Posts by Dave Bell 2133 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Sep 2007
I've heard the same basic idea, and the same basic explanations, quite a few timnes over the years.
Repeating the tests is good science. If you can't repeat an experiment, is it ever going to be science?
And a vague general indicator of health and fitness, I can go with that. But 99.9% of our ancestors didn't know any of this medical stuff, so I really doubt the detailed list of deadly faults has any relevance
This sort of tech could, eventually, mean that everybody is getting some check. And machines could replace expensive staff.
I see plenty of reports which suggest that TSA, and some other, security is not very competent. If the false positives are no worse than the current system, it could be a big improvement.
But with the sort of idiocy that hassles a five0year-ild because their name matches a watchlist, I don't see mucyh hope for this tech improving anything.
The Italians were doing this whole explosive-filled speedboat thing nearly sixty years ago. Attacked HMS York off Crete. It was the same outfit that sank a couple of battleships in Alexandria Harbour, and I'm sure Lewis knows far more of their history than I do, being in a related line of work.
10th Flotilla MAS, wasn't it?
There's a well-known British computer retailing chain which has its staff telling parents they need to get Vista, etc., to match what their kids will use at school.
Matching school isn't a bad idea in itself, but it would be better to sell something that actually matched.
I'd be inclined to sell them an Eee instead.
Recalling my own schooldays, the idea of a computer that the teachers don't have root access to would be very tempting.
Unleash British boffinry on the problem.
A quick squirt of hydrogen peroxide should be enough to spin the rotors. Hot steam and oxygen: add a bit of kerosene and you have a satellite launcher.
Morris dancers building a steam rocket: if you put that in a movie, nobody would believe it.
It's apparent that various Japanese and European car manufacturers can sell their in-American products in the USA, sometimes importing and sometimes building factories in the USA.
And the American companies, such as Ford and GM, struggle. They can't, it seems, build efficient cars.
Ford and GM own factories in Europe, and design and sell successfuk, efficient, cars in Europe.
So what is wrong? Marketing? A lack of executive balls? If BMW and Mercedes can build drive-all-day cars for Europe, and sell them in the USA, why can't Ford or GM.
And if they can build small cars which compete with with Japanese and European designs in Europe, why can't they sell them in the USA, with the marketing advantage of being American?
If anything, electric cars are a red herring, but it does point at something broken in the US auto industry.
Ask the American pilots in Vietnam who flew missile-armed interceptors without guns against the MiGs.
Maybe modern missiles are good enough that no enemy will survive to get into dogfighting range--that I can't judge--but what happens if your opponent is radar stealthy? And, biggest question in warfare since the days of stone clubs, what if he doesn't fight the battle you expect?
Let us not forget that ships have always been lost in extreme conditions. We have better weather forecasts now, but this system doesn't replace the conventional engines, and losing the sail need not endanger the ship.
But I wouldn't be surprised if few of these ships ever risked the Southern Ocean.
MAFF, as it was at the time, picked the most complicated system for assessing payments. They kept changing the rules until the last minute. It's no surprise that they messed up payment.
In Wales and Scotland they set up simpler systems, and get the money paid to the farmers. The last report I saw claimed 90% by Christmas, which is what MAFF used to do under the old IACS system.
The German system is similar to the English system, They manage to pay promptly.
And if the price paid to farmers had kept pace with inflation, there'd be no need for subsidy. But a loaf of bread would cost about three times as much.
I've seen some strange trademark claims come out of the USA. But the important thing to remember is that they can be very specific, which is how Orange was able to trademark a colour.
And I remember the game company story. It was a set of fold-up cardboard tokens, intended to represent the characters, for a game based on the first Indiana Jones move. So the word "Nazi" was a part of the whole, including trademarked character design.
...none of the stuff I use that needs Windows would run usefully on an Eee.
I can see getting some things set up being a little harder, though I've a little Linux experience, but I don't see much need to change to Windows. The only likely catch is over a large USB drive that might have been formatted to NTFS. Last I checked, access from other operating systems could still be tricky.
Where this could pay off is in a more corporate (or school) environment. It seems unavoidable that companies will want to run software that needs Windows, not just Microsoft Office, and schools will want their pupils to know how to use Microsoft Office.
It shouldn't surprise anyone that companies are still using software with a very recognisable MS-DOS-text-display look, box-drawing characters and everything. And if they're doing that, being able to easily install Windows is the key to selling to them.
On the other hand, while this isn't formally a "rugged" machine, it's cheap and durable. And, figuring inflation, it's cheaper than a Z88 was. There's a lot of corporate niches where the data, rather than the program is the important bit. You're the journalists--how often do you need features that aren't in Wordpad?
It's maybe not going to be as good as a real plane as an opponent--what's the modern helmet-mounted display capable of?--but one of the big problems in training is that an opponent in the same sort of plane is going to be misleading. Which is why the USA used the F-5 for their Aggressor Squadrons. Put the "enemy" in a simulator, and they could be flying anything. Even a plane that doesn't exist.
OK, so I was reading a short story by Martin Caidin which had some weird dogfights, and not every pilot is going to be able to switch from a MiG-19 to the Mig-29, and get the most out of the plane, even with the same simulator interface. But if your opponent has different advantages every day I reckon you'll learn better.
(I remember a multi-player flight-sim where everyone was thinking of turning battles, and my only two kills came from fighting in the vertical. And most times I missed.)
Current child porn law in the UK criminalizes images of lawful sexual activity. The age of consent is 16. The child porn law sets the limit at 18.
OK, so we all think we're talking of the abuse of children, but the law classes people old enough to marry (and bonk their brains out) as "children". I don't want to see under-18s in the porn industry, but calling them "children" is a debasement of the language.
Unfortunately, in my time playing on-line games, though text based, I have seen people involved in pretty blatant ageplay. Not the sexually curious teenager, illegal in some places but not others, but playing the genuine child.
It's disturbing. I do wonder what these people might be doing in reality. I don't feel comfortable about protecting them, or tolerating them. But then I look at the "protect the children" insanity that can regard a married couple as "children", and I wonder when the lunatics will come after me because of my tastes.
To be honest, I doubt computer graphics are up to the demands of live on-line porn. But how long before the lunatics erase the border between badly-drawn pictures and text? And what will that do?
It wouldn't necessarily ruin the film if Sir Ian wasn't cast as Gandalf, whatever the reason, What;s important is that he set a high standard, and Peter Jackson, while his film is flawed, also set a high standard for the quality of the design.
In some ways, >i?Fellowship of the Ring</i> is both the best-adapted part of the book, and the closest to <i>The Hobbit</i>. Match that, and IO think we'll be alright.
Whatever we might think about it, schools are pressured into using MS Office by the demands of the job market. And that's partly driven by the ignorance of employment agencies in ticky-box mode. And, generally, IT departments will be wary of supporting "non-standard" systems
But this is cheap enough that a lot of people will be inclined to flick V-signs in the general direction of Bill Gates. And this looks a quite viable replacement for the old ideas of the late 1980s; the sort of machines to tempt journalists that the likes of Tandy and Clive Sinclair sold.
Schools? Corporate budgets? I'm not so sure.
With all and sundry having to meet government targets opf one sort or another, anything which doesn't let them easily mark another tickybox is, if possible, ignored.
I'm aware of a series of poison pen letters locally, hand delivered. A CCTV camera would let it be cleared up in a few days. Technically, it wouldn't be difficult to set up a webcam with motion-detection software--no need to record every second of the day--but I suspect the lawyers would tell us that would be no good as evidence.
Having a petty criminal ask for hundreds of offences to be "taken into consideration" has been discredited, with reason, but the police don't seem to be catching them in the first place. Why should they: it only lets them tick off one minor crime.
Well, she said she was studying ninjitsu, and she seemed able to do martial arts stuff, so I wasn't going to argue. And not slender--muscle rather than fat.
The last I heard, she'd married a vicar. There's some church somewhere in England where it would be a seriously bad idea to try to break open the poor-box.
This is going to depend a lot on who it hits. I can see businesses risking a lot of stuff--why do they send half a dozen lines of text, and a huge don't-read-this warning, as a ,doc file?
Me, they'll get a lot of pictures, mostly CGI.
And a lot of spam.
But what's to say that another filter won't pick up different data, such as a spreadsheet extension?
Taking inflation into account, the prices being paid to farmers as a result of this shortage are still only half of what was being paid in the early Eighties.
People complained when the EU had stockpiles of food. Now they're gone, and people complain that they're gone.
And without a global shortage, which has all sorts of different causes coinciding, this price change wouldn't have happened, and the only thing some of you would have noticed is a few more untended roadside hedges.
Well, you've noticed this.
Work out the energy output of a machinegun sometime. The Maxim design, slightly modified to the Vickers in 1912. could sustain 200 rounds per minute for hours, if you had the ammo, the cooling water, and spare barrels. That's multi-kilowatt energy deliver, and a huge amount of waste heat (cooling water, spare barrels, and hot brass).
Maybe they should fit MHD generators to the machineguns.
There's got to be more to this than we're hearing about.
Whether or not the Police have good info, they must think he's up to something more continuing than a suspicion of an arson attack. Why were they even looking at him in the first place?
I think we're knee-deep in unreliable narrative bullshit on this. Who can we believe?
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