Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Playmobil crosses the final frontier with enormous, metre-long Enterprise playset

Re: tribbles, how to remove?

The only way to be sure is ..... to take off and nuke the site from orbit.

Because older people have more money and so can buy $500 LEGO sets that children can't

What do you sell to a well-off 40 year old that doesn't golf ?

Space force

I picture a bunch of these being sold in Colorado and a lot of Space Force (tm) generals wooshing them around the office when nobody is looking.

Warning contains small parts. Choking hazard, not suitable for under 36months or 2nd Lieutenants

Open standard but not open access: Schematron author complains about ISO paywall

Re: Negotiable Virtue

You really don't want ISO standardised sin !

Re: Similar but Different

What's even worse is when you don't need to read the standard, because either the technical work is being done by a supplier, or more often the standard is so vague that it doesn't tell you anything.

but you are required to buy all the standards that refer to your product and keep buying updated version.

Re: Free the standards

Of course you don't have to read them, but you do have to have a paid for copy of each standard filed in your quality management system somewhere - the ISO standard says so.

And every couple of years they change a comma, update the year suffix and you have to buy it again.

Re: Difficult to agree with this more

That's the idea.

ISO 9001 - quality standards in manufacturing

ISO 9002 - quality standard sin services

Now adding

ISO 9003 - quality standards in monopolies

ISO 9004 - quality standards in ripping off customers

ISO 9005 - quality standards in Ponzi schemes

New York congressman puts forward federal right-to-repair bill

Re: It'll die on Party lines.

It doesn't matter, any rep that votes with a dem will be deselected

UK spends £36m on 18 little 'bullet-proof' boats to protect Royal Navy assets

>At last! A boat you can use in the wet...

But can it be used in warm water ?

Wanted: Brexit grand fromage. £120k a year. Perks? Hmmmm…

You are Mat Hancock and I claim my £120k

Or jumping off a cliff, refusing the offer of a parachute on the way down, crashing onto the rocks and claiming that the view of the cliff is much better from down here

Re: Brexit Opportunities Unit?

And after disastrously invading Russia you can replace your leader and within a decade be a world leading country again.

How long before the "opportunity" of Brexit is overcome

Re: Brexit Opportunities Unit?

"Every problem is an opportunity"

In this case the a self-induced opportunity on the scale of deciding to invade Russia in Winter

Chinese web giant Baidu unveils Level 4 robo-taxi that costs $75k to make

Re: Jonny Cab

I had one of them Google Pixels in my cab yesterday, not saying I've got anything against Android phones but the government should send them all back, bloody Samsung coming here taking our bandwidth etc etc

South Korea bans 1700 tech products for using forged test reports

Re: The paperwork really matters

Not my problem, I used this big fancy testing firm in SF (who coincidentally were also cheapest)

Japan assembles superteam of aircraft component manufacturers to build supersonic passenger plane

Re: Do we really need this ?

The ultimate irony, buy maize driving up the price of food, turn it into bio-kerosene to fuel your supersonic business jet and get a tax-break because you are carbon neutral

Re: The richer rich got their own planes

Yes but that still only works for long trips.

There will still only be one flight/day, limited by market size, take-off/landing limits and timezone.

So if I still have to spend 2days on a trip to China it's not clear that waiting in the hotel for tomorrow's 5hour flight is better than having a choice of hourly departures on a 8hour flight sleeping in a business class seat.

A supersonic business jet, where it is on your timetable, assuming it doesn't need a NASA style runway that could turn a trip to China into a single day, or visit 10 places in Asia in a 3day trip - I could see a small market for.

Re: Subaru and helicopters

And will it be doing donuts in a supermarket carpark near you

Re: Dreams make great things

Depends on your definition of 'beyond'

We could have developed 200mph steam trains on special super-straight TGV style tracks.

But arguably our local automated light rail system is better - in transporting more people into the city center at lower cost with less disruption

There are also all the Europe-Asia routes over Russia. The Russians aren't going to care about sonic booms over Siberia for enough $$$$

Concorde's real failing was it's range. It could barely do London-NY, or Washington on a good day.

Re: The richer rich got their own planes

>either use the private jet and take 8 hours or for a fraction of the cost take the Boom and be there in half the time.

Or use a slow-subsonic private jet, leave from a small airport exactly when you want, arrive near your destination and return when you want.

Or travel for an hour to major airport, arrive 3 hours before departure to do security, travel supersonically, spend 1 hour getting from the airport to your destination. Have a choice of 1-2 flights/day

It probably needs to be a trans-pacific trip to be worth the flight-time saving.

There might be a small billionaire market for a supersonic trans-pacific capable business jet.

Hubble Space Telescope to switch to backup memory module after instrument computer halts

You worry about complicate unfolding mechanisms that are impossible to test on Earth?

When have they ever failed , except both Hubble and Skylab's solar arrays and pretty much every other time they've been used.

The radiation is mixed, there are more high energy = single particle blowing a big hole in some electronics - type radiation. But the smaller more vulnerable electronics allows for more redundancy.

Hubble's low orbit gave it a whole bunch of other radiation problems. To be reachable from the Shuttle it flew into a very nasty place where the radiation belts dip down and so it flew through a charged particle cloud every 90 mins.

Re: Yes, but can it give 110% like is expected in the workplace...

It's fridge cooled instrument is colder than Plank's fridge - but Plank also had an insanely cold (0.1K) cryogen cooled instrument.

Fridges have got really really good !

Yes and no,

Many of the objects don't need observing at the same time - if we have Hubble data in the UV/Visible on file then observing it in the IR in the future with JWST.

The real mission for JWST is to observe things that are only IR. The early universe with stuff that is now redshifted to being IR, and are too faint for Hubble anyway.

There might be boring nearby, low energy, objects (like planets) that people might want to observe multi-wavelength at the same time, but nobody cares about a bunch of non-cosmologist stamp collectors

Yes, at least in the early days of Hubble in normal mode that I'm more familiar with.

The campaigns are planned well in advance in long cycles to minimize maneuvering, which wastes time and fuel, instrument changes, and to fit around all the constraints of a Hubble observation.

If the observation (or observer) is important enough it could bump somebody else out of a slot in the next cycle if the telescope is pointing in the right direction and the right instrument is online - this mostly happened if some country/group had lost some guaranteed time and politics was an issue.

I suspect that it is now in a degraded mode where things are more limited

Re: Yes, but can it give 110% like is expected in the workplace...

>I'm not sure what limits the life of JWST: it may be the cryogenics but I think it's the fuel.

It's fuel, there are no consumable cryogenics everything is cooled by fridges.

The limit is orbit keeping fuel. The orbit is far enough away that although it isn't absolutely stable you don't need to maintain a very precise position or boost the orbit.

I suspect it will have a much longer mission life than advertised, guessing that some smart scheduling algorithms will let you use much smaller movements / fuel burns and eek out the fuel.

Re: Yes, but can it give 110% like is expected in the workplace...

The Webb Space Telescope will exceed its ie hubble's capability

Microsoft loves Linux so much that packages.microsoft.com has fallen and can't get up

Re: Not a conspiracy

Never had an online service that I setup in the early days of a startup, with renewal on a personal credit card, with a recovery email on a domain that we no longer have after a company rename.

No not me, I wouldn't be that dumb, well not more than twice anyway

Not a conspiracy

It's just that it was running on office365+onedrive and it was on Bill's credit card that expired, nobody knows the password and the recovery address is an expired hotmail.com

South Korea has a huge problem with digital sex crimes against women says Human Rights Watch

>I'm very curious to know what she expects the tech companies to actually do here?

Use the $Bn spent in AI research to detect nude pictures of women on a toilet and stop them being posted to Twitter.

If you want to post 'legitimate' pictures of a women urinating then it can be accompanied by a model release form.

UK product safety regulations are failing consumers online, in the IoT, and … with artificial intelligence?

Re: Eeek

>So people are happy to buy substandard electrical items provided they're 50% off?

Would like to see what the actual question was.

Hey kids, would you buy a fake branded T-shirt, handbag, headphones for 50% off ?

Headline - children would buy killer sub-standard electronics = wont somebody think of the children, ban Chinese cell phones now.

Re: Cell phones?

Problem - cheap flammable cyanide generating cladding on public housing kills lots of people

Response - ban open source roms for cell phones

Three million job cuts coming at Indian services giants by next year, says Bank of America

Re: Predictions are like arseholes...

>in 2005 the difference between the wage for a UK or North American techie and their Indian equivalent was $92,000. By 2019 that gap had narrowed to around $40,000

Some of that was "statistics" - in 2005 a big proportion of the Indian "engineers" were call center tech-support handling your Windows activation code phone calls.

The difference between regular Office Space / Tata cube dwellers has always been closer to the $30-40K and a lot of that is weighted by how any US developers are in SF/NY. Salary differences between an ordinary programmer in Arkansas and Bangalore is a lot smaller than you would think

Spacewalk veterans take a trip outside the ISS to pump up the power with new solar arrays

The thing about the ISS is that to reach it from Kazakhstan it's in an orbit that covers the continental USA and most of Europe, as well as India and China - so an opportunity to hit lots of people.

Re: ISS' swansong?

The Chinese station is small and wont be continually manned - so less than the USA/USSR were doing in the 70s.

The only point in having people in LEO is to learn how to have people in LEO, so not having any people currently there doesn't really cost you anything or give control to China. Not having a person continually on the peak of Everest doesn't take away your ability to climb Everest.

Continuing to support a LEO space station - initially intended to keep cold war rocket scientists gainfully employed when the cold war ended - as opposed to manned Mars mission seems short sighted.

Re: Solar Panel long-term performance

>The ISS is a good test environment for solar panels in a worst-case environment.

On the other hand

No snow,

No leaves,

No dust,

No pigeon shit,

No wind,

No footballs

The awesome power of LEGO

They can get a space walk just to force people to buy the new ISS kit

Intrepid Change.org user launches petition to make Jeff Bezos' space trip one-way

Re-entry

It doesn't re-enter because it doesn't get to orbit. There is a big difference between getting 100km up and falling back and getting 100km up AND doing 10km/s horizontally.

This rocket is doing the same as a 1945 V2, although with a payload that does more damage to the workers of London

Re: Waste of oxygen

>rather than admitting that they are too stupid/lazy to succeed.

That's the trouble with the poor, too lazy to get off their arses and get a $50Bn bailout for their "space" project

Realizing this is getting out of hand, Coq mulls new name for programming language

Re: There are two hard problems in Computer Science

>Those are human issues, not CompSci issues.

Ultimately they are civil engineering issues - if you are the BOFH

Re: There are two hard problems in Computer Science

But cock was the common use, Noah Webster and others deliberately went looking for non-naughty terms to keep American sensibilities decent

Re: Just shift the letters along...

It would be funnier to refer to the BNP as COQ....

Funny how Sir Tim Berners-Lee, famous for hyperlinks, is into NFTs, glorified hyperlinks

Re: Actually ....

Also for non-tangible assets.

I can own an original frame of Snow White, framed and certified by Walt Disney corp.

What if I wanted to buy an original .tiff of a frame of Toy Story?

Do they have to print it onto film, do they have to print out the hex file and frame it?

NFTs are a way of autographing digital assets - the assets might be worthless but that's not the NFTs fault.

Re: Nothing Fecking There

>A paper (or vellum) document, certified by accredited witnesses

Who gets to do the accrediting?

The UK court system, CERN's IT dept , the NEXT corporation shareholders?

In this case the signed by witnesses in a British lawyers office is reasonable but what about a Banksy style artist, working in Russia or China ? Would you accept a certificate from the CCP giving you ownership of an online video protesting the policing in Hong Kong

What Microsoft's Windows 11 will probably look like

You mean will it have a toolbar in the bottom middle of the screen (just like Mac) with icons that popup and do pointless animations (just like Mac) but have configuration dialogs from NT4 once you get down into the weeds of disk management ?

You may think so - I couldn't possibly comment

When security gets physical: Mossad boss hints at less-than-subtle Stuxnet followup

Re: This is terrorism

"If the man constitutes a capability that endangers the citizens of XXX, he must stop existing,"

So it would be perfectly legitimate for the Russians to assassinate Boeing engineers.

Or for the British to kill anyone working on RISC-V

'Welcome to Perth' mirth being milked for all it's worth

Re: Question

I wouldn't say wild - they are really quite reserved