Posts by bharq
34 posts • joined Tuesday 23rd March 2010 15:46 GMT
Posted in Curiosity drills into Mars
those damned metric measurements
you got them mixed up again! A 2.3mm drill bit making a 6.4cm hole in hard rock without breaking the bit? Quite an achievement, indeed. According to NASA, it's a 1.6cm drill bit (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/msl/news/msl20130209.html), quite a bit sturdier and - more importantly - doing a lot more damage! BWOUHAHAHAHAAAA
Do we have a Reg unit for small lengths? centiLinguine or something?
need a mirror!
"an ever-optimistic spokesperson for the firm told Miss Asia"
Why would she be interested? The most beautiful person in her neighbourhood would, per definition, be herself, so she probably needs something that turns into a mirror instead of getting transparent.
Paris, because... well, you know!
"We are now beginning to understand that Nature seems to overwhelmingly prefer systems that have a multiple planets with orbits of less than one hundred days"
I thought it was just our current planet-detection systems that are biased towards short-orbit planets?
Posted in WIMP-seeking detector flooded
Re: OY! Units!
IIRC: NYDRC (No, You Don't Recall Correctly) - the standardisation was solely for the El Reg's Special Projects Bureau. The only agreement made for the Reg as a whole was the inclusion of some proper Vulture units (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/24/vulture_central_standards/), but there was no unit included for temperature.
Maybe the Vulture Board should comtemplate including a unit for 'hotness' - so which one ranks higher, the Paris or the Lohan?
blast the devil with your laser canons!
that's what I would do if my nuclear tank was under attack...
I wonder
with half your brain removed - do you need to keep your head tilted at all times? If you shake your head, does the brain flop around inside? Or do they put in some dummy place-filler? (could be the new rage: look at my silicon implants! no, not there, higher!)
Maybe Paris can share here experience...
no more clouds!
"although Tanaka warned that a successful sighting will, of course, depend on the weather"
Damn Amazon and all it's fellow cloud providers... you can't even see a decent satellite from down here...
Re: "We can mimic that behavior"
The definition of AI is not the imitation of intelligence, but the imitation of intelligent behaviour. So yes, it is perfectly adequate in this context.
Re: Castration is....
for this effect, it would be balls out: the snip doesn't stop the testosteron flow that's accused of shortening male lifespan
uninformed
For some reason, I keep reading "uninformed" instead of "uniformed" personel. Are those words interchangeable?
Posted in Behold: China's robot noodle army!
conversion factor
Here we go again with these foreign units - what is the noodle / linguine conversion rate? And does it change when made by robots?
salt rain?
"...which would spout huge amounts of sea salt particles - generated from the ocean - into the air as they went along."
does that mean salt rain? I don't think the crops would like that...
I call BS!
"...is part of an arsenal of ocean-tracking tech that's receiving data from acoustic tags on the predators and transmitting it back to shore"
don't believe it - it's transmitting instructions to their underwater army of laser-armed sharks!
We are doomed - doomed I tell you!
long live the LCD!
so the LCD is fused to the gorilla glass, which is vibrating like hell. Any informed opinions (or, as this is the Reg, wild guesses) on how this translates into life expectancy for the display?
crowded
308 people in a canister the size of a lipstick... must be crowded up there! I can hear the ashes calling out to each other: move over - it's my turn to sit at the window!
got me there
you left me scratching my head when there was 100b won... how did he win it? or did he earn it?
then suddenly a light switched on inside my head...
Paris, 'cause she doesn't need a light switch!
Posted in Corny conversations prove plants 'talk'
Re: Accept it
"But what is the purpose? What can the plant do to defend itself?"
some plants are known to increase the level of toxins in their leaves when they receive such signals - I believe this was observed in oak trees when one of them emitted signals that he (she?) was infected by a certain beatle
now if only they could make 'em 3D, expand the memory to... say... roughly 800MB, get the size down to about 50µm and assemble some 100 trillion of them, you know what they could build?
so basically...
...they built the thing for half the price with underpaid engineers, took the money from ESA and the chinese and distributed it to the party officials while putting the blame on 'everyone but us'?
maybe these Russians are smarter than they appear...
unmanned mission
Is it a wormed mission, then?
a 3D X-ray video camera - could I have one of these? A hell of a lot of interesting possibilities is entering my mind
smart guy!
you can see why this man is called Cluley and not Clueless...
timewasters
"Now all we need to do is come up with reasonably efficient software that doesn’t waste processor cycles doing not much."
wrong - we need to come up with software that doesn't waste MY time as much!
a title is now optional!
You should either rethink your proportions, and make it longer and thinner, or put some insulation or a bit of dry ice on top - at the moment, too much heat is coming in from the top - besides, doesn't LOHAN deserve something longer?
Posted in Natalie Portman slaps John Galliano
obvious
sorry to point out the obvious - but weren't the Italians on the same side as Hitler?
welcome!
and of course "in the cloud" = controlled by some megacorp, be it Googlintosh or Macrosoft or whatever. And anyone not wearing their personal monitoring device is suspect, because "if you don't want the whole world to know what you're doing, perhaps you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"!
Monday morning
probably my calculating skills have left me on Monday morning, but I thought that 0.77 EB on a total of 69 EB is about one percent instead of ten...
Playboy!
nice to hear that the judge officially stated that Playboy is "no pornograpy". Time to inform the IT-department to change the net filters...
Posted in PARIS unveils impressive box
shake it, baby!
before you send it up into the sky, make sure you shake it and check everything stays in place. And make sure the aluminum foil doesn't come loose and block your camera...
Posted in Facebook Places - why, and why not
please rob me
reminds me of that Dutch guy with his "please rob me" website...
aha
aha, that explains it!
I got slammed with this for the first time yesterday, when I visited an online store and some hours later saw the banner of this store staring at me in a completely unrelated site. I thought it was so creepy, I felt naked in front of my pc! (no I wasn't, I was at work and my work at the moment doesn't involve getting naked). I immediately destroyed all the cookies on my machine, which solved it (temporarily).
Good to know you can opt out of it - but seriously, how many people have any clue that it's Google doing this, and if they do, know that there is a possibility to opt out of it?
work vs home
The StatCounter graph shows a clear weekly pattern: Internet Explorer peaks during weekdays, Firefox in the weekend. So there are quite some people that (have to) use IE at work, but when they can choose freely, prefer the Open Source way.
So I guess the choice is clear - sys admins, please follow!
Posted in Penalty for silent calling goes sky high
the Dutch way
in the news yesterday: in the Netherlands, they have a database that you can enter if you don't want sales calls. It's been extremely successfull: 4 milion people have already subscribed.
However, the flip side: when marketing firms realised they cannot reach their public by phone any more, they switched to door-to-door sales tactics - which are, in my opinion, a lot more pain in the donkey.
