* Posts by Alfred

409 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Apr 2007

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Japanese IT glitch leaves foreigners' ID cards incomplete

Alfred
Thumb Up

No political agenda here I see.

That final line isn't shoe-horned in on the most vague link possible, no no no.

Museum of Computing recognised as PROPER MUSEUM

Alfred

Re: Why isn't our national museum of computing in Bletchley Park?

Swindon.....City of To-mo-rrow.

Atos IT workers threaten strike during Olympics over 'living wage'

Alfred

Re: What about?

I'm told (although I don't have any figures to hand) that those are considered to be pretty good, well-paid jobs by the people doing them. In the UK, it's bottom of the pile. Overseas, not so much.

British Gas bets you'll pay £150 for heating remote control

Alfred

Automatic door locks?

Leaving aside the insanity of automating a door lock in a house - that if you actually need it unlocked you're going to be standing right there to go through it and thus manual mode seems pretty reasonable - does this mean that I'll be able to unlock someone's front door remotely? That'll make burglary a lot easier, thanks.

Texas Higgs hunters mourn the particle that got away

Alfred

Re: But.

Understanding how the universe actually works allows us to change it from how it is to how we want it. The more we know how it works, the better we can manipulate it in our favour.

I point you towards Newton's laws, thermodynamics, lasers, electricity, x-rays, MRIs, CAT and PET scans and everything else about which someone has wondered how it will make life better.

Oracle staffer accused of sex-for-favours in Singapore

Alfred

Re: Who said women in IT don't go all the way?

If you have to add "that's a joke" to anything, you shouldn't bother at all.

Alfred

Is it your money?

If it is your money, then essentially what you're talking about is simply paying for sex (or rather, indulging your fantasy that being jacked off by a pair of hired labia is somehow better than just doing it yourself).

If it's not your money, but you have a responsibilty and a duty to spend it in the most effective manner for the benefit of the company/group/whatever, and you then choose to spend it less effectively in order to buy yourself sex, it's a roundabaout way of skimming from the till to pay for hookers.

MoneySavingExpert.com founder flogs website for £87m

Alfred
Headmaster

Re: romanes eunt domus

I think you mean "vocabulary", not "grammar".

1930s photos show Greenland glaciers retreating faster than today

Alfred

Re: Dear Reg editors :-

What exactly do you expect the reg editors to do about Greenland's glaciers?

Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

Alfred

Re: variable speed limit

You're right. There is absolutely NO WAY that the people building this thought of that.

Alfred

Re: Why not Italy?

"Just look at the vehicle spacing on the M3 on a Monday morning."

At 50mph, a lot more than 6m. That's not much more than a single car length, or in terms of time taken to travel that distance, less than one fifth of a second.

Alfred

Re: Rome wasn't built in a day.

I suspect you'll ring _a_ car. Why would you have your own?

Alfred

Really? A six metre gap at 60 mph?

"So what happens if a car pulls into that 6m gap? i've seen cars pull into smaller gaps..."

That gives a metre ahead and a metre behind, at 60 mph. That's a ridiculously small gap to pull into. The driver doing that deserves to be shot (and is definitely guilty of motoring offences). At that speed, one metre is covered in about 0.03 seconds. Three HUNDRETHS of a second. Being one metre behind the car in front at that speed (which is almost touching distance) is effectively suicide, and if people choose to commit suicide by doing that, it won't make a difference if it's meatbags or HAL behind the wheel.

Alfred

Re: Wouldn't work on UK motorways

I picked a Ford Focus as the first standard-type car I could think of; on investigation, they look to be about four metres long.

http://www.parkers.co.uk/cars/reviews/facts-and-figures/ford/focus/hatchback-1998/dimensions/

If slipping between two cars with a single metre of slack ahead (about the distance from your left shoulder to your horizantally extended right hand - almost touching distance!) and a single metre of slack behind at 60 mph is the kind of thing meatbags get up to, the sooner they're removed from the driving process the better :)

Alfred

All these questions about following the wrong lorry

Chaps, the idea isn't that you follow J. Random lorry. It's that you follow the right vehicle. The vehicle that's there to be followed.

Alfred

Re: Worried

"All well and good until something goes wrong."

The exact same thing can be said about the current meat-bag controlled version of driving.

"The lady reading at the wheel will notice something has gone wrong, and by the time she reassumes a ready position, it is too late."

If only there was some way we could anticipate in advance the possibility that things might go wrong, and have some kind of automated safety system that will give the driver the time needed to take over. Perhaps simply slowing down whilst remaining within the lines, or some other such crazytech.

Automated cars are not perfect, but safer than meatbags.

'IT is no place for the little ladies', says Dell mouthpiece

Alfred

Re: "likewise to prove the police aren't racist they need a National White Police Association

So, let's imagine a hypothetical problem; say, in a given industry, black employees are routinely discriminated against. Some employees want to set up a group to counter this, and you insist that another group be set up as well to do the same thing for white employees, despite the fact that those white employees aren't actually suffering the problem?

I need to repair my roof - should I also repair the flooring, which is not in need of repair? I might open a tin of beans tonight. Should I open all the other tins as well?

UK milk wastage = 20,000 cars = actually completely unimportant

Alfred

Something missing from this analysis, surely?

What, no examination of whether we'd be better of abandoning EuroMilk and just buying cheap from the US?

Google's self-driving car snags first-ever license in Nevada

Alfred

Re: On the one hand...but on the other...

"A human would realise their mistake"

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=follows+gps+into

How politicians could end droughts forever But they don't want to

Alfred

Re: Absurd/@Alfred

I disagree. I think that humanity is smart enough to be able to have the population the size it is AND do all these things. Yes, our current system of government and our current economy is bloody awful at managing it, but it's possible. Yes, we'll have to improve the collection and distribution networks, but water just goes round and round endlessly.

Alfred
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Re: Absurd

Why? Why should I, given the choice between using 167 litres per day and using a quarter of that, choose to go with the smaller option? I _like_ power showers. I _like_ being clean. I _like_ washing my clothes regularly. I _like_ all the other things I do with water. Why on earth would I choose _not_ to do these things?

Female Chinese astronauts must have no scars, straight teeth

Alfred

Departmental Budget Infighting?

They could do what everyone else (UK forces included) do; have your teeth checked out before you go, and preventative maintenance undertaken to ensure they're not a problem. 15 minutes with the dentist seems a better move than binning a (presumably highly-trained and expensive to make) Taikonaut; perhaps the dental budget is empty but the Taikonaut training courses have money to burn.

Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board

Alfred
Facepalm

Re: Missing the point

"First of all, I trust electronics more than I trust people."

If there was some way of designing, making and using electronics without using people, this would make sense. As it is, there isn't, so your choice is untrustworthy people with electronics, or untrustworthy people with bits of paper.

Child abuse suspect won't be forced to decrypt hard drive

Alfred
WTF?

Re: Re: SO?

Maybe The Man might, but unless you're an international terrorist or an independent MP, you need only worry about people who would be foiled by the most elementary precautions that you choose not to take.

Do you wear your seatbelt? Why's that? If you ran into a tanker an 100MPH which then exploded, you'd still die, right? So why do you take that precaution? Do you look before crossing the road? Why bother? If you got hit by an asteroid the size of Poland looking wouldn't have helped.

Brit student locked up for Facebook source code hack

Alfred

Known crims working for me? No thanks.

The majority of criminals who work somewhere do not use their expertise to prevent crime - if they use it, they use it to carry out crime. Far more people help themselves from the till than turn in their workmates for doing so.

Apple tells authors: All your books iBook files are belong to us

Alfred

@Steve Ives :(

I don't understand.

New dole system is 'digital by default', like it or not

Alfred

register

Crikey, have they finally done it and made unemployment a crime? Anyway, if the alternative is paying for his travel costs to the dole centre, an internet connection might be the cheaper alternative.

Five ways Microsoft can rescue Windows Phone

Alfred

Saucer of milk for the Orlowski table

"Some things in the world are theoretically human-readable, but nobody ever reads them. Postscript source code is one example, the fiction of Cory Doctorow another"

Oooo, you bitch! Meow.

Potent proton pulse to BOMBARD EARTH Tuesday morn

Alfred

register

Of similar note, one of the new kids at work had never seen Carpenter's "The Thing". Just what do they teach kids these days?

Russia and NASA plan to COLONISE the Moon

Alfred

I'm afraid not.

"It would drop, eventually, if the speed is below Sun's escape velocity, so it's just enough to "throw it behind" in Earth orbit. No?"

No. That would simply be a different orbit. An orbit known to intersect Earth's orbit.

Alfred

Expensive, difficult and dangerous

Because that would be expensive, difficult and dangerous.

The following courtesy of the gorgeous RobotRollCall of Reddit fame.

"The Earth is in orbit around the sun. That means the Earth, and everything on it, is moving through space at about seventy thousand miles an hour. In order to drop something into the sun, you'd have to bring it to what is effectively a dead stop in space, which means accelerating it from rest to seventy thousand miles an hour going in the direction opposite the Earth's orbital motion.

That's twice the velocity necessary to fling something out of the solar system entirely. Now, we have launched a rocket to solar escape velocity before, about 35,000 miles an hour … but only once in all of human history, and doing so required a custom-assembled rocket and more than two hundred million US dollars, and the total payload was still only about a thousand pounds. And that's half of what we'd have to do, in terms of total velocity, to fire a payload of the same size into the sun … and rockets don't scale linearly with final velocity but rather exponentially, meaning the cost of putting a thousand-pound payload into the sun would probably be on the order of a billion US dollars, not counting the up-front R&D costs.

And did I mention that spent nuclear fuel is among the densest stuff on our planet? A cubic foot of the stuff weights more than a thousand pounds — 1,189 pounds, to be precise.

"Purely financial" doesn't even begin to cover it. To put any useful amount of the stuff into the sun would literally cost more than the total amount of money in the whole world."

Nuke support in UK hits record high

Alfred
Go

Taking "support" to mean "favourable":

What is the record support level? 40%. What level has been hit? 40%.

Did the support level (40%) hit the record high(40%)? Yes.

Etailer punts steamy lace-up 24-port switch

Alfred
Happy

You can enhance the effect by using one finger to slide the bridge of a pair of glasses back into place at the top of your nose.

Apple's TV killer 'on shelves by summer 2012'

Alfred

North Korean TVs are fantastically simple

All hardwired to one station, leaving a need for two points of UI only - an on/off switch, and a volume knob that looked like it could be operated but I never saw actually being used. Presumably once the volume is correct, there's no need to adjust it.

Christmas headaches? We prescribe a year long course of BOFH

Alfred

No need, shipmate

The pirates are way ahead of you. You've got to compete with both free AND available in a convenient format.

Alfred

Oh no

"Sorry."

We're really broken up. We'd set our hearts on your reading this. Christmas is ruined.

The cure for US job woes: More immigrants

Alfred

I went to read the actual paper and look at their data, and the answer is yes.

"Really? Do they cite ANY proof of this, the most central point of the argument?

Didn't think so.."

I went to read the actual paper and look at their data, and the answer is yes. It's arguable, yes, but they do present data.

You've clearly already decided and you didn't have the integrity to actually go and check. You're an embarrassment to your education system and ironically clearly ready to be replaced by a foreigner.

Alfred

The point? No buddy, you missed it, go back and take that left turn by the lights.

"In order to get more Americans in work, you hire foreigners to take the jobs..?"

No, you hire foreigners to CREATE more jobs. It's like you didn't even read it.

Alfred

I wonder how they ended up so lazy?

Who raised them? The previous generation, was it? Time to take a look in the mirror and ask yourself what you were thinking.

Crack GCHQ's code and become the next James Bond

Alfred

Page 1, Chapter 1: Thank you for purchasing this thousand page shellcode guide...

I'm actually quite impressed at the depth of knowledge required to do this. Bravo, chaps. No pandering to the "prizes for all" crowd here. Sadly :(

James Bond savages the Kardashians

Alfred
Devil

The beauty of genetics

In the same way that idiots can produce a genius, and people who can't rub their faces without poking themselves in the eyes can produce a piano virtuoso, it's just possible that attractive people can produce a right swamp donkey. God, I hope so :)

US nuclear aircraft carrier George Bush crippled by toilet outages

Alfred
Coat

Whoever did the plumbing must have (not) been taking the piss.

Britain's Harrier jump-jets reprieved to fly and fight again

Alfred

"if Libya kicked off and your carrier was in an exercise in the Pacific, the Americans could have finished the whole affair before you got your carrier in position. "

6 months to travel from the Pacific to the Med? Might manage a bit faster with the engines running.

Anonymous shuts down hidden child abuse hub

Alfred

Free speech and evidence of sexual abuse are not actually the same thing

Need I say more.

Question mark deliberately excluded.

Sutter: C++11 kicks old-school coding into 21st century

Alfred

There is no one true language. Use the right tool for the job.

"While garbage collection in C++ is bound to be contentious, the reality is it's absolutely necessary before it can claim to be as safe to program as higher level languages."

Is there some special bonus for being as safe as some other language? Use the right tool for the job. If you need that level of safety provided by some other language, use that other language. If you don't, then don't. I do not want the extra overhead of such things, and am prepared to pay the extra time and care in coding to ensure I don't need them. Other people have different needs and should use a different tool.

Fire burns away the Kindle dream of interactivity

Alfred
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So why 26 keys plus extra?

Other eBook readers with no such interactivity pretensions do perfectly well without the complete set of a-z plus gubbins. Someone designing the kindle wanted more than page flipping and menu tripping.

London rioters should 'loose all benefits'

Alfred
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National service is bad for the forces

National service may well keep the kids off the streets and maybe even benefit a couple of them. It would, however, be a bad move for the forces. The UK operates a small, highly-trained, motivated professional volunteer force. Everyone there chose to be there.

If we were to dump tens of thousands of angry youths on the forces, they would have to come up with a lot of extra money and resources to deal with them. For many of them it would effectively be a prison camp. Good people would be taken from their real duties and forced to babysit people who don't want to be there. The days of needing cannon fodder in the UK forces are behind us and many of the conscripts would be totally unusuable for important duties; I wouldn't trust them with anything that needed doing well, not paperwork, not maintenance, not supply, certainly not combat - I can't think of a single role in the forces that I'd feel comfortable assigning an angry, surly conscript to; they'd be passed from pillar to post, nothing more than an extra burden on the forces. The UK armed forces are not prison wardens, teachers or babysitters for tens of thousands of people with no interest in it. It would sap resources and morale and at the end of it they'd just be dumped back onto the streets.

UK gov chews over Amazon Book Depository engulfment

Alfred

If they are being bought essentially to be shut down...

Does anyone fancy starting a business with a website called something like www.thenewbookdepository.co.uk? There's clearly a viable business there.

Alfred

Print on demand

To amplify on the subject of out of print, they founded their own press (Dodo) to reprint them. Which is just brilliant. I really get the feeling that the head bod actually likes books and likes selling books to people.

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