Posts by Jan 0

If Britain is so bothered by China, why do these .gov.uk sites use Chinese ad brokers?

Re: ".... reasonable to assume most UK citizens wouldn't ....,"

My apologies, it seems that I ignored an important legal change that happened in 1949.

Let's march to the guillotine fellow citizens!

Re: An idea: inscribed on lamb's vellum

Would you prefer something more permanent and more expensive, like engraved gold plates? The longevity of ink on vellum surpasses any modern technology. (Consider how the Voyagers are taking information out into the Cosmos.)

".... reasonable to assume most UK citizens wouldn't ....,"

It's also reasonable to assume most people in the UK wouldn't want their personal data passed to any entity other than the one they're engaging with. There are, of course, reasonable exceptions that we would agree to if asked.

We have a government that has consistently ignored the rights of UK subjects with regard to the Internet (amongst other entities), ever since the UK joined the Internet. (<pedant mode> Yes, we are "subjects" of our monarch, not "citizens" of our country.)

Google all at sea over rising tide of robo-spam

@CowHorseFrog

Spam existed long before cookies and the WWW. Who remembers "Spamers on the Net"?

(Yes, Spamers!)

Tesla Cybertruck turns into world's most expensive brick after car wash

Grease?

I know that corrosion of stainless steel is possible, but what kind of "stainless steel" gets corroded by grease?

Some smart meters won't be smart at all once 2/3G networks mothballed

Re: "...... delays since its inception in 2012,....."

Re: "...... delays since its inception in 2012,....."

> Fixed your grammar.

No, you fixed the spelling.

NASA confirms nuclear-powered Dragonfly drone is going to Titan

Re: Ahhh.. so not draganfly

and certainly not https://draganfly.co.uk/

NASA confirms Florida house hit by a piece of ISS battery pack

Re: Here on Earth

Never mind the politics, leave our sozzled football star out of it!

San Francisco's light rail to upgrade from floppy disks

Re: "best in the US"

Yes "fond". Perfectly understandable if you haven't had a sarcasm bypass.

INC Ransom claims to be behind 'cyber incident' at UK city council

Council centers

If you're going to mangle the spelling, do it properly:

"Kownsill-run wreckreayshun senters", surely?

Lenovo scores deal to build supercomputer at UK's Hartree Center

Spelling.

Is this some off shoot of Center Parcs?

Apple iPhone AI to be powered by Baidu in China, maybe

ERNIE?

That's not going to go down well in the country that has used a ptecursor of /dev/random since 1957!

ERNIE, The Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment; has been rewarding Limey government bond "investors" ever since.

Caffeine makes fuel cells more efficient, cuts cost of energy storage

Caffeine is hydrophobic?

Does that mean it's purely in suspension in my espresso? How does caffeine get from my intestine into my blood? Do I have to consume olive oil?

It is a bird, a plane or a Chinese spy balloon? None of the above

@IGotOut

Errm, have you had a sarcasm bypass fitted?

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

Re: Arguments

> WaPo "How Ukraine became Ukraine, in 7 maps"

Well now I know that WaPo isn't a Chinese sage, but I can't load that page. Does anyone have a link that works?

Re: Star wars?

I remember it as START WARS!

Re: Star wars?

You've overlooked the fact that a dollar will buy you a lot more stuff or people's time in Russia and the PRC. Maybe there isn't much of an imbalance.

Joint European Torus experiments end on a 69 megajoules high

Is the promise of carbon-free energy production the only way to get money to study fusion?

Aren't there far simpler ways to use the heat of the Sun or the World's interior to raise steam and spin turbines.?

I'm all for nuclear fusion research, but hope it can do rather more than just raise steam.

Could it generate exotic isotopes , new subatomic particles or new elements?

Isn't pushing the limits of experimental parameters an end in itself?

EU repair rights bill tells manufacturers to fix up or ship out

Re: meanwhile in the UK....

I expect we'll be getting a lot of the unsold inventory that can't be sold in the EU in 2026.

Techie climbed a mountain only be told not to touch the kit on top

Re: “many thanks from the grateful postmaster”

>Not running Horizon then?

Well it doesn't sound as if the postmaster was under arrest.

Huawei prepares to split from Android on consumer devices with HarmonyOS Next

I have no idea what GMS is. There's no GMS on my M6, but Spotify is running fine on HarmonyOS.

However, I'm not sure that I'd trust mine to keep my banking details secret.

Netgear hauls Huawei to court over Wi-Fi patent spat

Suppression of Human Rights.

I like products made in a country with chain gangs.

LockBit shows no remorse for ransomware attack on children's hospital

Re: Time

> To go and check my tape backups!

Lockbit: That would be the ones that we have been subtly editing for the past 15 months?

The literal Rolls-Royce of EVs is recalled over fire risk

I'm very disappointed!

Why isn't the asking price in guineas?

Cory Doctorow has a plan to wipe away the enshittification of tech

Surely "soccerizer"?

Wot no Dabsy?

Surely Dabsy is the best author for this topic.

**Bring Back Our Dabsy!**

Elon Musk's brain-computer interface outfit Neuralink tests its tech on a human

Re: This could be a really big deal

> could also see fighter pilots ....., direct input and control.

Substituting wiring and computer control for muscles and electro-mechanical control systems, is still not direct input and control. It's just less visible.

> If I was a quadriplegic ...

It might be a good idea to see the monkeys dying from brain infections and battery leaks as well, to let me make an informed choice.

Things are going to get weird as the nanometer era draws to a close

Re: Weird is as weird does

A poetic, language-appreciating friend to boot. Hurrah for the new AMFM!!

UK Civil Aviation Authority ponders vertiports for flying taxis

Autorotation

A helicopter that has lost its rotor is not going to autorotate, it's going to "autoplunge".

A helicoptor that has lost power may still be able to autorotate

Peregrine bows out with a bang as SLIM aims for Moon's rocky runway

Re: UTC

That's why we should've kept on calling it GMT.

Wing, Alphabet's drone delivery unit, designs bigger bird to deliver pasta, faster

Re: ingredients for dinner - pasta, marinara sauce, parmesan cheese, canned olives and garlic.

What's better is smaller vehicles on the road: trundlebots please.

How Sinclair's QL computer outshined Apple's Macintosh against all odds

Re: Love/Hate

Were looped tape drives really new? I think I remember them featuring either in an article, or adverts, in Scientific American long before the QL arrived.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

Re: Sounds like Tesla drivers should always carry a can of petrol with them in Winter

Reminds me of the 70s/80s winters in East Anglia when I used to crawl in the snow to point a blowlamp at the sump and the (derv) fuel tank. Maybe Tesla could provide a "patch" to do the same with their batteries? Maybe a small coke stove with flues through the battery?

Drivers: We'll take that plain dumb car over a flashy data-spilling internet one, thanks

Re: Perhaps it's time for vehicle makers to take note.

I don't want them to take note. I want some lesser known vehicle maker to quietly get on with selling basic vehicles to people prepared to look for them.

Cutting-edge microscopy reveals bottled water has 'up to 100 times' more bits of plastic than previously feared

Re: Should have tested beer

Fining agents are basically gelatin. That's ground fish bladders for the gentry and ground abbatoir cartilage for you and me.

Next BT CEO Allison Kirkby takes the wheel from next month

Never mind the job titles.

Did she start out as an engineer? If not, why is she in the running?

DARPA's air-steered X-65 jet heads into production with goal of flying by 2025

Re: What could go wrong... Ram Air

I have a hazy recollection that the ram effect can only work down to airspeeds of the order of 300 to 350 mph. That could make an unpowered landing more than a brown pants situation.

X-ploited: Mandiant restores hijacked Twitter account after attempted crypto heist

It seems that sarcasm is effectively dead in 2024!

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

Re: Think of the Grid!

> ... without private driveways or garages, thus for these people hundreds of thousands of public charge points are needed...

Not if we get our robot cars soon. They can bugger off to a charger somewhere else while the charge ready to pick you up the next day.

Re: Think of the Grid!

Also how many USA homes have an oven, or even what we used to call a kitchen? A room with a fridge, a freezer, a boiling water tap and two dishwashers isn't a kitchen!

Scientists mull Solar Radiation Management – a potential climate-change stop-gap

Re: Gigabequerels per Tonne...

None of us can tell how many ACs are arguing with cyberdemon. Why don't you have a name?

Hacktivists boast: We shut down Iran's gas pumps today

Thanks Jessica Lyons Hardcastle!

For including the word "petrol", to disambiguate the article, before I got deep in it

Apple pops blue bubbles of Beeper Mini's iMessage service again

Re: Blue bubbles?

I had no idea that it did that. I just see it as a way to send text messages when you have an Internet connection via a WiFi router, but no phone mast nearby.

National Grid latest UK org to zap Chinese kit from critical infrastructure

Re: 特洛伊木马

ට්රෝජන් අශ්වයා?

සමහර විට අශ්ව බෝල්ක් පමණක්ද?

NASA engineers scratch heads as Voyager 1 starts spouting cosmic gibberish

The distress signal is working!

The Space Pirates have arrived to capture it, but they're having a battle with the Space Binmen who have already marked it as scrap. Space AA say there's a 20 hour delay and no hotel available.

Here's how fast a spacecraft should fly to successfully detect amino acids erupting from Enceladus

Spectrometer

I think the article needs to point out that the "spectrometer" is not looking at an electromagnetic spectrum.

It' is, presumably, a Mass Spectrometer, which measures the mass of ionised molecules.

Korean peninsula space race sees South and North launch tit for tat spy sats

US aircraft carriers at Norfolk naval base!

Oi! Get your place names right. Norfolk has a US airbase at Feltwell and some presence at Marham but no naval bases. Which Norfolk are you referring to?

If you just write "Norfolk, without qualification, it has to mean the original Norfolk, not one of the many places"named" by uninquisitive and unimaginative colonists. (When you move to a new country, it's polite to discover what the locals call your new location.)

UK government rings the death knell for SIM farms

Tugend?

Is that my arse or my willy?

Re: Upper Fifth

Wasn't that for people too thick to go into the Sixth Form, but whose parents didn't want to expose them to harsh realities.