Posts by Stoneshop

Mars rover Opportunity spots WALL-E in crater ramble

Re: Normal eyes?

Why can't the rovers taken a Canon 60D up there

Because those rovers were launched some eight years before the Canon 60D was?

@Chris 19 Re: time on mars

- the am/pm time format isn't compatible with planets where a day lasts less than 12 hours.

You may want to rethink that, and ponder the meaning of the 'm'. Hint: it's to do with the middle of the day; the moment your local star is highest over your local horizon. Whether that's just a few earth minutes after sunrise, years or even ages, unless your planet's rotation is exactly in sync with its orbit, your 'meridiem' will be there. If your planet is synced you will have to travel to lunch if you're not there already.

Re: Dramatic?

"Interesting maybe, not dramatic."

Ok, then you go there and make that dramatic photo.

Re: time on mars

"It happens that the Mars day is 24h 39m long"

And our human wake/sleep cycle tends to lengthen roughly three-quarters of an hour when left free-running (i.e. no synchronisation with daylight/nighttime). This can only mean one thing.

Sunshine nudges asteroid into odd orbit

Re: A 60g sample?

14 hamsters per horse!

$units

2526 units, 72 prefixes, 56 nonlinear units

You have: 380e3*53 watt

You want: horsepower

* 27008.185

/ 3.7025813e-05

SpaceX does what it HASN'T done before: Dragon in close ISS flyby

Re: Patent lawyers... IN SPAAACE!

As long as they burn up on re-entry, or have their life-support systems (do patent tro^H^H^Hlawyers have a life anyway?) mutually invalidated by patent violations, I fail to see the problem.

Boffins develop nanoscale vacuum tube running at .46 THz

Re: Could be disruptive

"should be interesting to see how the 'valve sound' lasts when it cost 2p, switches on instantly and lasts forever."

Nah, the Real Valve Sound Connoisseurs will still stick to amps that contribute significantly to global warming, have slightly lethal voltages present at the anode cap, present a serious hernia risk due to the weight of the chassis, transformers and chokes, and require hunting for exotic NOS firebottles every few hundred hours. Otherwise it's not the Real Valve Sound.

"Now if someone can do the same at 5kv then my electrostatic wall speakers can be used in summer..."

Just put your amp in the fridge; if you don't want to lose sight of that dull orange glow the obvious choice is to get yourself one of those glass-door units used in bars and such.

Vulture 2 trigger triggers serious head-scratching

Re: Definitely, I've missed a lot, but...

The same launch-on-burst trigger can be achieved with a switch or strain gauge detecting whether there's still pull on the suspension cord.

Re: Balloon radius

Also, what is the right size? And what is the production tolerance on those balloons, in other words, how reliable can the size be used as an indicator that it's close to bursting?

FIring just before balloon burst

SImple. You send a signal that the balloon has burst to CERN, they rig that to one of their FTL neutrino thingamajigs, and presto, you have a trigger signal back at LOHAN a wee little time earlier.

Maybe they can even send some of that lead they have flying around at high speeds right up LOHAN's, err, exhaust, for some extra impulse.

It has been discussed and dismissed

because a) a mass on top of a balloon is not stable either, b) those balloons change size quite a bit during ascent, which your attachment method has to take into account, and c) those balloons are not half as robust as required for such a setup.

Ouch! Facebook slumps below IPO value on day 2

Re: I said *bitter* pleasure

Vass ist dies "bitter" of vitch You speak? Schadenfreude ist an Emotionalstate, and Ich understand das dies "bitter" ist another Emotionalstate, aber zat goes not zogether. Nicht two Emotionalstates at ze zame Time, das ist against ze Rules. Ordnung muss sein, und two Emotionalstates gemixed ist not Ordnung. Also, Schadenfreude it is.

Thailand dries off and ramps up IT spending

Neither is IDC

whose report the quote is taken from.

SpaceX and Bigelow sign deal for inflatable space stations in orbit

"a pressure suit with life support system"

So, those that have no life can just dig up that old suit your mom made out of a duvet.

(mine's the radiation-hardened micrometeorite-resistant blanket)

Intelligence a genetic mistake

"that it except the challenge"

QED

Re: @Blofeld's Cat

Yes.

Dinosaur flatulence may have warmed Earth

Anne Elk (Mrs.) has this theory

(eeeEEEchm)

that Brontosaures are thin at one end, much much thicker in the middle, and thin again at the other end.

Not a peep though about whether they run on methane.

Praise for slick six's entries in dirty snaps compo

Indeed

VAX production was wound down some five years after Alpha took off, and it was Alpha that was killed after Digital was taken over by Compaq.

We've shut down the last of our VAXes a bit over a year ago, replacing them with DS10's.

Glider pilot 'swallowed camera memory' say plunge tragedy cops

How?

I've seen a setup used for collecting the contents of drug-smugglers bowels, in use at an airport; it's a toilet that simply has the waste pipe go into a holding basin in the next room, where the excrement can be probed at leisure by the investigating bodies. It's not out of the question that facilities like these are available to police departments as well.

(where's the noxious gases icon?)

A suspended sentence?

That won't fly.

Moon at annual perigee this weekend

Re: 10-1 on that

At sunset there's a lot more dust and atmospheric disturbance dispersing the shorter wavelengths, making sunsets appear a lot redder than sunrises. On land that is; if you're out on the ocean you're less likely to notice much difference between them.

Zuckerberg: Now share your organs with Facebook friends

No

They've all been rejected due to lack of braininess.

Biennial boner blights Beemer biker

Re: BMW drivers...

This is about a BMW rider, not a driver

Re: Maybe something like this one...

Nowhere in the article and its links can I find the model op the bike, but I am fairly sure it is not the GS/PD. I have one, and unless you're a complete money-wasting gadget freak, buying an aftermarket saddle is totally unnecessary. I have one, and it is the most comfortable motorcycle saddle I have ever sat on. For long rides (>10h) a sheepskin cover is recommended, though.

Apple sued for every touchscreen device by Flatworld prof

Re: I seem to remember Tower Records ...

It's not touchscreen tech that this is about, it's gesture-based actions using touchscreens.

Taxan touts tablet for bathing beauties

Waterproof and shockproof?

Then it might become a useful device for taking with me on a motorbike, as a replacement for the stack of maps and papers I have to have with me at events.

(having no moving parts doesn't necessarily mean it's capable of withstanding travel in a motorcycle tank bag)

'Attitudes to robot sex will change'

"but for the rest of the population, it should remain a human only arrangement."

Do not impose your reactionary morals on other people of free will.

"by 2050 the Amsterdam sex club will probably have to be partially submersible"

If that's your kink, someone will surely cater to it; aside from that we're quite capable of keeping stuff dry that would otherwise be under several meters of water. There's also the option of using houseboats, as practiced in Utrecht already.

Behind Facebook's $1bn Instagram antitrust dodge

"but it's not printable in polite company"

So, just go ahead and print it.

Zuckerberg blew $1bn on Instagram 'without telling Facebook board'

"a total of three people on twitter didn't like it."

On of which turns out to be Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. There's also an Apple fanboi that quit: Phil Schiller.

Re: Fanboy chagrin?

"Only three people said so,"

It used to be that there were only three people on the Internet*), and everything you**) see is just impersonation by those three. It's up to seven now, and because of the workload and the immensity of keeping track of who said what we're considering getting another two or maybe three on board, and also someone who can write us a computer program to do the administrative heavy lifting. Twitter was a gift from heaven though, we've got 99.9872% of the accounts set to auto-retweet, which cuts down tremendously on the amount of original (hah) content we have to inject there.

*) or was that just Usenet? I'm losing track a bit

**) you're not actually on the Internet, you just think so. You're impersonated by one of us.

Re: Interesting, though...

"a shed load of Lawyers"

That's the wrong collective noun. The correct one is "a gaol of lawyers", although "a wolfpack of lawyers" is usually considered not incorrect either.

Battlefield Earth ruled worst film EVER

Re: A lot of people have short memories

I was visiting a friend in Heidelberg (early 1990's) when a movie theatre announced it would be showing "The Worst Five Films Ever"; unfortunately it was quite some weeks away still and at least I wouldn't be there then.

Their Worst 5 list was taken from a well-known movie critic magazine, and contained *TWO* films by Ed Wood (Plan 9 and Glen or Glenda) and also included Manos. The other two I can't remember.

Going over the current list it seems that a lot of effort has been put, especially in the past 15 years or so, into pushing poor old Ed off his pedestal.

Cosmic ray source riddle mystery now even more mysterious

"chalk dust"

Then let's keep John McEnroe away from this detector.

'Perfect storm' drives electronics stores to EXTINCTION

"I can buy my tea to eat in front of the new telly"

A rather unconventional culinary habit, I must say.

Re: what I predict ...

Here in the Netherlands Dixon's (which wasn't much of a highstreet retailer here anyway) has been relegated to a shop-in-a-shop at Vroom & Dreesmann, a chain comparable to Marks & Spencer's or Woolworth's and for the past decade teetering on the brink of total collapse itself. Others have gone under already, or have merged and then gone under.

The only electronics and household goods retailer that seems to be doing well (as in: still opening new stores) is MediaMarkt/Saturn.

Boffins tout solar efficiency boost

Laden or un-laden?

That coconut's full of electrons. How can you suggest it's un-laden?

@Ru

"Trickier to build HVDC links across the Med than it is to build them overland."

7.7 nautical miles. Way less than the 300 nmi that the NorNed link spans. And Tunisia-Sicily is still below 100nmi.

"As the crow flies"

From Africa to England? Everyone knows it's swallows that do that, so maybe we should be looking into how many electrons can be stuffed into a coconut.

@Bronek Kozicki

"loses when sending power over large distances"

This can be remedied by using the electricity locally (for sufficiently tolerant values of 'locally') to create hydrogen, and from there hydrocarbons, for which the infrastructure for storing and transporting is already in place.

The other point you bring up does not have a simple solution. In fact, it may even be exacerbated.

Compulsory coding in schools: The new Nerd Tourism

@DJV

>"fixed" problems by going away and doing completely different

This is similar to "Explain it to the bear first": a stuffed teddy bear sitting on a chair outside some University IT department's helpdesk office. People would have to stop thinking about whatever problem they were having to deal with on their on level (and probably going round in circles on that level), step back and describe the problem into small, easy to understand chunks that a stuffed teddy bear can grok. Cut down significantly the number of helpdesk requests.

PLANET-SWAP shock: Stars grabbed dirtballs from other clusters

Re: Artist's impression

Look, if you want to go take a photograph of something which you know won't be illuminated, you bring a flash. Or two. Or half a dozen. In this case it's probably a dozen thermonuclear devices. And if it's a long journey there, a couple of days extra setting up the lighting so that you'll have the best image possible will be inconsequential.

Two worlds orbiting each other without a star.

I propose we name them Fred and Ginger

Re: IANAA

By putting a "roughly" into that sentence.

Gmail goes titsup for 30 MILLION PUNTERS

Re: Lies, dammed lies, and statistics

"Google admitted that an outage last night to its Gmail service affected around 10 per cent of its userbase"

Before you choose the Pedantic Grammar Nazi icon, make sure your pedanticity is up to scratch.

Toshiba gobbles IBM's POS biz for $850m

"Hewlett-Packard, which is number two in POS systems"

I disagree, but this article is clearly using a different expansion from 'POS' than I am.

Ikea to integrate TV, Blu-ray, sound system into sideboard

"This is a solution for a problem that doesn't really exist"

Well, apparently some of their customers do think otherwise, and in large enough numbers that IKEA, like any business worth its salt, considered offering them a solution for this.

SpaceX Dragon gets green-light for launch to Space Station

Re: Elite

"Docking computers used to scrape the sides quite often"

Well then, don't let those docking computers fly around freely where they can do that kind of damage.

Anyway, fenders, strips of styrofoam, bits of old tyres are tried and tested ways of minimising scrapes. Or they should send a bag of polyfilla and a tin of paint up with the rest of the payload.

Shuttle Discovery to buzz Washington DC at 1,500 feet

Re: A bit pointless?

And everyone looking at it will be directly below the flight path, hmm?

Whisky IN SPAAAAACE: Zero-G Scotch is matured aboard the ISS

Re: Aged not Distilled

Even though this particular batch will be *AGED* in space, there's nothing stopping whisky connoi^Waffici^Wsnobs looking forward to the first batch *DISTILLED* in space.

Except for the fact that distillation is dependent on gravity, but such physical trivia isn't going to stop the connoi^Waffici^Wsnobs.