Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Boeing CEO takes aim at Musk’s Starman-in-a-Tesla stunt

Re: Not a zero sum game...

a £100m launch cost is less than the $400m satellite.

That's the real game changer. A satellite is only $400M because the launch is so expensive and is planned so far in advance that you can't afford for it to fail.

If the launch is $10M then you can skip $200M of testing and $200M of space qualified procedures and launch a bunch of $20M satellites every month.

This is what a whole set of Earth imaging startups are doing. Launch 20x $10M satellites instead of a single $500M platform and get round the clock coverage and not care if 10% fail every year

Even more perfectly, they didn't land together - there was a deliberate 2second gap so that the landing radar didn't interfere with each other. That's how precise it was!

Anon biz bloke wins milestone Google Right To Be Forgotten lawsuit

So does that only apply to google.co.uk not google.com

Or does google have to block it for everyone in Britain?

Want to terrify a city with an emergency broadcast? All you need is a laptop and $30

Re: Personal hat-mounted beacons would be available for the partially sighted.

It's trained to do some trick when the phone rings so that the owner knows somebody is calling

Re: it must be scary living in fear of the warning Siren going off

Would the USSR target Wolverhampton?

The British might -

Re: Personal hat-mounted beacons would be available for the partially sighted.

But it doesn't help the fully blind

I assumed the portable beacons would be attached to the heads of the blind citizens. Even the most occularly challenged would be aware of the alarm once their own ear wax began melting.

the shortcomings of the whole remote activation process

True, perhaps equipping guide dogs with some sort of easily paw operated initiator (a'la Willey Coyote) would be more practical

Re: Or alternatively

A test message containing the phrase "this is not a drill" didn't help

Re: Beacons on mountain tops - the only reliable system

Unless you're blind, you sightist bar steward!

Personal hat-mounted beacons would be available for the partially sighted.

A small remote control pyrotechnic device could light them remotely

Though what you were supposed to do it the alarm went off is anyone's guess

I thought we were supposed to lie down, put a paper bag over our head or something…?

Re: "... warning sirens...only truly reliable method..."

Beacons on mountain tops - the only reliable system

European Space Agency squirts a code update at Mars Express orbiter

Re: Do space apps *still* use spinning metal gyros?

Supporting a maglev train is easy. Gravity pushes down, magnets push up, put magnets on sides facing slightly inwards to act as flanges.

Supporting an axle inside a magnetic bearing requires a uniform inward field from all angles - you can't do this with fixed permanent magnets (Earnshaw's theorem) you can do it with a bunch of electromagnets and a complex control system. But you lose energy from eddy currents, which can also cause speed jitter which is a problem in a precision platform - like a space telescope.

Remember you don't just need to support a free spinning wheel, you need to be able to put a torque on it. If your magnetic suspension can only resist a very small torque then you need to build (and launch) a much bigger flywheel.

Re: Do space apps *still* use spinning metal gyros?

Difficult to hold a gyroscope in enough directions with magnetic bearings (basically hard to stop it walking along the axis) and you need to connect a motor drive anyway so you can't make it totally free floating.

In Earth orbit you can replace the gyro with an actual bar magnet and 'push' against the Earth's field - Mars doesn't have a magnetic field

Re: Do space apps *still* use spinning metal gyros?

Gyroscope = measure attitude, yes you can use laser ring gyros

Gyroscope = reaction wheels or control moment gyroscopes, no there is no substitute for real mass

These "gyroscopes" aren't used to measure position, they're used to change your direction without using rockets. Imagine holding a spinning bike wheel and try and tilt it. In a spacecraft you use it as a "fixed" frame to push against.

After the "No keyboard, press F1 to continue"

Re: Deep space comms

Should be easy to run fiber - no roads to dig up and you don't need your own ducts

British government to ink deal for yet another immigration database

Re: Continuing to waste public money

You see a guy in the street.

This is going to require some Police retraining for stop-and-search

You can assume the majority of Afro-Caribbean looking teenagers are not immigrants

But anybody blonde and blue-eyed is likely to be a no-good sneaky Aryan Eu infiltrator.

Airbus plans beds in passenger plane cargo holds

He's probably thinking of charging extra for that

Any ideas on how to get people off and out quickly from a bunk bed type arrangement?

Open the pod bay doors Hal.

UK.gov expected to quit controversial harvesting of schoolchildren's nationality data

Re: It was pointless anyway

writing in "human",

Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about... your mother.

Not to mention Northerners. If these people are never going to have a job whats the point in wasting money educating them?

'Our way or the highway' warranty scams shot down by US watchdog: It's OK to use unofficial parts to repair your gear

Re: Enough with the replacement part conspiritards.

Simple remedy.

Apple have just built a new $Bn headquarters. Just require that all repairs and maintenance on the building is done by the original contractors - at whatever price they choose

They're back! 'Feds only' encryption backdoors prepped in US by Dems

Re: In light of this

China ? At least you don't have to worry about the sliding

Key 1 is owned by you and is relatively unique, Key 2 is on the keyring of every member of law enforcement worldwide.

Even better - key 1 is yours, keys 2 to 9999 are on the keyrings of 9999 different agencies worldwide.

There are only 4 digits in the key combination

Law enforcement of which country?

Even within the USA - which law enforcement?

Do you think the boss of the CIA is going to have a phone that a community support officer in Arkansas can access?

Every branch of government, law enforcement, state, county, municipal, military, DEA, DHS, MMB are going to want the ability to read everyone else's phone while having theirs entirely secure from all their law enforcement colleagues

UK 'wife'-carrying champion named

"your wife's weight in beer" - so there was an incentive for grabbing the lightest willing adult female

No it's a complex game-theoretical problem.

You don't want the skinniest wife because then you don't win much beer, but the heavier the wife the more likely you are to lose.

It's like fueling pit-stop strategy back when Formula one was a competition

Re: What I want to watch...

Or the wife-rolling cheese-carrying

Accenture, Capgemini, Deloitte creating app to register 3m EU nationals living in Brexit Britain

Re: Government IT projects, ffs!

20 minutes’ worth of data

Your forgetting the steps where you have to wait for them to post you a pin or which require a dozen different govt depts to send you paper copies of your data before you can advance.

For the sake of just 3 million people it would seem easier, cheaper and less problematic to just say they can have de facto British citizenship status

Forcing them to lose their Dutch or German citizenship?

Would they have to swear allegiance to the Queen?

What we really need would be some system that allowed people to freely move and work across a bunch of neighbouring countries to the general economic benefit of all

Re: Cheaper Option:

Send 'em all back.

Bloody, Normans what have they ever done for us ?

Anglo-saxons, vikings - bunch of hooligans

Re: A focus on security I hope

> Making this run on a mobile phone might be trendy, but is it secure ?

And of course mobile phone contracts will only be available to those who have already registered via this app

Law's changed, now cough up: Uncle Sam serves Microsoft fresh warrant for Irish emails

Re: Cloud Act ?

Except if the CLOUD act force them to do anything to obtain the data. So the German owned MSFT data center can no longer accept any Windows updates or Intel CPUs in case they contain a official trojan

It can expect its laws to apply to all corporations registered in its jurisdiction.

If foreign laws prevent you complying then you don't do business in those countries.

This law simply says that MSFT now can't legally work in EU, in the same way it can't operate in cuba, N Korea, Iran etc

Re: "They should have called it the : Amuricah World Police F*ck Yeah ! Act..."

Not just if you want your data secure.

Don't deal with American companies if you don't want your users to sue you and your directors to go to jail

Re: Cloud Act ?

Or the "American companies all banned from operating in Europe" act

Furious gunwoman opens fire at YouTube HQ, three people shot

Re: Of all places

However the strictest gun laws just mean the seller has to say 'no massacres please' while handing over an AR15 and 20 magazines

One solution to wreck privacy-hating websites: Flood them with bogus info using browser tools

Re: To paraphrase Mark Twain...

Bill S actually - henry VI pt 2

Citrix opens its third cloud region, this time in Australia

Oops

So Microsoft achieve special oz super secret squirrel status on the day the US issues its "all your (data)bases are belong to US" act?

Doomed Chinese space lab Tiangong-1 crashes into watery Pacific grave

Re: re. The radar picture

The picture is from the German Fraunhofer institute.

Yes, Emergency Service Network will be late and cost more - UK perm sec

Re: Bodes well for NI border

What if NI was renamed "Ireland" and Eire was renamed "Great Ireland" then everybody would be happy

IIRC from a previous el'reg story - one of the 'features' that was was currently unsolved was 'use with a vehicle' which seems like a pretty major feature fro a police/fire/ambulance system

Re: we're all going to die!

eventually ...

Re: Bodes well for NI border

Personally I think replacing all the signs near the border with Welsh and hoping everybody in NI is too confused to find it - is an innovative and agile solution.

What the @#$%&!? Microsoft bans nudity, swearing in Skype, emails, Office 365 docs

Re: That's Yorkshire fucked then

Except that Scunthorpe is in Lincolnshire.

Wait till t'anschluss

Privacy activists to UK plod: Wanna slurp folks' phone records? Come back with a warrant

Re: Section 20

what other legislation is lurking and being used nefariously?

OOh, OOh I know this one.

How about Henry VIII orders to allow the PM to pass any law they like without bothering with parliament?

Seriously

"Cops should need a search warrant to slurp information from peoples' phones"

SHOULD? Why is this even a question?

Fatal driverless crash: Radar-maker says Uber disabled safety systems

Re: Human-To-Vehicle communications

The answer is to fit not just bicycles, but all persons with human-to-vehicle CIWS

Phalanx is nice but I don't think you can beat goalkeeper for pure ludicrous mode overkill

Re: "Self driving cars can only only react"

but you would have damn well swerved in order to avoid taking the life of another human being.

If it was a Volvo driver an the human being was on two wheels?

NASA stalls $8bn James Webb Space Telescope again – this time to 2020

Re: Long, Not all that pretty, History

Adaptive optics is already a winner over this, the mirror is far too small to compete with ground based AO or interferometry - but that's not its role.

It will do some IR windows that you can't do from the ground but you can do a lot from the ground and its not clear that in a free choice you wouldn't rather spend the $10Bn on 5-10x VLTs or ALMAs or SKAs

IBMers in TSS: How WILL we support customers after these latest job cuts?

A cunning plan

Reduce service quality - so customers stay away

Reducing demand for services - so saving more money

Repeat