Posts by Graham Bartlett

@Neil Barnes

One thing the Moon does get you is a long-term testbed environment. Zero-G does nasty things for the body; 1/6G may be a lot better. Whilst it's too far for anyone to come over on a whim, it's close enough for regular resupply, easy comms with Earth with minimal lag, and so on. And it's close enough that an emergency craft to get you back home in case of total disaster is a possibility. (This doesn't have to be comfortable - the size of your average coffin is plenty. It just has to be survivable.) None of this is the case for anywhere further afield like Mars.

The Moon also has no protective magnetic field, so staying there for a while will produce useful info on how the human body responds to solar radiation, for when trips to Mars (and further afield) become feasible, and somewhere to try out possible solutions where it's possible to get back home if it all goes pear-shaped.

Anyone else see the irony...

... of a bunch of fundamentalist (and, frankly, simply mental) Christians being the first in line for something named after a pagan Egyptian goddess?

Jim59

Any storage medium is going to be limited by how fast you can get data in and out of it. Flash's limits are pretty high though, so it's not such an issue.

More of a problem for Flash is the temp file thing. Each time you write to Flash, you wear it out slightly, and eventually it stops working. The same is true of hard drive sectors, of course, so the same solutions will work, but the number of write cycles is a lot better for magnetic media. When your OS and all your apps dump a shitload of temp files onto your drive every time they start up, this is not a nice place to be if you're a Flash drive. Likewise the whole RAM paging thing where the PC uses the hard drive as a temporary RAM extension is not going to be good for a Flash drive.

The "doesn't do much more" thing is a big problem for software companies. Why upgrade from Word 97 if it still works well enough? Hence the recent MS addition of that godawful ribbon thing, which has to be the stupidest user interface in the history of computing.

Hope this wasn't an April Fool

If there's anything worthy of a damn sight more investment than it currently gets, it's improved prosthetics. If UK gov put the price of even a single Typhoon jet into prosthetics research, things would seriously start looking up.

Only £20k?!

I'm not a big fan of huge damages claims. Usually they're rubbish. But 8 years of this crap, trashed mental health, a whole bunch of no good for your family, and the loss of your business - come on! Loss of earnings alone is going to be more than that when his business went under.

OTOH, if he's had decent advice then he'll screw them to hell and gone on costs. Costs isn't just your legal team, it's also the time you've spent on this. Document every second you spend on this kind of thing, multiply by the hourly rate in your dayjob, and present your bill.

"They may need a good blow first, but it will be worth it."

Isn't it always?

Problem?

Some folks want to hunt things. Some areas have too many of a particular animal which needs culling (or have a specimen of that animal which is considered too dangerous). Putting the two together seems a natural combination.

Sure, across Africa as a whole, elephant numbers are well down. But in certain areas, there are far too many of them. And apparently you can't easily cart them around - quite apart from the whole size problem, elephant herds reportedly don't respond well to newcomers being dropped in by well-meaning humans.

@Sarah

Hell yeah, Star Wars prequels were bad. The originals weren't much better though - "George, you can type this shit, but you sure as hell can't say it", per Harrison Ford.

Difference is that Cameron has a track record of decent movies.

And it doesn't really press my buttons, any more than a Disney cartoon does.

Alternatives

"Good Firm Buns"

Or perhaps "Well Toasted Buns" for the fetish crowd.

Or of course "Toole Sandwich".

Ye gods!

I reckon there's a serious risk of no-one taking in any of it, bcos by about 30s they're creased up on the floor laughing. I only made it to "stretch and slide" before I fell off my chair. Christ knows how I'd survive the full thing.

2018?

Just about in time for the RAF to get its Typhoons in service, and the Navy to get its JSFs. Joy.

@Joe Cooper

The problem isn't so much "fighting the last war". The problem is that the RAF and army are locked into a mindset of fighting a war which never actually took place (land war with the Sovs in Europe). And as a kicker, the strategies they would have used in this non-existent war have been proven (in Iraq I and II) to be ineffective. Plus the navy played political chicken with their carrier fleet, never thinking anyone would actually swing that axe, and lost big-time.

Thing is, you need to think about who you're likely to fight. You're not going to fight China or Russia, or anyone with serious weapons, bcos they've got nukes and we've got nukes. So we go for diplomatic sanctions with them instead. No, you're only *EVER* going to be actually fighting the tinpot dictators and random nutjobs - the whole "global policeman" thing. So plan for that, yeah?

Is it just me

If (a) you started the war, (b) you lost the war, (c) the war was 5 generations ago, and (d) no-one living in that area wants to be in your country, I reckon you're pretty much SOL.

@Oliver7

I saw it for the first time a few months back. Until Paul Atreides gets to the Fremen, it is *perfect*. Thereafter everything goes to hell in a handcart in pretty short order, as vast swathes of plot and character are cut to fit far too little screen time. Also wish they'd left out the "weirding module" guns, which were completely unnecessary.

An amazing thing is that most of the special effects still work. The only way you'd tell this wasn't filmed in the last couple of years was the back-projection scenes on the worms. The shield effect in particular was an incredibly original image for me in 2010 - in 1984 it must have been "WOAH!! WTF did we just see?!?!"

@Charlie Stross

Would any alternative have been better? There was a sodding great fireball from an oil refinery too. This oil refinery was the opposite side of Tokyo from the earthquake and wasn't even touched by the tsunami. How well do you reckon an oil-fuelled power station would have survived at Fukushima?

As regards the grids - that's just crazy stuff from the Japanese. Not so much the different supplies, although that's pretty bonkers, but the fact that they've not done anything about joining the grids. I was sponsored through uni by a company (now called Alstom Transmission and Distribution Power Electronic Systems Limited - we needed small writing on business cards!) who amongst other things specialised in building back-to-back high-voltage DC links to join AC transmission grids, rectifying one grid to DC and then regenerating an AC sine-wave with the right frequency and phase. They'd been doing it for a while, and they're not the only ones in the market either. If the Japanese hadn't the nous to get one of these in place any time in the last 20+ years, they're mad.

Misreading

I'm glad I saw "barbecuing *with* the ferrets" on the second reading of that sentence. I was worried there for a moment!

Mind you, ferrets are conveniently shaped for a baguette filling...

Oops

So if all tests on ground crew came back negative, there's some guys about 200 miles up who they haven't yet checked. Guess some poor sod up in the ISS had one last snort before liftoff, and now they've nicked his stash.

@Not Fred31

"Major natural catastrophe"

So the nuke plant caused the tidal wave?

"Thousands of displaced people"

By the tidal wave. I've no objection to folks being moved bcos they weren't sure the failsafes really *were* failsafe. But if you want to compare apples to apples - industrial site to industrial site - then check out the state of the area around the oil refinery. Let's just say that the oil refinery did not put up with the quake and tsunami in a failsafe manner, shall we?

"Radiation leaks"

Radioactive material leaks from your cellar into your house every day. (Radon gas.) BFD. Worry about the oil contaminating the area around the refinery, if you want to worry about leaks.

@Andy E

Runways? Where we're going we don't need runways!

Or more informatively - how many runways do you think there were in the world in about 1930 or so? Mostly it was just grass airstrips. If you've got a fairly light aircraft (and this beastie is likely to be the epitome of lightness) then you don't actually need concrete underfoot. Make yourself a 400ft-wide trolley to support it during launch, and tow the trolley along until this thing reaches takeoff speed and leaves the trolley.

Erm...

Just a little bit worrying that this is a study about kids, and "driving ability" and "sexual energy" are listed as two of the things that can go wrong with lack of sleep. Personally I reckon if it reduces twocking and tugging, this is a good thing.

I went most of my time at secondary school without too sleep. But that was bcos I'd be coding or playing computer games all evening, then set my alarm early (like 5am) and rattle off homework in the morning. I missed a few assignments, but mostly it worked.

Old Bill isn't a sailor then

Following seas are not generally what you want on a boat, on account of how boats are designed for waves to hit them from the front. Having waves hitting them from the back (which is what a "following sea" is) is generally a bad thing. It's called "getting pooped", initially because the high deck at the back where the steering wheel lives was called the "poop deck", but now because it's what happens to your underpants when it's happening.

@AC and "too much CGI"

The problem isn't too much CGI. The charge of the Rohirrim in RotK and Helm's Deep in TTT (LotR) were almost entirely CGI. But they were awesome.

The problem is when it *looks* like CGI. The whole droids versus Jar-Jars (don't bother reminding me what they're called, I don't care enough) battle looked like plasticine figures on a green baize mat. Screw that for a crap bit of film-making.

Micro Men

Just caught that on the Beeb the other day (missed it first time around). As they had the Chris Curry character say, "If we'd stuck together then we could have been the British IBM".

It's amazing to me how Clive Sinclair and Alan Sugar are acclaimed as visionaries. They were (and are) nothing of the kind. They were just lucky in happening to release the right product at the right time, pure and simple. The fact that both men subsequently ran their companies into the ground with a long series of crap decisions makes that pretty damn clear. The only reason AMS is a millionaire today is that he offloaded some of his money to other people to invest - everything he personally touched turned to shit in pretty short order.

@Adam White

You haven't stolen the only copy in existence. However you *have* reduced the value of the information - a trade secret may become worthless once your competitors get it, or other information may create other risks which damage the company.

For something which might work for you, suppose I illegally took a copy of your credit card details and posted them on the web. All I've done is copy a string of numbers - but the result is not going to be fun for you...

@GameCoder

I seriously hope you're joking. If not, you *SO* need to do a quick bit of googling about European and American establishment attitudes to being black, gay or female before the 1960s. (For Britain you can add being Irish; for the US you can add being Indian.)

@Brian Miller

You probably don't care if your neighbour found out about your piles, no.

However you might care if BUPA decided to revoke your medical insurance as a result of tests on your last blood sample which found some genetic marker that predisposed you to skin cancer. You might care if your teenage daughter's schoolmates found out about her bulemia and self-harming. You might care if your employer found out that you had schizophrenia controlled by medication and decided to get rid of you. You might care if you moved to a country where vasectomies are culturally unacceptable and you couldn't manage your workers when they found out.

You might also care that this is absolutely not front-line healthcare, so your whole argument is bollocks.

@AC and adnim

Depends whether you both think classic electric guitars like the Parker Fly or Dan Armstrong plexiglass are also going to sound like flip-top bins. (Hint: they don't. ;-) And then there's lap-steels, where any wood is mostly for decoration. How you make it engineering-wise has a *lot* more to do with the sound than what you make it out of.

Crappy vote anyway

Just been and had a look at it.

For starters, this is exclusively games for home systems. If you think you can discuss art in games whilst omitting arcade coin-op games, you're sadly mistaken guys. Outrun? Space Harrier? Double Dragon, the original "freeform fighting" game with artwork straight out of The Warriors by way of manga cartoons? Golden Axe? Operation Wolf? Arkanoid? All conspicuous by their absence. One of the few coin-op games in there is Afterburner, and that's an emasculated conversion onto a low-power home platform.

For another thing, they've been pretty ignorant about where to find the games too. No Spectrum? No Amiga? No Atari ST? Any discussion of home computer games that misses out those three humungous gaming platforms is so ignorant as to be worthless.

In other news, Chuck Norris

... was reported to have said he's a bit worried about this guy. Apparently his guide-dog can roundhouse kick you through a wall too.

"Storage is a pain in the ass"

Is this a deliberate reference to the "Florida lag packs prison survival kit up jacksie" story yesterday? Or is it purely serendipitous?

@Steen Hive

Eben Moglen explicitly mentions "the willingness of Google to resist the state" as one reason to use this. If the state is on your case, I'm afraid you're SOL on an awful lot of levels, and this box ain't gonna help you. In fact you're probably better sticking to FB and hoping you don't get spotted in the background noise.

@Alexander Hanff 1

Don't make yourself look more stupid than you already do. Where did I specify violent crime?Reoffending rates FOR ALL OFFENCES (emphasis added for the hard-of-thinking such as Mr Hanff) fluctuate at around 40% - see UK OfNS figures.

@Willington: For obvious reasons I'm not going to be searching for details of kiddy-fiddlers on a work PC, so I'll concede that I can't back this up with numbers.

I'm not talking about locking up anyone "just in case". I'm talking about people who have already proven, through their actions, that they pose a very real threat to the people around them. Yes, I'd be quite happy to extend this to other violent crime too. I don't feel so strongly about crimes against property - ultimately that's all just stuff, regardless of how distressing it is - but if you're a danger to the people around you then their safety has to be the priority. Yes there has to be the possibility of appeal, because the original conviction and/or the decision about the nature of your crime may well be wrong,

And no, I'm afraid I don't care what the reason is - whether it's schizophrenia, prior history of abuse, drugs, or simply being a right bastard. If you can get yourself straightened out, then fine, you can go. The parole board will decide this, as usual, and the head-shrinking brigade are actually pretty good at spotting who's getting their heads straight. (I'd be happy with appeals here too, in case the parole board screw it up.)

But if you can't get yourself sorted out, I really don't see why you should ever be released from prison. If the police came and dumped a rabid dog outside your door, you'd be outraged. But the prison service are required to release criminals who've waited out their sentence, knowing full well that those people will reoffend in the very near future and some innocent person is going to suffer as a result.

Can it get any worse

... than Die Hard 4?

The first one was great - as in *really* great. Die Hard and Aliens between them define what an action film should be. Doesn't have to be stupid, doesn't have to be badly-scripted or acted. Blowing shit up is nice, but if you don't care about the people then you're screwed.

Second was distinctly average. Third was rather good, mainly because it went back to character-driven, and one of the characters was Samuel L Jackson.

And then there was Die Hard 4, which was such a gross turkey that even Bernard Matthews couldn't have mechanically-reconstituted it.

@AC

What do *you* think is the clearest definition of a contractor? I assure you that in the eyes of companies, contractors, and mortgage/finance companies who deal with contractors, the fact that you could be out on your ear next week with no notice is *THE* biggest factor. Thankfully this decision recognises that fact, unlike some previous bullshit decisions taken unilaterally by HMRC.

You might also think about things like paid sick leave, paid holiday, pension contributions, death in service benefits, health insurance, etc, etc. All of which are commonly provided for employees, and none of which you get as a contractor.

"Legally unenforceable"?! I think not. Back in October 2008, this is precisely what happened to me. The company I was working for lost a couple of contracts, so they had permies who needed something to do. Result: all the contractors were slung out at the end of that week. The following 4 months without a contract (remember that the economy was in the crapper and no-one was hiring) were a bit of a worry, but as a contractor I knew this was just how things were, and I didn't (still don't) consider it unreasonable. Unlike permies who think they're in a job for life, and then scream blue murder when an unprofitable department gets closed down.

Yes, there's the NI loophole. But would *you* volunteer to pay tax you weren't obliged to? Have you ever reclaimed PAYE when HMRC got it wrong? In that case you can take your hypocrisy elsewhere, thanks.

HMRC have spent hundreds of millions of pounds chasing this, and got (at most) tens of millions back. It would have been much cheaper to make better tax law, but that's not how we roll at HRMC, oh no.

Missing the obvious

If you pay teachers less than a Mickey D's assistant manager (teacher's starting salary is £21.5k, Mickey D's 2nd assistant manager is £23k), what standard of teacher do you think you're going to get? Add insane amounts of form-filling, mandatory unpaid overtime for marking, and an out-of-control classroom environment caused by chav kids with a sense of entitlement. Result: you're only going to teach if (a) you're ultra-dedicated, or (b) you literally can't find any other job. The exams they take are entirely immaterial - if you're dedicated then you'll teach regardless of the exams you took, and if you can't find any other job then you'd've probably just taken more filler subjects at Scottish Highers too.

If teachers were paid a starting salary in the high 20s, killed the form-filling, either paid overtime or made sure there were enough teachers for the school (many schools can't find enough teachers, so more strain on the rest), and gave proper backup to teachers - at that point, people might choose teaching as a career. Until then, it doesn't matter a damn what you do to the exams system.