Re: Interface (Verb)

That said, you do have fantastically successful engines like the Olympus, powering Vulcans, Concorde plus many other non aircraft applications.

Re: Boring

>>When they stopped being wheel driven I gave up caring.

Do you mean since last year? this was the last wheel driven world record, just different categories now (e.g. piston driven etc.), although they have barely improved the speed more than 50mph in the last 50 years.

Electric going over 300mph was cool (3 years ago?), fastest diesel also cool - British btw (350mph?)

Loads of different categories, loads of reasons to still care, or not - your choice.

Re: @DavCrav

There's about 2 million registered firearms in the UK, one weapon for 30 people, that's not "almost nobody", but as guns have to be locked up, can't be in public, have very tight licencing rules including interviews with your local firearms officer for a new licence or renewal, all transfers are recorded etc. you don't seem them around much (wander the countryside on a Sunday and you'll hear the pop pop of shotguns).

As opposed to the US where the ratio is close to 1:1 (9 weapons per 10 people), but gun availablity doesn't affect gun crime... face say hello to palm.

Re: If all they wanted was a usable ID card,

The thing is, these already exist, they are called provisional licences, and to get one you can use your "Government Gateway ID" to get one, which is the first step to a national ID card by the back door....

...just don't tell anyone that's what they are doing

SSSSSsssshhhhhhhhh.....

Nothing to see here...

Move on....

Re: US Treasury said ????

>>Who wrote this peice of garbage better hope they never meet my 6th grade English teacher - my knunkles still hurt

How about don't criticise someone's English if you write words like "peice" and "knunkles"

>>Prez O'Bummer

Oh yes, that makes us take you more seriously.

>>They see a dollar in your pocket as their dollar, and they will not rest until they take it.

Like it or dislike it, that dollar in your pocket belongs to the government, how else can they tromp around the world ensuring you pay about £0.45 for a litre while we in the UK pay £1.30 (about $9 a gallon), it lets you create WMD's to put other parts of the world in fear, about the same amount of money is spent on pensions (paid for by taxes), again the same amount is spent on medical benefits - you may not like this but one of the reasons it's so expensive is that the health industry is privatised, that's just asking for you to be ripped off.

Don't forget that the huge national debt created (mainly) by previous government policy means interest payments of over $200,000,000,000 a year.

What's your solution? stop paying pensions? don't pay off your debts? happy to pay $9 a gallon? can't afford the medication - die then?

The US is living on borrowed money to give you a level of comfort that you wouldn't otherwise be able to get, enjoy it while you can, not paying your taxes will just make it implode faster - so please do.

Re: The underlying trend is cooling

>>the Chinese (much bigger polluters than the US these days)

Not per capita they are not, the US has that crown by some significant margin, don't forget the US has a quarter of the people that China has (same for India).

Re: Fossil fuels are being used faster than they are being discovered

@Mike Richards

>>We have adapted to a world where oil costs $75-100 a barrel, we might be prepared to go even higher.

We have, and we will, it all comes down to "Energy returned on energy invested" or "ERoEI" the cost is what's invested, and the return is what we get for that money, but don't forget as it gets more costly to invest for a lower return the cost goes up, this particular feedback loop is not self maintaining, it escalates as the ERoEI ratio drops, this is why coal was dropped in favour of oil, not just the energy that could be released, but the logistics of moving it, burning it (mechanical vs pumps), UK coal will be mined again (and not just the open pits that have some resurgence).

This still doesn't change the fact that no matter how much money you have if it costs more in energy to get the energy you've already lost.

Re: Fossil fuels are being used faster than they are being discovered

>>Except fossil fuel resources are being verified as quickly as we are using them. Thirty years ago we had 20 years of oil left and we still do.

Well, that's nonsense for several reasons, firstly the "20 years of oil left" is a number (I suspect) you pulled out of your arse, or you are regurgitating someone else's arse sourced data.

Secondly, there are some studies that are based on actual data, there's a concept called "peak oil" a well known, measured quantity, constantly being (like the oil) refined, peak oil (approximately half way through the resource) is easy to define for known sources and fields, and you can predict with confidence when current technology will exhaust it - there is no debate here.

What you're alluding to is discovering more sources with the implication that this can go on for ever, hence the "we had 20 years of oil left and we still do", there is obviously some truth in this, we are also using shale oil, fracking, better gas usage etc. etc.

If you actually think about #3 this obviously can't go on forever, we know some major fields have hit peak, and we have discovered new fields, and new ways of exploiting existing fields, but this can't go on forever (if you think it can, please explain), I don't think that anybody believes we have only 10 years left, but (fag packet estimate) approximately 5 trillion barrels left would last 150 years at current usage, this obviously disregards increasing use and new discoveries, but it's ball park.

For arguments sake, lets take that "reasonable" number of 150 years until complete depletion, that means we must have absolutely no dependence on fossil fuels by then, but it's not going to be a switchover from one to the other in 150 years, it has to be a gradual move away from fossil fuels.

But the argument is accedemic, make that 150 years 1,000 years or 10,000 years it's inevitable, and the only reason not do do something now is because you're indifferent to future generations.

Unconvinced? seriously - don't take my word for it, look for the Hirsch report (The Inevitable Peaking of World Oil Production) it's a good starting point, make your own mind up, but do so with facts not anecdotes pulled out of your arse.

Re: People moaning about the cost of Apple hardware

I've still got my 2003 Dell 8600 running fine. Sure it cost 1000 UKP when new but 10 years for a consumer device that's still used every single day (by my daughter) after I used it for 6 years every day, carted to Australlia twice and NYC is not bad going (although the battery only lasts for 40 mins now).

Re: forced obsolescence, Apple douchebaggery

>>It's pretty cost effective to upgrade a Mac by selling it and buying a new one. Unlike the market for used PCs, the market for used Macs is pretty active. It's not uncommon for people to pay half retail for a Mac that's 4-5 years old. I've done this several times.

This might be because you've already paid a significant mark-up on the Mac? e.g. buy a Mac for $2000 and sell it for $1000 after three years, but you could have bought an equivalent PC for $1000, maybe an upgrade after a year or two, extra ram, SSD, new graphics all you can fit yourself, still more money in your pocket and a machine that you can keep up to date.

I've got a triple boot Probook 4530s, OSX/Win7/Ubuntu 8Gb ram/SSD/i7/1080p it's chunkier than a Macbook Pro (although I can change batteries etc.), but for less than £600 it's a fraction of the price, the equivalent MBP would be over £2k i'd still lose more money on the Mac than the Probook cost me (even a lower spec refurb is double the cost).

Re: Albedo

>>I'm confident that the whole AGW thing is an artefact of natural variation, made into a problem by dodgy global temperature measurement and statistical fiddling. At worst it is scientific fraud. Hope not though.

The scientific shame brought about by selecting and massaging figures to put forward and support a point of view doesn't mean that point is invalid, if there was a piece of string attached to the apple that hit Newton on the head doesn't invalidate gravity, yes they were wrong, and yes their careers are in tatters for it, but like the cold fusion experiments, this doesn't mean there's nothing going on or that we might benefit from finding out about.

Take these two (vaguely related) arguments;

#1 Climate change is affected by burning fossil fuels -> Find alternatives

#2 Climate change is not affected by fossil fules -> Keep burning

This is what most people end up arguing about, enter the conspiracy nut argument;

#3 Those invested in fossil fuels want us to keep us distracted by arguing so they can keep making shed loads of money -> FInd alternatives

(those opposed just back to #2)

But!

There's a far simpler argument;

#4 Fossil fuels are being used faster than they are being discovered, from the smogs of the 50's to the people in China dying from pollution they are not good for the environment, even if there are natural feedback loops and controls preventing/slowing/controlling climate change we should consider how to make these cleaner and find alternatives (while continuing to study the changing climate, natural or otherwise).

At the end of the day, this is one occasion when Pascals wager has some legs because if we do nothing we could very well have a perfectly OK climate, but also no fossil fuels left and no alternatives either.

Re: Don't get it.

>>Actually, it IS possible to deorbit by pushing away from the surface of the earth.

It's very unlikely that what you are suggesting could be practically applied for several reasons, there's little atmosphere above 100km, whereas the LEO junk is a problem around 900Km+ so you'd need top create a very eccentric orbit for periapsis to dip into the atmosphere, even if possible (and the article talks about, tiny nudges, 100m movements) this would make the debris itself harder to track and would potentially create a significanlty faster (during periapsis) object covering more danger zones, your laser would also have to be (coincidentially) at (or create a stable) apoapsis or you'll just create a circular orbit.

Nice idea, just not for the distances we are looking at.

Re: lack of innovation

Actually I kind of agree, my new phone is an iPhone4 that I got for free as a cast-off (broken home button, 99p fix) it's the easiest iPhone to work on, plenty quick enough, my Sony Xperia died (it was sad, I sent flowers), although there's more iPhone apps, there's not as many completely free "technical" ones as Android (such as ssh/vnc which are very limited on the iPhone) and iTunes is awful, there's almost no reason to "upgrade" from the 4 if it works, I kind of like the solid feel to the 4, but I do miss the cancel button!

Without the backing of a large body to back it up with something real?

All major banking systems that exist today are backed with sometign "real", however the value of that "real" is a serious problem, cash:loan ratios are rarely (if ever) 1:1, as we see in "it's a wonderful life" even a morally sound credit union or housing initiative will have non liquid assets.

Bitcoin vs "Real Money" is not an either/or, the "value" of Bitcoin is quoted in "Real Money", because "Real Money" gets watered down as new cash is produced the relative value goes up, and *key difference* Bitcoin will approach saturation with little or no new Bitcoin being produced, which means that it only has value when being exchanged, with no interest, no inflation, no new Bitcoin the traditional monitary model breaks.

Put another way, banks are often thought to reserve cash as gold, but how does that work when more gold is discovered? the value *must* go down, it has value because it's slow to discover, but suddenly if everybody had a ton of it in their back garden it would be as valuable as mud (i.e. it's manufacturing scrap value, witha lot of scrap around, not it's rarity value) as an aside this is why mining asteroids will not make everybody billionaires (if we were all billionaires, we'd all be just as poor).

So, when you say "it's NOT a place to sock away your savings" there is *some* truth, but it's a rather out of date truth, and I suspect as we have already put faith in banks with their pretense of "being backed" we have already moved into a virtually backed currency (this is of course the reason for the global banking crisis), but at least with Bitcoin we have a cap on it's ability to be devalued (in theory!).

It's Apple....

Actually doing something that it should do, in a reasonably timely fashion (although timing, like the article says could be a factor), which of course it's not renound for, it's renound for doing whatever it likes in a timescale it likes, the news isn't "Apple doing what it should" it' "Apple doing what it should, for a change", it's not their actions that the article is about, it's asking "why".

Take another example, it's 2am and a car is driving through a deserted town at 35mph, another car is driving through at 25mph, given the 30mph limit, who is more likely to be over the drink-drive limit? it's not action, it's motive.

Re: Poster boy for capitol punishment

Capitol punishment? isn't that a wrestling event?

Re: Gotta love techies

What if your burger had horse meat in it instead of beef, and you never knew?

What if your McFlurry had 5cc's of McJizzy, and you didn't notice?

What if someone stole £10 from your bank account, but you didn't miss it?

Do these cease to be crimes just because you didn't know? I suppose not knowing you're a victim might make it better as you don't have something to cope with, but this doesn't stop it being a crime, even if you don't understand this, she did know - she caught him in the act, and he was very obviously stalking her, she was abused and exploited.

Re: Political Correctness

One man and one woman would be representitive of most of the population of the world (>90%), biologically there are differences which would need to be measured, simple things such as the fact women tend to sweat less (and not until higher temperatures) all add into the mix as far as environment.

That said, if it was a larger experiment, say 100 people then there is an opportuinity for a broader test bed and a 50/50 hetronormative men/women split would be inappropriate to represent a society.

The ISS

While it's great, they schedule 18 hours maintenance a day, it's in LEO, regularly supplied, has very little sheilding, look at when the water recycler broke.

The ISS is like popping to the shops, a Mars mission is a no rescue, no resupply, no maintance (for most of two years) that level of technology is not out there.

Modular pods in LEO such as the ISS is a great start, but next could be moon orbit then lagrange stations, each one learning more, testing more, no reason not to step up to a moon base or an automated ISS around Mars, or a base on phobos/deimos, after all the moon missions were preceded with impacts, unmanned landing (and soil retrieval), to the unaware this seems like an appropriate first step, but it's a massive one, to the really unaware it's seems like a tiny step, perhaps 2031 is the more reasonable timescale?

Re: LibreOffice will need to upgrade their servers

Perhaps, Microsoft's real reason was to find a way of making Office 2010 look good?

MS Office Pro+ 2013, retail price £389.99 (seriously???)

My girlfriend has an iMac and a Macbook Air, because of the way the licencing works with her appleid she only bought pages once (with the "free" credit that she got with the student discount), when she got her air it should have come with Mountain Lion, as it didn't they gave her a free upgrade, which then (as it is iTunes software) she could then also apply to her iMac too (for no extra cost).

Re: No RepRap?

Not only leaving out the biggest names (such as RepRap), but also the fact that you can buy a complete Mendel kit for about £500, means that people who are genuinely interested may not know that some of the most important kits out there are even available, also the whole MakerBot open/closed source history is a story in it own right.

Re: Help Me Out Here

The difference (while still seeming disproportionate) is that they didn't share or sell, it appears they intended to, but as they didn't actually do it, there was no statuatory damage - no actual "loss" to the copywrite holder, whereas sharing 24 songs (she actually shared 1700+, it's just that 24 were the subject of the case), potentially copied directly many times, and those copies then copied many times again (as per their claim) is an actual loss.

It's perhaps reasonable to say it's unfair that Jammie was unaware of the potential cost and damage (and that should be taken into account), whereas a deliberate hack and theft is far worse (and of course it is), but that's purely the criminal activity, not the civil restitution, if you carelessly throw a ball through someones window you might be liable for a new window, or a multi-million ming vase, your intention is irrelevant with respect to the damage you caused (although it might mitigate a criminal case).

Re: Reflections on Trusting Trust

You're missing the point Wojcik, while we have better definitions now, back then when malware was in it's infancy the definitions were not as specific, and (as I pointed out) Von Neumann et al were defining things that didn't even exist!

Pluto is not one of our eight planets - but, 50 years ago it was a planet, it was the ninth planet.

Creeper may not be a "virus" by our modern definitions, but it certainly was (and the first known one).

Re: Ping Time

The fastest probes would be about 70Km/s, a light year is about 9500000000000 Km, which would take about 4,300 years (@70Km/s), so obviously it would take over 50,000 years to get there.

I don't think our "current tech" is up to the job!

There really is absolutely no point in sending anything physical there yet, because even if it takes 400 years to build something 1% faster we could send it in 400 years from now and it would overtake the first one (and get there 100 years earlier), build something twice as fast and it saves 25,000 years, really you'd need to build something capable of 10% the speed of light to be approaching practical speeds, which of course you'd need to accelerate to, decelerate from, have fuel onboard for both, even ION drives have fuel, most of the mass of the craft would have to be fuel (capturing fuel would slow it down more than it would gain), and of course it gets hideously complex as the mass changes (down as you burn fuel, up as you approach the speed of light, down more as you burn fuel to slow down, and decreases faster as you slow down) - and don't forget to steer, there's no way you could see let alone predict everything that could be in the way, and an ION drive may not be ale to turn the craft fast enough, conventional fuel? I don't thnk so!

We need completely new technology (some kind of space compression warp drive, so the physical distance becomes less) to travel that sort of distance, or we need to solve many, many other problems.

Re: Reflections on Trusting Trust

I think that Von Neumann back in the 40's designed the first computer virus, Creeper was the first known virus in the wild as it spread via arpanet, Elk was the first PC virus "outside the lab", the article is a bit misleading (otherwise known as wrong).

Re: Moores law says you get a doubling every 18 months

Nope, Moores (original) "law" was the number of components (or tansistors) doubling every year (and not computing power), when he realised his prediction was wrong (10 years later), he changed it do doubling every two years, which of course (because of hindsight) was moore accurate (pun intended), it's now drifting again and approaching every three years.

Moore is an accidental hero, never really that accurate, but held up by many as a visionary, cant really be blamed for that, not his fault, to answer El Reg's question, yes it fits in with the law, if you want it to.

If you want to look to a real visionary, Alan Turing, he made proper verifiable predictions regarding memory capacity, and he was pretty accurate, he predicted computers would have 128Mb memory by the year 2000, which, given the prediction was made 50 years before, was amazingly accurate.

Petition to put Alan Turing on the £10 note

Re: @ That Awful Puppy

[Chester]

Jules: Well, killing Welshmen is legal there, right?

Vincent: Yeah, it's legal, but it ain't a hundred percent legal. I mean, you can't walk into a restaurant, pull out a gun, and start blasting away. They want you to kill the welsh in your home or certain designated places.

Jules: Those are churchyards?

Vincent: Breaks down like this, okay: it's legal to kill them with a longbow, it's legal to kill them in Chester, and if you're the proprietor of a graveyard, it's legal to bury them. It's illegal Monday to Saturday, but that doesn't really matter 'cause, get a load of this, all right; if you get stopped by the cops in Chester, it's illegal for them to search you. I mean, that's a right the cops in Chester don't have.

Jules: [laughing] Oh, man. I'm going, that's all there is to it. I'm fucking going.

Sadly, it's untrue (based on a royal instruction to banish the Welsh from Chester, or be beheaded - not by other commoners that is, but by the Princes men).

Re: Over the top

@Chris Wareham

While that is the classic (school taught) view it is always wise to step back and give the landscape a 360° view, for example are you aware that the planned extension of the train line (known as the Orient Express) would have given Germany access to the new-found oil reserves in Iraq, this at a time when the Navy (of all nations) were switching over from coal (which the UK had) to oil (which the UK didn't have).

But don't take my word for it, I don't want to come off as a conspiracy theory crank, if you're interested in a different view have a look, look past the books that we were fed as children, the truth is out there ;-)

OK, so you've read a bit more, and you're in two minds, dismiss me, or actually do a little bit of research? a good starting point (light, funny, easy to watch) is Rob Newmans "history of oil" www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQhhrzHKMhI in years to come will people think that more or less people will think that the non existent WMD's in Iraq were the reason for invasion? what will be in our history books? go back 100 years when the government wrote history, compare that with now when media (especially social media) is much harder to control, now put that in the context of the history books about WW1.

Re: unbreakable

An interesting moral conundrum was when British ships and allies were deliberately put at risk by not acting on information discovered in the messages, if the British were too obvious with their information gathering, then Enigma would have been known as insecure by the Germans (rather than just suspected insecure) and they would have blanket changed to 4 rotor, or more (was there a 5 rotor transvertex?), perhaps introduced plugboards eairlier, a complete new set of differently encoded 5 rotors or changed the daycode more regularly.

In reality, there were sacrifices to make it look like the British had not cracked everything, but balancing that with the need to have a tactical advantage must have been a horrible situation to be in, being in the war room, knowing where the enemy was but not acting on the information so obviously that they know you know.

Re: Digital Research?

An interesting omission, perhaps coincidental but add 1 to the ASCII of VMS and you get WNT (which, one story says is why NT is NT, and "New Technology" was just convienient). Although denied, a similar theory was turning IBM into HAL from 2001 (IBM -1), probably another coincidence, the explanation that HAL stood for Heuristic ALgorithm works well, but doesn't explain SAL from 2010 (and of course doesn't work with a +/- 1 either).

Re: Big Fish

DDOS doesn't always depends on a large "attacking" force, in fact depending on exploits and bugs it can be trivial to bring down organisations, remember "ping of death", even http connection exhaustion could be accomplished by a handful of servers, while a "D"DOS does imply multiple attacks, different operating systems handle attacks in different ways, "half open listen drop" thresholds etc.

It could well be a relatively newly discovered exploit/bug, unpatched servers (the larger you are the slower you can move).

Re: Hard drive is NOT memory.

That is being rather picky, I always used to say (to people who didn't understand comupters) that computers have short-term memory for things you're working on, lost when you turn the power off (RAM) and long-term memory for things that you want to store away (hard drive/floppy/cd).

Besides, if a disk isn't memory remind me what CDROM stands for.....?

(ps. "retarded" is a rather non PC term, PC... get it?)

Re: It's all about timing

You're missing the point, it's *need* I'm stressing here, you're absolutely right that *a* big problem with the transputer is that it's fundamentally different, but it's only *a* problem fitting in with the existing paradigm, if there's some crossover possible, to allow migration (a slot in RISC accelerator, like a slot in GPU) and apps start to appear for it, it's a hideous chimera perhaps but it's still a step, like using PS3's to crack encryption there will be some niche markets which will expand.

Re: To all the complete free speech advocates.

You had me until the last line, free speech comes with responsibility and consequences, I don't think anyone could disagree, but it's about proportionality - I could see how a first offence caution would be appropriate as 50 people did end up at his door baying for blood, an opportunity to apologise for the emotional harm, learn a leson and change his ways, be an example for other people to learn, it was a support group after all, not his own page or a "[contraversial humour]" page that people seek out.

3 month prison sentence? not proportionate.

Re: Go USA milf

Surely Sarah Palin for President and Christine O'Donnell for running mate?

Maybe O'Donnell isn't quite in the same milf age bracket as Bachmann, but (theoracy wise) she more than makes up for it with her evolution comments.

Wouldn't that just be the dream team?