high metabolic rates tend to be bloody huge. Tuna, Mackerel sharks, that sort of thing. Odd that peopl estudying fish missed that one.

Is the shrinking size of fish suppers now not more to do with overfishing that means younger and younger fish are dragged from the ocean, before their prime?

And to think, I'm so tired of this ass-poor correlation automatically equalling causation mentality, that I was actually expecting their assertion to be that higher temperatures lead to lower solubility of oxygen in water, per se, in line with the general dissolution of gas in liquids. Someone might want to call the Devonian period and ask about how small the Dunkleosteus were then...

Seagate: Our tech will be better than WD's helium-filled hardness

Re: helium?

I'd be more inlined to consider the polymeric seals as a leak path...

Home Sec to decide Gary McKinnon's fate by 16 October

Re: @adam payne

Wow - what insight. When there's essentially only one reason for a course of unpopular and counterproductive action, who would there be anything but manifold references to it?

Anonymous considering another tilt at Australia

Oh, the old two-party works, screw activists mentality, eh?

I was going to comment on the naiveity of some of our ACs and their desperation to get their irrelevant twopenn'orth in, but meh.

Slurp me.

Korean boffins discover secret to quick-charge batteries

Re: It's the year 2020...

And thanks to EC/197/2006, there'll be no useable engineering materials nor chemicals to make anything with at all.

Valve: Games run FASTER on Linux than Windows

Re: No shock here

Not true. There are a chunk of DX10 components available through winetricks, d3dx10 springing to mind, and a number of dx11 bits being considered.

Even purely dx9 games feel smoother.

No shock here

Something I've empirically seen for yonks. Running most DX9-DX10 titles through WINE gives me better performance than on the Win 7 install I had before, and that's with another abstraction layer in the way, courtesy of Moroccan Tea :-)

Admittedly, my machine is more a lower end gaming rig by design anyways... 6950 GPU , 4-disk RAID 5 PRIMARY, 8GB of Corsair 1600 DDR3 and a 945 CPU. I'm not sure i fthat's statistically valid but meh...

Facebook ninjas scale wall, pluck iPhone techies from Apple's garden

Shinob-no-mono

The plural of ninja is ninja :-p

Lego space shuttle hits 114,000ft

Re: Temperatures

Lego is made from ABS, so about 140 degrees maximum service temperature.

It's moulded at about 240 degrees.

Shark versus shark in Barrier Reef DEATH MATCH

No recordings of it before you say?

Go speak to the Foxs. Their life's work is a scrapbook of sharks. They've lived them.

Dinosaurs were super mums, nest find proves

Yes they were warm blooded

Bearing in mind that lizards shouldn't even be part of herpetology, but some kind of cold-blooded precursor to the rest of aves, then yes. Big yes.

And don't start throwing megalothermy about. It's an embarrassing parachute for biologists with a piss-awful grasp of physics.

Swearing fine quashed as teens have heard it all before

Re: Broken Window Theory

Police are citizens, too? Really? Not a paramilitary force, as has been put about by various members of the Met?

From the reading of the report, I'd have said it would have been quite obvious to any bystander who and where the ire was being directed, and that it was not cursing in their direction. Context is everything, Jim. So why those in earshot but utterly unaddressed should feel harrassed or assailed by what is in essence, just a sound, is beyond me, and I would have thought anyone with a modicum of temperance and reading comprehension.

And he didn't query it. He called bullshit.

Swedish political party pledges War On Wolves

One woman is not a party. Nor a mandate.

It's merely because of the handful of confirmed reports of wolf attacks on humans in the Fennoscadian area in a *two hundred* year period were on women :p

There have been no recorded wolf attacks on humans in that region since the 1900s, and some of the recorded ones in regions such as Russia appear to be utter nonsense - a wolf carried a 17 year old girl *by the throat* over a four-foot fence? P*ss off. A Ridgeback couldn't do that.

Well, it appears that wolves are the new threat in Sweden, after Larsson's poor grasp of maths.

A tenth of Chinese farmland polluted by heavy metals

Poor, maligned zinc...

I like the way that a barely-transition metal essential to mitochondria gets the same shoeing as lead...

You could of at least had the decency to name cadmium and mercury :-p

Common brain parasite 'can affect host's actions'

Just of fthe press, huh?

Except that Robert Sapolsky and his whole lab have been making this known, this specific aspect, for over three years, and that Leeds and Oxford Unis have been talking about it for at least six...

What are we, the Daily Mewl now?

Manufacturers testing wider cars for swingbellies

Really?

I'm 6'6", weigh between 195-200lbs (depending on how much riding I've been doing recently) and my Focus (penultimate model) is the second most comfortable car I've ever driven. Maybe it's because I don't have the muscle tone of a beanbag.

Skype for iPhone makes stealing address books a snap

Falt_Steve beat you to it by three hours :-)