Posts by Steve Sherlock 50 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jul 2007
"He suggests that trees could be genetically engineered to reduce isoprene emissions, and states that plantations should be located away from urban pollution."
I was always lead to believe that one of the major factors in support of using biofuels was that they'd be grown locally, avoiding the costs and emissions associated with transporting the fuel around the country.
Surely I'm not the only person in the interwebs who primarily reads the negative reviews when looking at a product or service. You can quickly see if someone's being unreasonable and are able to dismiss that review as worthless. On the contrary, if all the negative reviews are constructive and reasonable you know to avoid the product/company.
So you've never done three laps of town trying to find a space? If the data is available, it can be stuck into an app. Whether the final use is helping you to find somewhere to park or letting you check online before you leave to see how busy the shops are going to be, I'd say that's a useful bit of data.
There's plenty more inventions of the past that have seemed useless at the time, but turned into something we find critical now.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
- Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
"But what ... is it good for?"
- Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.
And just in the interest of not only picking on IBM:
" There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
- Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977.
"You could just add 1p on to the petrol to cover it and that way there would be no "crushable" untaxed cars on the road, no way to avoid paying it and those that use the road more would pay more."
Why should I be paying to repair your roads when I get some fuel for my RC car, lawnmower, backup generator or whatever other petrol/diesel fuelled device you can think of?
"There you go. If you want to follow the magic hawk into the maze, turn to page 43. If you want to stay and fight the goblin lord, turn to page 51."
I've some real fond memories of reading those books when I was a kid - thanks for the reminder. Almost as good as the A1200 my brother cracked open the other day :D
I always preferred to use /dev/urandom (although obviously this can be distro-dependant - I'm a gentoo man). /dev/random attempts to be closer to 'true' random (if there is such a thing) by seeding from mouse movement, keypresses etc. Unless the machine is being actively used it runs out of numbers pretty quickly, and even when under heavy use it's unlikely you'll be able to get enough numbers generated to overwrite even a small HDD. When it runs out of numbers your process just stalls until some new ones are generated.
Unfortunately that wouldn't work, because we all slow down when passing dangerous areas anyway (when was the last time you drove past a school at 30mph during kicking out time?) so there'd be no profit. We'd still (as taxpayers) be picking up the bill to operate the camera though :(
I'm running at an insane res on a laptop and I'm getting two huge grey bars down either side of the site. Looks awful and it's a terrible waste of space. Can we come to a compromise and make use of the full screen when reading a story at least? Shoot the mac-wielding graphics types if you must...
For those who mentioned the times you have to use networks of questionable ethics (internet cafe or what not) if you get a half decent router at home you should be able to set up dial-in VPNs on it.
Set up a VPN on your laptop or what not and tell it to use the VPN as the default gateway (which is the default iirc) and fire it up when you're on questionable networks.
Works a treat for me :D
(And I guess I'll take this belated opportunity to use the paris icon)
Not to mention when you accidentally misplace the hyphen one character to the left. You don't want to know some of the things I've seen in my time...
That being said, it's sad how expert-sexchange, errr, experts-exchange turned out - had a lot of promise in the early days :(
"4. Adding this nuisance to the general inconvenience, cost and unsightliness of wind turbines, might it be better to build an single always-on 1.2 GW nuclear power station, rather than 4000 wind turbines (1MW at 30% load factor) that stop working when the weather is calm?"
Can't we crank it up a touch to 1.21GW? If you get the reference, come join me back in the 80's...
A whopping 15 minutes of jail time to compensate for each of the dead. This bloke is the lowest of the low - stealing from those who have literally nothing. Throw the bloody key away.
Then again, 2 years in the slammer might well be enough for him to be dealt with appropriately by fellow inmates...
I think my choice of medium would have to be email.
You think viacoms networks can handle an influx of 12TB of data? I've no doubt google can manage it - they probably hit that daily at least!
Naturally, you'd have to send it two or three times just to make sure it gets through. Don't wanna delay things with the courts now, do you?
"The only way to put a tap/split on a fiber cable is to cut it...... U.S.A. have submarine(s) equipped for this type of mission."
How many people get bored waiting for a webpage to load and hit refresh?
How many people get bored waiting for a webpage to load and reach for the tinfoil hat because someone must've purposely cut the cable to tap it and reattached by the time they reload?
Hundreds of thousands my "place where sun don't shine". Who downloads music/movies/games/whatever? Simple, people who are too tight to go buy it. These donation-driven sites barely, if at all, bring in enough to cover running costs.
Let's just hope the courts see the full picture and not just the propaganda that's fed too them by the REAL thieves...
Corsas are made on the continent and shipped over here.
Astras are made in Ellesmere Port, NW England (amongst other places in Europe too, but most of ours are homebred).
I wouldn't worry - it's just continental crap that's going tits up. I have a right to say that after the amount of time and money I've spent on my 406. French cars... *shudders*
"BEFORE!?!?!?!!!! IT WAS MADE IN THE GOOD OL' US of A!!' How come this guy got to 'film' it on a MOBILE PHONE before it was released!!!! Aaargh!!"
Wasn't it released on the same day worldwide? Australia being so many hours ahead of the US means it would be released there almost a day earlier, allowing him to record, recode and upload it and still have time for pizza before it was released in the US.
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