Posts by Swiss Anton

There is no privacy to lose.

To be able to compare the facial image with the id, the system needs to already have a copy of the id image. It doesn't matter whether the airport scanner saves it recorded image or not, the authorities already have a copy of your face. They will also have all the info the require to track your journey through the airline ticketing system and banks used to processes the transaction used when purchasing the ticket. All the tech does is reduce staffing costs, and arguably improve accuracy, as the robots won't have a hangovers at the start of the day.

I know what you mean, my favourite "was" @WorldBollard. An account dedicated to bollards protecting the world from bad drivers. I say "was", becuase I was recently banned from twitter for reasons that remain obscure. I can't say I mind, I'm glad to be out of the cespit that accounts for 99% of the content that is now current on the site.

The problem is with 1 of 4 engines.

Since 3 of the 4 identically designed engines do not have an issue, Occam's razor says that the problem is down to some sloppy build or QA work. Though of course that doesn't rule out fragile design etc as being the cause.

Re: "population sentiment"

To be fair, there are many town halls up and down the land that could benefit from some rapid deconstruction.

Forget that £2, EV's are going to get taxed.

As demand for fossil fuels falls the governemt will need to replace the tax income from old tech cars with a new tax on electric vehicles. I'm thinking that it will be some software that reports your daily milage back to a central computer, and which then taxes you for each mile that you drive. Obviously it will charge more for driving into cities.

Re: Faulty backup computer

I think the fact that we once had the ability to fix Hubble was a bonus. There will be no such options when it comes to the James Webb space telescope.

Re: Huh

The problem is that it is very expensive to retrofit the required electrical infrastructure, and on some lines, like the one through to Aberystwyth, the volume of traffic doesn't come close to justifying that that investment.

Re: This is starting to look bad

If they can fix Hubble's optics, then I can't see any reason whty they can't attach a small rocket motor to force it's re-entry. It would be easy enough to ensure that it then comes down over an ocean. As to creating more space junk - satellites have been known to collide, so I would suggest getting it out of orbit when it's of no furthure use should be a priority.

Any businesses that still have to use IE probably have much nastier things to worry about than a flaky browser.

Re: One word:

You need to do more than check that you can recover from a backup, you need to make sure that the backup isn't compromised. There is no fun in restoring a system with a dormant virus which then wakes up and re-infects the restored software and data.

Re: I've never been so happy to be wrong

I suspect that it probably uses some solid state accellerometers and rate gyroscopes, much like the ones in my mobile phone. Its a simple enough job to integrate their outputs to get a measure of distance travelled in the X,Y & Z directions. Since the flights are so short, the cumaliative measurement errors will be tiny.

Re: Er ...

By Fance

Re: Wish upon a star

We had a near miss with a 100m-140m rock in June of last year (it is named 2020LD). The rock came as close as 200,000 miles, which 80% of the distance to the moon. It wasn't spotted until 2 days after it had passed us. I guess we got lucky.

Re: A bit late, don't you think?

An "expert" on the radio (*) reckons we need to build 1 nuclear power plant, or a 2500 turbine wind farm, every day for the next 30 years to replace all of the fossil fuelled power stations in the world by 2050. He didn't say what the generating capacity of these units was, so I decided to do my own estimate based on a 800MW nuclear plant (like Hinckely Point B), or a 80x10MW turbines wind farm, and I came up with a more optimistic estimate of one of these every 4 days. My estimate based on current electricity demands and does not take into account the increased demand of electric cars and of replacing gas central heating systems.

So in short, I agree, we're fucked.

(* The radio show is a BBC world service programme How soon can we go carbon zero? )

Brazil, (the film, not the country).

Re: Move along please - nothing to see here

The PM is accountable to parliament and the electorate. Software developers aren't really accountable to anyone.

Re: WHy bother looking at asteriods that will destory earth?

We had a relatively near miss at the start of June this year from asteroid 2020 LD. A mere 100-150m in diameter, and it came within 200,000 miles of the earth (that's closer than the moon). It was only big enough to wipe out a medium sized town, say something like Bath, but if we saw it coming, then we could at least evacuate those in the danger area. As it happens it wasn't spotted until two days after its closest approach, and that was nothing to do with Musk's satellites, but down to it making a sneaky attack from the direction of the sun, but the point is, there are things that we can do, if the asteroid isn't too big.

Re: eCall only activates when there's been an accident

The car was completely burnt out, there is a picture that shows nothing but remaining steel shell. The data module could not have survived that fire. The data could only have come from some external record (which I beleive was LR's HQ)

Re: Just Wait Ten Years.

I thought they already did that using personal tracking devices. Also known as a smartphones.

Re: What are they going to do with the heat?

Would that be a really hot cup of tea?

Better still don't connect it to the internet, though there are some advantage to that.

When I first read this story, I dug out my old (15+ years) Garmin Etrex GPS to see if it still worked. Amazingly it does, and it is at least 30m accurate; however there is a slight problem. Whilst I still have a cable to connect it to my computer, it needs to plug into an RS232 interface. My computer doesn't have one of these, but I'm sure I can get a RS323 USB adapter (the irony). If not, then there is always my Raspberry Pi - now there's an interesting project for the weekend.

Not so long ago I got an e-mail (apparently from my company's training department) informing me that I needed to take a mandatory online course on computer security. The email even had a link, please click here to start your training session. Of course I deleted it. Some weeks later my boss moaned at me because I hadn't taken the mandatory training. The irony.

Re: Good Grief...

I use Nodepad++ a lot, but sometimes its text colour coding* is down right annoying, Sometimes a simple monochrome view is what I want, and MS Notepad does that. (*Yes I'm sure there is probably a config setting in Notepad++ to change this, but life's too short to find out how).

Re: The current Windows dev process is horribly flawed...

"...just try getting a mortgage if you don't own a printer."

Its kind of quaint to find that someone will except anything that you have printed as some sort of proof of income. All it proves is that you can use a word processor and a printer.

Re: Looks like a job for...

It might stop us from using their planet as a trash can, sorry I mean a legitimate target for one of our space probes

Re: Yay ! Justice is served !

Downvote because this happens all over the world, not just the USA. The only difference there is that their lawyers are so much more expensive than the rest of the world. That and the very real threat of a hundred billion dollar award against you, should you lose.

Re: But Netflix has kittehs!

Possibly, but Netflix do automatically show a preview of their latest and greatest on the home page. Something I find very annoying and I haven't found a way of disabling it.

Re: The maths is strong in this one...

A dodgem car can easily do 800 miles, although the distance from its starting point is never going to be more than a few feet.