Posts by Dr. G. Freeman

BOFH: But soft! What light through yonder filing cabinet breaks?

Re: Pretty sure...

I think the cleaner, George, owns the building ? (from reading old BoFHs)

So, probably on a percentage of their schemes for his retirement fund.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Re: Rural...

https://www.railfuturescotland.org.uk/img/Scotland-rail-decarbonisation-proposals-to-2035.png

The Scottish Government are talking about electrifying the lines up to Inverness and Aberdeen sometime between 2030 and 2045, (link above is the most optimistic) depending on who you talk to, with the line between them getting done...., well, early 22nd Century is the best guess.

Seeing as we've got these new 125 Trains going round now, don't expect a change for a while.

I was hoping by now we'd have those cool Maglev trains or something

What job title would YOU want carved on your gravestone? 'Beloved father, Slayer of Dragons, Register of Domains'

Gordon Douglas Freeman (1981- ...)

If found please return here.

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

Come back windows 3.1, all is forgiven.

Perseverance Mars rover sets off on its first mission, to boldly drill and return samples as no rover has drilled before

Hope they both get interesting results, which means more probes, landers, and hopefully humans finally getting there.

Hate to break it to you, but football's not coming home if this AI pundit is to be believed

Can we just cut out all the hassle and just have the AI predict the whole season, and take its answers as the results ?

Might mean my team (Forres Mechanics FC) win a game for a change.

Royal Yacht Britannia's successor to cost about 1 North of England NHS IT consultancy framework

Re: Global warming

Finally a use for all the MPs, political advisors, researchers etc.

Give them an oar each.

There's your green technology.

Be careful, 007. It’s just had a new coat of paint: Today is D-day for would-be Qs to apply to MI6

Thought Q was short for Quartermaster ?

As in find stuff, make stuff and give (grudgingly) out stuff, a job I'd be perfect for as a bodger, tinkerer, and miserable git who hates sharing things.

From the job description sound more like the computer hacker Alan Cumming in Goldeneye's PHB.

Beyond video to interactive, personalised content: BBC is experimenting with rebuilding its iPlayer in WebAssembly

Will all this faffing about with the iPlayer mean that there'll be decent things to watch on it, or am I just getting my hopes up again ?

Lambda School, a coding bootcamp that takes a cut of your next tech salary, now takes a 30% cut in staff

Re: Identured Servitude Agreement

"I can't wait to see what Slavery will be modernized euphemistically into by these clowns."

Through the Jobcentre (UK), they're called "workplace trials"- where you work 40 hrs for an employer for no wages (or even travel costs) to see if you are good enough to work for them.

Had three of the things before- one at a major grocery chain, one at a major high street discount retailer, and another at another retailer masquerading as a charity shop- each time just brought in as staff to cover shifts, then released after then 40 hours for someone else's turn.

China claims it has stolen a march on 6G with colossal patent portfolio

So how many Gs to go until we get to H ?

Technoking of comedy? Elon Musk to host Saturday Night Live

Re: Musical Guest

Thought she was still on maternity leave with [keyboard mash] ?

Lego's Space Shuttle Discovery: No trouble with Hubble, but the stickers will drive a grown man to insanity

Re: Welcome back

Green ?

What luxury-

Mine was red, yellow, blue, black, white and grey- green was just coming in as a colour, for the forest men figures (who were re stickered as Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles) as I was growing out of Lego for the first time.

Now, back into Lego again, surprised at the range of colours, but still miss my old sets.

Mine's the one with the Lego spacemen in the pocket.

Average convicted British computer criminal is young, male, not highly skilled, researcher finds

They're low in the proportion that get caught.

Therefore, female hackers are the better ones.

Mullet over: Aussie boys' school tells kids 'business in the front, party in the back' hairstyle is 'not acceptable'

Re: Very open-minded

It wasn't a school on the East Coast of Scotland, just North of the mythical city of Dundee, with initials matching alcoholics anonymous (which the staff should have been members of), with Black and Gold colours was it ?

If so, and if it was early 90s, I was part of that act of rebellion, and remember it well.

Scottish National Party members found among list of names signed up to rival Alba Party after website whoopsie

Re: "Donald, where's your troosers?"

"Alba's first mistake was to name themselves after a purveyor of ratty old clock radios"

Along those lines, with Salmond's reputation, could have called themselves Bush.

The kids aren't all right: Fall in GCSE compsci students is bad news for employers and Britain's future growth plans

Re: Never been a better time or a lower bar for entry.

"It's like telling an aspiring teaching that it's fine they're cleaning toilets, you're cleaning toilets *in* *a* *school*!"

Have actually been told that by a recruitment coach (to do with the Jobcentre), go be a cleaner at the hospital, get my "foot in the door" to work in the hospital labs.

Millimetre-sized masses: Physics boffins measure smallest known gravitational field (so far)

Gravity is still tiny compared to the strong and weak nuclear forces inside the nucleus (10^35 and 10^26 times bigger respectively) so they drown out any effect from it.

The four fundamental forces (electromagnetism, gravity, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force) hold things together, and all of them have a coupling constant, that it the strength needed to overcome the force.

like how much effort you have to use to pick up something (gravity), compared to trying to pick up the same thing if it was attached to a big magnet (electromagnetism), which we've measured and it's 36 orders of magnitude bigger.

UK Space Agency will pay a new CEO £125,000 to run non-existent space programme

Re: C'mon, people! This isn't rocket science.

Give Dildo Hardly the job !

If she naturally screws up the job, then who knows instead of a non-existent space program, we might get a superb manned FTL starship program (HMS Enterprise ?)

MPs slam UK's £22bn Test and Trace programme for failing to provide evidence that it slows COVID pandemic

So, the Track, Isolate, Test for Suspected Unprecedented Pathogen (TITSUP) system went Tits up, what's the problem? Did exactly what the Government described in the document.

And £22 Billion went into the pension pots of a few of the People in charge's mates, again, what they wanted.

It wasn't about saving lives, or even protecting them, if it were, they would have done things that actually worked. (theoretically)

No joy for Julian Assange as Uncle Sam confirms it will keep pushing for WikiLeaker's extradition to America

Re: Right to remain?

He's Australian, so maybe here under an ancestry visa, or permanent resident before moving to Ecuador, then Belmarsh ?

UK college courses show decade-long surging interest in computer science – just as new intake was locked down

As a furloughed physicist, I resemble that remark !

One careful driver: Make room in the garage... Bloodhound jet-powered car is up for sale

Is it road legal ?

Just wondering for getting it to the Transport Museum (the London one or Glasgow one, or any of the others)

Reg reader's XXXbox oddity: The BBC4 topless thumbnail trauma whodunnit

"displaying an image of a suggestively posed semi-nude person alongside BBC4"

Please be Hannah Fry, or Lucy Worsely. I know standards have dropped on there (the usual "Dumbing down" arguments), but a man can dream.

Suckers for punishment, we added a crawler transporter to our Saturn V

suppose you could always mix the two, 3D print some conversion parts (http://fffff.at/free-universal-construction-kit) and have the mechanical structural bits of meccano (and the addition of motors, servos etc.), with the aesthetically pleasing parts of lego (no big holes around the place), and use other toy building parts as needed.

What can the 1944 OSS manual teach us before we all return to sabotage the office?

Re: That list!

During the house arrest we've been under since March, been writing a version of the Anarchists' Cookbook that works, mostly out of sheer boredom, and to see if I can.

Apart from the spiced prawn* recipes, going quite well.

(not in the original cookbook, but was in a similar "underground" publication.)

HP bows to pressure, reinstates free monthly ink plan... for existing customers

Does that include the test pages, alignment pages, ink nozzle cleaning test pages, etc. that it spews out ?

What does my neighbour's Tesla have in common with a stairlift?

Suppose telling the car "Tesla. delete star-dot star" might help.

Either that or a strategic Electromagnetic Pulse in its general direction, could work in a pinch.

Japan pours millions into AI-powered dating to get its people making babies again

I know, I ended up with the Wife.

(Joke in case she's reading this)

Mysterious Utah monolith mysteriously disappears without trace

It's not gone anywhere, it's still where it was.

We've moved.

Cool, cool, cool: Screwdriver-wielders delve into the guts of an Xbox Series X

Re: Gratuitous TV Reference

Wonder if they have a portable version called ORAC ?

Missing Alan Turing memorabilia to be returned to Blighty from the US, 36 years after it went walkabout

Yes, it was in good faith- not just Alan Turing, and Paul Dirac, but statues of other greats like Dot Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin. People to look up to

With all this pulling down statues malarkey and stuff (which I don't agree with, but anyway), why not put one or two up of Old Alan in their place?

FYI: NASA appears to have scooped dirt from an asteroid 200 million miles away and plans to bring it back home

Re: "While you were out..."

Have to go to the nearest depot instead, which is at Alpha Centauri, next to the planning office.

They handed you a "while you were out card" as the probe wasn't put on the delivery vehicle today.

If you're feeling down, know that we've just buried a heat sensor in an alien planet. If NASA can get through Mars soil, we can get through 2020

So, how deep does it have to go to get to the caramel ?

Mine's the one with the chocolate bars in the pockets.

Years after we detected two neutron stars crashing into each other, we're still picking up X-rays. We don't know why

A theory-

Things went bang. When that happens smoke comes out.

X-rays equivalent to smoke when neutron stars bang into each other ?

So, whatever is sitting there now is smouldering x-rays.

'Work is an activity not a place' got tired on LinkedIn about three months ago, but Citrix just based its new logo on the idea

" what have Citrix senior management done that they need a distraction for...?"

Let a version of their software out that actually works all the time ? I know, preposterous, right ?

India connects submarine cable to islands where some still live in the stone age

Re: Speck of land....

Have they discovered fire yet in Wigan ?

Last time I was there at the station waiting for a connecting train, was asked for a light (for cigarettes) that often, began to wonder.

First alligators, then dogs, now Basil Fawlty is trying to standardise social distancing measures

Sadly, here in Aberdeen, people couldn't understand how far one metre was (inside the pub), so we're in Lockdown again.

It's all well and good telling people to stay apart, but when they lack any spatial awareness at all, well, it's easier talking to the pigeons. (who just want to talk about political uprisings- coup, coup)

Boffins baffled as supergiant star just vanishes – either it partially blew itself apart or quietly turned into a black hole

Maybe, and this is just a guess, when it went bang, and became a black hole, the hole then sucked in all the light, and no photons were quick/far enough away to get to our telescope ? Why we didn't see it go bang, You know what it's like when you first wake up, just want to stuff your face.

CERN puts two new atom-smashers on its shopping list. One to make Higgs Bosons, then a next-gen model six times more energetic than the LHC

(Conflict of interest- sometimes work at CERN)

£21 Billion over the next thirty years isn't really that much- I'll probably be playing with my grandkids by the time the Great Big Collider switches on, instead of watching my newborn Son/ portable radioactive napalm generator (delete as applicable) try and work out his universe.

Like has already been said, it's not about the subatomic particle smashing, although its cool, and is part of my career, but its the spin-off stuff from the research that everyone's after/ wants.

We had a lot of data to move around here, so Tim built the world-wide web to deal with it, and looked how that turned out.

So who knows what we'll come up with trying to get the new thing to work, and isn't that the point of it all ? Making stuff that makes life better, while working out the whys of everything- if we didn't we'd still be in caves, with people complaining "don't use that fire thing, it's hot and somebody could get hurt".

NASA to send Perseverance, a new trundle bot, and Ingenuity, the first interplanetary helicopter, to sniff out life on Mars in July

Can I go with it to Mars ?

Meet the dog that's all byte and no bark: Boston Dynamics touts robo-pooch Spot with $75k-a-pop price tag

Think I'll stick with Kereberos the (real) Dog,

Like AC 12.30 ish said "..doesn't have teeth, then there's no point."- proper secure document destruction, Dog ate it. Also works on school homework, although handing the dog in does get some strange looks.

Dog also useful for other things

-Don't need one of those smart doorbells (or any doorbell), as soon as gate opens, wants to lick to death whoever's out there.

-Also impromptu desk/seat warmer, whether you want it warm or not, we had a lengthy discussion over the ownership of the chair this morning. I lost.

-Know my biscuits aren't poisonous (biosafety), as they are snaffled away if within muzzle distance

-Weather monitoring; either not wanting to go outside at the merest hint of rain, or finding the rainfall amount, by jumping into every muddy puddle afterwards

Although, does have problem with battery life, currently on second recharge (sleep) of the day.

Spending watchdog doubts UK is capable of managing Brexit and coronavirus info campaigns at the same time

I doubt very much the government could run two information campaigns at once.

Not because they're incompetent (they are)- either by design or just naturally - but rather, the general population.

We've had, for however long it's been now, the slogan "Stay Home" thrown at us incessantly, and still people of all intellects from World-renown writers (Neil Gaiman),down to the village idiots, and as far down as Prime Ministerial advisers have ignored it- it couldn't have been simpler, even my dog understands it.

So, going by the lowest common denominator, they'd be throwing too much information out there.

Executive Summary- people too thick for two bits of information.

Publishers sue to shut down books-for-all Internet Archive for 'willful digital piracy on an industrial scale'

Re: But what about...

I can see my local public library from my window.

But due to "something" it's been shut for the last twelve weeks,and probably won't be open again, by current estimates, until the day after the heat death of the universe, or as the government call it "phase 3".

Same with all the bookshops- closed until then too,.

Laughing UK health secretary launches COVID-19 Test and Trace programme with glitchy website and no phone app

So, the Track, Isolate, Test for Suspected Unprecedented Pathogen (TITSUP) system has gone live.

Means they can open the pubs now, right ? right ?

Baby Diesel? Little d'Artagnan? There is another child of Musk in the world

Dad's Elon G. Musk

so kids' name is Elonger Musk

Grandkid could be Elonger Still, or Elongest Musk.

NASA mulls restoring Saturn V to service as SLS delays and costs mount

If it wasn't today, would take this seriously, as why not use what they already have ?

Thought it would be a good start anyway, even as a proof of concept.

Whoa, someone actually texted you in 2020? Oh, nvm, it's just Boris Johnson, telling you to stay the f**k at home

Re: "It's not clear why progress on this faltered"

About 1214 in England, 1235 in Scotland, before parliaments were formed.