Posts by VeganVegan

Indian navy computers stormed by malware-ridden USBs

Simples

re-wire the 5-volt USB slot so that it provides 15-volt (or maybe even household voltage?).

That should take care of thumb drives, and dumb drivers.

World+dog discovers hi-res aerial maps, thanks to Google and Apple

Re: You appear very loud to me.

I'm guilty as charged!

Never under-estimate the usefulness of being ignorant!

The ignorant are those that bleat the loudest

See title

LOHAN seeks failsafe for explosive climax

Zero pressure balloon

LOHAN could use a zero pressure balloon, that does not burst, potentially has much larger lifting capacities, and can go much higher than latex, pressurized balloons. They can also be made in vrious shapes (e.g., a cube).

A drawback is the expense of the balloon. Another drawback is that they are a bit more fragile to handle during launch.

However, with the shed-centric approach taken here, it may be feasible to manufacture your own zpb. The main skills needed are some elementary geometry, to design the shape of the skin panels, and the ability to fuse the panels (plastic sheets) to form the balloon skin....

For the launch itself, laying out the balloon on a large enough piece of tarp so that the balloon is kept neat & untangled & undamaged does the job.

The biggest drawback: the balloon needs a self-destruct mechanism, to prevent it from traveling all over the world. Perhaps LOHAN can be perched on the top of a cubical zpb, such that ignition burns a hole thru the balloon skin?

LOHAN sucks Reg reader's instrument to death

Re: I bet this is a bug...

For the processor/compiler used, do you know what happens when the value gets above the 16-bit limit?

<DataMassaging>

Perhaps the drift down to 20,000 actually indicates 32k +20k = 52k feet, and the later 30k is the loss of vacuum back down to 30k.

</DataMassaging>

Universe has more hydrogen than we thought

New weight unit!

the echidna

LOHAN sucks 27 inches

Re: Check your tubing

I used to have a vacuum pump maintaining 50-100 microns vacuum over a period of months, using a dedicated single-vane rotary pump (I forget what cfm capacity).

As already mentioned, some of the tricks are:

1. Thin coat of high vacuum grease (no volatiles) to coat all joints.

2. Use metal T-tubes and straight-thru connectors. The ones used for plumbing (water supply line) work fine. The plastic gadgets you have may be leaking like a sieve! For the shut-off valve: try to use a metal ball-valve. Make sure its connectors are greased, and apply teflon tape to the hose-valve joints on the outside, any leaks will tend to pull the teflon inwards towards the leak, potentially sealing it.. The worm-gear clamps you are using work fine.

3. thick vacuum hose. You can get away with tygon tubing, if it is thick enough (mostly so it doesn't collapse under the vacuum).

4. Use as short a length of hose as possible. More hose, more volatiles...

5. Upon startup, do open the gas ballast, and let it pump for an hour or two to get rid of volatiles in the system (especially if the oil is old or of unknown provenance). And do check the oil level (via the idiotic little sight window).

Don't let the pressure get to you!

What is SpaceX Dragon's secret cargo?

Re: It won't be spam

Sardines, perhaps?

(What? No fish icon? What the fish will have to do!)

LOHAN starts to feel the barometric pressure

Sensing balloon burst

Assuming that you want to sense the bursting of the balloon to use as the ignition trigger, the most direct way is to sense the pressure drop in the balloon itself:

Inflate the balloon, and then seal a pressure sensor in the inflation tube. The pressure should be positive (one would hope). When the balloon bursts, the pressure goes down, the feed from the sensor is then used to trigger ignition.

Google Drive Issues on Mac

Re: Down with this sort of thing....

Google is like a black hole.

First it hoovered up all web pages on the intertubes.

Then it nabbed onlline videos.

It tried/is in the process of sucking in all the holdings of librairies.

Now it is trying to grab everybody's files.

Fancy doing a Google search on somebody else's private documents?

I say use Google Drive only if your files are heavily encrypted.

<icon: Google are ultimate pirates! /icon>

Wannabe-human bots face 2012 Turing Test in Turing's old office

Re: Agreed

My psychiatrist does a good imitation of 'Eliza'.

Ted Nugent fined for failing to kill bear

Re: Weird laws for sure

iirc, it's illegal to shoot an arrow in London on Sundays.

Boffins tout solar efficiency boost

Longevity?

And how long will those organic dye molecules survive the daily assault by the (admittedly low-energy) photons?

Gmail goes titsup for 30 MILLION PUNTERS

Re: Smudge mode

What is Red Dwarf?

Rabid skunks attack US

Re: "Thought this was a story about our elections"

@Arctic fox: arctic foxes apparently constitute the major rabies reservoir in the circum-polar region; see, for example, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22102679.

Facebook accused of 'wanton' use of Canadian woman's pics

Re: Welcome to Facebook, sweetheart

You can check-out any time you like,

But you can never leave!

Tibetan activists' Macs targeted using trojan-laden MS Office files

Re: Nice of Microsoft...

The Mac OS is *nix underneath the GUI veneer.

The backdoor apparently operates in userland, not in root.

Unless you make the user confirm every time a new port is opened for network access, it will be hard to prevent this kind of backdoor.

LOHAN demonstrates impressive sucking skills

Re: Not enough suck?

Can't understand why someone down-voted you. You got my up vote.

It's standard on-the-cheap practice to cascade vacuum pumps to get to lower pressures.

Visa shows off data centre 'moat'

Re: Shhhhhhh

Are you hunting wabbits?

Los Alamos fires BLOODY BIG MAGNET

minor gripe

100 tesla = 1 million gauss = 10,000 100-gauss frig magnets.

What is frightening are magnetars, boffins claim that they have gigatesla magnetic fields.

Microsoft tarts up custom Mustang Muscle Microserfmobile

Re: Now we know...

I totally agree.

Remember that US warship out on sea trials that had to be towed back to port?

So, what IS the worst film ever made?

Un Chien Andalou

an eye-opening experience.

(icon: ouch, my left eye)

Earth once had hazy methane atmosphere like ice-moon Titan

Early faint Sun

The young Sun was quite a bit less luminous than nowadays, so the methane atmosphere might have helped keep water liquid on the Earth's surface.

Interestingly, there's evidence that the Earth went thru a massive ice age (snowball Earth) a few hundred million years after the period dealt with in the article. I don't know when most of the methane was replaced by an oxygen atmosphere, but a faint young Sun, and the loss of a warming blanket due to reaction with oxygen might have contributed to snowball Earth.

(flame/methane/warmth)

UPDATE: GAGA team hunts down grass-smoking ROBOT

Re: Buy a sheep

and automatically applies fertilizer as well.

Lévy walk

Put a brick or concrete barrier all around the grass so it cannot escape, then set the bot loose on a Lévy walk.

Re: SPB Banner

Works in Safari

LOHAN is heading towards REHAB

Re: Vaseline?

High vacuum grease is better: better seal (high viscocity), low volatiles.

It's relatively inexpensive, available in small quantities. Or, head to the nearest university chemistry department and cadge some.

Robot NIGHTMARE sets new leggy-bot speed record

No worries,

Stand firm, get a tight grip on your cricket bat, and try to swat a sixer.

Top Gun 2: It's happening - and the choice of star is stirring controversy

Re: Storyline...

or do a playmobil version of it

LOHAN's flying truss: One orb or two?

Re: Vertical

I like this idea:

The pressing issue is the balloon(s) swelling so much that it / they block LOHA's path. Perhaps cutting the balloon tether & launch can be coordinated? Another idea is to intentionally bursting the balloon. Launch LOHAN during free fall, using girder-mounted aerodynamic surfaces or little drag chutes to stabilize its orientation. This is easiest if the girder is imagined as an arrow: add drag-inducing features to the top of the vertically hung girder, and a pointy tip at the other end

Swivel mount

How about mounting LOHAN, not directly on the girder, but on a rail hung off of a swivel mount, so that LOHAN will point up vertically, regardless of whether the main girder is horizontal or not. Have to make sure that the swivel doesn't freeze up, perhaps by using kel-f surfaces, and loose tolerances (bolt size << hole size). If you want to guard against the other axis tilting, you can put in a double swivel mount...

PARIS soars to Guinness World Record

Congratulations!

Onwards & upwards!

HP's Whitman suggests Googorola may close Android

Google might not close off Android...

She might not be totally off the mark. It all depends on if Google keeps Motorola at a sufficient arm's length to overcome the suspicions of the other Android vendors. These vendors would abandon Android if they think that Google will be playing favourites. Look at what happens with the Microsoft music fiasco (plays for sure, etc.)

Swiss space-cleaning bot grabs flying junk, hurls itself into furnace

Re: Reverse Thrust!

I am not very sure of this, but I believe that slowing down an orbiting object actually raises its orbit. For example, low Earth orbit satellites whiz around the Earth several times a day, while those way up higher can be geostationary. What you need to do is the opposite of what you propose: speed up the junk, to lower its orbit.

Reptile boffins spot world's smallest chameleon

It's small enough to hide

in the Hary Nosa then?

LOHAN lifts skirt on 3D printed parts

Wrong preposition?

Would hew to (as in conform to or adhere to) suit you?

sincerely,

Your fellow pedant.

Ancient cave girl genome could crack Man's genetic puzzle

Who's to say our imaginary friend did not create everything

just 2 seconds ago?

Our entire imagined lives would be nothing but a joke.

large file size

Yes, they could encode the 4 bases (and all the combinations of ambiguities) using a nibble (4-bits, one each for A,C,G and T), as we used to do many years ago when we only had 48K RAM and 122K floppy to work with.

The large file size is more likely because each position in the genome is covered by an average of 30 reads (70% of 3E9-base genome x 30x coverage = 63 gigabases, however you want to encode it).

The reason for needing 30 or more times coverage at each position is because the high error rates during the sequencing, a combination of the quality of the DNA and the inherent limitations of the sequencer.

US Navy preps railgun for tests

Where to escape to?

At a sailing/steaming/turbine speed of 30 knots, the ship would travel 0.5 nautical mile in a minute. The turning rate of large warships is not too impressive, but let's pretend that it can be instantaneous.

Ergo, the target could be anywhere in a circle of radius ca. 0.5 nautical mile. That's what the shooter has to aim for, and that's part of the reason the old fashioned battleship guns frequently have multiple barrels, to be able to fire barrages. I've heard that navies that have nuclear weapons are loathe to forsake them, because they have a large destruction radius, and, after all, you don't make permanent holes in the water.

From the point of view of the target, the trick is to use, e.g., radar, to find the projectile (the horizon is 50 miles away, so you won't see the projectile until it is already half way to you), predict its path, and avoid the patch of ocean where it will hit. Not an easy task, especially if the projectile is a slender 10 kg tungsten rod.

Koala food may power US Defence force

You are perfectly correct.

I believe that they were introduced (by Leyland Stanford), as a potential source of wood for railroad ties. They proved unsuitable for that purpose, and now all they do is shed debris and stink all over the state.

Hong Kongers protest over end to all-you-can-eat tariffs

What is so glorious about Mong Kok?

It's just a translitertion of 'busy corner' in the local dialect.

Symantec 'fesses up: 'Code theft worse than we thought'

A draining endeavour

"Pouring through thousands of lines of code looking for holes sounds like quite a chore, unless you are very well paid."

What are you proposing to pour? A cheeky white, a robust red, or perhaps a dry sherry? Any of them should drain through the holes in the code rather nicely, and easily.

Now, poring through that code is a different matter...

Apple will not kill iPad 2 at iPad 3 debut

Knee jerk much?

I hear that it is purely a spinal reflex, no higher brain functions involved.

Japanese boffins fear virus nicked spacecraft blueprints

will

low orbit ion cannon be satisfactory?

Rumoured 'GarageBand for e-books' to bulldoze textbook biz

The race to embrace & extend ePUB3 is on!

(see title)

The Sons of Khan and the Pascal Spring

This is particularly amusing

since programming the original MacOS used either assembly or Pascal (see. e.g., the venerable 5 volume "Inside Macintosh" guide from 1985).

A basic knowledge of Latin may be useful, but the world has moved on somewhat in the meantime.

(Flame icon, 'cos how many of us can still start a fire by striking together a couple of chunks of rock?).

iPad typos are Apple's fault, not yours - new claim

This is a conflict between

expectations for keyboards versus pointing devices (mice).

The finger is the replacement of the mouse as far as touch screens are concerned.

Hence, mouseDown and mouseUp events. As any fule snows, they do different things.

Hence, pick up your fingers when you are typing.

HSBC pinpoints branches with sub-atomic accuracy

With that kind of position accuracy,

Your momentum must be awfully imprecise.

Any chance that this can be applied to the LOHAN project?

Cops cuff rectal shoplifter

Was it a

Zune?

MIT student unicycles, Segway-style

Well! If you insist on

running over helmets and sundry other road hazards, nothing will protect you.