Posts by Phil O'Sophical

James Webb Space Telescope finds first evidence of CO₂ in exoplanet atmosphere

Re: We come in peace ...

If the instructions we send are anything like those for flat-pack furniture I hate to think what the results would be like.

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

Re: Photocopier challange

the instructions on how to use the parking brake were on page 200!

A few years ago my wife got a new mobile phone. Not even what we'd now call a smartphone, although it could do email & basic browsing (remember WAP?) on its tiny screen.

She bought it primarily to be able to make phone calls, the instructions for doing that were on page 80 of the manual, after all the info about choosing ringtones, etc.

As far as I can see this is the only industry that revels in this type of piss taking.

I think the car servicing industry could give it a good run for it's money.

NASA's Space Launch System rocket is on track for August 29 liftoff

I hope it works

I remember the Apollo launches, but only seen on TV. I'm already saving for my Florida holiday to see one of these lift off, in person.

UK's largest water company investigates datacenters' use as drought hits

They certainly seem to enable plenty of steam venting from the ears.

In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up

Re: Masochism

You did not need a calculator or a ready reckoner (anyone remember those?)

I still have an old copy of Newnes "Everything Within" probably from the early 1930s. It has £sd ready-reckoner tables in the back. Fascinating reading in many ways, such as the chapters entitled "Careers for Boys" and "Careers for Girls"...

Re: Bank Accounts

Phone numbers have been subject to sporadic modification since the phone was invented. The largest change I can remember was the conversion to all-figure numbers, more like 50 years ago than 30. I suppose the 1992 change must have been the additional digits required because of the unforeseen size of the address space.

Indeed, and apart from the need to print new letterheards it mostly 'just worked'.

If only IPv4 -> IPv6 could have been as simple...

Scientists use supercritical carbon dioxide to power the grid

Re: recuperator == heat exchanger

Why they think that using supercritical C02 is better than water is not explained by this article

Maybe for environments where water is not plentiful? Martian power stations?

Re: Comments section

"Come home to a real fire. Buy a holiday home in Wales."

(Not the Nine O'Clock News, IIRC?)

NASA has MOXIE, but rivals reckon they can do better for oxygen on Mars

Re: Hazard

Divers (and even astronauts) do for only limited periods - not for their entire natural lives.

A 3 minute outage is likely fatal in either case.

NASA selects 'full force' for probe into UFOs

They have tables in their anuses? handy for picnics, I suppose.

We were promised integrated packages. Instead we got disintegrated apps

Re: Cloud access?

it certainly could add a significant amount of extra time.

Like the way that my car insists on looking up the driver profile on a server somewhere in the cloud every time I unlock it? If my wife unlocks it with her key it then has to download her profile and replace mine with it, so that it can move the seat & mirrors to the right place, and change the radio presets... This all takes 60-90 seconds, before I can actually do what I unlocked the car for, which was to drive somewhere.

12 years ago I had a car with similar functionality, but with the data stored locally. 3 seconds to swap profiles, it was done before I even got my seatbelt on. This is progress?

UK launches 'consultation' with EU over exclusion from science programs

The UK has, for decades, been spending significantly less than other European countries on healthcare

Not correct. According to the OECD the UK spends 10.3% of GDP on healthcare, which is above the EU average of 8.3%. Sweden (10.9), France (11.2) and Germany (11.7) do spend more, Belgium & Austria about the same as the UK, the others spend less. Outside the EU, Norway and Switzerland spend more. These figures have remained largely unchanged for the past 10 years.

The UK is easily in the top 20% among European nations.

Of course, one important thing to consider is where this spending comes from. The UK has a health service that is entirely funded from public money, which has both good and bad points. In France, on the other hand, the government (taxpayer) only pays about 70% of most medical bills, and most people are expected (required, if they're employed) to have insurance to make up the shortfall.

Re: What part of "Leave." ....

The UK has NOT reneged on fishing quotas, some French fishermen simply refuse to produce the proof that their government agreed to when it signed the withdrawal agreement. Most likely because, following the time-honoured principle of l'exception française they chose to ignore the requirement to keep such proof as not applying to them. Other countries have no problems, it's just a few irréductibles Gaulois...

How do you define should be? It has to be a balance with other public spending and taxation. Since UK life expectancy has grown from ~70 to ~81 over the past 60 years, healthcare is obviously working.

There's no consistent correlation between funding and party politics. For the period 1950 - 1980 investment in real terms (allowing for inflation) consistently went up during Tory governments, and down during Labour ones. For the 1980 - 1997 Tory period it dipped then rose again. During the Blair years it grew to an historical high, since then it has returned to close to the historical average of 3.7% above inflation.

There's no defunding, by stealth or otherwise, it's still steadily increasing.

Re: Leaver whining!

I think it would have been much more prudent to try to reform the EU from within

We spent 25 years trying to do that, but even with the help of allies it was a doomed task against the federalist mindset of members like France and Germany

rather than just sabotage the whole project, breaking European unity

But we're not a part of it now, any such sabotage and loss of unity is down to the other members now. The UK can't be responsible for the behaviour of Hungary. After all, we left, we surely can't expect to have any influence, isn't that what we're constantly being told? Cake & all that?

Better to be inside the tent, pissing out, than outside the tent, pissing in.

Better to leave the tent & piss in the latrine, surely?

Re: Leaver whining!

The reality is that the UK voted to leave the EU and no longer has a say in how it is run.

No, the reality is that the UK left the EU under the terms of an agreement negotiated between the two, and it has a perfect right to expect the EU to respect that agreement. It should not have to put up with the EU dragging its feet in one area as a way to apply pressure in another.

Most of those with PPE degrees go into politics or the civil service

People with a degree in Politics and Economics choose jobs in politics and economics? No shit, Sherlock. Next you'll be telling us that people with engineering degrees get jobs as engineers!

Re: Reap what you sow

UK can join the EFTA whenever it likes

Unlikely. The current big fish, Norway, does not want a shark like the UK arriving in its waters. It would almost certainly veto any such request, in the highly unlikely event that the UK would make one.

Ransomware attack on UK water company clouded by confusion

Re: "and by making sure employee behavior is driven towards best practices."

Don't sack them, just levy the costs of repairing the damage against their present and future bonuses.

Keep your cables tidy. You never know when someone might need some wine

Re: My girlfriend did it

A clear example of why it's much better for you to drink beer than Coke.

General Motors charges mandatory $1,500 fee for three years of optional car features

Re: They might find the use of their wording problematic under UK law

Bollocks. UK consumer law is stronger than EU minimums, and always has been. Suggesting that Brexit would allow it to be weakened is fud and paranoia.

Re: Other car manufacturers are available.

When I choose to eat in a restaurant it's because I want someone else to serve me, instead of doing the work myself. Why, then, should I pay an additional "service charge", when that's what I'm paying the restaurant for in the first place?

'I wonder what this cable does': How to tell thicknet from a thickhead

colour me sceptical

Thicknet cables used N-type connectors, and Thinnet uses BNC, and they are not compatible.

BT union wants pay dispute talks with telco's largest shareholders

Re: Unheard of

Or were you referring to queens with fabulous hair and shoes, daaaarling...

Fantabulosa!

Re: Unheard of

I won't bring up that Brexit thing and the dire consequences it has had ...

Dire consequences?

It's not even two years since it happened, far too soon to draw any conclusions on its outcome. Most countries that leave a larger political group take a decade or more to re-establish themselves, you probably won't be able to make any full analysis of Brexit until 2030 at least.

For the moment it's clear that there have been some issues where things weren't thought through, they need to be worked on, but most of the doom & gloom predicted by the remainers has not come to pass.

Re: called itself the Union of Democratic Mineworkers

Oh, it doesn't mean that the union was democratic, few are, but the fact that the breakaway miners felt the need to use the word shows that they did not feel that Scargill & the NUM were doing much more than paying lip service to democracy.

Re: Unheard of

No, it really didn't. That was the lie sold to the miners to persuade them to continue, but most of the country was behind Thatcher & the government. We were all fed up with the unions by then.

Re: Unheard of

Remember Thatcher and the coal miners?

Very well, and it wasn't the same situation. It may have started off as a protest against the ending of a dying industry, but Scargill hated the Tories with a passion and soon realised he could use the striking miners as cannon fodder in a war to bring down the government. No elected government could tolerate that, and although the miners were being told that "one more push" could get Thatcher out, the reality in the rest of the country is that people were fed up with unelected unions trying to control how the country was run.

It's no surprise that the breakaway union, objecting to being told by their leaders to strike when they had voted against it, called itself the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. Remember also that after the government faced down the protests, they won another landslide election victory two years later.

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

Re: REstart?

I think the prior heating to 300C would be more disturbing, though.

Enough with the notifications! Focus Assist will shut them u… 'But I'm too important!'

Re: Another great victory for Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive

If someone in their office was careless enough to leave their workstation unattended, a favourite jape was to configure a root cron job to trigger a cuckoo clock on the hour. By noon they, and those near them, were often found looking for wire cutters for the internal speaker.

Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists

Re: you focus on EVs were you can

The only reason that fuel costs of a BEV are cheaper than petrol/diesel is that the latter includes fuel duty which brings £30bn a year to the treasury. If electricity for cars was taxed at the same rate it would be little if any cheaper. The government (of any political stripe) won't pass up that income, so sooner or later BEVs will cost the same per mile as ICE vehicles, either through tax, road pricing, or some other scheme.

Re: you focus on EVs were you can

Unfortunately those measures penalize the poorest people who can't afford new cars, and can't get to work by other means, but they have little or no impact on the people who can still afford new 50k+ SUVs

Yes, that's what makes this so interesting. Syngas chemistry is well understood so having large amounts of very cheap renewable syngas could be a game changer.

Efficiency doesn't really matter if the energy is "free", as long as it can scale to produce reasonable quantities. If it could produce a liquid fuel for road transport that would be even better, since it could be distributed via existing networks.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

So a bit like the printer cartridge model, send it back for recycling when it's used up?

Maybe we could sign up via Amazon Prime?

Homes in London under threat as datacenters pull in all the power

Re: And we also want EV's?

And yet National Grid still claims that it can easily meet the needs of EV charging stations, even though the numbers always made that seem doubtful even without the DC demand. Someone's telling porkies.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Re: Pedant alert...

What, not licensized?

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

Re: One Ring to rule them all ...

Surely they can't all survive?

Meh, give it 5 years and everything ends up on ITV3 anyway.

Computer glitches harmed 'nearly 150' patients after Oracle Cerner system go-live

Re: Not a unique issue

A bit like my school in N.Ireland. The four first form classes were divided according to alphabetical order of names: A-E, F-M, Mc, N-Z.

Re: Not a unique issue

I'd have half-expected that to be Schenectady NY, which has ZIP code 12345.

Chinese booster rocket tumbles back to Earth: 'Non-zero' chance of hitting populated area

Re: What, no nukes?

Yeah. Same problem with people who object to new roads because the country is "already covered in too many of them". It isn't, if their width was shown on maps to actual scale they'd be almost invisible, so they get drawn not-to-scale as thick lines which gives a totally misleading idea of how much of the country they occupy.

Still, Betjeman had a point. There are ways to build new stuff without acres of faceless square boxes of grey concrete.

Doesn't that track cover most of China? We can hope for some karma...

Re: What, no nukes?

Betjeman was just using Slough as an example of how the countryside was being concreted over. Even he was embarrassed that the poem was taken literally, he didn't intend it to be. His daughter eventually made a full apology to the people of Slough.

Software issues cost Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess his job

Yes, that philosophy seems a likely cause for the utter crap of their latest "infotainment" software, which appears to have been designed by someone who knows smartphones but has never driven a car.

A character catastrophe for a joker working his last day

Re: Not final day antics ....

No, just an interrupt mask.

Russia, Iran discuss tech manufacturing, infosec and e-governance collaboration

Re: Heartwarming

And now all those Russians who've had to put up with holidays in Europe and the US will be able to expand their cultural horizons with trips to Iran and China. I'm sure they're just bursting with anticipation.

UK lays world's longest autonomous drone superhighway

> determining place of death.

They'll do what the airlines do. People never die midflight, it makes the paperwork too complicated. They only die once the plane has landed.

Microsoft Teams outage widens to take out M365 services, admin center

Re: Numbers

I assumed it was a typo for "endure"...

a recent deployment contained a broken connection to an internal storage service,

i.e. the installer forgot to plug it in.

Seriously, one missing connection and the whole system falls over?