Posts by Paul_Murphy

50 years ago: NASA blasts off the first humans to experience a lunar close encounter

Publi Service Broadcasting - Go!

Yes, a song about the pre (and post)-landing checks of the first lunar landings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHIo6qwJarI

From the Race for Space.

NASA 'sextortionist' allegedly tricked women into revealing their password reset answers, stole their nude selfies

>Good grief. Is there anyone who ISN'T keeping nude pictures of themselves online these days?!

Well one of those women wasn't, for starters.

I'm also not doing that, so there are at least two of us that don't store nude pics of ourselves online.

Anyone else?

Not one, but 20,000 black holes hiding in Milky Way's heart

Re: Interesting

Also a bit dutch... :-)

NASA Earthonauts emerge from eight-month isolation in simulated Mars visit

Re: I'm trying to figure out why else they'd need a "British science" officer.

Since in Trumps Amerika science is a four-letter word I suspect that British science might be the better idea.

DARPA orders spaceplane capable of 10 launches in 10 days

Re: Trigger's broom?

Of course it's reusable, as long as everything can be reused.

The actual number of swappable components is relatively immaterial as long as the basic frame can stand the pace.

If the object is to, for example, rebuild the GPS constellation, after it's unexpected demise, in a few days then I can totally see a production-line approach where used components are removed, tested, re-filled and slotted back into other airframes for re-use.

China's phone quartet is shouldering its way into Western markets

'There's very little round the £100 SIM-free price today.'

I can recommend the Cubot Note s if anyone is interested - bought two at the beginning of the year and are a a good all-rounder.

Don't go for the Gold one though since that came with an older version of Android.

Russian RATs bite Handbrake OSX download mirror

Re: Malware? On a Mac?

I would say that they are a 'prime market' who have too much money and are more than happy for the inner workings of their iStuff to be hidden from them.

Head of US military kit-testing slams F-35, says it's scarcely fit to fly

Re: There have been planes like this before.

After the Mosquito I would suggest the TSR2 (if it had been continued) or the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow (ditto) as the Mosquito equivalent of the jet age (excepting the Buccaneer for the low-level stuff) the Harrier being the only other jet plane that could fly slower and lower.

Since the Americans screwed the country (and Europe) over with the F111 it's been downhill ever since.

Trump's America looks like a lousy launchpad, so can you dig Darwin?

Re: Based on location and nominative determinism...

A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah!

Fire brigade called to free man's bits from titanium ring's grip

Re: I keep seeing these

or like this?

http://www.callagold.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/P1120875-400x300.jpg?x71152

From: http://www.callagold.com/all-about-rings/ring-removal/

BlackBerry-driven robo-car spins its RIMs across Canada

Re: Excellent test roads

And I guess the real world testing will show up those and other items that can't be replicated easily in a test environment.

Here's how the missile-free Royal Navy can sink enemy ships after 2018

War in a stringbag

I can't recall the author but the title stays with me,

I recall one story about the stringbag when they were deciding what the max safe landing load would be and ended up slamming the fully loaded swordfish onto the deck as hard as they could - they saw the undercarriage splaying apart each time but the swordfish kept going - as I recall they got bored rather than finding the limits of the planes undercarriage.

There is also the Buccaneer but that would need catapults.

US citizens crash Canadian immigration site after Trump victory

Re: Personally

I didn't know the 2600 could run spreadsheets - I used it to run Star Raiders. :-)

DRAMA ON MARS: Curiosity bot fires laser at alien metal object

Re: Excellence in engineering versus planned obsolescence

And not forgetting the 24/7 team that will be looking after each car that is sold for not only it's expected lifetime but until it's beyond all hope of economic repair.

I've arrived on Mars. Argggh, my back!

Re: A never-ending study on how to mess up humans...

Perhaps the real solution to manned spaceflight is to stop messing about with inadequate vehicles and work seriously on physics to identify an energy supply which will actually get enough stuff up there to make things really feasible.

Like a nuclear powered rocket maybe? up to 8,000,000 tons enough? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

Supermicro's macro Microblade: That chassis is... huge

Re: Cooling

I can't see fluid cooling happening on blades, but a chiller unit that clamped to the front might be worth a punt.

I'm still waiting for water cooling for servers to be the norm.

Hacker flogs '42.5m freshly stolen logins' for seventy-five cents

Re: SSO

I believe that android has/ had a feature where one user has their login/ swipe pattern and a separate swipe pattern would go to different account - I haven't used it (if it exists) and it may have only been on cyanogenmod, but it sounds like a useful feature.

Did your UK biz just pay £1,500 to stop a DDoS? You've been had

Re: Lizard squad?

I just caught the tail end of this thread.

Plane food sees pilot grounded by explosive undercarriage

Re: Is there anyone on board that can fly a plane?

I have flown F-15s, Concorde and the Shuttle, Apache helicopters and many other aircraft, though I doubt that games and PC-based simulators really count,

NASA boffin wants FRIKKIN LASERS to propel lightsails

Slowing down

The original idea, as I'm sure people are aware, is that of sending probes to other systems, using the local star as a braking system.

Sending probes at a good fraction of the speed of light via lasers and light sails (most light sails were supposed to be a measured in tens of meters) was seen as a cheap way of sending things out and exploring the local sphere of space.

Sending light sails around just our solar system was somewhat more difficult, thought I'm sure there was a Clarke or Niven story about a solar race that used light sails.

I'm waiting for people to start proposing Rama-class vessels using nuclear propulsion (either bombs or electric ion) though I doubt NASA has the budget for something like that..

Boffins celebrate 30th anniversary of first deep examination of Uranus

Or Yormum maybe?

A recent survey reveals that Yorrmum is the size of a very large planet etc.

:-)

Sneaky Microsoft renamed its data slurper before sticking it back in Windows 10

Re: If someone can show me

After looking at the Linux Steam client Wine (and PlayOnLinux) would be the first port of call but you may also want to look at Cedega.

DS5: Vive la différence ... oh, and throw away the Citroën badge

Re: Meh...

I have has 4 GSs (all estates) - the first one suffered from noisy tappets but the others were great. They could really do with ABS but otherwise too many features to mention that I miss; starting handle (surprisingly handy), inboard brakes that you would struggle to get wet, brake pedal at the same level as your right foot when driving, ability to take the engine out using a trolley jack and of course user-selectable height adjustment of the car - very useful for changing wheels and putting heavy loads in the boot.

I also swapped some engines and gearboxes around and got a 1300cc engine with the 4 speed box which I had loaded to the roof with wood and pulled away with no issues.

Shame about the rust and fuel economy really, a modernised version would certainly turn heads.

French Playmobil heist: El Reg denies involvement

Of course that should be spelt 'coincidence' but I'm only being picky.

I agree that the rewarding of a bronze badge to a known (when they tell you of course) criminal - together with this article about a high-value theft makes for uncomfortable reading.

Also do the staff at El Reg believe that we wouldn't be able to piece this together? Hah - they under-misestimated us!

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushism)

:-)

Microsoft rolls out first 'major update' to Windows 10

Re: W00t!

Don't feed the trolls please.

Lone wolves could be behind multi-million dollar Cryptowall ransomware racket

Re: What's the vector, Victor?

No.

If it were that straight-forward we wouldn't be hearing about it.

A quick trawl found this site which has some information about the attack.

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/forums/t/532879/cryptowall-new-variant-of-cryptodefense/

Backup your important files onto a couple of types of media - DVDs and USB flash drives and assume that at some point, when you get attacked, your backups will also hold your files in encrypted form, hence something like DVDs that are written once and then left alone.

Oh and moving to Linux would also be a good idea.

:-)

Time Lords set for three-week battle over leap seconds

Re: Until we become a spacefaring race...

and a significant fraction of the population don't live on the surface of the earth, then most of the race will synchronise their day with the rising and setting of the sun

That makes no sense - the rising and setting of the sun? where - in space?

Once (if) we are a space-faring race we will need to have a time system that is robust enough to handle communication lag over light seconds and minutes, that people can agree on and will mean the same thing where ever everyone happens to be.

What's needed is a far away slow pulsar that can be used as a metronome, or to discover some thing similar to a half-life of reality.

Answers on postcards would almost certainly not be good enough :-)

Caption this: WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

1) You looking at me? well are ya?

2) Having made it more portable the new porta-light still needed way too many batteries to make it useful.

3) His wife still hadn't found out about the new toy that Jim had got.

4) The only plus was that now you could tell who Big Brother is watching.

'Death star' reaches out invisible hand, rips planet apart

Dwarf star and planets hmm.....

So the star is a white dwarf and the object circling it is a dwarf (Ceres sized) planet.

There must be a joke about this - maybe the star should be renamed 'Snow' and a hunt undertaken for the 6 missing companions :-)

https://www.google.co.uk/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=size+ceres+vs+pluto&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gfe_rd=cr&ei=dpUoVvTdD8XEUMevmvgI

Top VW exec blames car pollution cheatware scandal on 'a couple of software engineers'

Other makers

I wonder what the story at other manufacturers will be, since I doubt VW will be the only ones making use of technology to make their cars appear better to the buying public.

If your competitor appears to be making cars that are so much better than yours, in terms of fuel efficiency at least, then what do you do?

Get consigned to history or see what you can do to catch up??

Brown kid with Arab name arrested for bringing home-made clock to school

Re: Who's to blame

I would recommend the film 'Idiocracy' at this point, but I'm sure that everyone is aware of it already.

I am also bewildered that people can't tell a 'bomb' from a 'not bomb' (explosives, power and detonator being the three essentials) and that apparently a bomb needs a clock (with a display!) - if that is their means of identifying a suspect device then I wonder what the american(tm) police would make of booby traps and remote-triggered devices.

I also wonder what would happen if a person made a IED using only a single colour (not red) of wire - no doubt the item would be dismissed as a 'not bomb' since there is no red wire to cut.

<sigh>

The Martian: Matt Damon sciences the sh*t out of the red planet

I enjoyed the book immensely.

The story was as it should be, with good explanations and descriptions of what was happening. There are some stand out moments that I really hope they keep as they were in the book but I do share others views that Hollywood (tm) just can't tell a good story without passing it through their "how to make a money - making film" machine.

I hope that the excellent visuals live up to my imagination.

Paul Allen hunts down sunken Japanese WWII super-battleship

Re: Who trained the Japanese to torpedo bomb?

I don't think a Lancaster counts as a dive-bomber, but with a tall boy or grandslam I doubt people take much notice.

Google+ goes TITSUP. But WHO knew? How long? Anyone ... Hello ...

Re: Titis up?

No that's the aforementioned tits down/ normal state.

You should have typed g(*)(*)gle or similar.

:-)

Stray positrons caught on ISS hint at DARK MATTER source

Re: BBC to balme

So you're saying that Dr. Who isn't an entertainment program, but a documentary?

Where can I subscribe to your newsletter?

:-)

Boffins say they've got Lithium batteries the wrong way around

Re: @ Def

>Better start planning now for a major move to another galaxy

A more local star system would be a better bet, and a slightly further away one should be sufficient unless FTL transport is deemed to exist in which case a galaxy would be another option.

Boffins attempt to prove the universe is just a hologram

Re: I was thinking of another type of hologram

Well there could be two differently lost socks or, potentially, the same sock at different points in it's existence (though the same point in ours) though of course that could be used to prove sock time travel, which would open up a whole new can of worms - or a whole new washing machine if using the sock-idiom.

Why has the web gone to hell? Market chaos and HUMAN NATURE

Re: "teenagers hogging the phone line "

C20 for the lazy, CXX for the latin-trained

:-)

Oracle reveals 32-core, 10 BEEELLION-transistor SPARC M7

Re: Nice!

No idea, but maybe these servers will have liquid cooling as standard or something.

Which is about time to happen IMHO.

Top Gun display for your CAR: Heads-up fighter pilot tech

Re: Irrelevant observation number 1:

I use a speedview (http://www.speedview.co/) after market HUD, which just shows your speed - which I think is all you need, apart from voice navigation perhaps, else there will be too many distractions.

The idea of handling calls when driving is just wrong.

LOHAN acquires aircraft arboreal avoidance algorithm acronyms

My suggestions so far

Safe Landing Under Trees System

High Altitude Rentry Detect Correct Or Reject Emergency Software EXample

Careful And Methodical Extraneous Local Tree Observation Engine

World's only flyable WWII Lancaster bombers meet in Lincs

Re: Random factoid.

Well you could have started a discussion about the Buccaneer, or the TSR2 I suppose.

Russia, China could ban western tech if they want to live in the PAST

Re: Heck no...

My 990 is still going Ok, and I bought mine in the new year - I have found one location that doesn't allow either sim to work, but away from there it's normally fine - the tunnels out of Kings Cross can be troublesome though :-)

After all a quad-core (1.5Ghz), dual sim, dual camera, microSD (up to 64Gb) phoe with 2Gb RAM and 32Gb ROM for £200 from Amazon is worth a try isn't it?

NASA tests crazytech flying saucer thruster, could reach Mars in days

Re: Even accounting...

A space elevator would be far more useful.

App permissions? Pah! Rogue Android soft can 'place phone calls at will'

4.2.1 is SDK >=17 and vulnerable on my Zopo Captain S

My particular version wasn't listed on the website, but the call came up despite no permissions granted to do so.

Of course there is no OS update available from the manufacturer yet - and Cyanogenmod doesn't seem to be available for my phone yet :-(

Revealed: GCHQ's beyond top secret Middle Eastern internet spy base

Re: Why did we publish this?

And of course we are the ones paying for it.

IT'S ALIVE! ISEE-3 responding to commands

amazing

Also the whole story behind it http://www.rockethub.com/42228 and more at NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/content/isee-3-an-old-friend-comes-to-visit-earth/ is well worth a read through.

Achtung! Use maths to smash the German tank problem – and your rival

Re: The tank used for the illustration ...

I was wondering if I were going to be the first to notice and post :-) not by a long shot,

Concurr - ISU122 sp assault gun

Thats why I read the Reg comments..

Russia to suspend US GPS stations in tit-for-tat spat

Re: American GPS stations

I think you have to be american for that to make sense: ie. the World series, MIss Universe, .com etc.

SpaceX touts latest gear: new module, rocket demo

Space Elevators

I think that more effort should be put into building space elevators, rockets are rather a dead-end as far as the future goes.

The LiftPort Group (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiftPort_Group) are trying, but more needs to be done.

With the development of usable graphene we are seeing the first of the real technical hurdles go down.