Posts by Prst. V.Jeltz

EasyJet: We'll have electric airliners within the next decade

Re: charge times

battries are , like , heavy , man.

I think the problems weight , not space , you dig?

Re: "just use inductance and fire that puppy off - railgun stlye!"

"Looks like each airport would need its own power plant to launch and charge planes, doesn't it?"

Well they could capture energy from landing planes to avoid all that wasted energy on brakes and retro thrust. Arrestor Hook on the back , cocks the catapult for next plane.

Re: Well....

" The next obvious evolution in airline seating is standing through the whole trip."

To me its lying down. Where you have 3 seats abreast i'd much rather have 3 bunks / tubes . like those things in japan . tak a nap , read a book , all the things you can do sitting , plus sleep .

Re: So many negative people on here.

" one might have received a look of incredulity and a comment about training magic fairies as carrier pigeons."

As sir Pterry has told us, is that is a valid method, although for transmitting AV you need imp's and goblins , not Fairies

Re: Well....

" it's not beyond reason to go for runways that provide initial takeoff power. "

Sure could. You wouldnt need to transmit the power to the vehicle either . just use inductance and fire that puppy off - railgun stlye!

well , if were chucking ludicrous "green" power ideas around . I'd like to suggest pedal powered airplanes. Sure it dosent work in those funny b&w videos , but with modern materials , and a couple hundred people peddaling - i think its a goer!

That is one hell of an informative xkcd!

It really hits the nail on the head as to why you cant invent or renewable your way out of trouble and of the extraordinary amount of energy held in a tiny amount of hydrocarbons and why we are truly fucked without them.

Also I'd like to point out once again that electricity does not grow on trees , like hydrocarbons. It is not a source of energy it is a transmission meduim. Something the public and media at large seem to be completely oblivious to. It might be more efficient if you generate the power elsewhere in bulk and use electricity all down the line , but you still have to find the energy . people forget that.

Re: not a magician

use sunlight as fairy dust. if the machines stuffed with tlighter than air gas , you can just get a little solar fan to push it along. Or sails - why didnt zeppeloins do that? oh wait , no centreboard - would only work downwind . dosent seem to stop Hot air balloners though.

Comet less of a problem because it was still much quieter (and smoother) than a piston engine aircraft.

..and of course it was comforting to hear them, because then you knew they were still there.

Alleged dark web drug baron cuffed – after he flew to US for World Beard Championships

Re: I believe the word we are all struggling to vocalise is ...

I thought same .

Although he's not *only* a market trader ,

He's the one who rents the traders their pitches , so i guess thats the link.

And yeah , idiot to even go to US , doubly so for taking the evidence with him.

UK third worst in Europe for fibre-to-the-premises – report

Well i get about 7Mb , and thats fine for me, mostly because I havent got a teenager watching 1080p on a 3" phone screen 24/7

Alexa and her kind let the disabled or illiterate make the web work

It was a visually impaired person who taught me to use a computer without using a mouse.

Different disabilities (or combinations of ) require different solutions .

Having skimmed the article again i'm not sure what alexa's claiming credit for - inventing speech recognition?

You'd think disabled people who cant get out much would have investigated the net years ago. You dont have to be a spelling bee champion.

"I work with a guy who has LITERALLY (sic) never read a book in his life. That just shocks me."

What shocks me is how proud of it they are: "IVE NEVER READ A BOOK IN ME LIFE, ME". often followed by "i'm too busy)

I know a few . a fireman friend , a car painter , my girlfriend , her son . If you change "Literally never" for "only under duress , for school etc .. " , in fact you don't even have to do that - a high proportion of my generation, (40's), just don't read for pleasure, and have never read a book voluntarily , and that percentage has risen steadily ever since with the invention of other distractions.

The only thing they've read are menus , roadsigns and instruction manuals and possibly the first and last pages of "The Sun".

They just dont get it when forced to read , they count the pages , and mechanically read read the words , barely stringing them togther to comprehend the sentence , and definately not following the story . bitching about it the whole way "theres too many words!" " the lettters are too small" . Then you get protests of" I read a whole page and nothing happened" .

Well fuck them. I'm never again going to try to explain the beauty of literature to these people. To be honest they dont need it , they can still be well rounded human beings , they're just oblivious to one of lifes pleasures and are missing out.

You take a horse to water but you cant make it drink.

Driverless cars will make more traffic, say transport boffins

Re: @AC - "getting Tesla fanatics all riled up"

I think you have to stop thinking of your car as your office , and more of a personal bus seat.

Re: "congestion around here is caused more by parked cars than moving traffic"

" I think I find that a bit creepy."

"but to have a CCTV pointed at your face at all times?"

look , if there was a driver in there he could see you at all times. do you find that creepy?

problem - no driver to stop shaggin

solution - CCTV

simple fix

indeed , they will drive much more sensibly and avoid "waves" of congestion , even if there is the same number of cars cos no one shares one.

Re: Am I stupid (be kind)?

You have 4 very sensible comprehensive answers up there above this one.

my answers are

Short version: Yes, you are being a bit thick

Long version: I think you are missing the point when you say

"Just because everybody has their own personal car parked somewhere (i.e. static), how does that increase traffic congestion? "

The difference is that less cars are moving , not that more cars are static , which I believe would ease congestion , unless indeed I'm being a bit thick , and I'll happily admit it if proved wrong. I know where the paris icon is , and im not afraid to use it on myself!

Re: Asking people if they're willing to share

Quite right RMason , without knowing the questions asked , and the context , the survey is worthless.

Was the sharing linked to AV cars? or is 7% the default for sharing of any vehicle?

Is that 7% of those asked or 7% of the 27% who said theyd buy an AV?

Whats Leasing and sharing got to do with AVs anyway? we could do that now but we dont.

So mixing two completley unrelated questions into 1 survey only muddys the waters.

Also , Aussies dont walk anywhere , trust me . Too hot and dusty , and everythings 100s of miles away.

(please dont correct me on this , I was just indulging in a bit of harmless lazy cultural stereotyping )

Microsoft and Facebook's transatlantic cable completed

"My understanding is that Bytes are capitals and bits are lowercase"

"All prefixes greater than 1000 use a capital letter. Kilo, hecta and deca use lower case"

So a kilobyte should be written: kB ?

160 terabit per second

Now thats speedy!

I also like how unambiguous it is about wether its bits or bytes. Refreshing.

When ISPs quote things like "ooh u can get 50 mbs" or mbps or Mb/s Its never clear wether they are indicating bits or bytes , or if they even know they know the difference , I guess the techs do , do the salesdroids? Are they pulling the wool over our eyes by relying on the customer not knowing and quoting the bits implying they are bytes?

I seem to remember the correct distinction is all in the capitals or something?

How does one correctly quote bits and bytes?

CCleaner targeted top tech companies in attempt to lift IP

Re: I still don't understand how this happened

I also wondered that.

The only thing I can imagine is that someone pwned the webserver enough that they could swap the compiled msi for thier own.

I dont know how hard it would be to fool the client ccleaner that it got its update but it could certainly unload the malware.

Think about it - every malware writers wet dream is a surefire "infection vector" ( is that the buzzword?) that dosent rely on some idiot clicking on an attachment - as is the route 99% of the time. As such anyone whose hacked into the servers of a massively popular program that updates regularly is in an enviable position. (bonus points if its an AV company!)

I bet that ccleaner access was sold on the' black hat market' rather than perpetrated by the same people who made the payload.

Re: CCleaner targetted?

CCleaner didnt get infected. its a program . Machines get infected.

I'm not sure what you mean with your Intel analogy ,

What appears to have happened here is that some ner-do-well has hacked into AVGs house , and planted their virus inside the downloadable update for CCleaner.

So AVG and their cleaner program were "targetted" but not by the malware.

I'd still like to know exactly how the malware got in there

Re: And yet when I suggested the only way to safely fix a malware infected host...

yeah but thats a bit of a faff isnt it. Easier to use a reputable AV and be 99% sure.

I mean , as soon as you plug that shiny new re-flashed rebuilt reinstalled PC into the internet you are instantly "not sure" again , so you just wasted 3 or 4 hours.

Manchester plod still running 1,500 Windows XP machines

Re: Inaccuracies from those who should know better

Yeah, but it succeeded at the NHS, proving the point that the Public sector is more lacksy-daisy about patching and other security measures, and they do indeed hold a lot of juicy data

"The remaining XP machines are still in place due to complex technical requirements from a small number of externally provided highly specialised applications," a spokeswoman told the BBC."

i read as:

"The remaining XP machines are still in place due to an incredible lack of foresight and standards on the part of the teenager who wrote the system as his 6th form project"

Compsci degrees aren't returning on investment for coders – research

Re: More!

You were lucky!

When I was at University , we had to get up at 5am, build us own mini computer out of peanuts and shoeboxes , code our own OS every day because there was no storage ,then render our own 8x8 images on the slide tile display and midnight the tutor would beat us to sleep in our dorms.

dont get me started

that is all

HP Inc's rinky-dink ink stink: Unofficial cartridges, official refills spurned by printer DRM

Y'all seem to know a lot about printers.

Stop Printing!

Paper is dead!

Re: @Dr. Syntax

" If they have a 'good' quarter now then their price rises."

This is what I hate about about capitalism. Everything has to grow until it ,presumably, eats the world.

(A bit like the Moore's law discussion the other day)

If HP made £100 last quarter , and because of this chip DRM scam make £120 this quarter, then the following quarter's £110 will be considered a failure.

Re: if the same market exists for laser

" I think now that ink jet is too slow and expensive."

You forgot "unreliable"

Inept bloke who tried to sell military sat secrets to Russia gets 5 years

Re: Gregory Allen *Justice*

Wouldn't it be more ironic if justice hadn't been administered to Justice?

BoJo, don't misuse stats then blurt disclaimers when you get rumbled

regulation

I agree medicines need regulating

Just do what they do , hell , pick a country with the best safety record and use their "approved list".

We dont have to get involved.

We just use thier rules , dont have to be in the eu for that.

Its duplication of effort

and money

People make a big deal out of £350 million a week

As of Q1 (the first quarter of) 2015, UK government debt amounted to £1.56 trillion, or 81.58% of total GDP, at which time the annual cost of servicing (paying the interest) the public debt amounted to around £43 billion (which is roughly 3% of GDP or 8% of UK government tax income)

Whenever people band around big figures of govt spend / loss / need , I always like to compare to national debt interest payments.

3.6 BILLION per month , whilst may be only be 3% of GDP , still seems like a bit of a waste to me, and when I get into power , we're all eating spam sandwiches until its paid off!

Re: 2 percent

" who is going to approve new drugs if there isn't a shiny new British agency to do that"

Why dont we just watch what the old agency in the EU does and go off their ruling?

NASA Earthonauts emerge from eight-month isolation in simulated Mars visit

Re: Righhhtttt....

I see . Offsite backups.

I'm not clear on a whole load of other survival necessities - but at least we know these red shirts can go 8 months without killing each other.

Re: I'm trying to figure out why else they'd need a "British science" officer.

Its not clear to me if its the officer or the science thats British.

"It's really important to get off Earth – if you look back at the geological records it is just full of mass extinctions."

Hopefully , we're a bit smarter than a Woolly Mammoth or a dinosaur and therefore wouldnt be totally surprised by an ice age or even a massive impact. I'd rather take my chances here than move to a small rock a billion miles away with no air, water , plants , animals , fuel .

Hell you'd be just as well off staying in the space ship.

Whats Mars got to offer apart from somewhere to stand on? and it dosent even do that properly cos the gravitys not been turned up enough.

8 months?

I'd imagine the participants of the Volvo Ocean Race could tell you what thats like , more isolated in a smaller space , for longer.

Pirate Bay digs itself a new hole: Mining alt-coin in slurper browsers

Re: you may laugh

if this was mainstream all the coins would be mined out pretty quickly

Re: Protection software spews sensitive data to third parties

I think he meant he'd welcome that as a change to advert revenue on other more respectable sites.

And that's exactly what Pirate Bay.

Huh?

Equifax's IT leaders 'retire' as company says it knew about the bug that brought it down

Re: admin/admin

Well the poster a couple of posts above that mentioned that he like to make sure he learns something new every day or he cant sleep. So I offered that nugget in the hopes he wasnt aware of that.

I wasnt. I guess you think of nevada as inland and LA on the beach . Turns out CA is a bit bendy.

Its like a geographic optical illusion. I was in Canada once and worked out I was further south than at home in UK . Also I bet its further across the bottom England than it is from to top to bottom .

Re: admin/admin

Heres your new fact for today:

"Reno is farther west than Los Angeles."

There. sleep easy.

exactly .

I dont get why collecting it in the first place isnt illegal

Re: admin/admin

Anyone who has studied at undergraduate level will attest that it does not matter what you study (bar vocational degrees such as law or medicine), It's your attitude to learning that matters. You get taught HOW to learn. I went to university thinking I'd learn everything about my subject. On graduating, I left knowing just how little I know, but with the confidence to know I can pick up any damn book and learn a subject just as well as anyone else.

Why did nobody tell me this at the start? There's me learning differentiation , integration , fluid dynamics , youngs modulus, resonant circuits etc ad infintum, when I could have just chosen "Navel Gazing" and gone on a bender for 3 years.

I find it a little sad that you apparently dont pick up any useful information or skills on a "dosent matter what subject" degree . Dosent that make it a waste of time?

Didnt you learn how to learn in school ?

does it really take 3 years to learn how to learn? (5 years if you count your A levels.)

New HMRC IT boss to 'recuse' herself over Microsoft decisions

Re: What will she actually do?

"what is there left for her to do?"

Just sit back and collect the 180k i reckon

Re: What could possibly go wrong?

What next a minister for health who believes in homeopathy?

Brit ministers jet off on a trade mission to tout our digital exports...

Re: Brexit

If at all , sounds like a made up soundbyte to me , to justify having digital in your job title

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Re: Because It's Not Google

question1 = "Do Hoover even still make Hoovers? whats the market share now?"

question2 = replace (question1 ,"Hoover" , "JCB")