Posts by HelpfulJohn

Short-lived bling, dumb smart things, and more: The worst in show from CES 2025

Re: making an essential appliance too damn complicated

"There is literally no way to improve this thing by making it more complicated."

Have it tell you, through an application on your mobile 'phone, when the last bag of curry made from the left-over turkey is being used? Or when you're running out of space for the bodies? Or when the mains is off and the ice cream is under threat of melting?

Have it cool to -18 in one part for the meats, -25 in another for the ice cream and -80 in the centre for the solid CO2? With, of course, an application on your mobile 'phone to show you a thermal map?

Have it have the ability to convert from C to degrees C to Farenheit to Kelvin using ....'phone?

There's *loads* of ways a "smart£ freezer could amply improve your life and reward you for the investment.

Firefox ditches Do Not Track because nobody was listening anyway

Re: Tracking

Not once you have used them to carry tea.

Most seriously not once you have used them to contain strong, tasty tea.

Which brings up a thinky, *can* chocolate be made strong enough to withstand hot tea? Without melting?

In short, are chocolate tea-pots even possible?

Not tea-pot shaped chocolate bars but actual, useful functional tea-pots made from chocolate instead of glass?

Materials technology is wonderful but is that beyond even our 21st Century powers?

BOFH: Don't sell The Boss a firewall. Sell him The Dream

Re: That reminds me of "The Plan"

The "security issue" is a bad certificate.

The site's certificate has been issued to a multitude of other sites but it seems to be valid for those so I went to CATB. It looks fine. No scripts and other nasties hijacked me.

There is a weird issue with spaces being shown as diamonds with ?'s inside them but Firefox can correct this. "Toolbar > View > Repair Text Encoding".

The CATB site itself looks interesting and potentially useful but perhaps saner people than me will want to avoid it.

Merry Christmas and have as wonderful a New Year as possible.

Congress ponders underwater alien civilizations, human hybrids, and other unexplained stuff

They should watch more TV.

There's ten years of "Stargate: SG1", a prequel movie, five years of "Stargate: Atlantis", two years of "Stargate: Universe" and at least two "SG-1" movies that the USAlien Congresscritters could be using as "evidence" in this hunt for THE TRUTH.

Should they need more documentary evidence, there are many years worth of "Doctor Who" files that they could catch up with. Those even relate some of the activities of the very important United Nations Intelligence Task-force, U.N.I.T. which has protected the world and the human species since the 1970's.

And they could ask for copies of the super-secret filmed documentaries collected under the project name "U.F.O.", which discusses some of the background of the S.H.A.D.O. planetary policing agency.

There are others, including the "Secret Wars" paper-copy documents, excerpts of which, amended and rheavily redacted, were once published by the Marvel Corporation but those first three should be enough to give the Congresscritters sufficient expert testimonies to begin their highly vital work.

Getting the Goa'uld or the Aesir (the badly named "Asgard") to sit in on a Senate Hearing, even a closed-door, top-secret one could be difficult and sending a subpoena ad testificandum and a subpoena duces tecum to the lifeform called The Beyonder, which, as an aspect of the Cosmic Cube may not even have an email address, would be problematic but some of the human agents are still among us.

And I'm sure Hydra and A.I.M. would be delighted to testify.

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I need to get out more.

We regret to inform you Earth will not be destroyed by an asteroid within 1,000 years

Re: What

Errr.. isn't the proper form of having been made extinct, "extinguished"?

Falcon Heavy sends NASA probe to metal-rich asteroid Psyche

Re: Next big crater on the Moon?

"Err, what do you think would happen if a sizable asteroid collided with the moon without being slowed down?"

"What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth?

Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledgehammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad." - Dave Barry

"I would worry about a big crater, debris being flung widely over the Moon's surface,"

Oh, and those have *NEVER* happened on the Moon. Not in all of her history. Why, it's almost impossible to find any impact craters anywhere on the Moon's surface and debris splashed from impacts such as the one that happened in the centre of Tycho just *never* happens.

"possible moonquakes,"

Yes, but they would be yards and yards and *yards* away from fragile buildings in Los Angeles so there wouldn't need to be any movies about them.

" some of the debris being flung into the space between the Earth and Moon."

Well, okay, that's a maybe. But stuff gets dropped onto this planet all of the time. Millions of tons per year, every year and quite a few human beings have survived this massive bombardment for a ew days. Anyway, if we're dropping rocks onto Farside, Earth isn't going to be hit by much. And we could always film the bits that do get through and save Hollywood a packet on special effects.

" Any installations on the Moon could be negatively affected by this."

Protective, transparent, washable domes around the artifacts. Hairspray on the foot- and rover prints. Is there anything else up there needing to be protected?

"This probably wouldn't be as bad as an asteroid hitting the Earth, but still it doesn't seem like a good idea to me."

Well, it depends where on the Earth one hits. There's a lot of places no one would miss.

Farside.

There's an entire fifty per cent of the Moon that dioes not have valued and precious Apollo artifacts on it. It currently does not have anybody's artifacts on it though our pals in China do have odd ideas about landing there for little holidays. We'd only need to pick a day when the Chinese robots had all gone back home so we didn't damage their stuff.

It may be that were we to slightly gently-ish drop a mile or two of metal-rich stuff onto Farside the vibrations could erase the footprints and rover tracks and the dust could could perhaps coat the laser ranging mirror thingys but if we're going to go there in crowds to pick up the splashed bits of the incoming rocks, which we'd need to do to complete the "mining" bit of the process, we could always hairspray the prints and cover the artifacts with protective, washable domes - both of which would be fun ideas anyway.

Re: My prediction ....

A dirty snowball is both volatiles for air, water and farms and fuels for the City-Farm and any drive it may someday decide to install. Sucking up comets to make cabbages, onions, meat and pharmaceuticals that can be delivered to any point on Earth cheaper than Amazon could ever do might take some sense, long-term planning and investment but the pay-off would be large enough to make Amazon look like a corner shop.

The metals in even a metal-poor rock from the Belt are a bonus. The valuable thing is the rock itself. Having a new nation to build would be like finding the Americas, only better because it would begin with high-tech and advanced Sciences.

The stuff dug out to make the central cavity and the housing and stuff inside the rock could be sold to Earth cheaper than any surface-based mining company could supply refined metal yet would still be pure profit for the asteroid miners.

It's all in how you see the thing.

To the asteroid guys, the metals are mostly waste that they can use some of to build extra bits onto their home-world. To Earth they are valuable resources. Put the two together and you have the basis of Commerce.

And you have some people becoming unimaginably wealthy but that's okay.

Re: My prediction ....

"Moving the entire asteroid into Earth orbit is a massive waste of energy."

Not if you want to build a City-Farm in high Earth orbit. Hollowing out the thing would mean using the "useless" debris to fuel the economy of metal-hungry Earth and Moon while the resultant caverns would become habitats. Some of he tailings would also be used to build external structures, labs, entertainment centres, zero-gee sports arenas, "high-gravity" hotels on the skin, research tools, loads of stuff, but that would be a bonus.

Once a couple of hundred, mile-wide "rocks" are floating over Earth, some would find HEO too crowded and would migrate slowly to circle the other useful bits of debris in the System, Mars, Mercury, Venus, the Trojan Zones, Miranda, eventually the Oort Cloud.

From the dark but rich zone of comets around Sol to that around Proxima (if there is one) or Wolf 359, is a mere matter of drifting, conservation and good engineering. Oh, and patience, lots and lots of patience but if your entire Culture is contained in your falling world that isn't really an issue. Circling Sol at a couple of light-yers or drifting towrds a lesser light are pretty much the same thing, with the major difference being that Barnard's Oort cloud wiould be quieter, for a while.

Once a couple of other stars are "colonised", it is inevitable that the galaxy would be. It is inevitabe that some of the more idiotic City-Farms would try to make the huge jump to the Magellanics and to the big, bright light of Andromeda. M31 is *such* a temptation.

Dropping *one* falling rock into high Earth orbit would start the eternal ubiquity of the children of Man.

It's a shame that we'll never do it.

Gates-backed nuclear plant breaks ground without guarantee it'll have fuel

Re: Western Wyoming geological (in)stability.

Emm, I htought the recent thinking was that the hotspot was moving under the thick, mountainous bit outside of the park and that Yellowstone would never erupt again?

Also that it never really was a "super"-vocano?

While the BBC drama "Supervolcano" had it as its main point that the caldera was 40,000 years overdue and could boil the planet at any moment. It's a fun story but not entirely up to date.

The origin of 3D Pipes, Windows' best screensaver

Re: Personally

One of the nice tricks you could do with the toasters was to change them into other objects by editing two hex characters in the script.

One could then save many of those scripts and write a DOS batchfile to swap them around.

It wasn't "real" programming but it was nice.

Adobe users just now getting upset over content scanning allowance in Terms of Use

Re: Windows OS hoovering

Hmm.

To me, "The GIMP" is plural and has nothing to do with images. "The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search", The GIMPS, Prime95 software from https:///www.mersenne.org .

I've never even seen the other one and I've certainly never used it.

Oh, and the name may be "stupid" but it is an acronym for "GNU Image Manipulation Program" which is quite a sensible name as it's what the software does. Maybe, though they could have called it "GNU Licence Image Manipulation Program" or GLIMP?

Sodium ion batteries: Yet another innovation poised to be dominated by China

Re: China Singing

"Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey, goodbye"

"Na-na is the saddest word"?

Well, in this context, perhaps it should be "Fr-fr"? Or could francium and fluorine make a cell? Temporarily.

Re: Na Ion Battery surely

So, "Naib" for Natrium-ion batteries?

Is "Naib" a rude word in a recognised human language?

Oh, Wikoi-poo says it's Arabic and not at all rude. That's nice.

Re: Written while listening to to "Burning Down the House" by Talking Heads

If you lose 50% of your atoms in 22 minutes you can solve that by simply having lots and lots and *lots* of atoms.

If you start off with a battery weighing in at a couple of hundred tons, it should be able to power a 'phone for weeks.

Screwdrivers: is there anything they can't do badly? Maybe not

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

I tried this. It worked.

For a couple of weeks.

Then I got distracted by "life" and the backlog started.

Then my scanner got broke by Win XP so I needed a newer one, which I never did buy. So the backlog grew.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

It may come as a surprise to the guys born after 2000 A.D. but this also happens with digital file systems.

Even email programs.

With great storage comes greater ability to store tremendous amounts of trash you'll never need.

But I *know* that that one necessary file is in here ................... somewhere.

Re: Not screwdrivers but...

Make a note of where the screw is, remove the screw, tape it to something solid and not loseable then move on to the next.

Ideally, use a marker to number the screw as you tape it in case some are of different shapes, sizes or genders.

In the age of digital cameras, including 'phones, you may possibly use pictures instead of notes.

Taking the time to do it right can save *days* of scrabbling about when you don't.

And how often do I take my own advice?

Guess. :)

Apple unveils M4 chip with neural engine capable of 38 TOPS, and some other kit

Can't the iPads be hacked to stuff MacOS onto them?

Or does that void the warranty?

Can it do distributed computing such as BOINC [ https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ ] and GIMPS [ https://www.mersenne.org/ ]?

I like those and have been contributing a little dribble of CPU for decades.

How do you get four elephants into a Mini?

First, take out the whales.

Cannibalise to upgrade my Mini?

Is it theoretically possible to cannibalise the new iPad to put its M4 chip into my M2 Mini?

I like my Mini a lot but I suspect that I'd like it even more if it had two CPU's and more memory.

I'm not thinling of doing this myself, of course, but I know a guy who'se Authorised. :)

So you've built the best tablet, Apple. Show us why it matters

Re: Just think

"Buy a GaN charger. If you’re a serious traveller this is a no brainer."

I would agree that it's a no-brainer. Anyone with a brain would have given at lest one web-linkie to at least one supplier.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=gan+charger

https://www.startpage.com/do/dsearch?q=gan+charger&cat=web&language=english

That took very little brain and about thirty seconds.

Oh, and for those not interested enough to look but stil wondering "GaN" is Gallium Nitride. Gallium is silicon's cousin.

Elon Musk's latest brainfart is to turn Tesla cars into AWS on wheels

Re: Let me guess...

Hmm ...

I sometimes take a taxi from the Town Centre to my home. Ten minutes or so at a cost of about £10 or one pound per minute. Assuming you could average 50% usage on a taxi over the year, with it charging and doing distributed computing projects the rest of the time, that's about 60x24X365/2 = £262,800 per year. That is well worth having and more than the cost of the car, charging and inevitable random fixes.

It could be that Tesla-taxis may charge less due to them not having a human driver to feed or licence or they could possibly need that slack to cover lawsuits so let's run with 200,000 per car, per year.

With, say, a million cars, that's an income of about 262,800,000,000 per year, not all of it profits. That is slightly more than Musty owns at present. A million taxis isn't a lot if you scatter them over the entire planet and serve the entire population. If they become cheaper to build, cheaper to run, cheaper to hire and far more numerous, the profits on such a fleet could be astonishing.

If Muesli has ever been in a taxi and paid for a journey (is that likely?) he might have run those simplistic numbers. They are very attractive numbers. He might even think that he could stop *selling* cars and instead use them as taxis.

Then he could pay for his rockets to Mars.

Re: Farts

Could we tell Old Musty that the idea would work on the Moon?

It could even be a monorail, above-ground, so the passengers could see some scenery. With, perhaps, underground parts avoiding critical structures.

Musty is possibly malleable enough to see this as a good idea and building it would mean we'd need cities to serve as stops and transit points.

Lunar civilisation built because a bunch of billionaires want to one-up one another with a truly stupid notion?

Re: Farts

Doesn't that depend on how it got stuck?

If it slowly ground to a halt on spilled beers and wines and an assortment of cheeses, or on the rodents eating said spills, perhaps the deceleration would be survivable.

Until the air ran out. Or the vending machines and everyone reverted to cannibalism.

Have we considered the air? And, perhaps, some jolly pranksters with helium, sulpher dioxide or nerve agents? Or those who eat loads of beans before traveling? Or those delightful folk who live in torrid climes and have yet to hear about showers? Or laundry.

Hyperloops are potentially *lots* of fun. :)

Re: Farts

The universal law of tool usage:

If it moves, and it should not, duct tape.

If it doesn't move and should, WD-40.

For everything else, clawhammer.

Re: Farts

"... greasing it up to help only meant that it became attractive to vermin."

Yeah, well, he probably used edible grease such as duck fat or lard or something. If we did it today, we'd use super-hi-tech silicone jellies or something even more inedible.

Rendered politicians?

Re: Farts

"Now imagine the amount of noise created by a pump large enough to create a vacuum in a hyperloop tube."

So don't pump the vacuum, import some from the Moon.

She's got lots to spare and the more we use down here the better it would be for the little bunnies up there.

Japan's Moon lander makes it through another lunar night

Re: It has to be recognized

There *is* an "environment", it's just not very full of stuff.

It does have "air" of a sort, and intermittent precipitation of rocks and ices as well as fluxes of solar gases and, of course, the rocky bit underfoot but it's slightly lacking in trees, grasses, cats and cafés. For humans able to get there and to build permanent stations, it would have been a far more benign environment than an English Winter in the 1980's.

Luna is colder, true, but it's a dry cold and easily insulated against. :)

Somewhere, deep in the rock, it's even nicer. Or it could have been.

It's sad that we'll never really know.

NASA's Psyche hits 25 Mbps from 140 million miles away – enough for Ultra HD Netflix

Of course they do.

"NASA has better broadband than this writer, it would seem."

Just to ruin the joke, almost all of NASA is on Earth, most of it inside the continental USAlien 48 contiguous States. The tiny bits that aren't are statistical outliers and can generally be ignored.

As such, and as an extremely generously funded Government Agency, with highly-paid Executives and Administrators who need access at all times, one would *expect* them to have some of the fastest connectivity on the planet.

*Off* the planet is a little iffier. More so as some of the kit they talk to is a tiny bit far away and was built in the 1970's, when "supercomputers" weighed megatonnes and has less processing poer than an iPad.

The writer has to pay for his connection, NASA bosses probably mostly don't, at least at work. That' too, makes a difference.

Boffins suggest astronauts should build a Wall of Death on the Moon

Re: Meanwhile, here on Earth...

You also need to consider that at a ten metre radius, only the feet are ten metres away from the centre and experiencing the full force.

The head is about two metres closer and feeling far less acceleration. A larger pit, one that could accommodate many person at once like a bicycle stadium, would be better. The larger the circle, the more even the forces spread along the body would be.

Bicycles would also be fun. Cheaper and lighter than motorised vehicles, easy to build or assemble on site and easy to maintain. And,as they are entirely powered by the drivers they would provide far better exercise than would hogs or lunar rovers.

Indeed, bicycles could have been used as transport *everywhere* on the Moon. They could go anywhere a mule could and, unlike mules, would not die without a suit. If the Loonies needed to carry gear, maybe a trike with a large cargo-box would suffice for many tasks?

Fitting the pedals and brakes to gloves and boots is simple engineering. That is already done on Earth for those with differently-abled bodies. A sunshade would have been able to double as a solar-powered photovaltaic charger for any electronic kit, and the suits, that the Loonies might have used.

Well, perhaps it might have solved the "arm-goes-to-sleep" problem?

If she doesn't weigh very much maybe she wouldn't cut off the circulation?

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22549/22549-h/22549-h.htm

It's a fun book and, despite the beggining and middle, a very hopeful story. It's Sf but it relies on the plasticity of humans.

Though {SPOILERS} I'm not entirely sure that the people there would *be* human any longer. Not really.

"Will it ever be possible for humans to be gestated, born, and grow up in Lunar gravity? Or how about Mars gravity?"

Yes, we could do it now though it would have presented problems in the 1970's. That's just modern medical miracles in action. Whatever issues arise, they would simply sort them out.

The one issue that can't be sorted is that the seond and third generations and later would not have been "human". They may pay taxes(*) and have passports but they won't be able to go "home" to Earth nor to breed with Earthmen without help. Nor would an Earthman-Loonie hybrid be true to either subspecies, they may not even be fertile. H. Sap. Sap. and H. Sap. Neadndethalis. *were* interfertile but that pair lived on the same planet under very similar gravity for a few generations. Also, H.S.N. wouldn't have looked amiss on a London street. I don't see Homo Lunaris being four metres tall and elven, necessarily but there would have been differences. Definitely cultural ones, too. Loonies might have evolved to be better than Terrans.

This would have been even more true had Man colonised the starworlds. The Children Of Man would have been descendants and may have had a cultural link to us, however tenuous but they would not have been true Hoo Sapiens Sapiensis any more than H. Sap. is true Homo Habilis.

It's a shame that we'll never know if this assertion would have come true. Man isn't going out there. The Dream Of Stars is dead.

(*) Trust me on this, they would have paid taxes to *someone*. Local councils would push property taxes on cockroaches if they could think of a way of enforcing it.

DARPA's latest toy is a 20-foot, 12-ton tank that drives itself

Re: "20-foot, 12-ton tank"

Engine technologies have improved a lot in fifty years.

Now all Windows 11 users are getting adverts to 'make the Start menu great again'

Re: Prediction

"... why the blithering flip would I want ..."

Because you're bored, it's dark and you're too lacking in drive to cook anything?

Oh, and all the shops are shut.

Re: First email in my inbox this morning

I think most people's thinking is that we shouldn't *need* "Steam Proton and other tools".

Indeed, we really shoudn't need to know what Operating System the box is using unless we're a nerd fiddling about inside it.

*Everything* should "just work".

It's been bloody decades, it's well past time those guys got their acts together.

Re: Dear Microsoft.

Could you be a little more explicit? Your message is a bit ambiguous and vague.

Add sufficient hot sauce and it's fine.

Just remember to compliment her cooking skills.

But ...

"... Turn off the toggle for Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more."

Okay, but can the toggle toggle Tips back on while leaving the others off? Sometimes, not often, the tips are useful.

Musk moves Tesla's goalposts, investors happily move shares higher

Re: CyberCabs - Cybus Industries TM?

"Why add explosives?

Aren't the batteries enough already?"

Not, perhaps, should you wish a *reliable* outcome.

Sometimes their battery packs don't fail.

Re: Teslas that aren't being driven would be added to a lake of distributed computing resources

Why not?

According to Apple, Google, Microsoft and TwatFarce our pads, 'phones, tablets and PC's all belong to *them*.

There's probably something in the 4,000 page EULA that mentions Tesla keeping the motors even after we pay for them.

Re: Teslas that aren't being driven would be added to a lake of distributed computing resources

BOINC projects, https://boinc.berkeley.edu/ and the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS, https://www.mersenne.org/ ) do very well with contributors using their own electricty, computers, bandwidth and personal time.

There are other distributed computer projects where tiny, little blobs of computer power inside our homes combine to mimic humungous super-computers when they are all added together.

The idea of using the *static* and *charging* Telslas as nodes isn't utterly idiotic, so long as the software running the show tells the projects to get the hell out of the way as soon as the motor car starts moving. Both BOINC and GIMPS are polite like that. They reduce their own usage of our machinery when we are using it for something. It wouldn't - or rather it *shouldn't* - be difficult for Tesla to "borrow" the code that does this.

The biggest problem could be making any "borrowed" code reliable.

But, even if it were implemented and it worked 100% reliably, and BOINC-types used the platform, ten million iPad sized PC's, some of whom would be disconnected from the network because they were being used as actual cars, isn't a huge distributed computer. Old Musty seems not to have any idea of scale.

Senate passes law forcing ByteDance to sell off TikTok – or face a US ban

So ... just before the 270 days of grace period expires ...

... ByteDance forms a company "based" in a little house in Delaware (whatever that is), sells TikTok to them for one USDolar and RealAmericanCompanyHonest

re-issues the program as PikPok with absolutely no link to *anything* Chinese or Commie or Government.

Ten minutes of work for a junior partner in a minor law firm and the problem is solved.

Of course, they would also need to hire a web-page designer to add a re-direct to former-TikTok pages to bounce them to the equivalent PikPok ones.

But that's another ten minutes of work or so. Just do a global change of the name over all of their servers.

If they really want to comply more, they could also move their servers to Tuvalu or some other innocuous site but that would take more than ten minutes.

With 270 dys worth of warning, most of their users could easily change their bookmarks.

Tiny11 Builder trims Windows 11 fat with PowerShell script

But ...

... I *like* Solitaire and it was the reason I learned how to run Windows programs on the wife's MacBook many years ago.

Well, that and "Mutant Space Bats Of Doom" and a pinball-type thing.

Can't we keep that one and remove some other bloatware instead? Maybe the "telemetry"?

Open source versus Microsoft: The new rebellion begins

Re: I wish them luck

"... some massive cluster of systems with some clever software ..."

That is essentially the main thread of five years worth of a TV serial called "Person Of Interest".

Spoiler: an artificial super-intelligence is built. She tries to do good things. She uses human agents as "fingers".

More spoiler: it all goes massively wrong at the mid-point which provides for good story-arcs.

Another spoiler: Microsoft, Apple, Google and FB-X in the "POI" world seem to be totally oblivious to the obvious potential of the A.S.I. critter. I guess that's what makes it Fantasy, not hard SF.

Nothing like "The Machine" is possible in the real world. We all know this. :)