Posts by Steve Brooks
208 posts • joined Sunday 28th October 2007 11:10 GMT
Re: Why legs.
Yes, the entire purpose of a pack robot, scout robot etc is to basically go everywhere a human soldier goes, whereas wheeled robots would perforce be limited to flat areas, making them and the humans with them vulnerable to attack, basically suitable only for logistics transport. Tracked would work better, except seeing a bleeding great set of steel track marks from where the scout robot was by spying on you might be a givaway, with legs they can put fake animal pads on the bottom, dress it up like a feral dog and go spy all they want.
Now that's interesting, seems the mix of apple defenders and attackers has markedly changed over the course of these patent cases, I only saw one defender here, and that looks like a poe. While Apple may win this case and the next, the one thing that any seller of mass market premium goods relies on is public opinion, thier billions may keep them going for a while, but unless they change something that pile is eventually going to get smaller instead of bigger.
Re: ability to discern pictures more quickly than words
It's not necessarily the ability to discern words quicker than pictures that's the issue, it's that the words never change. Delete is always delete, paste is always paste, cut is slways cut, but have two programs that do the same thing, or even two versions of the same program, and the pictures to do common functions will be in a small or large way, different, and then starts the hunt. It's even worse when you change the interface style, because then every icon has to change to match the interface, so every icon has to be relearnt, but guess what? Delete is still delete, paste is still psate and cut is still cut.
You missed the fact that over $5m is being given to the greek orthodox church in adelaide to sound proof it against aircraft noise, see what problems these hightech flying doodads cause!
Re: the PR people need to go to the same place as all the lawyers.
Wasn't that just phone sanitizers, social documentary film makers and hair dressers?
Damn these problems that keep popping up unexpectedaly, oh if only the interent powers that be didn't change the way they address computers on a network every other day, oh hang on thats right they don't, they been using the same system since the internet started, and NOW they realise the have a problem, just before we all switch to IPV6, lol.
Damn buggers, killing my money stream. Supply PC with windows, 4 more visits teaching poeple how to use it, can it be any more perfect as a moneymaker?
What?!? Because the first one wasn't perfect? You start dabbling with perfection and it's all downhill with a very bad crash at the end.
Re: SR-71 Intake Design
Probably not, as I recall the design of the intakes on the SR-71 was specifically designed to slow down the incoming atmosphere to below the speed of sound to allow ignition, unfortunately the design and theory doesn't scale up to higher mach speeds, hence it never going hypersonic. The scramjet is designed to negate the need to slow the incoming air to below the speed of sound, hence its much higher potential velocity, the problem is igniting the fuel in a superssonic and hypersonic stream of air, so probably nothing like it at all.
No, plenty of rockets, you don't really thing that Elon Musk and Burt Rutan only hired American brains, it's NASA job to pull all the dead wood in and leave the brains for private firms.
Re: If it's possible...
Because homemade guns are already widely available made from cheap easily obtained parts that are proably more accurate and last longer. The point with these is that they are undetectable using your standard metal detector, unlike your regular homemade guns. Single shot homemade weapons have even been made in prisons.
Being well organised to make them is irrelevent, it only needs one person, one computer and a 3d printer, so any terrorist can make them privately. But this doesn't mean we should ban them or anything, all that will result from that is the terrorists will be the only ones carrying them, oh apart from the intelligence agencies of most countries. It might be useful if they were out there so that our border security personal can see them and tell the diffreence between a homemade gun and a fancy wobbly electric dildo, but then again speaking of border security personal.......
innovation
The worst thing that can stifle innovation is placing artificial barriers in the way, MS would have been much better off in the first place to just produce the OS and then tell the manufacturers to go for thier lives and try whatever they want. Controlling form factors and resolution works fine when you are the only kid on the block AKA iPad, but even Apple had to bite the bullet and eventually make a mini iPad to be competetive. Trying the same stunt in todays market would have been a recipe for failure.
Re: "chans of communication"
Of course not, everyone knows anonymous communicate over 4chan, probably 7chan and 21chan as well. Although I wouldn't suggest the sensitive go looking at 7chan or 21chan, 4chan is mostly harmless (and no that wasn't Douglas Adams pun!)
Posted in Kepler continues exoplanet bonanza
Re: If we can detect these planets...
Even worse, its likely that the earth's radio signature is actually decreasing due to the use of new technologies, internet tv to replace broadcast tv, satelites to replace over the horizon radar and communications, and who kows what else in the future. That hundred years or so might be the only hundred years or so in 8 billion years of habitatable time that you have chance to pick up radio waves. So if those radio waves crossed 1200 light years and started hitting earth 200 years ago, we have already missed our opportunity to detect them.
Re: Interesting
As pointed out by a famous science ficiton writer, if you have a green laser painting something green wil result in less absorption of energy. Now what colour where the US lasers? Ah yes infared, when you come up with infrared paint let Iran know will you?
Re: Impulse?
Pulsing Electric Nuclear Injection System
Re: I wonder what this will do to the Drake equation.
Don't care but if they DO have planes I am flying first class, don't want to sit to close to any methane breathing lifeforms, its bad enough here where we have to sit next to methane expelling life forms!
Re: Fallacy
It appears more to me that devices like tablets are filling a niche that existed but was never catered to adequately. I always explain it to my customers thusly, a good percentage of my customers just want email, facebook and web browsing, in the 90's they HAD to buy a desktop, no tablets, laptops out of price range etc. In the 2000's they had a choice, reasonable priced laptops or a desktop, still, either of these provided far more funcionality than they ever used.
It's 2013, many kids now use their mobile phones for facebook, email and web browsing...oh and shopping, texting, taking photo's, sending said photo's to latest flame etc etc, a series of functions that once used to require at least 2, if not 3 seperate devices. Tablets and smart phones now fill a niche that already existed but was catered to by inadequate equipment, it was a no brainer at least for me to see that tablets/smartphones would usurp laptops/desktops in a significant percentage of cases, thus leading to lower PC sales.
I often just walk into a shop I see just to see what they have that I may be interested in buying some time in the future, $5 for the privilege though? Just so not going to happen.
peer reviewed?
You miss the point of the statement, and no it's not circular. Its not that studies don't exist, there are probably plenty around produced by the anti-windfarm activists, but once these studies are presented for peer review none of them pass, therefore the statement is, "we have no peer-reviewed" studies, and not "we have no studies."
We are coming to a world where the courts have finally caught up to the average person, it shows there's hope yet.
Re: When?!
I suspect its not about being able to do it, it's about being able to do it at a price that's competetive with current storage methods, look how long its takes SSD's to get a foothold on a market full of spinning bits of metal, to actually succeed it needs to be purchased by your average joe in your average computer.
of course
All this assumes that they are even interested in finding out if we exist. We are a very selfish species, we assume if something is intelligent it has to be intelligent like us. We don't think (well obviously some of us do cause I just thought it) that there might be an intelligent species somewhere that looks up at the sky and goes meh...so what?
Posted in Seagate squeezes out 4TB desktop monster
Re: But%20at%20what%20price%3F
And I remember when a 300Mb HDD cost that much, and if I care to think even further back I can remember when a 300Mb HDD cost AU$10,000. Some people expect to much for their money.
Re: Lack of faith
So after about 10 or 20 iterations of this we will be down to the nanobot level? All hail our nanobot overlords!
Re: Is their military playing catch up?
The Syrian Freedom Fighters (or filthy rebel infiltrators depending on which side you are on) are using playstations to control homemade armored vehicles.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/syria-rebels-playstation-tank-sham-ii-video_n_2272930.html
I suspect China is suddenly realising these aren't just toys but can be cheap military hardware, fancy that.
"Either, a lot of them didn't list _all_ their online aliases/emails or hardly any sex offenders play video games. " And now ALL of them will have at least one alias/email that's not listed so they can play online games, way to go. Now from having a way they can check and track offending users by obtaining online game company logs they have nothing.
Re: Pinch to zoom??
Actually no, "zoom" is ambi-viewable, you can zoom IN, or you can zoom OUT, but in either case it is a zoom. So to pinch is to zoom IN, to open (or spreadem in law enforcement parlance) is to zoom OUT, but either practice is a zoom. Now if it was called pinch to magnify you would be correct!
I have my own ad-block, its a little red cross in the corner. I go to a news website, it has a link to an interesting video, click on link, ad comes up, close webpage, look for same video on youtube or similar, simple. The reason I do this, and will still put up with the ads on youtube is at least youtube will play the content.
The BBC news website is a case in point, about 80% of the time the video won't play, it either just sits there with a black screen, or a message comes up to tell me this content has been removed or is not available in my location, but the FRIKIN ads always play, so I have to watch the ad to find out I can't watch the interesting video, lol at that, failed once to often and now I just shut it down when an ad comes up.
Mars...and back.
North Korea has just announced a new anti-gravity drive based on using just the bottom few coils of a slinky. This new technology will have them on mars in a few months it is claimed. The astronauts will return the following day when they will collect some more supplies before returning to Mars, and back the following day for news conference, followed by a return to Mars and......the North Korean government admits there are still a few kinks to iron out!
Re: "The fingers you have used to dial this number are too fat"
Don't know about you but I use a fing-longer and a pair of binoculars for the really small buttons!
Re: It's weird how Apple get all this flak...
I am guessing he means Viturbo Italy, which his now seviced by the Starada Statale 675, the old road appears to be Viale Fiume which joins to the Strada Ortana with rather nice looking hairpin bend and some picturesque little towns...source google maps, whod a thunk it!
lack of consensus, lol
The problem with NASA is that they can't rely on support from the government for any plan they set out, so what happens is they flap around with half a dozen different versions of any plan so that if the newly elected government decides space is just a black hole that swallows money, and summarily cuts the NASA budget by 40, 50 or 60% they can still do something.
If NASA set out a huge plan, was promised funding and invested all thier rescources in that plan, say permanent moon habitat, then the government cut funding halfway through everyone would accuse NASA of wasting public funds on pie in the sky, visionary, unachievable plans instead of spreading the money around on small enterprises.
So agree with other posters. Of course the upshot is, these sorts of enterprises shouldn't be in government hands, a democracy is the last thing you want when investing billions on long term enterprises, it just takes a couple of twits to get voted in and everything collapses, but I can't really see anyone or organisation rich enough to take over at the moment, except maybe Apple or MS, but who wants to fly in A) an iShip? All looks and glamour but you have to hold it right to launch or B) a Winrocket, goes fine till it gets a virus then you are stranded on mars waiting for a service pack to be delivered.
Because V'Ger and the whole damn first movie was just a remake of Season 2 Episode 3 ST-TOS, Nomad should have kicked his butt for copyright infingement! Now there was an emotionless killing machine if I ever saw one, an indestructible planet destroying space probe....of course they destroyed it....one up for the fleshies!
Posted in America planned to NUKE THE MOON
"I can imagine some dumb general chomping on his cigar, enthusing: "We'll light up the dark side - then those damn commies will be able to see who's the boss."
Perfectly reasonable statement, you do realise that once a month the dark side of the moon is facing the earth? (for any particular spot on the earth I mean). I am sure you are confusing the Far Side of the moon with the incorrectly named "Dark Side of the Moon" musical album by...um..musicians, not astronomers. Fair enough for them to make a mistake, being filthy rich musicians they probably know naff all about anything else, although I won't swear on that since I have never met any of them, but a reader on a tech site? Come now!
And the rest of them don't know how to delete the compromising pictures stored in the memory so they don't dare pass them on!
Re: Was there a survey?
"How are they getting this data? Was there a survey? How big is the sample size?"
That's made quite clear in the article; "derived from Microsoft's logs." and; "Reller also said Redmond has logged “1.5 billion impressions of customers using the home screen.” and also; "90% of customers use Charms on the first day they get the product."
Notice the repeated use of the words logs and logged. Also 90% of customers, NOT 90% of those whio filled in a survey! So unless they have surveyed 100% of their customers, and got replies from 100%, to derive that 90% figure MS are actually logging everything you do on your copy of Windows 8. Although to be fair probably only those copies that get activated using an MS account, for which you have probably already given permission when you created it. Thats why the other type of account is called "local" because the data stays "local" and doesn't get sent of to redmond for analysis.
Test, go through and list the number of ancient greeks you know by name, Plato, Archimedes, Aristotle etc, not exactly plebs right? Yes compared to the average 20th centrian these guys would still come out pretty smart. Now it's 2000 years in the future, name the pre-spacesettled humans you know the names of, ooh Einstien, Heisenburg, Hawkins. Gee they were brainy back then! Looking back from our point in the future the only ancient people we know anything about personally were the outstanding's of that era, does this really need explaining?
has nobody done the obvious yet and turned TIFKAM around and looked at it?
MAKeFIT, cause we will make it fit on anything, whether or not it makes any sense!
Re: Did Simon get bored of proof-reading before the end?
You did hear that we have an educational crisis right? I am sure this extends to spelling and grammer as well as other areas.
Posted in Kindle Touch bites the dust
I have a Kindle, didn't buy it, was given it in return for some work, don't buy books, I have about 3,000 genuine paper books, I would like to see the distributor come around and try to take those away if they decide my account is iffy lol! Any ebook manufacturer that exerts such control that they can actually erase books you have paid for is out of the question as far as I am concerned. If my Kindle dies I will get another ebook reader but it will be whatever I decide is most suitable for me, maybe a kindle, maybe not.
Re: Fast cheap access to justice
The actual statement says it all "suspected piracy."
When was the last time you were imprisoned for suspected murder, or suspected arson, or suspected rape, or suspected shoplifting? What, never? However you CAN be punished for suspected piracy. And as for the courts being jammed, that's only because the music industry has insisted on trying to make a civil offence a criminal offense, and if it IS a criminal offense it should follow the same rules and procedures as any other criminal offense, sorry you can't have a criminal offense of being suspected, it has to be proven in a court of law if the accused denies liability.
Posted in Study finds file sharers buy more music
So, we conclude that sueing the heaviest P2P users into bankruptcy will actual lead to reduced sales of legitimate music, causing the RIAA to sue average P2P users who are obviously killing the industry, leading to reduced sales of legitimate music, causing the RIAA to sue light users of P2P leading to reduced sales of legitmate music, causing the RIAA to sue occaisional users of P2P, the end result being that all the money that people had to spend on music is now in the hands of the RIAA!
You see the thing is I can't work out if this is the most brilliant plan I have ever heard or just sheer stupidity, the end result being that either way they get all your money.
TV?
Its quite unlikely, even given the absolute impossibilty of not being able to obtain media anywhere alse, that I would go back to watching TV, its not like if all cars stopped working, then we would have to go back to horse and buggy, TV is optional, its entertainement. Actually its not, having been forced to sit through some when the elderly relatives visited I find 10 minutes of show followed by 15 minutes of adds just excruciating, and worse the same add repeated 3 times (yes I kid you not, this is Australia) in the same add break.
Re: Couldn't they come up with...
"... a process to purify water using the sun's heat directly, instead of spending a fortune in energy and resources making all those solar panels....?" Why, we already have a perfectly good system for that, its called "the weather". Sunlight heats the ocean, water evaporates and turns into clouds that drift over the land so that we can catch it while its falling. Any attempt to duplicate that is bound to be (if you forgive the expression) a drop in the ocean compared to current natural processes. The system is there, all we need to do is catch more of it! How about we equip each house with a rainwater tanks and filters so that they can catch falling water on the roof to pipe into the tanks for storage and use in drier easons?
Re: Religions
"(Cue atheists saying they have no religion on 3, 2, 1)" Actually we have no god, thats the strict definition of the term, there are in fact a couple of atheistic religions, ie: that is religions that do not worship a god, but atheism itself is not a religion. You can be atheist and have a religion, or be atheist and not have a religion, the same as you can be a believer and not have a religion (thats deist by the way) or vice versa.
Atheist/theist describes the position of believing or not believing in a god, religious/irreligious describes the position of belonging or not belonging to a religion. Any other questions?
Posted in Australian gamers can get high and naked
If its in line with current movie classifications you can have sex, or you can have violence, but you can't have sex AND violence, even if the two take part in different areas and are completely unrelated. For instance the spoof porn movie "Pirates" based on "Pirates of the Carribean" was actually released as two seperate films in Australia, one with all the sex, and one wth all the violence. So possibly we could have a video game with sex, OR a video game with violence, but not one with sex AND violence, should be interesting to see how the game makers get around that one!
Did I read that right, you can't check email unless you pay for an app from the app store? True Win7 didn't come with an email client, but you could just download one from anywhere, the implications here are that you can't just download one, you have to buy one from MS. Every tablet, at least every one that I have used, came with a built in or pre-installed mail app, a lot of people are going to have a bit of a shock here, in my experience tablets are, for the most part, used for web browsing and email, its only after owning one for a while do users actually start spreading there wings a bit, should be fun!
Re: This is how the wedge goes in:
" Flat chested actresses? [allegedly banned in Australia, can someone confirm?]" Technically not flat chested no, that was used as an example of what could constitute CP. The actual meaning is, if the actress looks as if she might be under the age of 18, for example if she has very small breasts. You could have an 80 year old with very small breasts, she would be fine, but a 19 year old, even if she held her ID up beside her very small breasts, could be used as the basis for a CP charge.
Re: In Aus they are mobile
Umm, haven't had a rego sticker supplied to me for 3 years now, I know they used to call WA "Wait Awhile" cause we were so backwards, but where are you from, Tasmania?
