Posts by x 7

Game to go a round with a Spartan? Microsoft will pay if you bruise it

going live end of july? Cutting it a bit fine to find and remedy everything.

Russian space geckos caught on film playing with jeweled collar

they were bored and wanted stimulus

FBI alert: Get these motherf'king hackers off this motherf'king plane

my understanding has always been that the comms databus is shared. No airgaps. The worst is feasible.

Same applies to modern trains e.g the Virgin Pendolinos. Theoretically if anyone could bypass the firewalls they could control the train

Neurobabble makes nonsense brain 'science' more believable

Re: Neurolaw, neurotics, and the old frontal cortex excuse...

"I find his his frontal cortex guilty as charged, and order that it shall be confiscated,"

Isn't that more or less what a frontal lobotomy / leucotomy is?

I think this article is nonsense. The pictures aren't pretty enough to be serious

Nobody should have to see their own rear, but that's what Turnbull's NBN will do to Australia

"immersive video"

when was the last time you read Farhenheit 451?

not the same technology, but scope for the same brain-deadening result

Don't worry, Apple hypegasms haven't gone in the WRISTJOB ERA

Strange

I just googled for pix of Angela Ahrendts (just wondered what she looked like) and found hundreds of pictures of her - in every single one she's "smiling" with her mouth closed as if in pain.

But even more strangely, mixed in with all those photos is just one of Seven of Nine. Does someone know something? Are we being given a clue as to her real ID? Are Apple employees being subsumed by the Borg?

Re: Slight volte-face

" jizz-bangle (thanks x 7 - that's an excellent name for it)"

I can't claim originality - I'd guess its what Paul Kunert wanted to say in the report, but discretion struck so he called it a "jazz bangle"

Jizz Bangle

thats a better name

WIN a RockBLOCK Mk2 Iridium sat comms unit

So what / who won?

Philip Glass tells all and Lovelace and Babbage get the comic novel treatment

Re: his [locomotive] designs were crap

Webb's designs were pretty useless as well, way underpowered. But Brunel was a failure at locomotive design - thats why Gooch was hired

Re: You might as well argue Brunel

The South Devon Atmospheric Railway. The Great Eastern, both excellent examples of how not to do it. Only only just managed to build and survive his Thames tunnel by the skin of his teeth, the floods there were seriously fatal.

And as for locomotive design, the directors of Gods Wonderful Railway took that away from him because his designs were crap.

What he was good at was civil engineering : railways, bridges and his later tunnels -e.g. the Severn Tunnel

Watch the films Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi and then re-evaluate Glass's music.

Its more a kind of structured soundscape than classically inspired music and needs to be experienced within the correct context

"The Thrilling Tale of Loveless and Bondage".

That would probably sell better as a graphic novel tiitle

Flying giant octopus menaces New York

Re: The most important metric

"The cover was blown 0.4408 to 0.6613 brontosaurusses..........."

Get it right please - Apatosauruses. Or should that be Apatosauri?

Who runs this world? Sony Pictures CEO jokes about getting UK culture minister fired

Re: Meanwhile, in a Bletchley Park type Adastral Park v4.2 Venue ......

"The most potent and destructive of weapons systems nowadays are virtualised and capture hearts and minds and souls and bodies with truths which are impossible to deny have a growing validity and are being cynically ignored by media and spun by puppets and muppets as being dangerously anti-establishmentarian?"

No. Thats crap. If you substitute "mistruth" for "truth" them you may -just- have an arguable point

We still design and build nuclear warheads. Want we don't make are the delivery systems, though building a freefall nuke bomb would still be within our capabilities.

Re: Sony Entertainment...

With luck someone at Sony HQ will see the reports and sack the prat. They surely can do without the bad publicity the way group sales have plummeted in the last few years.

With any luck he'll suffer the fate the plotted for others

So....we have a mouthpiece for a modern-era foreign zaibatsu, convening (or congealing) with a highflying member of the clitterati, conspiring with a lizard-grandson of a leading illuminati to put pressure on a tory powerplayer and probable mason to sack a mere mortal human.

How many conspiracy theories can you find in a story? How many strings are being pulled? I say shoot the lot of them. Conspiring politicos, especially unelected or self-appointed ones, deserve every bullet they get.

DWARF PLANET Ceres beams back SUNNY north pole FROWN

I never knew dwarfs lived on Ceres

Is it true that Tony Orlando always awoke at the crack of Dawn?

the positioning of that bright spot makes it look like a central umblilicus .........or a doorway to the interior. Whats behind the doorway?

So why exactly does almost ALL tech live in Silicon Valley?

Re: Another question

"would a few cluster bombs in Dallas sort out the troll problem"

trolls live under bridges and would be protected from cluster bombs. You need a Tallboy or Grand Slam to get a bridge

another element which leads towards clustering is the local authorities views on planning: whether historically they were prepared to accept hazardous processes, environmental issues, etc.

Thats why historically you had clusters of butchers shops in towns, often known as the "shambles". Keeping the butchers together kept the animals wastes together. On a larger scale, there was a tendancy to group trades such as leathermaking together - usually near a source of water into which waste could be poured. Steelmaking tended to be clustered because thats where the fuel was - initially charcoal, later coal/coke. It was easier to transport the iron ore that it was to shift the bulky charcoal fuel (until the arrival of the railways). But you have to consider second/third technology generation effects as well......why did you get so many IT manufacturing companies setting up in the Clyde area in the 1970's? Because there was a large pool of unemployed labour there of people who could be retrained. People who had proved to be skilled in one job, now redundant, but intelligent enough to be successfully reskilled. None of the "new" Japanese owned UK car plants were in traditional car-building towns. Think Swindon, Derby, Hartlepool, but all had a tradition of skilled engineers who could be retrained. Ironically one of the biggest pools of available labour for the Clyde IT plants was due to the closure of the Linwood Hillman Imp plant

Another fact is.....spinoffs from local centres of Academic Excellence. All you have to do is cruise around Cambridge in a 15 mile circle and count the number of high-tech chemical/biochemical/drug discovery/electronic/IT businesses which have spun off from projects at Cambridge University. Hundreds if not thousands. The key deciding factor there is closeness to the university, easy access to other academics for mutual support.

In short, clustering of businesses isn't such a simple art as you imply

Post-pub nosh neckfiller: Tortilla de patatas

Re: just checking

"If left overnight in the fridge the mixture turns black!"

adding lemon juice should prevent that. You don't need a lot, just make sure its mixed in. Citric acid is a good antioxidant

Re: Mmm, nice. Inspired to share mine.

I can think of many things to describe tuna, but subtle is not one of them

Re: Yum!

Jan 0

I was using poetic licence and writing in a hurry. I knew it went back a fair way, but didn't realise there was a Roman use.

Regarding the crossbar, that seems to have been very much a changing style - I've seen print with a full bar, half bar, no bar. Some with an uncurled bottom, like an f, some curled like an s. But of course what was printed didn't necessarily reflect how people wrote - otherwise we would still have those missing letters eth, thorn, yogh and ash

Re: Yum!

"slices of fuet "

Victorian spelling there - I've never seen a long "s" used in online text before - but you got it wrong, you never ever start a word with a long s/f

chilli powder

it needs chilli powder

and shrimps...........

and fry in butter not oil - no need to strain then as the butter will solidify when you take the heat away giving you even more nice fatty nutrition to line the gut and ease the beer away

What's 'appening with WhatsApp? '800 MEEELLION LOSERS* actively use us', says boss

Re: metrics, metrics but never the word EXCLUSIVE

Whatsapp/WhatsApp - so good you used it twice????

" the mobile messaging service was now accessed by 800 million chimps worldwide each month."

So by the law of averages the chimps should be well on the way to randomly completing Shakespeare's works by now?

RADIOACTIVE WWII aircraft carrier FOUND OFF CALIFORNIA

Re: That's it...

lots of ships were sunk after WWII, many of them with far more dangerous cargoes than this. Some with thousands of tonnes of bombs / shells. Some laden with poison gas. For most of them the exact location is unknown.

The problem is once you're out of sight of land, navigation - and location - is very much an art, not a science. No satnavs. No Decca / Loran. No navigational aids whatsoever, just time, distance, compass and dead reckoning. Thats fine when you're on the open sea, trying to avoid running into something: you just err on the side of caution. But trying to know exactly where you are to the nearest half mile, or mile, or five miles........thats hard. And going back later to find it again? Even harder.

Theres the added complication in that where possible these "death" ships were sunk in the nearest available deep, but as someone said earlier, ships don't simply go straight down. They drift.......after all they drift on the surface with the current and wind, why shouldn't they drift as they sink? The final resting place could be miles from the point of sinking

Re: Wot carrier

The Falklands would be the ideal place to build a couple of Iraqi-style superguns. Perfect location and range to cover the Argie ports and airfields. And the Parliament buildings.........You could run them up the east side of the mountains, facing west or northwest

We've got the technology, it was British companies who built most of it, so lets use it!

so just how hot would you expect it to be? All I got was an irradiation pulse and presumably a fair bit of fallout. If Hiroshima and Nagasaki are now safe to live in, whats the betting this ship is now safe, with the fallout washed away

UK now part of another Euro data-spaff scheme

Re: Plants from abroad

That would be a good present for the ex-wife. And her mother

Re: Plants from abroad

"bought a nice plant in Amsterdam. Want to take it home to Wales. Can't."

presumably a pot plant?

Go for a spin on Record Store Day: Lifting the lid on vinyl, CD and tape

Re: Skrssh-skrssh-skrssh...

Sounds like you had a copy of that record by The Residents comprised of eskimo throat singing.....I can't remember its name. Was it just "Eskimo"?

Re: A modest haul

"Britney Spears - Toxic."

That girl's powers of self-analysis are remarkable

Re: Legality of torrent downloading vs ripping old vinyl?

"so I don't feel as if I've robbed anybody."

Of course you have....the download was a new remastered newly tweaked version with different mixing by different engineers and so establishes a new copyright commencement. So you've done them by not contributing to the costs of the "new" version. Its an increasingly common trick - new versions every 10 years or so, remixed, establishing a new copyright commencement for existing works.

In the UK, music copyright expires after 50 years - so anything before 1964 is now "free" unless reprotected. Over the next few years all the classic recordings of the 1960's and 1970's become free of copyright unless someone recreates the copyright - hence all these "40 year anniversary" re-engineered versions coming onto the market

Not totally impossible to purchase lossless audio.......one example where you can is DGM Live where its possible to download hundreds of recordings of King Crimson and allied bands using FLAC

OK if you like King Crimson (I do but I realise others may have a different view.....)

https://www.dgmlive.com/archive.htm

Gwyneth Paltrow flubs $29 food stamp dare, swallows pride instead

typical actress.

Can't survive a week without a piece of meat in her mouth.

DRONE ALONE: US Navy secretary gives up on manned fighters

Re: All will be well then...

@John Brown

the military planners are way ahead of you

first, one of the roles of unmanned helicopters is CASEVAC / MEDEVAC from battlefields and hazardous areas. The initial aircraft are in trial now, and are not far away from squadron service. Some are unmanned, some are optionally manned.

as to your surface ship redesign, that is exactly what is happening to the new generation of unmanned ships. The limiting factors being the need to be able to site the sensor arrays high enough to work, and weapon systems in positions where they are invulnerable to sea damage

" I'd have thought drone ships would be easier to operate than drone aircraft and wonder why they don't even seem to be investigation that possibility let alone starting production."

But they are - see

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/16/us/u-s-navy-drone-ship/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fleet-class_unmanned_surface_vessel

Quantum computers have failed. So now for the science

"Powered flight was first achieved in Chard, Somerset"

powered by steam.......what glories could have been if technology had continued along that route

Hungry Apple fanbois can now buy a lunch date with Tim Cook

Hungry Fanbois?

Someone who can afford to buy an Apple product has too much money to be hungry

Cross-dressing blokes storm NSA HQ: One shot dead, one hurt

Re: x 7 If only the NSA protected MY information with such zeal.

Nitroglycerine......

easy on a small scale, but once you get beyond a few grammes the probability of blowing yourself up during manufacture means you're unlikely to succeed as a terrorist. If you tried to make it the authorities would probably sit back and let you get on with it - and piss themselves laughing at the eventual accidental suicide.

Soil and sand harden as SPEEDING MISSILES and METEORS SLAM into GROUND – boffins

Re: Research

What am I implying? That the penetration rounds are for destroying hidden WMD manufacturing capability. Its the machinery that counts - but if the operators get killed along the way, all the better. Its easy to train people, its not so easy to replace the equipment.

If you can eliminate the centrifuges, you eliminate the risk of nuclear escalation. And the Iranian centrifuges are now all deeply buried - as a result of the Israeli surface attacks of a few years ago - hence the need for a penetration round

Lube company merger receiving second 'in-depth' probe

So next time you're in bed with the missus she's going to smother your bollox in e-liquid and then set fire to you and enjoy the roasted flavour of the tobacco?

Chrome version 42 will pour your Java coffee down the drain: Plugin blocked by default

Re: Here's the deal.......

"What about if you have multiple web apps you need - one with an ActiveX plugin that won't work on anything newer than IE9 (can vouch for that one), another that requires an ActiveX plugin so requires IE but is coded such that the menus only work in IE10/11 and a third that is coded for Chrome and requires NPAPI plugins (2 of them) to perform essential functionality."

Sounds like the NHS ......except that you also then need three different versions of Java installed as well. And if you're one of the poor sods looking at CCG finance you'll possibly need a couple more JVMs in the guise of long-outdated JInitiator versions.

Remember SeaMicro? Red-ink-soaked AMD dumps it overboard

Daft question maybe......but if you add it all up over the years, just how much has AMD lost in total during its life?