Re: It doesn't add up.

"The psychology students probably decided to compute the stats themselves. Nuff said!"

The weapon of choice for the head hunting types is SPSS "Statistics Package for the Social Sciences"

Basically what you used before spreadsheets were available.

Hopefully it's not quite as ghastly as it was when I used it.

But I doubt it.

Re: The race is on!

"Theres gold in them thar ills"

It's true that pills will pay your bills.

But the knife sets you up for life.

Re: Engineers often simply lack understanding of emotional situations

" comparable in empathy to either cockroaches or starving wolves, or some evil genetic hybrid, in fact they possibly were some kind of evil genetic hybrid."

A cockwolf?

A wolfcock?

Scary either way.

Re: I'll

""I dont want to listen to what you watched last weekend , or the latest ****ing football scores, I'm not ****ing interested in how many woman you shagged or ****ing fast your stupid iPhone is.. I'm here to solve problems and I dont ****ing well need your useless ****ing prattle putting me off, now **** off and bother someone who ****ing cares""

You're friend is far too emotional.

A simple STFU would have sufficed.

It's what I would have said.

Re: Psychologists as a measure of normal?

"Here's a hint - 95% of the kids won't be engineers, scientists or mathematicians, but you still have to teach them. One of your staff at least is an emotional mess, one or two may not really like children. Explain how you will use your knowledge of integration by parts to get the GCSE results up."

Didn't you miss the one whose a bit too fond of the kids.

TOTC because well that's sort of the problem.

Re: Rev 13:16-17 a bit closer?

"(16) It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, (17) so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name"

I've often wondered if shrooms grow in the Middle East.

I think they probably do.

But let Google into my personal business. F**k off.

Re: Indeed..

"But it won't happen - why? Because the senior management only look at the single figure of cost and despite the fact that they are supposed to be taking a strategic view are so myopic that they make Mr. Magoo look like Hawkeye."

Sounds likely.

I'd love to add up the cost of every change order and bug fix a piece of outsourced software costs over it's lifetime.

With my software-houses-are-machines-for-producing-sofware-faults hat on I'll guess eyewatering relative to the original project cost.

This might clarify things

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7L3iSZsNpY

"What's really fun though is that the biggest mercury emitter in the US is forest fires......guess we'll be banning them as well."

I remember cremating people is meant to be responsible for 25% of the Mercury in the environment but I can't remember if its the top cause.

But I do believe the ban on incandescents and the common shift to CFD will increase the Mercury level unless the recycling chain is as comprehensive as it is for car and truck batteries.

Just my 2 centimes.

Re: But Mercury is so good for you, and the environment.

Sponsored by the International Mercury Mining Association

Re: Fluorescents

"In the link to Osram they had researched alternatives to mercury like xenon for generating UV in fluorescents but the energy efficiency was much lower than mercury, although doubtless much better than hot wires."

There are other low melting point metals and at least one that melts at near room temperature.

Is it just price that stops them being used or are they as unhealthy? I'm thinking of things like Indium and Indium/Gallium alloys.

Re: Biassed BBC

"some say he's more of a twat than matt bryant...

some say he's exactly who godwin had in mind....

we just know hes called eadon"

Impressive.

Re: designed to convince users an ARM cannot run a "real" OS

"The Office VBA engine is based on VB6, which compiles to x86 "

So either the toolchain cannot support other processors or no one knows how to do so. Either show a real contempt for any users not running on Windows.

As for macros they are the reason Excel was once described as the most common programming language in the world. Because it allowed accountants to program without realising they were.

Wheather they should be used to construct complex financial models of various things is debatable they have certainly been in the past.

Re: More detail on the error budget?

"The narrow beam spread of a laser would give much better energy density on the target but would make steering and pointing more difficult."

It's a subject JPL have given much thought to.

I think the phrase "nanorad pointing" will give some idea of their work.

You're right a lot of the errors are likely to be in the last 100km or so as all that air turbulence leads to the beam "wobbling" about. Adaptive optics or serious post reception processing are probably involved.

Re: Fluorescents

"I wasn't aware that there was any kind of fluorescent bulb that didn't use mercury. They all need a UV emitter and there aren't many choices."

I joked regarding wind power this would be much greater threat to the environment (the massively increased use of them with what seems like poor disposal arrangements) than any number of gas powered generating stations.

Looks like I was right.

As chemist pointed out the individual quantity is in the mg range but the numbers are in use are going to be in the billions, (EU population c500m, 4-8 lamps a dwelling).

I think florescents without Mercury are stuffed.

Kerching go the lamp mfgs as they stiff the people for yet another new lamp tech.

Re: Just like lead

"I only drink rainwater naturally, so no commie heavy metals in the groundwater to sap and impurify all of my precious bodily fluids."

Something tells me this strategy may end badly.

Re: It's all about the long term strategy

voted up for being loathsomely accurate, not for being liked.

Oh really.

"You have to tell adults to keep their business to themselves! Kids have a better idea than their parents"

Unless they have a Facebook account, in which case they will tell you anything

Ah the facebook fools of today are the identity theft victims of tomorrow.

Re: Reason 8 - Eadon predicted Win 8 RT would fail

"And the market listened to Eadon. And lo! Windows RT failed."

Voted down due to head being firmly placed in rectal cavity.

Re: So the conclusion is...

"I do favour Intel winning out in the end just because of their manufacturing capabilities will remain 1-2 generations further than anyone else "

Perhaps in your universe mr AC.

" which means they can manufacture more power efficient CPUs negating any advantages a RISC (ARM) vs CISC (Intel) architecture may have"

But Mr AC if Intel have had that "more power efficient" ability enabled by their technology lead why have they never used it?

Re: If I had to buy a tablet, I'd buy a Surface before an iPad or Android.

"If it comes with Office then its about 10X as useful as an iPad or any Android tablet."

How about if it's not real office but some half assed hybrid that can't handle macros.

This is the strategy MS pursued when they advertised Office for Palmtops.

It looked compatible.

But it wasn't.

Re: Tell me something

"So if we had told the failing banks to go fuck themselves we could have had SEVEN Apollo program equivalents and probably be colonising the asteroid belt by now? I am so glad we have our priorities right."

IIRC without inflation adjustment the bank bailout (for that year) was equal to the total NASA budget for the last fifty years.

Wheather you think that's a bargain of space research or a ridiculous amount of money spent on a bunch of arrogant ingrates who've colossal f***up has been well rewarded (so they will probably do it again) I'll leave to others to decide.

Re: But this ESA product doesn't need to survive reentry...

Every previous support module has been jettisoned prior to CM separation and reentry.

That includes the Dragon "trunk."

Re: For all of you that felt Orion was going to LEO & ISS...

" There were cracks (and it needs improvement to have no more cracks). "

The point is Apollo managed to build their capsules without cracking during mfg.

"The Apollo capsules all had such cracks after reentry."

Reentry is reputed to be somewhat stressful on hardware.

Re: Devil's advocate

IIRC the usual government IT project overrun is 3x.

That's 00%, which is why % don't make a lot of sense in central IT overspend.

Re: White House Accused of Lateral Thinking

"American right wing groups have a long history of rejecting science or experts in any field and being damn proud of it."

Including (but not limited to) evolution.

Re: "presuming the project isn’t budget-cut to death"

"Plus the first time they pressure-tested the capsule at KSC, it cracked with a loud bang. "

I don't think I've ever heard of this happening before. Main stage tanks yes, capsules no.

Machined stiffener plates have been in use since the 1960's, when they were invented by Douglas.

There is a NASA design handbook on the subject

And an update on how to improve the safety factor.

And modern methods of FEA allow much better prediction on behaviour.

So all in all a bit surprsing.

Re: Solutions in the 3rd world

Wasn't that one of about 40 areas that Nature reported as "low hanging fruit"

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/06/warming_low_hanging_fruit/

Re: Ambulances

"have an equivalent of France's "Carte Vitale" scanned, and the GP has immediate access to my records, including prescription history, so they can re-issue a prescription for example. "

Very commendable.

That is not what is being proposed.

It's too human scale for the DoH bureaucrats.

Re: Here is what happens when you try to opt out......

"She has not been "denied access to a GP". She won't register with a GP unless that GP will opt her out of proactive health mailings, and no GP is able to do that. "

So the "opt-out" clause is meaningless in the NHS.

The process being with a lie.

Not a good way to build trust, is it?

Re: and these days that bracelet could contains USB storage

"Last time round a justification for the national database was to prevent multiple x-rays being taken by each hospital that someone with complex problems,"

IIRC the capture and storage of X-rays digitally was one of the jewels of the almight cluster**ck that was the NHS PfIT. That is already taken care of.

" Instead, they defined a standard for the operation and interaction of domain name servers. Anyone could set up a server as long as it complied with the standard, resulting in a gloriously simple and scalable distributed database. "

In fact the internet is a family of standards designed to share date between wildly differing computers back when there were many more different systems (a dozen operating systems at least in widespread use).

People see the WWW and think they are seeing the internet. They are wrong.

Re: John Smith 19 @Matt Bryant

"I don't think that option works too well on humans!"

Well your powers of observation are certainly better developed than your empathy.