Posts by Cuddles

Nasty firmware update butchers Samsung smart TVs so bad, they have to be repaired

Re: Samsung computer monitors don't have this problem

"Do they come in five foot versions? Curved screen? Multiple HDMI inputs?"

Well yes, obviously. For the most part those kinds of things come to monitors before they arrive in TVs, especially when it comes to choice of inputs. You might struggle to find a monitor much more than 50", since you're generally expected to sit closer and not need the really crazy sizes (they do exist, but tend to be billed as conferencing monitors and be somewhat lacking in features), but for the most part a TV is just a monitor with lower refresh rate and less input options.

Re: Bricked TVs

"I could say "this is the last Samsung I will buy" but they're all like that. Big screen, shit contents - an inseparable combination for modern TVs."

And yet I've recently managed to buy a perfectly functional modern dumb TV. "Smart" TVs (scare quotes definitely needed) are a bit more common, but it's not at all difficult to find a perfectly good dumb screen with a few inputs for the upgradeable smart devices of your choice (or just an aerial socket if that's the way you roll). They're available from all the major manufacturers, and there will generally be at least a couple of examples high in the results if you just do a general search for "TV" on Amazon.

Forget trigonometry, 'cos Babylonians did it better 3,700 years ago – by counting in base 60!

Nothing to do with fingers

People have come up with all kinds of clever ways of counting in various different bases using their fingers and/or other body parts, but there's no evidence that any base system was developed because of the ability to do so. Indeed, the fact that it's possible to count in so many different bases rather suggests no such preference even makes much sense. The best explanation for why different bases have been preferred at different times is exactly the same as why different languages, alphabets, and so on have also been used at different times - coincidence and habit. A language or numerical system or whatever evolves naturally, and then people keep using it because it's what they're used to, until it evolves into something else or gets pushed out by a new system for a variety of different reasons.

As for the article itself, the tablet is interesting but the comparison to trigonometry makes no sense at all. The whole point of trigonometric functions is that they are the ratios of the sides of triangles (OK, it gets a bit more complicated, but that's how they were first developed). In fact, the Babylonian method is clearly more primitive since they only address special cases, much like the Egyptians and others who also knew a bit about triangles long before Pythagoras*. The big deal with trigonometry is that you're no longer stuck with a few special cases and laborious tables, but can instead use general functions to handle any case you like.

* Pythagoras himself quite possibly knowing nothing about triangles at all, with no evidence linking him with mathematics at all until over five centuries after he died.

'Driverless' lorry platoons will soon be on a motorway near you

"Great!, And how do they get to and from the "major roads" I wonder?"

They'll be driven there by the drivers that all the lorrys will have. The convoy part only means the back lorries will copy the front one's (which is entirely manual) acceleration and braking, the steering will be done by a human who will still have full manual control when needed. The eventual plan might involve more automation, but these first tests are basically just adaptive cruise control with feed-forward instead of just feedback.

As for the complaints that they could just use a train, the problem with trains, and Australian-style road trains, is that they're limited in where they can go and everything always has to end up at a central terminal before being loaded onto other vehicles for local distribution. The advantage of convoying regular lorries is that they can get similar fuel savings while on major trunk roads, but split away to different destinations as and when required.

Uncle Sam outlines evidence against British security whiz Hutchins

"an interrogation that basically ignored his fundamental rights"

The trouble with fundamental rights in the USA is that if you're not from the USA, you don't have them. There are a few parts of the constitution that have been successfully argued to apply to everyone in the country (hence places like Guantanamo, which aren't in the country), but most of the protections only apply to US citizens. So while such treatment may breach what you think his rights should be or the rights an American would have in the same situation, it's entirely possible that it was all entirely legal and will easily hold up in court. It's not a sloppy investigation, they just know exactly what they're able to get away with while obeying the letter of the law.

Kill animals and destroy property before hurting humans, Germany tells future self-driving cars

"Great! Now what about amounts? Does 2 adults trump a child?"

Not sure why you bring up things like the Queen, given that's already covered by the "not discriminating against anyone" part - if it's a choice between hitting the Queen or hitting a single other human, the car isn't allowed to choose based on the fact that one of them is the Queen. But as you note, there are an awful lot of situations that aren't a simple 1 vs. 1 choice, and automated cars will inevitably be required to discriminate between who they kill based on some criteria. Blindly legislating that they're not allowed to make a choice over who to save can't prevent situations arising that will require exactly that.

Of course, the bigger problem is that this isn't a question people agree on in the first place. It's all just variations of the Trolley Problem - a runaway train is heading towards 5 people on a track, if you pull a switch you can divert it to a different track with only 1 person standing on it; do you pull the switch or not? In this bare problem, most people will say you should pull the switch, but not all even agree on that. Throw some complications into the mix and things get, well, complicated. Basic complications such as changing the number of people or saying the lone person is your partner, the 5 are clones of Hitler, and so on, can be relatively easy to deal with if you agree on the base problem, and the latter two are the sorts of things that would be covered by the recommendations given here. But things like removing the lone person from the track and instead saying you have to personally murder them in order to reach the switch can make huge differences in how people view the problem, and that's exactly the sort of scenario that's most analogous to the issues autonomous cars will face.

Long story short, we're trying to decide how autonomous cars should behave without actually agreeing on how humans would or should behave in an identical scenario, and in the absence of a universally agreed objective morality, it's not going to be an easy issue to solve.

Seriously, friends. You suck at driving. Get a computer behind the wheel to save your life

"Better driver augmentation rather than driver automation makes sense"

What confuses me is why people insist on thinking there's a difference. It reminds me rather sadly of creationists who insist on distinguishing between micro-evolution and macro-evolution. Even creationists can't deny the many changes we can see actively happening in organisms on a human timescale, so they came up with the rather odd idea that small changes are incapable of adding up to big changes - even if we can see some changes as they happen, they can never amount to a whole new species.

Cars are really no different. Augmentation is simply a step along the way to full automation. If you keep automating more and more parts of the driving process, it's pretty much inevitable that you will eventually find the driver is no longer actually necessary, or is even actively detrimental. It's not easy to say how quickly it will happen, and personally I think most proponents of automatic cars are far too optimistic on that front, but it truly baffles me how people can see a constant stream of automation being added - ABS, cruise control, active cruise control and automatic braking, lane warnings, automatic lane steering, automatic parking, etc., etc. - and yet still insist that there must be some vital spark that can never be reproduced artificially.

Focusing on incrementally adding more augmentation until we can take the drivers away rather than trying to jump directly to full automation may well make sense, but saying we should go with augmentation instead of automation really doesn't.

Reality strikes Dixons Carphone's profits after laughing off Brexit threat

Re: Why?

"They've sold the phone, they've got commission from the network, why would it hit their profits when people go on holiday for a week or two?"

Presumably it's that commission that is the issue. Networks anticipate losing income, therefore retailers get offered lower commissions on sales. Given how easy it is to buy a phone through a network, or just from Amazon or often directly from the manufacturer, retailers like Dicphone have a seriously weak negotiating position; about all they can do is accept whatever a network says and pray they don't change it any further.

AccuWeather: Our app slurped your phone's location via Wi-Fi but we like totally didn't use it

Re: An argument for simpler engineering

"Anyone brave enough to poke around in Android's internals"

What do Android's internals have to do with this article about privacy issues with an iOS app?

Verizon kicks out hot new Unlimited* plans

Re: Not sure what your issue is...

"And, that affects us Americans how?"

You appeared surprised that people would consider $75 excessive for a heavily limited mobile service that restricts their ability to watch video to be expensive or unacceptable. The simple fact I pointed out is that that is, in fact, far more expensive and far more limited than the majority of the developed world expects. Your title says you're not sure what everyone's issue is; the issue is that you are being massively ripped off. You may not have a problem paying through the nose for such substandard service, but many people do. And bear in mind this is coming from someone in the UK, which is something of a laughingstock itself when it comes to both mobile and wired internet provision.

Re: Not sure what your issue is...

"720P isn't high enough for live video?

For $75 a month?

Seriously?"

Yes, seriously. That's more than double what I'd pay here in the UK for an actual unlimited contract with no throttling or caps of any kind. And for which the USA is one of the countries I can travel to while still enjoying the same lack of of limits (other than tethering being restricted abroad). My current plan costs less than a quarter of that, and while it does have a limit on total download, there is still no throttling or limit on what I can use that data for. Streaming 4K video might hit my monthly cap rather quickly, but it's no-one's business but my own if I choose to do that.

Who needs 5G? Qualcomm, Ericsson and Verizon hit 1Gbps with LTE gear

Finally

1 Gbps was the original standard for 4G, so it's nice to see we've finally got there. Only 8 years late, and in a manner that will never be seen outside the lab. Progress!

Google's Android 8.0 Oreo has been served

"If Apple can upgrade ipads from 2013, surely Samsung/Google can upgrade my flagship GS6 from 2015?!"

Yes, they probably can. The S6 already has Android 7 and gets relatively regular security updates, so I don't see any reason to assume it's suddenly been abandoned. Probably be a few months of course. Your carrier might be getting in the way of updates, but that's not Samsung and Google's fault.

Uber bros kill car leasing program after losing nine grand per vehicle

Thought to be?

"the hit was thought to be around $500 per car. When the true toll was calculated"

Do they not have accountants? It should be fairly easy to know how much you paid out compared to how much you have coming back in. Was the $500 actually a prediction that turned out to be flawed, or did they really somehow manage to run the scheme for two years before anyone bothered to look at the actual cost?

Horsemen of the disk-drive apocalypse will ride upon 256TB SSDs

Re: Confused editor?

"Can you please talk more about why you expect these products won't make it to market in the next few years?"

They will, that was the entire point - 100TB+ SSDs will be with us soon, disks with comparable size will likely not ever be with us at all. And while a previous AC makes a good point about just how much prices will need to drop to make them directly compete on cost even with that size discrepancy, needing 1/10 the number of drives can have benefits that go well beyond just cost.

Can GCHQ order techies to work as govt snoops? Experts fear: 'Yes'

Re: Off the leash

"It is a way of saying, "OK, boys and girls, you are off the leash.""

I suspect you may be right about the intent of the law. The problem is that when it comes to laws, intent is ultimately irrelevant, all that matters is the exact words that are written. That's the entire basis of loopholes - even if everyone knows exactly what was intended, courts often have no option but to allow unintended behaviour because they can only go with the exact letter of the law. Throw in some deliberate ambiguity in case you decided to change your mind about the intent later, or rush it through without allowing proper scrutiny, and you can easily end up with a mess like this law where the original intent may well have been one thing, but no-one is entirely sure what the final wording actually means in practice.

Mediocre Britain: UK broadband ranked 31st in world for speed

"The correct context for this discussion is 30 years ago when data was the new kid on the block and no-one was really sure how popular it was going to be."

No, the correct context is 40 years ago, when Peter Cochrane was already making the point that the infrastructure was old and crappy and not at all suitable for future use. If you read more than the just the first line of my post, you'd have noticed that that was the entire point - we didn't have a shiny new system that we weren't sure needed upgrading, we already had a crappy old one that was already considered unsuitable, and it's only got worse since then.

"It's always easier for countries started from nothing or a tatty, falling apart network."

Should be pretty easy for the UK, given the state of our antiquated copper network. Techradar recently had an interview with Peter Cochrane, who noted that the UKs copper infrastructure was considered old and outdated back in the 1970s. While you can argue about whether Thatcher was really to blame and whether the solutions proposed at the time would have held up today, the fact is that we're still using the same tatty infrastructure 40 years later.

Sure, it's easier to justify buying a new car when you don't have one than when you already have a fairly new one. But it's still pretty easy to justify buying a new one when all you have is a 1950s Reliant Regal.

Engineer gets 18 months in the clink for looting ex-bosses' FTP server

Re: It's not the company's fault.. yeeesh.

"Yes, the company obviously had crappy InfoSec; however, this doesn't put them at fault. If you leave your home unlocked, this doesn't mean anyone can enter it and browse through your possessions."

Blame is not a zero-sum game. Sure, if you leave your house unlocked it's still illegal for someone to wander in and take your stuff. But your insurance company won't pay anything to cover the losses, because it absolutely is your fault that you left it unlocked. Exactly who shares what portion of the blame will obviously vary; with the example of the house the burglar is a criminal who should go to jail, while you've just been a bit stupid and will suffer some financial loss as a result. But just because one party was worse than the other doesn't mean that everyone else involved must be completely free of any blame.

"This case shows that law enforcement officials throughout the Western District of Tennessee will work together to ensure that individuals participating in any criminal act will be brought to justice."

Isn't that basically just their job description? What exactly would be the point of a law enforcement department that refused to ever work as a team or to go after criminals? Does the state attorney really need to end every statement by saying "The fact this case exists shows we're not completely incompetent"?

Can the last person watching desktop video please turn out the light?

Not a surprise

"Ad revenue from TV plug-in boxes has surpassed revenue from videos that play in a desktop or laptop’s web browser. The news may surprise you"

Why would it surprise anyone? PC web browsers have ad-blockers, streaming dongles generally don't. It's not surprising that advert revenue is higher in places that people actually see adverts.

Bixby, why is Samsung's heir apparent facing 12 years in the slammer?

Re: No, you didn't tell us

"This really didn't explain the alleged the link between Lee and the corrupt regime."

There really wan't much of a link between Samsung and the corrupt regime. Or, more accurately, there was no more of a link than with the vast majority of Korean businesses. The problem is that El Reg, along with most of the media, have been strangely reluctant to actually talk about the sheer insanity of the whole case, for some reason preferring to paint it as just another run-of-the-mill case of corporate corruption. Some of the basics can be found at these links, with plenty of other related posts on the same site - http://askakorean.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/the-irrational-downfall-of-park-geun-hye.html

http://askakorean.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/the-ultimate-choi-soon-sil-gate.html

To give a basic summary, Park Geun-hye, the now ex-president, had essentially been in thrall to the leader of a shamanistic sex cult, Choi Tae-min, who claimed to be able to talk to her dead mother, and the relationship between the two was even cited as one of the reasons her father was assassinated. Tae-min used the relationship to make an awful lot of money for himself and his children. Choi Soon-sil his daughter, who essentially took over the relationship after Tae-min's death. Once Park actually became president, Choi had almost complete control over pretty much everything - she appears to have not just had full access to presidential briefings and influence on policy, but pretty much controlled Korean government policy through Park as a puppet. There were all kinds of bizarre goings-on involving shamanistic rituals, sex and drugs (yes, seriously). The scandal finally broke when questions started being asked about favours granted to Choi's own daughter, but that was simply a continuing part of the same corruption and extortion that had been going on since the '70s. As noted in the first link above, Koreans pretty much expect some corruption in politics and industry, as does everyone else really. The big deal with this mess is that it wasn't simple corruption, but rather that the president was apparently utterly irrational and not simply trying to benefit herself but instead doing whatever some cult leader told her to.

When it comes to Samsung, they were simply one of a great many companies who were extorted from. The only real difference is that they basically just went along with it openly and paid bribes when asked rather than waiting to be threatened with being destroyed first. That's not to say those involved didn't break the law and deserve to face justice, but given the scale of the corruption and length of time it's been going, Samsung's role in it just isn't a particularly big deal. And given how utterly insane the whole thing actually is, it's really quite sad that the media has focused almost exclusively on a few bribes; for once we have a story truly deserving of all the clickbait headlines you could come up with, but for some reason no-one seems to have bothered. The government of a major country has been run, and subsequently brought down, by a family-run sex cult masquerading as psychics to control the president and extort billions, and no-one seems to care at all.

Tech giants warp eco standards to greenwash electronics, rake in cash

Re: Repair != Green

"For example, you replace the battery. If you just chuck the old one into landfill, not exactly green."

You seem to have missed the rather important point - the alternative is throw the entire thing, including the battery, into said landfill. Making phone's repairable is certainly not the answer to all our environmental problems, but it's a hell of a lot better than being forced to throw the whole thing out every time a single part fails.

Hotspot Shield VPN throws your privacy in the fire, injects ads, JS into browsers – claim

Don’t let ISPs monetize your web history

...let us do it instead!

Forget Iran and North Korea. Now there's another uranium source

Re: Intriguing

"the catch is no black holes smaller than maybe 3.8M0 have been seen."

Maybe they all collided with black holes already?

On a more serious note, my main issue with the hypothesis here is that we don't seem to have actually observed anything to support it. It's proposed that there should be an entire new class of supernovae common enough to be a major contributor to the elemental composition of the universe, but we've never seen a single one. Sure, they say it might explain a variety of as-yet unexplained observations, but that's all highly speculative and can't really be counted as supporting evidence at this point. So it's an interesting idea, but so far we're both missing evidence of the actual explosions as well as evidence for one of the two things needed to cause them.

Particle boffins show off 'cheap', cute little C^osI, world's smallest neutrino detector

Re: Faster than the speed of Light... through water

"I'm most likely horribly wrong"

Nope, that's pretty much correct. The important part, however, is that it's not simply "a particle" that gets hit by a neutrino and accelerated to silly speeds, but specifically an electron, which is light enough to be accelerated to the speeds needed to produce Cherenkov radiation. You need such big detectors with tons of water because the chance of a neutrino actually hitting an electron is extremely small, so you need an awful lot of them to actually see anything. The trick with the detector in the article is that it instead looks for neutrinos hitting nuclei, which are much bigger targets and therefore you can still see a decent amount of collisions with only a small detector. The tricky part is that since nuclei are so much heavier as well, it's much harder to actually see the collisions since they don't produce Cherenkov radiation.

"I'm not a physicist but did he try moving it away from the nuclear reactor?"

While I don't know the details of the case, the problem when dealing with particles that can pass through the entire Earth as if it's not there is that "next to" can take fairly large values. In order to move it far enough away it could well have needed to move to a different campus or town rather than just to the next room or even building. That's not necessarily easy, especially if it's a fairly small experiment and the person running it has many other things to do, many of which may be considered more important.

To truly stay anonymous online, make sure your writing is as dull as the dullest conference call you can imagine

Re: Clever

"In the original, the writer has pride in him/herself. In both modified versions, he/she has pride an a mysterious 'them'."

Beat me to it. It changes the meaning of literally every part of the quote. "I am proud" is not the same as "I am proud of them", "I carry my love with me" is not the same as "I carry my beloved", and "he shall never know it" is definitely not the same as "he shall ever know it". Overall it goes from "Because I am proud, I will die without ever letting someone know I love them" to "I am proud of someone, and also carrying the corpse of the person I love who will always know it". It's not dull, it's just wrong.

Developing world hits 98.7 per cent mobile phone adoption

"more than one subscription for the world's ~7.5bn people"

Well it would be a bit of a hassle if we had to share one subscription between all of us.

Canadian ISPs do not Canuck around: Bloke accused of piracy grilled in his home for hours

Missing time

"Sixteen hours later they were still there, and had subjected Lackman to nine or more hours of grilling."

I now have a lovely mental image of them all sitting around sipping tea and awkwardly avoiding eye contact for the other 7 hours.

Browser trust test: Would you let Chrome block ads? Or Firefox share and encrypt files?

Re: Doesn't seem much point

"Buy their ads and they will appear on sites, buy ads through anyone else and Google's ad blocker will block them."

A few people have expressed similar sentiment, but I don't see it happening. Google are already facing massive anti-trust fines from the EU, among others, for far more subtle behaviour. Blocking everyone's adverts except their own would be so incredibly blatant there's simply no possibility they could ever get away with it.

Doesn't seem much point

Anyone who actually wants to block annoying adverts will continue to use an ad-blocker plugin of some variety. Anyone who doesn't do that is unlikely to even realise Chrome has the ability to do a half-arsed version built in, let alone the motivation to actually find and activate it. As long as Google don't start blocking the use of other ad blockers, at which point everyone should immediately abandon Chrome, this doesn't seem like functionality that is useful to anyone.

Uber drivers game Uber's system like Uber games the entire planet

As above, so below

Uber bends or breaks whatever rules it can in order to benefit itself. Uber's drivers bend or break whatever rules they can in order to benefit themselves. This isn't about the poor put-upon drivers desperately fighting back against their overbearing masters, they're all part of the same company and they're all behaving exactly the same way; the whole company is rotten from top to bottom. That's the thing about workplace ethics, the people underneath tend to follow the example set by their superiors; if the people at the top are complete arseholes, you're not going to see the rank and file all working together to make the world a better place.

Sputtering bit-blasters! IBM's just claimed densest tape ever record

Aerial density?

Do IBM tapes only work when launched through the air? If they're going to release official graphics boasting about world records, you'd have hoped they at least have someone involved who knows how to spell "areal" (the "area" part is the clue when you're dealing with something measured per unit area).

Dark web doesn't exist, says Tor's Dingledine. And folks use network for privacy, not crime

Nonsense

"so insignificant, it can be discounted... only three per cent of Tor users connect to hidden services"

"Only three percent of drivers mow pedestrians down on the pavement while laughing maniacally."

"Only three percent of plane flights result in crashes."

"Only three percent of the population are serial killer."

Three percent can be a pretty significant proportion in many contexts. Given millions of users, even if you assume most of those three percent are still not malicious, that leaves you with at least tens of thousands of drug dealers, pedophiles, and so on, using the service specifically for criminal purposes. We can argue about whether the legitimate uses justify the service despite the potential for misuse, but it's incredibly dishonest to claim the issue doesn't exist at all simply because the majority of users aren't criminals.

White collar crime prosecutions fall as offences rise

Not surprising

"Online fraud was the most commonly-reported offence"

Given that online fraud can be carried out by anyone anywhere in the world as long as they have access to the internet, it's hardly surprising that the police aren't able to prosecute anyone over most incidents. It would be much more meaningful to look at the rates of crime and prosecutions for actual white collar crimes, rather than lumping them together with everyone who sent money to a Nigerian prince.

Autonomous driving in a city? We're '95% of the way there'

Good choice of test location

"a fleet of six Oxbotica vehicles will be released on the M40 motorway"

If the absolute worst case scenario happens and the cars all go berserk and start deliberately ramming other cars bringing the entire road to a standstill for hours, at least no-one will notice any difference from a normal day on the M40.

Inside the ongoing fight to stamp out govt-grade Android spyware

Re: Whilst I don't have anything to hide...

"Hey, if they want to hack my phone go ahead - all they will find is loads of piccies of my children"

So you admit to having lots of pictures of young children on your phone? I bet you've shown them to other people and even emailed or passed them on in other ways. "Area man suing government is suspected pedophile who distributed pictures of children over the internet!"

OnePlus cash equals 5: Rebel flagship joins upmarket Android crew

Re: The trouble is

"I found that both myself and people I've talked about the OP5 to would much rather pay the £150 for the 'extra' features"

Indeed, and you're certainly not alone in that. As the recent article on Samsung's quarterly results noted, consumers simply aren't interested in expensive but not top-end phones. If they want an expensive phone, they're going to pay a little bit more to get all the bells and whistles available, while if they're happy to compromise on features they simply don't want to pay that much. There's a good market for £250 or so and lower phones, and a smaller but profitable market for high-end phones, but OnePlus are jumping into the not-quite-good-enough niche just as everyone else is abandoning it due to lack of demand.

Apple exits music player biz by killing iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle

It took until now?

Seriously, they were still selling iPods for $300? You can get a cheap phone and an SD card for a fraction of the price and it will be better in pretty much every single way. Don't give it a SIM and leave it permanently in flight mode with everything disabled that can be, and it will even easily rival the battery life - a phone used for nothing but audio output can last weeks. And of course, you'll always have the option of actually using all the other features if you happen to want them later.

Ransomware scum straighten ties, invest in good customer service

Re: When are they going to get caught ?

"At one point they'll become big enough to be a target that even our myopic law enforcement cannot miss."

At which point they'll be considered too big to fail and be bailed out by the government.

Astroboffins discover that half of the Milky Way's matter comes from other galaxies

Re: Was April 1st involved somewhere?

"To a normal person, 'many' usually means less then three digits."

No it doesn't.

"The size of the galaxy does not affect the number of supernova and as a large galaxy, we have more super nova then a small galaxy."

I like how the first half of the sentence directly contradicts the second half. "Large galaxies don't have more supernovae, therefore our large galaxy has more supernovae". Classic. Maybe you realised just how stupid the first part actually was halfway through typing.

"Looks like somebody can't add..."

Looks like someone hasn't read the paper they're flailing around trying to criticise. Instead of pulling random numbers out of your nether regions and whining about how something you don't understand isn't science, try reading what it is the science actually says.

Re: Was April 1st involved somewhere?

"Galaxies that are closer then stars?"

No, that is not suggested in any way anywhere within either this article of the paper it discusses. You've made that up yourself.

"'Winds' carrying material between galaxies? And what material were those winds made of?"

Everything. Primarily hydrogen and helium, but the whole point is that they were composed of all heavier elements as well.

"Up to half the mass of our galaxy having traveled here from other galaxies? Ejected by supernovas?"

Yes.

"So half the mass of our Galaxy should have been ejected outwards as well?"

No. As the article clearly states, the flow is primarily from smaller to larger galaxies. Since the Milky Way is the largest galaxy within the distances in question, any outwards flow would have been significantly smaller, although no doubt there was still some transfer.

"Wheer are the trails of matter?"

Between the galaxies. Aside from the intergalactic medium being far too tenuous to actually observe such a flow directly, the article clearly notes (again, you did actually read it, right?) that the study was about the early universe which wouldn't be expected to be the same as today.

"How often do supernovas happen? Three have been seen from Earth in the last thousand years, so, not very often."

That's extremely often. We're not even dealing with geological time here, but astronomical. Something that has been observed happening many times locally in the tiny span of modern human history will happen a hell of a lot over the course of several billion years. Secondly, you've again missed the part about the study looking at the early years of the universe; early, low-metallicity stars had much shorter lifespans so the rate of supernovae was much higher at the relevant time. Finally on this point, your number is just plain wrong, probably by an order of magnitude or more. In the last thousand years there have been three supernovae recorded for which we've been able to identify the remains with modern observations. Far more events have been recorded that almost certainly were supernovae but that we can't now prove, and many others would have been missed entirely.

"This isn't scientific, it is just silly."

The paper in question is scientific, your nonsensical rambling that bears no relation to either the paper or the article you're commenting on is silly.

Re: "kicked out by a powerful wind"

"wind is the movement of a medium...

Yes, I know, "solar wind" but that's just an analogy too."

No it isn't. Solar wind is movement of a medium. The mechanism that starts it moving is different from wind on Earth, but once it's left the surface of the Sun "wind" is an entirely accurate term for the bulk movement with no analogies required.

Smoking hot Galaxy S8 and storage sales fire Samsung to flaming brilliant quarter

Mid-range?

"punters reluctant to acquire mid-range phones"

That's because what most manufacturers now consider a mid-range phone is really no such thing. With flagships pushing their way to four figures, a supposedly mid-range phone can now cost £500 or more. Here's a quote from Wiki about their latest "mid-range" Galaxy A-series:

"this model was never sold in that region because it was being deemed too expensive and also due to near-direct competition against Samsung Galaxy S7."

Samsung didn't even bother trying to sell it in Europe because it was obvious no-one wanted to buy a "mid-range" 6" phone that costs the same as their flagship. The slightly smaller A5 still costs nearly £400. People aren't buying mid-range phones because as far as actual consumers are concerned, mid-range means no more than £200, maybe £250 at a push, and there are plenty of perfectly decent phones available at the price.

The problem is essentially that the top-end phones keep getting more expensive, but the low end hasn't moved at all. The people who want a cheap phone can have one for <£100, the people who are happy to pay a bit more can get a very good one for <£250, and the people who want the best phones available are now paying £800+, There's simply no market for anything in between; no-one wants to pay £500 for something that isn't the best, and is hardly distinguishable from something half the price.

Uneasy rest the buttocks on the iron throne. Profits plunge 14% at Sky UK and Ireland

Re: THe Real Reason

"Glad to hear they are losing cash."

£1.3 billion profit isn't quite the same thing as losing cash.

The Reg chats to Ordnance Survey's chief data wrangler

Data?

"demonstrates the OS’s commitment to data"

I can't help wondering what that word is actually supposed to mean here. OS is a mapping service; it has been doing nothing but collect and distribute data for over 200 years. What on Earth does a "commitment to data" mean, and how exactly do they plan on demonstrating it any more clearly than doing nothing but handle data for longer than many countries have existed? Buzzword bingo is annoying enough when they make up their own nonsensical terms, but it would be nice if they could avoid taking words that already have meaning.

Firefox doesn't need to be No 1 – and that's OK, 'cos it's falling off a cliff

Bollocks

"at the same time that Firefox is sliding into irrelevancy it's becoming a better browser. It's faster than it's ever been and uses less memory – less than its replacement, Chrome."

Utter bollocks. On starting up with just a single tab, Firefox uses 240 MB while Chrome uses 177 MB. More importantly, Firefox leaks like a sieve and quickly climbs to 1 GB or more after browsing a few pages and completely grinds to a halt, requiring killing it and restarting. I've never seen Chrome go over around 300 MB with a few tabs open. (I opened new instances of both to check the numbers; by the time I'd finished typing FF had already managed to hit over 300 MB without even being clicked on a single time.) I used to mock the idea of browser wars since all the silly Java benchmarks and the like that they like to boast about being a couple of milliseconds faster have no meaning in real use, but Firefox has finally got to the point where it actually gets in the way of normal browsing. I'm not a fan of Chrome, which is why I stuck with Firefox so long in the first place, but Firefox has reached the point where I'd happily pick IE6 in preference to it.

Firefox doesn't need to be the most popular browser, but it needs to be a lot less shit if it doesn't want to disappear into irrelevancy.

.. ..-. / -.-- --- ..- / -.-. .- -. / .-. . .- -.. / - .... .. ... then a US Navy fondleslab just put you out of a job

Re: Trained != practiced

"Voice and data coms are down. You need to communicate.

Do you 1) Have someone who can do a fair bit of morse at a fair rate, even if only 5wpm or 2) have nothing?"

Obviously neither. Instead, you go with 3) Use exactly the kind of system this article is about, which is significantly better than both 1) and 2).

Re: Trained != practiced

"Only if you want to stay in the uber-proficient class..."

Such as someone taking responsibility for communications during an emergency situation, quite possibly international communications during wartime? That's exactly the point; if the navy wants to use trained meatbags as their emergency backup communications system, they need to actually do it properly and take the time and effort to make sure they will be capable of functioning competently when needed. Being able to just about get by in unimportant civilian situations is not at all the same as being a critical part of an emergency response plan. Not having your communications specialists fluent and up-to-date in their language would be as insane as having your medics with no more qualifications than a 30-year-old first aid certificate.