Posts by baseh

Audacity 'scared and excited' to be bought and brought under Muse Group's roof, promises to stay free and open source

If it ain't broke don't fix it

A saying proven right time after time, especially in SW

IBM slaps patent on coffee-delivering drones that can read your MIND

WIDOW???

Surely if you are so miserable that you suicide, the drone will take the coffee to your widow, you paid for it so it cannot be binned.

Voyager 1 fires thrusters last used in 1980 – and they worked!

Yes you can communicate with it if you have the patience to wait 39 hours for an answer

Re: it's already doing 17.46 km/hour

From JPL site:

Voyager 1 present speed relative to Sol

38 026.77 mph = 16.999 km/s (in Standard International units)

So a small units error on the reporter part.

Microsoft scoops Search UI out from the gaping black maw of Cortana

Alternative

I use Classic Start Menu in Win7 style.

Searching cannot be easier: Window button, begin typing and presto the results pop up.

Why should I be the guinea pig for MS UI changeling? When they try and try and don't seem to get it right

The case of the disappearing insect. Boffin tells Reg: We don't know why... but we must act

Pedantry

"feeding amphibians or mammals such as birds" - revolutionary taxonomy

Leaky-by-design location services show outsourced security won't ever work

Re: You are shitting me?

You and the ElReg readers and knowledgeable people are careful but if you figure by accident in a picture taken by John/Joan Public?

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

Re: Who - "invisible" objects

"your AI realises too late that the patch of blue sky aheah is actually the side of a light-blue truck."

The Tesla accident with the white truck as with other "invisible" cars could be easily avoided by mandatory markings/GPS location, like reflective bands or rear reflectors are today (but adapted for autonomous viewing systems). This will go a looong way towards making autonomous driving easier and safer.

Come to think of it, pedestrians should also wear visible means, something that is sadly overlooked today in the name of fashion. When I see bicycle riders and pedestrians crossing in all black clothes at night in the rain I'm asking myself if they are intentionally suicidal or simply do not care to live.

NASA: Bring on the asteroid, so we can chuck a fridge at it

Damn right it does - DART brings to the binary additional momentum and angular momentum so the system total changes and consequently its orbit around the sun changes! Maybe not by a lot but it is still a change. So either Tom Statler was misquoted or the word "significantly" was dropped.

I don't believe that a scientist can make such a high school physics mistake

Coming to the big screen: Sci-fi epic Dune – no wait, wait, wait, this one might be good

Re: I thought Arrival was decent.

Just a small point about Arrival. I read the story a few years before the film and that made readily understandable the whole film.

The film explained but not clearly and without emphasizing strongly enough the difference between the human and alien perceptions: humans view time as a linear stream advancing forever in the direction of the unknown future while the aliens view time as a fourth dimension that can be traveled at will in any direction as we travel in the three spatial dimensions so the future is known. This perception is mirrored in their writing which is circular and can be written and read in any order and has no beginning or end, it is a indivisible whole.

Studying and internalizing the alien language unwittingly shifts the protagonist perspective to the alien one and so she can visualize her whole life past-present-and-future as a whole and not as a linear story.

She performs all events in her personal life even after knowing the end because in the alien philosophy you do what you have to do - it is preordained and there is no choice really (Was edited to avoid spoilers)

The alien viewpoint vs the human one is the real kernel of the story and film and it is a pity that most people (including my wife and friends) did not get it - I see it as a fault of the film - it is "boring" to explain but really necessary.

Dawn falling late: NASA's other glitch of the week

Re: Both Dawn and New Horizons?

Or the same programmer wrote both

So why the hell didn't quantitative easing produce HUGE inflation?

Thanks Tim, great explanation

And yes, as already commented here the worry is now how to ease the Easing quietly. The bonds are already crashing at the mere hint of rising interest rates and the volatility jumps. It is a real worry about the "solid" investments, pensions, mortgages, etc., where the big money of the ordinary people is.

Wham! NASA claims 'picture-perfect' blast-off for tricky MAGNETIC EXPLOSIONS mission

NASA PR

NASA sends hyperbolic announcements on near-Earth parabolic spacecrafts

UK cops caught using 12 MILLION Brits' mugshots on pic database

Non-existent privacy

In this day and age of electronic and Internet everything you should assume that nothing is private anymore and your profile is available to anyone with a computer, even the retarded govt bodies

'Turn to nuclear power to save planetary ecology from renewable BLIGHT'

Re: About the Fukushima case

Just to reiterate: 24 thousand lives were lost in the tsunami v/s 0 (zero) due to the reactors.

Antarctic ice THICKER than first feared – penguin-bot boffins

Great word/Intel history play

hopefully without floating point issues

There it is! Philae comet lander found in existing Rosetta PICS

Leaway2, you mean AAA surely?

SO LONELY: Woman DARED to get rid of her iPHONE - Apple DUMPED all her TXTS

Re: Oops!!

Answer to Mike Bell's "I really do wish some of you numpties would pay attention. iMessage will default to SMS delivery on failure IF YOU FECKING WELL ENABLE THAT OPTION."

Sorry Mike Bell it is you who does not understand!

The average Apple customer is not tech-savy and expects from Apple a ready-for-use gadget with no fiddling.

All settings should be automatic. not requiring the user to configure etc! In worst case, the user should be informed of the problem and guided how to solve it.

Leaving the user in limbo because he didn't read his contract 5 years ago i s a kind of lock-up,

Man brings knife to a gun fight and WINS

Re: Shooting a robot

Until true conscious AIs are developed and recognized as sentient beings, I think it will count as property damage

CONSUMERISM IS PAST ITS SELL-BY DATE: Die now, pay later

Re: put the money away for a rainy day

Where? In a bank which will siphon it and any gains into its own coffers and executives bonuses?

And if something will remain, it will be taxed!

So, sad as it seems, consuming now and enjoying it is better than feeding the sharks

Take THAT, hated food! It's OVER, tedious chewing! Soylent strikes back with version 1.1

Soylent 1.x

Is this some sort of April's Fool joke ahead of time?

MOM: CHEAP Mars ship got it right first time. Nice one, India

Re: Nice package...

Reminds me of an oldie:

How many kinds of people are?

Answer: 10 - those that count in binary and those that don't.

Re: Any comment from NASA?

It will cost 74M$ to craft a comment

THE DEATH OF ECONOMICS: Aircraft design vs flat-lining financial models

Re: If you give a politician 1£ ...

Basically referendums will be probably be the way of the future, the technology (internet/social nets) even today is easily able to support popular voting on everything, even on the most trivial subjects.

However there is a very dark side to that: the ease of voting can lead to short term, populist and shallow decisions.

This comes back to one of the points of the post: education, education, education; without having a very good knowledge of the subject to be voted upon, how can you choose the optimal option???

And that leads to another facet of the popular vote, maybe the hardest of all: you should learn all you can about the subject before voting and if you feel that you do not know enough d o n o t vote!!

Each one of the steps above is fraught with dangers and potential misuse, so making it viable is a real challenge.

Is it realistic?

Bonking with Apple has POUNDED mobe operators' wallets

Apple pay...

Card companies work for their percentage: insurance and refunds if card number is stolen, security analyses to discover frauds, etc. And yes they profit too.

But what Apple will do except skim the cream????

Israeli spies rebel over mass-snooping on innocent Palestinians

Critics

I'd like to hear from the Palestinians that criticize their government over rocketing and suicide bombing of Israelis.

Oh, they can't, they were executed in the Gaza marketplace.

Siri: Helpful personal assistant or SERIAL APP KILLER?

Yes, we will use our brains less for this but

it was also true of the calculator replacing logarithmic tables multiplication.

And didn't humanity find something else to use the freed brain capacity for?

Typing in Cortana

Isn't that the same as a Search??

My big reveal as macro-economics analyst: It's a load of COBBLERS

The problem as I see it is the lack of true and reliable data

that is kept secret by interested parties (mainly financial institutions and bodies) so that they may profit from it.

Not only that, but even misinformation is used to increase their gains.

So how can an honest economist or person unaffiliated to the big ones calculate and predict economic events if the data they have is missing or even right misleading?

And by the way, this weekend idea is great - it enables taking a step back and see and think the larger picture and rise to the more rarefied levels above the day-to-day gruel

No, thank you. I will not code for the Caliphate

This is satire at its best

On two levels: the ISIS matter itself as well as the media/social level that matters more that the matter itself

SpaceX prototype rocket EXPLODES over Texas. 'Tricky' biz, says Elon Musk

Re: On YouTube

AdBlock, Ghostery?

Intel forced to shoot down viral 'Israeli boycott' whopper

Re: But there is no part made in Gaza,

So sorry, I didn't mean all Gazans, I meant Hamasland

But there is no part made in Gaza,

so how can it be "Satan Inside"?

CIA infosec guru: US govt must buy all zero-days and set them free

The man is right but it costs money and effort

History teaches that humans remain complacent until a crisis occurs. Then they try to patch the system in an "economical" way. They do it until a real catastrophe happens. Then the whole old system has to be ripped up and rebuilt from scratch.

All is well for a time until a crisis ....

SCORE: Rosetta probe hits orbit of duck-shaped comet

Fantastic achievement and congrats to all involved

Not forgetting those that coughed up the money.

Now on to practicalities - an Armageddon-like mission planning

Snowden latest: NSA targets Gaza, pumps intelligence to Israel

Timing, timing

Almost good timing, just a little late, the current hostilities started a month ago and only now the documents surfaced?

Did it take so long to find the documents? Or to cook them?

Just kidding, I don't see that somebody will bother for such well known secrets.

Your fitness tracker is a SNITCH says Symantec

Is that an issue for the target users?

IMHO it is not a problem.

I would think that most, if not all, those that record and share their activities

are anyway extroverts that w a n t the whole world to know.

In my opinion, most if not all the people who record and share their activities are extroverts and w a n t the whole world to know about them and what they are doing.

So IMHO the bad security is not a problem for them so why invest in security and privacy?

The Sun took a day off last week and made NO sunspots

Fortunately, human activities helped to counteract the lower solar output

and we did not (yet) enter a new ice age.

Just to remind you lower temperatures and ice are devastating for vegetation and consequently for all living things. A little taste of that we felt in 1400-1800.

Mars Orbiter spots FRESH IMPACT CRATER

And don't forget that the asteroid belt is between Mars and Jupiter

so you have to expect more impacts of larger rocks

Former CIA and NSA head says Huawei spies for China

Look who's talking!