Corse?
With it's capital Ajaccio? Lovely seafood there
Sorry, mine is the one with the tourist guide to Corsica in the pocket
4245 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Apr 2007
Come and say that to my Italian PhD student (or my missus for that matter), you might get a response as depicted in the icon. ;-)
Curiously, people say I make very good coffee, but I will still opt for my tea (Keemun black for preference, or a good Assam or Darjeeling).
Can't be too bad, given that tea also contains caffeine. I do not drink coffee, unless the alternatives are on a par with the poetry of the Azgoths of Kria (i.e. to me coffee is worse than Vogon poetry). Last time I drank coffee was 1986, around Xmas. It was Italian coffee, which according to all others present was excellent coffee, so apparently coffee is just NOT my thing. I do drink gallons of tea (Olympic swimming pools?) and apparently have very good memory (anecdotal evidence of course, I know).
The positive memory effects of tea and coffee can of course be negated by that other favourite drink, depicted above
An absolutely awesome image from Hubble again. The Tarantula Nebula (seen quite easily with binoculars from the southern hemisphere) is spectacular in its scale, but several other star-forming regions in our galaxy are of course much closer (the Orion Nebula, for example).
And there I was thinking that was the Symantec Norton mess (just try removing it). Early versions were OK, but as of about 2006 it brought a powerful quad core machine with MASSES of RAM (6GB, well, it was big in those days) to a crawl. After a lengthy uninstall process (I cannot count the times I must have said "Die, Symantec!! DIE!!!!"), and install of a competing (free) product, the same machine was back to it's responsive self again.
I am happy to take McAfee's word for it, but other contenders for the title of worst software abound, I suppose.
Should the reg introduce IT Razzies?
That's another place I should take the kids to. The Mosquito has always been one of my favourite planes of all time. I had the privilege of seeing one fly near Bude some time around 1990. Awesome sight.. My other favourite was the Hurricane IID: A tank-buster variant which showed just how amazingly versatile and rugged the Hurricane was.
Indeed!! This is why I wear at least one every day (the roo leather Barmah today). Essential!!! The only way to fully appreciate the meaning of life!!!! Ask any wizard or witch about the importance of hats!!!!!!
Yes I'll have the kippers today! Hooray!! How do we do it? VOLUME!!!
Mine is the one with the dried frog pills in the pocket (left one, the right has a miniature universe in it)
'I think the collective term for men is "barfull".'
Good suggestion. However, in this case the word "basket" could also be used, given that men who send threats to people campaigning for an image of a famous female author to be put on a banknote, should be treated as basket cases. If people make serious threats of violence in any media (or indeed verbally). simply because they disagree with them, prosecution should certainly be considered.
It is good to see somebody getting jail time for financial shenanigans. However, I do somehow wonder whether this was because he cheated (rich?) investors. Swindling poor people out of their homes by selling them mortgages you know they cannot afford, or breaking the financial system leading to untold hardship for many poorer people does not seem to carry any penalty. For the LIBOR scandal financial penalties have been handed out to the banks, but the responsible bankers seem to get off scot free, to name just a single instance.
But let's take a balanced view: One down, many more to go .....
Brings back memories. I tend(ed) to go to extremes: Ilford HP400 pushed to 1600 for theatre photography on the one hand, Kodak Technical Pan film developed in Technidol LC for super-fine grain landscape. I still have a print of water, reeds and willow tree taken with a Carl Zeiss 85mm F/1.4 at F/2.8 in my office. Closest thing I ever got to Ansel Adams (still a LONG way to go ;-) ).
I also did a whole lot of botanical photography on Fuji Provia, and the odd wedding of friends on Kodak Portra. Still have the camera lying around somewhere. Pity really.
Good point, it could be an "orphan planet"
I can imagine they may have some indication of the planet's radial velocity, but I doubt the data are sufficient for full orbit calculation. There is of course also the possibility of capture, as in the case of the moons of Mars
New tools rarely replace old tools outright. Since buying electric drills and screwdrivers I have not thrown away my hammers, or manual screwdrivers, nor will I. I use tablets (just got an ASUS Transformer Pad cheaply, like the hybrid set-up) and like them for browsing, but I still use my laptop and desktop machines (writing articles and coding), and when I need more serious grunt (Gigapixel images) a 64 core compute server, and when I want to play with the big boys with big data: clusters or supercomputers. I use WIMP or touch as needed, but very often still use the command line. As new tools are added to the toolbox, we gain flexibility. Do most users need the command line? I would not think so. Do I see my students use the command line? Not as much as I do, but they still revert to it for certain types of work.
I love using editors, or word processors, but boy am I glad I still have pen, pencil and paper.
I might also suggest PC sales are going down because many people have PCs that work just fine, and are in no hurry to upgrade.
a true compute science approach to generate an ElReg-style paper would be to write a script to turn an ordinary paper into and ElReg paper by auto replacement of terms like "scientist" into "boffin", "psychologist" into "trick cyclist", and convert every SI unit into approved ElReg units. Alternatively, adapt the SCIgen automatic scientific paper generator into an ElReg article generator
You are right. By not going on this mission they could have spent a whole $0.06 per capita on education and the like. Besides, by developing the capability to launch hefty kit into any orbit they please (cheaply), they are not gaining access to any kind of useful market. After all, satellites aren't money spinners, and level-headed business men like Elon Musk steer well clear of this kind of frivolous, money-wasting projects.
Aliens, because, well, it's about Mars, init?
The UTTER bastard is the one wielding the cattle prods and sending abusive e-mails in your name to the CEO to get you fired. Oh, and his PFY would put you on some most-wanted (armed and dangerous) list to give you a well-deserved wake-up call by armed police.
Isn't that about right, Simon?
There does seem to be some remnant there, but it is unlikely to give us a spectacular show. Pity for those living in parts of the world not covered in solid clouds for the next week or two.
I am happy I took the time to spot it in the morning sky (and was lucky enough to have two whole clear mornings this whole autumn),
Latest SOHO image suggest ISON is lighting up again. Now all I need is a clear patch of sky
ftp://sohoftp.nascom.nasa.gov/incoming/lasco/rtmovie_jpg24/20131129_0818_c3.jpg
For me at least, though for many others it is no problem.
My battered old VAIO SZ series machine came with an nVidia card, and weighed in at onl 1.67 kg. I seriously need to replace it, but this crop of machines does not fit the bill. Pity, because there are some nice screens out there that finally push beyond the poor 1366x768 that plagued so many 13.X" screens (and beyond).
You are right: the filter is the main culprit. Possibly the reduced distance between mains and low-voltage ends of the small transformer (compared to the beefier old ones) increases risk, but that distance is not smaller that the distances typically found in optical couplers (and they are safe, as a rule).
As the charger is only designed to deliver a few volts, and almost any plug you think of has the zero/earth on the outer shell of the plug, a metal casing should be perfectly safe. An old-fashioned charger with transformer would insulate the low voltage circuit completely from mains, and is therefore the safer option. However, with copper prices the way they are, and the weight and bulk of a transformer, most supplies are now switching power supplies, in which there is a potential conductive path from mains to low voltage. Properly designed, there should be fail-safes that should prevent accidents happening. In cheap replacements, these can apparently fail. So while I can understand why phone designers can get metal casings approved, a plastic case would provide an extra fail-safe. Not buying dodgy chargers is another.
This ad is a page out of The Short List. The aim is to frame the ad in such a way that you only get one candidate,