Re: I know relativity means there is time dilation between orbit and the gound

It was just a mix up between Metric and Imperial weeks

Re: Creativity

They had already successfully installed 3 new exchanges by disguising them as Range Rovers.

Re: "Chip level" is not an answer

>overkill for a personal laptop, probably, but impressive nonetheless.

But pointless for anything other than a personal laptop.

If you care enough to have full disk encryption and your laptop is returned after being stolen - would you still use it?

Here you are Mr Official Visitor to China, your laptop was stolen but we the Chinese police have recovered it. Please take it back to your office in Washington and plug it into your network as normal.

Re: Again!

They looked at it but it meant replacing the GAO and PAC with a single intern txting "well duh" about each suggested project.

Re: An accidental clue?

The war in Iraq/Libya and Syria are entirely different - Syria doesn't have any oil

Arabs without oil ? Fsck-em

Re: Bradley Manning

But at least it gets you out in the open air.

Re: Prohibited

Although to be safe - you should call it "Summer 0x7DC"

Re: Ofcom chief goes to BBC, BBC chief goes to ofcom.

I was betting on either Alistair Campbell or James Murcoch

Re: Opera...

I can't see it becoming more bloated - surely being adopted by facebook will simplify the browser.

Removing the need for the address bar for example, or the ability to browse to other sites.

Re: Seriously

That's the legal point.

The airport didn't take the threat seriously, there was no evacuation, there was no security response. He was later arrested for making a credible terrorist threat and he argued that if nobody took it seriously then it couldn't have been credible.

Re: Liquid cooled??

What's even funnier is that they will happily let you take a box of incomprehensible wires, batteries, and blocks of plastic onto the plane - so long as you drain the water out of the pipes first!

That's their great achievement

Over SeaLaunch 20years ago - they finally got the government to recognize that if they didn't allow more choice in the launch business people would just take their satellites to India/China/whoever.

Then they tried to block this by preventing satelites being exported to China for launch they simply built the satellite there aswell - what better way to destroy your industry!

Re: Worried

>They are Volvos

I'm more worried about them running off to chase motorbikes

Re: Talk about betting the farm on it

That's the point - you want a lot of apps on metro, not the desktop so the easiest way is to make metro the only thing you can program for free.

The old studio express didn't do MFC because they wanted people to do c++/CLR and winforms instead (or were banned from pushing MFC on kids by some sense of moral resposnibility)

Re: Frame frequency and so on.

Precisely the point - since there is not longer anything broadcast in Pal or NTSC (or there won't be by the end of the year) is there any point in making different digital versions, except in a pathetic attempt to enforce local monopolies?

Re: Shhh, hear something?

S Africa is still pretty big and the site is on a desert mountain miles from anywhere.

Re: Bandwidth!

The SA and Oz telescopes aren't directly linked, instead each local set is correlated with a local clock and then compared off line later. The data rates are only really scary at the high frequency end and there isn't much point in doing baselines that long at those frequencies (although resolution increases with baseline the filed of view and sensitivity drop)

Combining telescopes on different continents (VLBI) has been done for decades at lower frequencies - one of the interesting bits is that you need to know the position of the dishes relative to each other and the centre of the Earth accuratley - so it's the best way of measuring small changes in the Earth's crust.

Re: Great but oversold?

When the commercial supply module leaves a card saying "we tried to deliver but you were out" before buggering off before you can answer the door.

Re: North America

A little tricky for a geostationary satellite to be centred over anything other than the equator.

That's the reason for the failure of Yorkshire's space program - you can't put a satellite in geostationary orbit over Barnsley

Re: Can do / can't do

All they have to do is invade Germany and kidnap a few scientists again

If only they had managed to pinch a few car designers and brewers as well......

Re: re Flat Earth

That's why they never show you the other side with the turtle

Re: What about my 3 year old?

Making a laptop with a completely smooth flat surface but with all the connectors, lights, switches etc of a regular laptop is trickier.

Adding 'design' to a laptop by just putting bits of chrome plated plastic on the corners and having LEDs stick out of the case at random angles depending how the solder worked is easy.

Re: It's not the fuel but the source

That's the other economic advantage of gas.

If we use gas we don't need to spend 30bn on Trident.

After all it would be a bit silly to have an expensive nuclear weapon to protect us from Russia when they can shut us down by just turning a tap off - so savings all round.

Re: What about my 3 year old?

Did it have rounded corners? - the lawyers will be round to have words

Re: USA does free WiFi so much better

But look at the beer you have to drink!

Do you want Black Sheep and a login page or Miller and free wifi?

Re: If you want some sort of consistency with Windows

Except the makers conspire with MSFT to stop you

Server will only run signed drivers and the HW makers only supply 'server' drivers for their 'server' HW - that's why the same PC from DELL costs 2x as much on the server page

Re: Format shifiting levies

In Canada there is a levy on all blank CDs to cover this.

In theory it goes to the artists based on all time record sales (so Bryan Adams and Celine Dion) - however the 25c/disk (!) doesn't cover the costs of the scheme so no money has been paid out.

But small local bands selling their own home made CDs do get to pay the levy on the blanks - so that's OK then.

Re: No matter what happens to the stock

Yep - always a good idea to marry a doctor

Re: I said it before...

It's not necessarily a HTC prove it is compliant it's more a case of - these foreign phones are doing bad things to a great American company, we might just have to take a look at all of them, that might take a few weeks/months etc.

Back in the day when Japan actually made stuff we would often get this - if there was some sort of issue with a Japanese competitor - our kit would sit on the docks waiting for some paperwork.

I once used one of those back before mobiles.

I managed to get an operator somehow without putting in the credit card, then I get her to put the call on my ATT calling card (remember those!) without her knowing I was on a plane - then I couldn't think of anyone to call !

Re: Before anyone says "here comes big brother"...

It will mean more running red lights.

There was a trial scheme in one town on this side of t'pond. Since they don't have detailed maps of speed limit zones it just tracked how often you braked hard.

More breaking = bad driver = lost your discount insurance rate.

So if a little old lady walks out into the road or a cyclist cuts across you - you have a split second to decide if the dent in the bonnet will be cheaper than the insurance hike.

Re: Adapting adaptive optics

We used to use "active optics" for correcting mechanical effects and "adaptive" for correcting atmosphere - but now people use adaptive for both.

Adaptive optics doesn't really help for looking down into the atmosphere - but isn't as necessary. Standing at the bottom of the atmosphere looking up - any small change in refractive index turns into a big angle distance and so the image of a distant object moves a long way. Standing at the top of the atmosphere looking down - any movement of an atmosphere near the object has very little effect

In el'reg terms it's like putting your eye up close to a crinkled bathroom window and looking out vs pressing a body upto the glass and looking at it from a long way off.

Re: Did you program any other space projects?

It's because they have a very "manned mission" mindset - you can't upload a new crew if you kill them with a bug.

The reason Apollo worked - in spite of the technology at the time - was that everything was tested and rehearsed to a ludicrous degree. But this attitude has continued as religous doctrine in everything they do.

I was involved with one of the original instruments on Hubble. Everything on it had to be "man rated", that made sense as far as not using toxic or hazardous propellants that an astronaut could come into contact with, but it extended to everything. We were restricted in comms chips to very low bandwidth designs that were man rated (ie apollo era) that severely restricted the science data.

One report put the build cost of Hubble at 300% of what it would have cost if had been made to launch on a rocket rather than the shuttle.

No it doesn't - that was shot down by an El'reg story last week

It was based on a claim that 7.2% of goods were bought over the internet.

That's like saying Staples contributes 50% of GDP because people's payslips come in envelopes.