Posts by Sparks

Half of EU members sidle up to EC: About the data-sharing rules. C'mon. Chill out

Interesting that the Irish signatory has been a junior Minister less than a week...

Sony sends muso stratowards on vintage TV set

So... how did they prevent damage to anyone on the ground when dropping a TV case from 60,000 feet up onto terra firma?

The Martian: Matt Damon sciences the sh*t out of the red planet

Not to be overly rude but...

"Science therefore emerges as the book's hero to perhaps a greater degree than Watney himself."

That is the entire sciencing-the-shit-out-of-it point of the entire novel and the entire film.

Next you'll complain that the giant monsters and giant robots made it hard to focus on the human drama in Pacific Rim, or that all the sex got in the way of the plot in a porn movie...

Scientists love MacBooks (true) – but what about you?

It's nothing to do with the users, and everything to do with the IT department

Macs and Windows boxes have endpoint controls for IT so that software upgrades and security controls can be used. With Linux, that's a lot harder (even though IBM has software to do that, it's readily bypassable).

So the simpler cheaper option is to not allow Linux to be used.

You honestly think anyone who's used to tiling window managers, keyboard controls, proper virtual desktops and a thousand other productivity increasing things that have been developed since 1982 on GUIs is going to *choose* to give those up to go to a Mac platform where the next big feature that's just been announced in 2015 is a rudimentary and basic form of tiling in their window manager, something that's been around since 1983 in Unix and since version 1.0 in Windows? Of course not. It's not a choice they get to make; the company says its a rule and you have to work within it.

And then they spend lots of their time finding workarounds and fighting a window manager that should have been taken out behind the chemical shed years ago.

*goes back to trying to get hammerspoon to handle virtual desktops properly despite Apple thinking standard APIs are for wierdos*

ps. Don't go on about the build quality of Macs. Lenovo's thinkpads left them behind years ago in terms of solid builds, and the only reason you see retina displays on Macs first is commercial deals with the manufacturers of the displays, not superior R&D. As to brushed aluminium and shiny cases, you can get that for a normal PC if you want to go buy Asus :P

Mars needs women, claims NASA pseudo 'naut: They eat less

The Mercury 13.

'nuff said, really.

Animal Liberation drone surveillance plan draws fire

" farmers with nothing to hide have nothing to fear"

Dunno about farmers, but everyone else in the world has plenty to hide and with damn good reason. Your PIN, your credit card number and security code, your wife's favorite sexual position, etc, etc, etc. Privacy exists for a damn good reason.

Besides, if this Animal Liberation lot are the local branch of this happy bunch ( http://www.directaction.info/index.htm ) then they deserve locking up, not being allowed fly surveillance drones. Seriously, any group that needs seperate icons for Arson, Sabotage and Vandalism (to say nothing of "Liberation" - meaning the release of non-native apex predators into an unprepared ecosystem which they then devastate) on their webpages is really one that the local police ought to be looking at with surveillance drones...

Re: Good on 'em

From over 30 years ago (seriously, what does it take to settle arguments like this?):

http://www.mustaqim.co.uk/printhalalstudy.htm

From Deutsche Tieraerztliche Wochenschrift (German veterinary weekly) volume 85 (1978), pages 62-66

translated by Dr Sahib M. Bleher, Dip Trans MIL

The approach of these studies can be summarised as follows:

Experiments for measuring the heart frequency and brain activity during slaughter conditions were carried out on 23 sheep and 15 calves. After implanting permanent electrodes into the Os frontale the cerebral cortex impulses were measured for 17 sheep and 10 calves during ritual slaughter and for 6 sheep and 5 calves during captive bolt application with subsequent bloodletting. Some sheep were additionally subjected to thermal pain stimuli after the ritual cut.

...

These first experiments carried out under clinical conditions and the insights for the correlations of sensory physiology during stunning/slaughter of small ruminants initially lead to the following factual and legal considerations for the preparation of legislation:

These experiments on sheep and calves carried out within a clinic show that during a ritual slaughter, carried out according to the state of the art using hydraulically operated tilting equipment and a ritual cut, pain and suffering to the extent as has since long been generally associated in public with this kind of slaughter cannot be registered; the ritual slaughter carried out under these experimental conditions complies with the requirements of article 4 para. 1 TierSchG. The EEG zero line – as a certain sign of the expiration of cerebral cortex activity and according to today’s state of knowledge also of consciousness – occurred generally within considerably less time than during the slaughter method after captive bolt stunning.