Posts by Steve 114 368 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
I did Imperial at school, and it wasn't easy but at least it's divisible and visualisable. My children did Metric, and now have No Idea. They simply don't know how to 'measure' things, or put up shelves, or hang pictures centrally. Total fail of central governance (and me too, I sometimes think, while sorting it out for them with twin-scale rulers).
Note the Google-guy's (current?) wife, who runs the rather interesting and neatly-UI'd DNA testing website named above. Which the US's 'FDA' has lately forbidden to publish new, if soft, health information. The FDA should get their waggons in a circle, as Google is darkening the hilltops with Tribes from all over, and arrows may begin to fly.
Have you seen how much they add on-line to post their spit-kit out of the USA? (even just over the border to Canada)? That's silly, because to get plentiful comparative results from Eeur-op, where most USians' ancestors came from, they'd really have to tempt us. Meanwhile, 'FTDNA' still looks the pro alternative.
The 'speed of light' is a distraction. Light is instant (in the frame of reference of the photon doing it). Anyone else watching has to consider a universal constant called 'c'. You can't do without 'c' for spacetime, just as you can't do without 'pi' for circles. If you think something has travelled 'faster than light' you have simply misunderstood the problem. Go square a circle.
As an 'elderly, confused', I got an Android phone. Liked it a lot, rooted it same afternoon. But it seems the only way I can get the sainted 'Google' Maps' integrated is by getting some kind of Google ID, so that they can track me - no thanks! (Meanwhile some other mapping system downloads useful slabs all over Europe). And my various TomToms in several cars almost never mislead. But my son can't upgrade his I-Thing because 'the maps don't work'. Whatever is going wrong?
Try chairing any international collaboration where the reps are mainly men. There'll be sharp disputes on process, elections, personalities, even when to take coffee breaks. Nothing to do with the science, but events with public exposure do highlight any splits. The upside here is that lots of people have had relativity dramitised by the press, and got a bit educated - yay, I even bought a book myself to answer the questions better.
About an hour on my old x64 Toshiba laptop. Only one bluescreen 'DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION', solved with a reboot and then 7 updates listed (one Tos-specific). Password- and start- screens are ridiculous, but desktop once found is redolent of Win7, with cosmetic plusses and minuses. I'll stick with XP.
A broader problem: the client hopes the sly catalyst for change they find hard to announce will be 'integrated' new IT. They can't specify what they want (because they haven't done 'change' yet), so they give the specifying to the consultant too. What nobody notices is that the plebs who actually do the work now don't want change. There are layers of them entrenched, each with different resistance agendas whether justified ('these things never work') or unjustified ('bosses will see what we're doing'). Result - institutional sabotage, and an ever-escalating volume of profitable change-notes until the buck stops. Fire, health, offender management - you name it, we've all been there and done one.
yes, and we have:
'appeal the decision' (grammatical error)
'find your representative' (constitutional error)
'more on this story' (a tragedy is only a 'story' to expensed journalists)
All I want is BBC headlines on Firefox, and Radio 3 with fewer smug music-over self-ads.
I'm told they do TV as well? Keep your movies off my screen-estate!
I regretfully left COBOL (with ICL) very many years ago. Never really found anything better: in later more managerial years UML came close, but you can't seem to get it to compile (as we used to do, all night, with punched-card decks and flailing magtapes). Where's today's comprehensible, self-documenting, unambiguous language with which I can define, describe and evolve my business interrelationships?
Good point, so that's an exaggeration too. But the ISS has the option to be just a tiny fraction faster and then they really would be in space. Actually, we're all in 'space' when we jump, it's just that our orbits intersect with the earth's quite soon. Also, kms are French too - told you so. And Paris is in France.
No way is it a 'space' ship. I know what I mean by 'space' (and the formal definition is frankly rubbish, must be French), and you simply can't be anywhere there without doing escape velocity first. It's a glider launched from the thinnest of atmospheres, and maybe quite fun as a fairground ride for our epoch.
Transport's not my sector, but Brussels is. Are we sure that there is not some strategy there which *compels* governments to require location-aware electronics in cars? (already happened with 'On Board Diagnostics', which isn't for your servicing convenience, but so that they can police emissions). So maybe the 'Softening- up' is being done in the knowledge that Britain will eventually have no choice. Picture of Eurocrat stealing sovereignty by stealth.
..is always involved (check it out - the 'holes' can line up). But in this case, the failure of any feasible system to detect that two arguing pilots have tried to take off fully-loaded, without checklists, slats, and flaps, and with the warnings of same curiously disabled, does seem to make the 'Trojan' holes rather minor.
So the latest Firefox wisely advises me on startup to update Flash. But if I do, I must first remember to untick some 'MacAfee' thing they try to slide in, and when the update is done, uninstall some 'Adobe downloader' thing. Easy - but do I have to tell my non-geek cousins all this?
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