Posts by loopy lou 74 publicly visible posts • joined 11 Nov 2009
Things only disappear smoothly into a black hole if they have no angular momentum. The moon is rotating about once a month so it would spin up into a very hot fiery disk well before it got down to pea size and we'd have a super-bright accretion disk thingy to look at in the sky and probably get fried by hard radiation.
As an iPad owner, this makes sense to me:
First, the iPad is effectively instantly on/off (well suspended, but why would you ever shut it down completely?). I doubt anyone is going to be using it solidly for 12 hours.
Second, presumably they will mainly access web apps with it. No local data, no windows to get confused with, nothing to tinker with. Being so restricted is actually a bonus for this case - its just a portable browser window.
Interesting, though beer could be a special case. Tax and sales costs vastly outweigh the production costs, so economies of scale in production hardly effect the price you pay in the pub. Not sure that applies to so many other goods.
Then again, I guess it is the case for pretty much anything you buy in Waitrose...
There are already superconductors up to 100K or so, whereas space is pretty cold (below 3K) so you should be able to have your magnetic forcefield for interstellar travel already. Of course, there could be one or two other issues but it doesn't look as though the superconductors will be the problem.
Lets hope its the beginning of the end for this ridiculous "agree to something you can't be bothered to read before you continue" when you visit some trivial website. Why does every site have to draft its own terms anyway? Couldn't they all use the same ones? Then the user might actually stand a chance of knowing that they are happy with "standard terms A" but won't agree to "standard terms B" or something.
If a site that insists on you agreeing to five pages of its own legal garbage was actually forced to make sure you'd read it before you continued, then they'd rapidly decide it wasn't worth it and settle for "standard terms A" or something so they'd actually get some users.
Did you bother to look at the PDF? Mikes logic is equivalent to saying that your chance of being killed with an arrow is substantially less than by a bullet, precisely because there are fewer nutters with bows and arrows out there than with guns.
As far as I can see, Dell is carefully avoiding saying whether it thinks one or the other is intrinsically more secure, just that Ubuntu is less of a target.
the "more secure" statement seems to be lazy interpretation by el reg (unless it's a deliberate attempt to fire up another tiresome windows/linux debate, that is).
Heard Pickles on the radio today: some guy who'd done a study of schemes elsewhere in Europe said more or less that rewards are OK, bit they're not the whole answer because they don't give people an incentive to produce less waste. Pickles came on and said "bloody ridiculous" and started ranting about tesco cards and said he believed in treating people with respect bla bla.
If this is the intellectual level of our elected representatives then I despair.
Of course siphons need atmospheric pressure. The maximum height you can have bend above the inlet is even proportional to the atmospheric pressure. No atmosphere, no siphoning.
As for the good doc, this extract from his paper demonstrates a truly mind boggling degree of stupidity:
"The column of water acts like a chain with the water molecules pulling on each other via hydrogen bonds"
Perhaps he should correct his own misconceptions before addressing everyone else's...
"Therefore, it is surprising that the anti-piracy groups try to stop millions of downloaders instead of a handful of content providers"
And if you stop those handful? they seem to think that would be the end of it. More likely, someone else would start. My guess is there's only a handful because other people think "why bother, its already there. " What they would do if it wasn't there is unknown, but it seems unlikely they would all do nothing.
Great to see NASA giving us temperatuers in Fahrenheit and dutifully converting "about a million kelvin" to 1,799,540 F. Six significant figures eh?
A little gem from Wikipedia about Dan Fahrenheit. Zero was the temperature of some mixture of salt and stuff. The other reference point was 96 "the level of the liquid in the thermometer when held in the mouth or under the armpit of his wife". Cool.
To distinguish them from underage adults maybe? Underage dogs?? How can a child be underage anyway. That's what a child is.
Ok, so it makes a little bit of sense in context, but you don't even mean that "a quarter of human beings aged below 13 have social networking profiles" (thank god). Its just 8-12 year olds. So if a 7 year old isn't "underage" in Offcom parlance what are they?
And as for "the parents of 17 per cent of the owners of social networking profiles" - good grief, who are these people and how did they find the time?
On a similar theme, Lewis has argued before that wind is awkward because you still have to have backup capacity in gas, but switching gas generation on and off all the time is extremely inefficient (and bad for power stations). So if these boxes are comparable with gas for efficiency but can come one and off line easily, then isn't that a major benefit that might make transient sources like wind more palatable?
Here's one I know of - we need to run a lot of instances of a particular simulation with different parameters. Each one is relatively quick, but they add up to a lot. Queuing them on the hardware we normally use will complete some time next week. In that time we could monitor EC2 and dump some on there when it is cheap, to bring the completion time forward. It would be nice of you got kicked off gracefully, but even of the odd ones gets trashed and goes back on the queue it would still be worth it.
These guys are in the hot seat now because people actually care about their results. Most bits of science are not like that, and software support is hopelessly underfunded across the board, even when the science depends on it. An application rarely has more than one developer at a time, often just a phd student, and quality control is typically nonexistent. Data analysis is even done in Excel. It is just depressing. So yes, software-dependent results in science should be treated with extreme caution.
e.g. http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/wheres-the-real-bottleneck-in-scientific-computing
"For every successful simulation of global climate, there were a dozen or more groups struggling just to get their program to run."
Misread your comment first time and thought you meant "delivered". Reminded me of the burglar in court who requested a break in the case because as he said,
"my wife's baby's going to be conceived".
"I think my client means 'delivered' m'lord" said his lawyer.
"Well, in either case I think he should be there" said the judge.
So where are these 40,000 women the rest of the time? Sitting on shelves in some warehouse? And how exactly are the traffickers supposed to recoup the costs and risks of transporting them half way across Europe for two weeks? It is not as though accommodations is going to be particularly cheap at the time either. Traffickers may be scum but they aren't idiots, unlike certain of our esteemed political representatives.
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