Never mind "book format", I want 'Scroll Format. Then I can pull out as much screen as I need: portrait, landscape, Cinemascope, "On the Road"*.
*The 120 foot long, Jack Kerouac manuscript
1399 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Dec 2009
>Moving first to London not being able to see stars was a huge disappointment.
I doubt that anyone has had a good view of the Milky way, from London, for several hundred years.
When I first went abroad, in the '60s, I was stunned by the brightness of the Milky Way and the number of meteorites that I could see while camping high in the Pyrenees.
However, on the Norfolk coast and other darkish places in Britain, you can occasionally* get a good view of the Milky Way. I presume that NZ's small population doesn't generate a lot of smog or light pollution. (Does the smoke from SE Asian forest burning get to NZ skies?)
*wind from the Arctic helps.
> "documents scanned via a scanner and emailed as an attachment [in TIFF/JPG/PDF format] are recognized as being exact copies of the original, and are hereby considered as facsimile copies in addition to documents sent by a fax machine."
Yes, but that doesn't stop the "original" being an unsigned document with a carefully cut and pasted (literally with scalpel and glue) signature from an entirely different document. That's a technique that works with faxes, scans and even photographs, if you use a widely diffused light source.
We really should move to secure email.
Yes, but if you’re not in the USA, there are no refurbished ‘phones on offer via the Online Apple Store. However, I have bought some well spec’d Mac Minis. You can trade in old iPhones at UK stores, but you can get a better price by selling them privately.
There is no way to "fix the pips". It becomes obvious, when you have more than one DAB radio, that there is no standard for the delay introduced when the signal is decoded and reassembled. The Pips could be broadcast a few seconds in advance, but manufacturers would have to agree to introduce a standardised delay on all broadcasts. As I walk through my house all the FM radios are nicely in sync. I find NTP a lot more useful than "the pips". Does anybody need to use "the pips"?
>Killing civilians will always be a problem
That's too simplistic.
In democratic countries, the citizens are responsible, because they pay taxes and employ soldiers as their proxies. At least, those who support a war are legitimate targets. If you live in a dictatorship, the populace is much less responsible.
Don't plug a 'phone into your landline. Get legitimate companies to contact you by email. Ask all your friends to use your mobile number. You'll receive remarkably few nuisance calls or texts.
*I do realise that this doesn't help the considerable minority that live in cellular wireless shadows.
This article and comments remind me of letters and articles in Wireless World* in the late eighties. Electronics engineers were dismayed by the amount of effort being poured into cellphone technology, when there were so many more worthwhile projects available and we already had a reliable, global, telephone system. However, we're all now really pleased that the suits persisted and the techies ultimately delivered portable computers that could be held in the hand and connect wirelessly to the global telephone system and the Internet.
We have some interesting developments in AI, for example IBM's Watson. However, Watson also shows that the hardware needed to run an intelligent kitchen would require a sizeable adjoining room and consume far more power than all the electrical appliances. I wonder what technology will be being hyped in another 30 years and whether portable AI will have arrived?
* A defunct UK journal for electronics engineers and technicians.
> However, as IPA boss Tony Meggs noted, the report does not consider the "mega-programme" that is extricating the UK from the EU. . .
If Brexit is a mega-programme, where’s it happening and why haven’t we heard about it? Where are all the vacancies and contracts? The Brexit programme that I hear about is dwarfed by the projects in this article, some of which must therefore be giga- or tera-programmes.
Sometimes I think that some commentards have no grasp of the history of the society they live in.
If WOT, was good enough for Chad during WWII, then it's good enough for a Limey like me.
See http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/stories/19/a3568719.shtml if you really don't know about Chad. Beer, because of its technical origins.
Well, when you and I were at school, most CO2 was obtained from breweries. But then Grotneys cornered the CO2 market and injected it all into a strange device called a Red Barrel. It's not too big a leap from there to the current sorry state. Thankfully, many sensible people have remembered how to make ales and lagers without all this nonsense.
My next pint's a Billericay Vanilla Mild please.
On the subject of spammers, I'm amused that there's been a huge surge in spam sent to my special whois email address. Is anybody else noticing this? It seems that the ICANN/GDPR spat alerted many spammers and spam list suppliers to a free source* of email addresses that many of them were unaware of.
*Now unavailable, after the horse has bolted.
> Yep, too bad the USA are not part of the UK anymore. Well, I grant you, as a 3rd party, they're still influencing the UK's policy just as if they were still inside.
Where do you live? Haven’t you noticed that they are still inside? Don’t you hear the USAF “protecting” you by flying from a former RAF station most days?
The USA is inside and we vote for their poodles.
@Tony Paulazzo: The Rift suffers from underwhelming resolution. I've only spent a 15 - 20 minutes in a Rift environment, but I kept getting distracted by the pixels. Reality doesn't appear pixellated, even though its mediated via discrete rod and cone cells. Current technology just can't provide visual VR, let alone tactile, kinetic, olfactory, etc. VR.
Alistair, this is by far the best non-humorous article of yours that I’ve read. It is a shame that the monument is posthumous, but at least it gives hope to other unsung heroes and will be greatly appreciated by their families. I really appreciated the factual and historical content.
Thanks too for, as usual, producing an article that isn’t full of typos, schoolboy errors and grammatical mistakes. All in all a wonderful (late) breakfast read.
The easy way to stop your door being kicked in is to have an outward opening door, meaning that the would be intruder has to kick the entire door frame in!
I'm not sure that I'd trust the company that convinced most UK households in the last century to use its easily circumvented rim locks. If I wanted one less key, I might consider an Abloy mechanical combination lock, but Abloy keys are so small and neat that I'll continue to use their keys.
As for the IoT stuff, well your home IT system could detect your 'phone as you approached and switch the house on, or you could send it a message from further away if it needs to heat or cool some rooms.
H4rm0ny> I refuse to believe these tales of sweets that cost half a pence. Surely that would be below the minimum transaction free of your debit card.
Maybe, but I don't think we had debit cards before decimalisation. (The Barclaycard, credit card, arrived in 1966). Back then your statement was on a Hollerith card, which you returned with your cheque. Harvey Matusow discovered that, if you edited the Hollerith card, you could choose a new balance. I never tried this, but I had a friend who achieved the same end by purposely "maxing out" his Barclaycard on high end camera gear a few days before emigrating to Australia:)
As someone who lived* by a bend on an unlit main road in darkest North Wales, I can assure you that the sheep come off worse. I can still clearly remember the tell tale sound of cars going too fast and the strange thump as the sheep died. The car will require an expensive repair, but the sheep is a write off: It's unfit for anyone but a desperate road kill eater. (Burst blood vessels and shit everywhere.)
It still reminds me to be very well lit at night and to always pick an escape route when I hear a fast car approaching a blind bend.
*It was North Wales, long ago, so assume small values of "living".