Posts by Grikath

16 exoplanets found huddled around 12 lightweight stars

Re: Tides

Never been too hot on the "tidal requirement" argument when it comes to "advancing life". Even when the Moon was a lot closer to us, and tides were .. a bit more pronounced.

Thing is, life over here progressed from Green Goo up to Fishes, Crustaceans, and Other Stuff well away from any tidal zones, in the ocean. The fossil record is clear enough about that. So really.. Moon Not Needed.

I think the metal content of the stars is more significant. More metal = more chance on a viable metallic core = a solid magnetic field. Which is the first buffer a planet, and anything living on it, has against several shades of Nastyness happening to it. The way Mars lost its water and atmosphere to solar wind shows what happens if that magnetic field fails..

Air gapping PCs won't stop data sharing thanks to sneaky speakers

Re: Theory and in practice?

yup...

Especially given the directionality of high frequency sound, and the fact that the speakers would generally not be aimed at each other...

You'd need to put out some serious volume to get anywhere. Well into hearing range of all but the most disco-deaf.

Tech giants should take the rap for enabling fake news, boffins tell EU

Re: Thank god for tech giants

Big Tech is responsible for all the crackpot sites, because they must be, because they're Big Tech.

simple isn't it?

For all we know, aliens could be as careless with space junk as us

Re: just a little rant...

Anybody up to calculating. The probable mass of an opaque satellite belt around the Earth?

napkin time...

Geosynchronous circumference is about 226000 km.

Say we've gotten *good* at parking and maintaining orbit you may get as far as one satellite per 10 km. Anything closer strikes me as ..not enough elbow room.. But I may be wrong there.

That gives us 22600 satellites in a ring.

However geo is not a single line, but a zone where you can park several rings adjacent to each other and still do the equator-zoomy bit. Ignoring the toroïd , (https://i.stack.imgur.com/xzORe.jpg), signal blocking and other Stuff, I'd guess you can get about 10 rings in either side from the center before moving out of true geo territory. That makes for 20 feasible orbits ( 200 km orbit definition), containing roughly 450.000 satellites.

now comes the question: how much does the average geosat weigh? The thing there is that while still the heaviest birds around, their mass has been declining over the years, (https://blog.forecastinternational.com/wordpress/average-commercial-communications-satellite-launch-mass-declines-again/). Now there's only so much you can strip, and you need some serious tech in space, so they can't drop *that* far in weight. So let's assume a 3.500kg standard mass to allow for future tech.

The Napkin says that amounts to a total mass of 1.6*10^9 kg.

Which, for comparison, would be 2.15*10 ^ -14 the mass of the moon.

Worse.. the mass would be evenly distributed around the equator, so there'd be no wobble to detect. Albedo? You'd have to know what it would have been before the whole ring got up. Spectrography? Possibly a bit more metal, but that would be a hell of an assumption. Radiation? At that density you'd need *very* tight beams out, and the satellites themselves beam down.... Visual? at the right angle... That would mean whoever is looking at us can achieve a resolution high enough that they can also see our continents/major cloud patterns. Who cares about satellites at that point?

ok. It's no XKCD , but I've done my best. Thank the damn Flu and the resulting Boredom.

Pasties in SPAAAAACE: Cornwall hopes for slice of £50m spaceport cash

Re: "..located in the area around Newquay airport and Goonhilly..."

"Not so. This scheme is air-launched rockets only, from well off-shore to the south, I presume. Thus Devon will be spared, but not, alas, France."

Nah you can easily miss France.. Just aim over the length of the Mediterranean.

Boffins discover chemistry that could have produced building blocks of life in space

"The big question is whether this is something that, inherently, the laws of physics do allow"

Ummm last time I checked the laws of physics don't give a hoot about personal opinion, they just are.

Which means that they do allow for "life". Thankfully so, given that our whole body chemistry is dependent on those reactions to survive and ultimately make more "life".

Hansa down, this is cool: How Dutch cops snatched the wheel of dark web charabanc

Re: Fake news

That's why we traditionally have those puffy pants and shirts. Good emergency flotation devices..

Our women have gone one step further and even sport headwear with sails, just in case..

Re: But did they get the criminals too?

ShelLuser: See, I see one small problem with all this: Dutch law forbids the local police from staging criminal activities.

For *local* police you are correct. This was done, however by our *national* police department. Who are allowed to perform sting operations if OK-ed by a parliament committee. Same goes for cooperation with a foreign law-enforcement entity ( FBI...* at least* in this case ).

So yeah.. This operation was vetted, and legal. So any suckers trying to pull the " but this was entrapment!" card will have a very hard time.

Inviting nearby exoplanet revealed as radiation-baked hell

Re: Not really near

"and so far the furthest Earth has been able to send an operation space craft is 40 AU and that has taken decades"

The trajectories of the probes in question were never meant for interstellar travel to begin with... They were meant to get the probes to their designated targets as accurately as could be managed. Solar escape velocity was a secondary issue, really. Depends on how you look at it.

Mind... I'd love and applaud any idea that would endeavor seanding a probe away at any appreciable fraction of c.... Doesn't even have to be aimed at anything in particular. The Science that can be done on board while it's speeding up would alone be well worth it.

Boffins gently wake the Large Hadron Collider from annual hibernation

Whelp.. At the energy they let those nuclei crash into each other I wouldn't be surprised if they do create singularity-state instances regularly. In fact... that's the general idea of the whole exercise...

Thing is, the lifetime of a singularity of that mass is so short that it's probably impossible to even measure. If I remember correctly, a singularity with Earths' mass would have a lifetime of several femtoseconds before evaporating, with an event horizon smaller than the nucleus of your average atom. Not really world-gobbling material... And the mass of what's zipping about in the LHC is, mildly put, several orders of magnitude smaller than our planet.

Troll it your way: Burger King ad tries to hijack Google Home gadgets

Re: Computer Misuse Act?

The easiest answer to that one is:

If you leave your device open to the point where the voice of a random stranger can activate it.... Well.... start with Schadenfreude and work up from there..

Russia and China bombard Blighty with 188 cyberattacks in 3 months

No US in there..

Then again.... Blighty... does the Full Access Moon when it comes to the US and sensitive data, innit?

Netherlands reverts to hand-counted votes to quell security fears

Re: Is this a Bing translation?

Except that our politicians are noted for the atrocities they inflict on the english language. It's almost as if it's a mandatory requirement for the job.

Asteroid nearly gave Earth a new feature, two days after its discovery

Re: What if it had hit?

Íf it'd had hit Earth's atmosphere it would most likely not have hit at all.

Note the comparison to the Chelyabinsk rock... At that size meteors don't burn up, but disintegrate/explode midair.

It's what you get with Youth.. Not patient enough to wait until they touch down and make a nice crater.. Noooo.... They have to do the whole "You don't need Nukes to make a Big Bang" right away.. **

** No... I deny any science here... This is the celestial Youf , Showing Off , playing chicken with the older bigger kids, and occasionally failing to miss.

How Apple exploded Europe's crony capitalism

Re: I had to laugh at this

It's Orlowsky unabashedly showing his Fanboi colours. Nothing new here.

Fatal genetic conditions could return in some 'three-parent' babies

"Presumably in evolutionary terms there must be a selective advantage in maintaining consistency of mtDNA."

Given that mtDNA is so far stripped down in the "self-sufficiency" section that any mitochondrion cannot possibly survive unsupported by the body of an eucaryotic cell....

Yes, there's a selective advantage to mtDNA consistency: There's. Hardly. Any. Room. For. Errors. Period. mtDNA mutation frequency is about the same as "normal" DNA. Mutations in mtDNA are, however, almost exclusively lethal to the mitochondrium in question. There's only a couple of spots that can mutate without the mitochondrium conking it, and they lead to very rare, and ultimately lethal diseases...

Oracle finally targets Java non-payers – six years after plucking Sun

"read the license"

Ermmm... yeeeeessss.......

You do realise that those things are, quite deliberately, stated in the most obscure lawyerese so that no normal user can even begin to comprehend the implications of what they actually have bought, and how much they open themselves up to the sharks who have written the document to begin with. And even to the sharks themselves there's "a lot of room for interpretation", so that even specialists can get the odd surprise ot two.

So "Read the License" isn't going to cut it.

Unless, of course, you've retained a Lawyer..... oh wait...... /facepalm.

It's a date: Hard-pressed Samsung prepares for shareholder love-in

Awww.... widdle American wants to play Shouty-Splashy in the pool with Korean sharks? How ...endearing...

Loyalty card? Really? Why data-slurping store cards need a reboot

Or... don't do either cards or IoT, flip the finger, and live a happy life without being Analised by the Marketeers.

But that, of course, is not how forward-thinking people are supposed to Do Things..

iPhone fatigue and fading Samsung. This planet is bored with big brand phones

It's not "bored"

By all available date the technology simply has matured. This means that unless there's something *spectacular* tech-wise the coming years, phone-makers simply cannot make the big jumps "people" ** would like to see. Not unlike the situation in desktops once we got past the Intel/AMD race ( which made mobile phones as we know them possible to begin with...)

Not unlike desktop processors, a Budget mobile phone has the Ooomph to do whatever you can realistically ask of it, and you will pay Premium for each % of performance above that. ( which, also like desktops is mostly Gaming Territory..) ***

** the current crop of El Reg reviewers are, in fact, a breed of Sourpuss.

*** This amount of common sense is Boring and does not make Headlines, This is, of course, Anathema to the Reviewer strain of Sourpusses.

So long Vine, your six seconds of internet fame are over

sour grapes then...

The post... etc....

NASA gets last Pluto data

Yay!!

Time for a Pint for the lads/lasses then ... :)

Hackers pop top 'secure' wireless keyboard and mouse kits, gain RCE

Alternatively....

If you want *security* you use "oldfashioned" wired peripherals..

But that would be too easy now , wouldn't it...

Samsung to Galaxy Note 7 users: Turn it off. Now

Bet you....

Next model will once again have a removable battery......

Windows 10 market share fell in September

Re: ... we know mass enterprise adoption is still to come - ?

" How confident are "we" about this? "

Well... I believe it's M$ intention to keep the Win10 name/brand for a long time, well past the point where we'd have gotten a Brand New Version in the past. Given that whichever actual version of Windows the corporate world will actually switch to in, say, 4-5 years, it will quite likely still be branded as "Windows 10".

So quite confident, actually, as long as you ignore what's actually under the hood.

Signs of recent tectonic activity found on cooling Mercury

Re: "chemicals that have the potential to eventually form cells"

I doubt very much the question is if Mercury could harbor life or not.

The question : "how common are (plate) tectonics, actually?" is quite valid. Them being present is, by current knowledge, one of the subclauses for the development of an environment suitable for the emergence and subsequent development of life.

Get ready for mandatory porn site age checks, Brits. You read that right

Re: New Puritans

They're trying to legislate *because* even a toddler is more net-savvy than the set of Luddites in Whitehall...

And what they don't understand must be forbidden...

Genes take a shot at rebooting after death

Re: Not that surprising

"If they are "inflammatory, immune genes and responses to stress genes. " then they are essential not detrimental to the living phases"

Exactly this. In the living organism cell death plays a very significant role in ,for starters, development. Apoptose is a major mechanism, and in the end individual cells die al the time and need to be recycled in the living organism.

It makes sense that there is a genetic mechanism that kicks in after cell death.

Three non-obvious reasons to Vote Leave on the 23rd

Bollocks.

Potemkin has a point. UK politics has always suffered from a severe case of Islander mentality, if not post-empire delusions of grandeur, and has always fought tooth and nail against anything it considered "non-British" when it came to compromise on matters political or economical. Criticism is a healthy thing, but the UK has always behaved as a petulant child, throwing tantrums if it doesn't get its way in the european theatre. This is a matter of record, and no amount of smooth-talking can hide this.

The notion that the UK is the least racist of the lot is one of the most conceited notions of them all. If anything, it is more racist than most, with some great festering boils waiting to rupture, hidden from the Public by enforced Political Correctness by all the british media and institutions. It's a disease not unique to the UK, but the UK is one of the most profound examples of how Nanny State tries to control some serious problems in society by Legislation and Propaganda, while completely ignoring the root causes. Put on the paint extra thick, and eventually you won't see the rot underneath...

There's plenty of good reasons why Brexit is a good idea, but playing the Holier than Thou card? Really Bad Idea. Especially when you realise that the UK is the one nation in Europe that uses 1984 as a manual, not as the warning it's supposed to be.

Bring on the downvotes, but unpleasant truths must be stated once in a while to remind people it's not all Fluff and Rainbows. A Brexit is a much-needed first step to let matters get worse before they can get better. In the UK as well as the EU.

US nuke arsenal runs on 1970s IBM 'puter waving 8-inch floppies

well...

The shuttles still used ye olde core memory...

You'd almost get the feeling that kind of legacy is by design, not oversight..

Boffins achieve 'breakthrough' in random number generation

Re: I'm no Mathemagician...

*could* ?

ExoMars probe narrowly avoids death, still in peril after rocket snafu

The chance of any live microbes from earth arriving on Mars from this launch are so small they're effectively negligible.

Even if one of the pieces manages to hit Mars ( a very big If, given that there'll be no course corrections for the debris, and a different momentum for each piece..) , there is the cold, the radiation, and the heat of re-entry without a heat shield or parachute.

But the odds are easy to demonstrate.. Take a bit of steel, and drop it on the floor of your average pub loo at closing time ( or a healthy compost heap if you're squeamish ) . This guarantees Contamination. Then drop it in liquid nitrogen, and place it near a convenient gamma source for 7 months. After that , take the piece and put it in an induction ring at full power until orange-yellow. Let it cool until safe enough to swab, and inoculate some agar plates, see what grows.

It's pretty safe to say that piece of steel will be more sterile than anything classified as such here on Earth.

Cosmic bonks, breakups led to birth of Saturn's moons as dinos died out

Re: Cosmic shotgun...

actually , we have already been shown who's really to blame....

Good Going, Skrat!!

Yahoo! kills! more! passwords! with! push! notification! app!

YaWho?

The post is required, and must contain ...Stuff...

True believers mind-meld FreeBSD with Ubuntu to burn systemd

Beliebers..

Could. Not. Resist...

FBI backs down against Apple: Feds may be able to crack killer's iPhone without iGiant's help

Re: Smoke and mirrors

Or... the FBI brass, being tried-and-tested political creatures, are well aware of the attention span of the US Media and Public General, which happens to be akin to the lifespan of your average mayfly, and chose this tactic to ensure any continuation would at best reach page 5 news when the trials recommence.

Also smoke and mirrors, because you can't use *that* as an excuse to hold up a court case, but whether this "third party solution" works or not, they'll have their month.. in election season, with 150% chance any different SJW issue will have the Twats in Arms when the trials recommence. Even more time given that picking up the case starts out dry as dust, and the next Blip will be the verdict pro or con Apple, with option to appeal.

It'll be almost summer before anything definite happens again...

If they would continue now, win or lose, the FBI would suffer tremendous political, social, and operational damage. This smacks more of damage control than any real solution to cracking that phone.

If they were sure of a method that *worked* , they'd be dropping the case and crowing victory.

Apple stuns world with Donald Trump iPhone

Re: 30 seconds of my life...

Umm.. what did you expect? There hasn't been any articles anywhere on anything seriously new regarding mobile tech in ... months. Minor jiggles, lots of "in a couple of years", but nothing new.

So whatever new product of any brand will bring is a reshuffling/resizing, half an update, and 200% more Bling/Bloat. And Hype.. Apple is the master of that..

Microsoft will rest its jackboot on Windows 7, 8.1's throat on new Intel CPUs in 2018 – not 2017

Re: M$

"A week, I've spent, trying to get my wench's PC back into playing games."

And you're sure that the issues aren't , in fact, those games?

Given that between Win7, Win7compatibility mode, and DOSbox you can pretty much run anything gamey created since the dawn of the PC. or with a different emulator quite a few other platforms as well...

Lemme guess... she likes the dime-a-dozen bargain bin pointy-click "adventure puzzle games" or any other Zynga-type knockoffs?

Microsoft's equality and diversity: Skimpy schoolgirls dancing for nerds at an Xbox party

She'd probably be offended by that as well, if not more, because that would reinforce the stereotype even more in her eyes, plus being Forced To Watch Male Flesh, and stuff.

Mind.. a quick look at her twats teaches that she's pretty volatile, short-fused, and prone to CAPS!!, so there's probably no pleasing her to begin with.

'Millions' of Android mobes vulnerable to new Stagefright exploit

Hmmmm...

User experience: click linkie.. video plays...crash... click linkie again, video crash.. click linkie again..

That video had better be something people *really* want to see. Most people won't bother after the first crash, most certainly won't after the second crash. The technique may work, but given the delivery method, I doubt that the potential footprint would be "millions".

Apple tells iPhone court 'the Founders would be appalled' by Feds

Meh...

If you look at the intention of the ideas set out in the US Constitution, and what the US has become, you more or less can use the spinning corpses of the Founding Fathers to solve the world's energy crisis anyway.

FAA's 'drone smash risk to aircraft' is plane crazy

"Many countries already have laws governing hobby aircraft and where/when/how they can operate."

Make that all as far as I know.. Any Mintellect that flies anything in , on, or near an airport/flight path without proper authorisation is breaking a serious set of laws and regulations, and simply deserves anything the Book can throw at him ** if caught.

The only thing that's changed is that with a drone any moron can attempt to fly one. RC controlled flight is simply no longer a rather peculiar and expensive hobby for enthousiasts. The downside to this is obvious, but nothing that the proverbial ton of bricks can't solve.

Incidentally.. the same odds were quoted for Space Shuttles Blowing Up... So it's simply a matter of time then, isn't it?

** Yes, male.. girls tend to do their Stupid in other ways.

Middle-aged US bloke pleads guilty to iCloud celeb nude photo hack

Re: Middle aged?

well... according to your average Teenager anything over 20 is "old"...

Perspective is everything.. Personally I'm on final approach to 50, but I will apply Interesting Times to anyone who calls me/treats me as Old. I am, however, slowly starting to entertain the option that "middle aged" may or may be applicable in the near future. Say.. the next decade or so..

Who'd be mad enough to start a 'large-scale fire' in a spaceship?

There have been tests, on all spacestations. Thing is they were really small-scale experiments, under very controlled circumstances, and nothing like the "someone tossed his smouldering ciggie stub in the trash"

Microgravity fires are weird.. hardly any convection, slow-burning, *almost* self-smothering, but retain ignition temperature a lot longer and get hotter overall, so any draft could get them going again with a vengeance. A firefighters' worst nightmare, really.

Your unpatchable, insecure Android mobe will feel right at home in the Internet of Stuff era

Ummmm yeah....

Given that your average (dodgy) android app + average user = install + insane/unnecessary access without checking anyway... Isn't this a little bit....fancy?

Oh wait. Terrible Danger!!! .. Big Drama Reveal !!!1!one! ...Much Hype!! So Terrible!! [/unimpressed]

Millions menaced as ransomware-smuggling ads pollute top websites

Re: "accidentally pushing out booby-trapped adverts via ad networks"

Interestingly, the big websites tend to run the big campaigns, which are usually pretty well vetted given the potential for backlash. But still they served up the bad ads.

May be tinfoil hattery, but this makes me suspicious. My bet is that somewhere down the line one of the Big Ones got one of their servers compromised.

Swedish publishers plan summer ‘Block Party’ to thwart ad blockers

Re: They don't understand

Of course they don't understand, and neither do most people..

The magazine publishing earning model, even in the dead-tree era, was never about articles, it was about selling ad-space. The articles were purely to create the vehicle to sell that ad-space. With the shift to internet, that earning model has not changed for the majority of publishers. They switched medium, but not their earning model.

So, no, they wouldn't understand... They're still stuck in an economic model that was already failing 3-4 decades ago, and have failed to evolve.

Here's what an Intel Broadwell Xeon with a built-in FPGA looks like

Re: Wanna play? Get it with ARM today.

Specialised...definitely..

Very yummie though..

Boss of classified ad website Backpage.com faces first contempt of Congress in 20 years

Contempt of Congress...

You mean he's simply voicing what other people think?

Linus Torvalds wavers, pauses … then gives the world Linux 4.5

Re: PS/2 Mice

and then some.. It may be oldfashioned, but it doesn't involve the whole USB layer, which has its uses. The fact that it's supposed to improve touchscreen behaviour may be a hint ;)