Posts by 96percentchimp 128 posts • joined 11 Jan 2012
"We should also remember that to arrest someone, the results of the facial recognition processing have to be presented to a human, the question arises as to when the human compares the output to the actual target list and so is able to rule out many false positives before someone is actually stopped."
Unfortunately, humans are notorious for accepting the infallible authority of machines - AKA the "computer says no" fallacy, even when their decisions are obviously wrong.
"Alternatively, have Excel bring up a dialogue box telling the user how to convert the cell type - "Hey, it looks like you might be working with dates in this column. If you wish to convert it to a date format, select the column by double clicking the header and then right click, Format Cells"."
Maybe they could give it a little personality, and a name, say "Clippy"? (or don't, really, please don't)
Maybe for a few days in the 1960s when it was a new thing. I don't recall anyone giving a crap about Concorde when Iived and worked in Hounslow in the late 1990s.
I worked in a crappy office a mile or so north of Heathrow, without air con or double glazing. The main benefit of Concorde's afternoon flight (around 5pm) was that it told you the working day was almost over.
"Likewise, other people are also perfectly entitled to think you're kind of a jerk for saying that, and want to distance themselves from you."
They're also entitled to say you're a jerk, *in public*, and for other people to support, repeat and amplify that opinion. And if your employer, or your customers, subsequently choose that they don't want to be associated with a jerk, then that is the consequence of your personal choice.
Straw man argument. CO2 is a persistent pollutant that doesn't magically disappear after a few months. The only air-pollution benefits to appear during Covid have been particulates, and sadly this has only shown how much one kind of pollution has mitigated the other, with a sudden warming in arctic regions this spring.
That's why policy to tackle AGW needs to also be persistent over decades and the action required to prevent significant warming gets more drastic each year we delay - if we'd taken action 20+ years ago instead of listening to deniers like you, the overall cost of changing to a carbon-neutral or C-negative economy would have been relatively small.
If you're talking about the SpaceX Demo-1 mission, it may be that both feeds were visible to the ground, but only to each via ground relay through the TDRS satellites, which isn't practical for the Moon or Mars.
I assume this will be more like an approaching spacecraft automatically becoming part of the station's network so it can be controlled remotely and broadcast its progress so the station's computer or occupants can judge whether they think it's safe to proceed without the go/no-go from Earth-based mission control that happens on the ISS.
"I sometimes wonder what would happen if a couple kids tried this kind of thing today ... sadly, however, at that age they aren't taught enough of the basics to even contemplate the concept, much less attempt to implement it. Sad, that ... we've lost something as a society."
You falsely posit a golden age when every 10-year-old was educated and motivated to produce innovative feats of engineering. I suggest that you're just a moaning old codger who looks at the past through rose-tinted specs. Then, as now, these bright kids represented a fraction of the total kid population, most of whom live unremarkable lives. Today, the bright kids have even more access to the knowledge they'd require to do this, but they're probably focusing their efforts on coding-based shenanigans.
It's so typical of the BBC these days to have a site like Taster that shows off the amazing work of BBC Technology (often through international collaborations with the EBU and NHK), but not promote it because they're worried the licence fee refusenik wankers will moan about their money being wasted on something that doesn't directly benefit them.
Most GEO satellites are pushed into a higher graveyard orbit at end of life, where they'll remain for a long time, but space is a hostile environment and occasionally they die before the operator can make them safe. So-called 'zomebie' sats roam in and out of GEO on increasingly inclined orbits that can be a risk to operational sats.
The rocket breakup didn't have to be caused by a collision: any spacecraft with fuel on board and no-one controlling it is basically a bomb going through regular cycles of thermal extremes that degrade pressure vessels, and radiation that can make cause sparks in defunct circuits. If it doesn't fall back to Erath or get hit by something else, chances are it will go boom one day.
IIRC typically the lawyers' percentage is agreed when they agree to take the case, based on the probability of winning and the payout they expect. If the plaintiffs don't like it, they can shop around for a different shark...the USA seems to have no shortage of lawyers.
I used to live in a place with IoT heating, and it was indeed very handy to be able to adjust the heating when I was out of the house - when I wasn't going to be home at the normal time, or I'd gone away for a few days and forgotten to change the timer.
IMO this is a hopelessly naive idea.
Ireland has a high proportion of independents, who are famously corrupt and dedicate their efforts to fineagling as much as they can for their local fiefdoms so they get re-elected. On the big issues, they're absolutely hopeless because they don't care. It's no better than parties who offer a manifesto, and in some cases significantly worse.
I have great sympathy for the plight of the astronomers - particularly the amateurs who crontibute a lot to the field simply because they have a passion for it - mostly because Musk never bothered to ask - he just went a did it like the brilliant, arrogant cock that he is.
All the same, if Musk and Bezos succeed in making space travel affordable (YMMV) then Starlink is going to pale into comparison over the next 50 years as the night is filled with microsats, manufacturing hubs, hotels and habitats. The next generation will see the skies change in the same way the postwar generation saw the countryside around big cities turn into suburbia.
'Tis, perhaps, the inevitable price of something that may or may not fit your definition of progress.
I'm surprised at how many commentards think this guy deserves no sympathy for his situation. He attempted to remove his former employer from his Trello account, but the second email couldn't be removed. That's particularly bad in this case, when the ability to work through multiple emails is touted as a feature of the service - the onus lies entirely on the operator to enable the user to manage their account fully.
Sure, he shouldn't have mixed work and personal data, but life is rarely that simple and few people are capable of achieving the levels of anally retentive pedantry on which many top Reg commentards pride themselves. The superiority you feel might just be hubris waiting to bite you where it hurts.
Falcon's pretty much a mature product now, rarely failing to deliver the payload and regularly landing unless they push the envelope (which they like to do).
Starship looks a lot like the early days of Falcon now - build one, blow it up, build a better one - but a 2STO interplanetary vehicle is orders of magnitude more difficult than Falcon 9/Heavy. Conventional wisdom said that was impossible, so who knows how long it will take Starship to go from prototypes to product. I predict a lot of enjoyable RUDs, a lot of naysayers, and Starship will still fly around the Moon before SLS.
I was reassured by the volume of righteous commentards who leapt on Holden's tweet, and do sterling work to fight the fires of other idiocy, such as anti-vaxxing, AGW-denial and Brexitteering (some on these very pages). There are many bright minds out there.
The problem is that the idiots won't shut up, there's always a small fetid corner of the interwebs where they can find other fools of their ilk (some of them pushing more sinister agendas for which regular stupidity is an excellent shill). They reassure each other that the fight must be fought, recharge and return to poison the well for everyone with a gram of common sense.
Over time, it's like a drip of water cutting into the bedrock of sensible thought, until one day a fucking great sinkhole opens up, and you realise the whole edifice has been undermined and you're all teetering on the brink of national, regional or global stupidity.
Very few authors earn a lot of money, or very much at all, althought he publishers might, but mostof that is down to sheer economies of scale.
Authors advances are typically <£30k for a novel that might take 1-2 years to write and another 3 years to go through the publishing process. >90% of novels never "earn out" their advance - they don't make enough to pay the advance back. Some 2-3% of novels make all of the money, and apart from a few high-profile authors whose success has become self-perpetuating, picking a successful novel is, publishers tell me, like trying to catch lightning in a bottle.
Copyright might be abused on a corporate level, but at the level of individual creators, it's a vital protection to their livelihood and creative freedom.
I read it as Haydale has graphene but it doesn't yet have the cutting edge customers/applications that the investors were promised would deliver megabucks. The investors want to see ROI/repayment of credit. iCraft needs something techy for its bullshit cosmetics.
Haydale stays afloat while the genuine tech & engineering applications follow their slow journey along the Gartner hype cycle, and the people it employs keep their jobs.
That's your synergy, right there.
About 3 years ago I bought a Neato Botvac to do the housekeping I hate. It's a mid-range £350 model, just about smart enough to manage a 2-bedroom flat and the pre-vacuum floor clearing is a good way to tidy up.
After about 2 years it ground to a halt and the usual maintenance didn't help, so I got onto the support line and they lead me to a lot of stiffness in the brush rotation. Their solution was to replace this large lump of plastic. My solution: remove the spindle (an easy part of the regular maintenance routine), gently unclip the cap and - hey presto! - remove the lump of dust clogging it up. A spritz of WD40 and it worked like new. Now it's part of my regular maintenance and has been running smoothly for another year.
I wasn't really bothered about the £25 cost of a new brush, but the thought of chucking the whole thing in landfill when it was so easy to repair. Consumer tech companies have to move beyond this mindset if we're going to escape the disposable society that has us drowning in mountains of plastic waste. At the very least, make it possible to return the parts and buy refurbished units instead of churning out disposable crap.
"I suspect it would be a trivial exercise for a telescope taking a long exposure to "blink" as a satellite flew past."
"I suspect" is doing a lot of work here. Who's going to develop the software and hardware that allows telescopes to detect (or be notified) of a satellite entering their field of view? Who's going to pay for it to be provided to all the professional AND amateur astrophotographers who have been inconvenienced without consultation?
That's the real issue here: arrogance. Musk had a good idea, so he went ahead and did it because he could. He didn't bother to ask if there were any downsides because that might compromise his visionary genius.
>> "Blame the congress critters that believe it's better to have open borders rather than a space program."
Agree with most of what you say, but why are these mutually exclusive goals?
Why is open borders relevant to a thread about spaceflight?
And is the pork-troughing Republican senator for Alabama (or his congresional allies) also in favour of open borders? It sounds unlikely.
There are still a lot of engineering & design obstacles to mass consumer adoption of VR - clunky, ugly headsets, nausea caused by refresh lag, resolution - and like all such issues they'll be overcome in time.
In industry, it's another matter, and VR is being widely adopted for tasks such as hostile environment training (nuclear reactors etc), remote location surveying (use a drone to obtain a point cloud model of a location that's hard to reach and recreate it in VR), architectural and engineering simulations (structural modelling, lighting simulation, etc). Funny thing is, they often use gaming engines and IT talent, so it's a win-win for the gamines industry while the consumer market emerges.
As Musk frequently observes, the fuel isn't expensive, but throwing away rockets is very costly. Developing the hardware is the most expensive part, particularly if you want it to be reusable, because you'll have to iterate through several designs that you can't reuse to a useful degree.
We've seen that with the Falcon 9/Heavy, which is just entering the commercially reusable stage of its development. SpaceX's Starship/Super Heavy is at a much earlier stage in its development, but it will get there (even if not on Musk's ambitious timelines). SLS will never be a cost-effective platform, it just exists to siphon money from the state, because that's Boeing's business model.
Maybe it doesn't apply in this specific situation, but everywhere I've lived in the UK, if there's a planning application the local authority (or developer) has to place notices on lamp-posts and similar street furniture in the affected area, and nearby residents receive letters notifying them of the application.
If the council failed to post proper notifications prior to the decision, they're almost certainly in breach of their duties and the decision will have to be voided.
So good of you and Musk to make the decision on behalf of the astronomical community, after they've committed funding to Earth-based telescopes that will take a decade or more to complete. Let's hope we don't miss that killer asteroid in the >20-year window before space-based astronomy comes into the range of most professional astronomers and the enormously important amateur community.
Maybe if Musk had bothered to ask in advance, both sides could have worked on mitigation and compensation during the design stage instead of being forced into confrontation by one socially-inept billionaire's arrogance.
Live Aid/Band Aid was certainly a flawed organisation, but it's nonsense to say that none of the funds raised money made it to Africa, or to suggest that the organisers personally profited from the charity.
I Googled "Live Aid Sunday Times" and found nothing, which leads me to suspect that this is the legacy of the ST's infamous Insight reporting team, and demonstrates how long a lie can persist in the public consciousness. In 2010 the BBC was forced to apologise over allegations that Band Aid funds were used to buy weapons.
There are ongoing arguments over how the money was spent and Band Aid's decision to work with the corrupt Ethopian government rather than pull out altogether. The most daming coverage of this comes in SPIN's "Live Aid: The Terrible Truth" and even this doesn't claim that Live Aid was the scam WS Gosset suggests (https://www.spin.com/featured/live-aid-the-terrible-truth-ethiopia-bob-geldof-feature/).
Having worked with a conservation charity, I can confirm that a lot of money (around 50% of income) goes on fundraising. No-one liked this situation, but there didn't seem to be an alternative.
'...defence secretary Ben Wallace was quoted by the publication as saying: "It is definitely our intention, though, that the carrier strike group will be able to be a wholly UK sovereign deployable group".'
With Trump doing his best to dismantle NATO and the Brexit loons destroying our European alliances, Britain will have no one else to sail with in a few years.
Unless Farage plans to have the Royal Navy join a Russian fleet. I wouldn't put anything past that weasly gobshite.
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