Posts by Stephen 27

Boffins use DVD burner to scale graphene supercapacitors

El-Kady

Been many, many years since you had to use an el- caddie for your CD. What's more Graphite Oxide? Isn't that carbon dioxide? Is someone pulling someone's lower limb?

Stephen Hawking gets $3m physics prize from Mail.ru tycoon

What about the Hawking radiators?

If they hadn't installed the Hawking Radiators at the LHC we would all be swallowed up into tiny black holes!

$3M hardly covers his services to humanity.

Of course they also made sure their Heisenberg insurance policy was paid and installed a Schroeder cat flap in the back door at the LHC so they could deliver valid results.

Scientists build largest ever computerized brain

Emotional connection

Is it strange that I feel empathy for this poor wee brain? Trapped with limited ability to express its self. It might be in pain. Or if might be hungry....... FOR BRAINS!

Astronomers find biggest black hole, 17 BILLION times the size of Sun

The bloody egg

Looses all credibility using the "Chicken and egg" causality dilemma. It's the Egg! The modern chicken came from an egg laid by its predecessor, a chicken like bird.

Now. Do black holes spawn galaxies, or do galaxies spawn black holes? Perhaps black holes are formed early in the universe and swirl up the soup of matter created by the big bang and form galaxies?

Probably not, but just putting it out there.....

Habitable HEAVY GRAVITY WORLD found just 42 light-years away

Could it be a planet with moon?

The information they have indicates a mass at an orbit. But is there anything to say that it can't be a smaller planet with its own moon and therefore not sooo heavy?

Bald? Looking old before your time? Don't panic, but you might DIE

Re: Oh dear,

Really trying to work out why I'm not dead yet. Is there some sort of Aaaaarrrrrrggghhh

Is lightspeed really a limit?

Then divide by the number you first thought of

It helps that mathematics keeps working with negative numbers and you can conveniently step over any divide by zero's. Unfortunately nature is not so kind.

USAF declassifies ‘flying saucer’ design

Re: 1974? Or 1794?

Maybe an anagram for 1947... Roswell ...

"the Air Force doesn’t seem to have ever built a flying saucer", but maybe someone else did?

(appropriate alien music)

New questions raised over Kim Dotcom snooping

Re: I'm confused...

Eh? If I saw a sudden increase in latency I'd run traceroute. Anyone who has a modest knowledge of network architectures would do the same. He's not just a kid who plays xbox, he's someone who's made millions on exploiting the advantages to be found in the brave (relatively new) world of the Internet.

Curiosity success 'paves way for Man on Mars by 2030s'

Just say'n

I think you'll find that the reactor is a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator (pedantic). While it may generate a fair bit of heat, its not going to go critical. However if you pour a little Martian water on the Lithium batteries and short them out while cracking open the reactor you should have a nice little dirty bomb to scatter your competition :-P

The Martians won't be impressed.

Ice Cream Sandwich still a no-show for most Android users

Re: Security updates?

Agree whole heartedly. But everyone seems to forget. These are phones! I have no need to upgrade my 2.3 phone. It works just as well as when I bought it and does everything I need. Except I would like to know that any vulnerabilities are plugged.

Qubits turn into time travellers

Makes perfect sense

So assuming the brain is in fact a quantum computer. Then this explains fortune tellers. Ahhh it all makes sense now!

beer - medicinal purposes for strained brain

Hadoop's little buddy Nutch 2.0 gulps down web's big data

Re: Does this article mean anything?

If I Hadoop, I would Nutch up an Accumulo by this Avro. Soir now that Cassandra has moved to HBase, Gora won't let Tika go.

Makes perfect sense.

HTC peeves punters with One X woes

Re: yep, indeed... not

Not my personal experience. I bought my wife a Touch Pro 2 a couple of years ago and its the best mechanical keyboard phone ever! (although a little over weight by today's standards) So I've just bought a Desire S and absolutely love it. Solid hardware, only the wifi is a little dodgy if I hold it in the wrong place. I'd buy HTC again.

Australia to issue passports for males, females and... X

Why list gender at all?

There is no value in listing gender, how can it be relevant if it's an arbitrary user option?

To the border patrol, we're either human or luggage... either way we're going to be scanned, (hu)manhandled, opened and ferreted through.

Oracle: 'Eight Android files are decompiled Oracle code'

looking at the code ... → #

Its like saying every piece of C code with #include <stdio.h> is copied (which it is in my case). Soooo freaken WHAT!

NASA hails 'amazing' exoplanetary system

The use of times less

Does this only bother me? The use of terms like "10 time closer" or "twice as close" distance. WTF is that supposed to mean? How about something that makes sense like one 10th the distance and half the distance?

Just bugs me... thats all. Mine's the one with the slide rule in the pocket.

Oracle sneaks out Solaris 10 refresh

Bzzzzt support costs are not 20%

Wrong. You do not pay 20% for hardware and OS support. The 12% of net price includes OS and hardware. 8% is OS only.

It is just that you cannot buy hardware only support, or anything other than Premier support.

BTW, the software support includes Solaris, Oracle Linux and Oracle VM (x86 or SPARC based).

Germany warns surfers against Firefox

3.6.2 is alive!

Funny, I was just reading this article and thought I should just do a quick check for updates, and there it was 3.6.2. Nothing like a German threat to get things moving!

Intel Labs unveils PC power plans

ProxZzzy

I hate these sorts of slides showing massive savings using bad ass-umptions!!! What marketing/sales/politician droid got a hold of these slides? (grumble, grumble, rant, rant)

NO! There are not 150 million PC's that will automatically give you 6$Bn of savings if ProxZzzy is deployed. A fare percentage of these PC's already have power management operating in some manner and will have less savings, plus many have long running processes that ProxZzzy will not be suited... you know, like screen savers, SETI at home etc....

Yes ProxZzzy is more efficient and will be easier to deploy, but it will not save the world $6bn!!

Grrrr

Forget SETI, this is how you find aliens: Hefty prof speaks

All a matter of time

It's not really a paradox. Aliens may well have visited or may well be ready to visit, but as humans in the time scale of this planet, and even the universe, have only been here for a blink of an eye and have been looking for a femto-second of that time.

It's all a matter of perspective, and expectation..... something I have to explain to my teenage children all the time!

MS update gives some XP boxes the Blue Screen

But, yes

I always disable automatic updates, but I always manually apply updates when the notification comes up.... except today when I had a chance to read this (and other ) article and now I can wait for M$ to fix the problem.

Being up to date is very important, but it is even more important to make informed decisions on patch management. I don't have blind faith that every patch is safe.

Aliens more likely to live on moons than planets, say boffins

Dunce?

Marc, I do not believe Tom_ was flaming you, it was more an observation. Put simply, your logic is WAY OFF BASE!

I'll pick one flaw in your post. Moons at different orbits around a gas giant do not experience significant differences in gravitational force other than tidal forces. The main gravitational force you will experience is the mass of the moon that you are standing on.

So for example two identically sized moons orbiting a gas giant at different distances will feel pretty much the same to anyone walking on them.

There are a whole lot more problems with your post, but because I live on the other side of the planet to you, I'm a lot closer to Christmas and don't feel like typing any more.

Merry Christmas.

Camera catches Samsung's OLED iPhone wannabe

Kiwi?

Yes I'm a Kiwi? And I thought her voice was annoying? What grates with me is when you get this stuff over public address systems?

Air New Zealund advises passengers on flight NZ1 to board their plane?

Just as well it's a nice country to live in :-)

Oh yeah, was this something to do with a phone or someting?