Posts by Loyal Commenter
1354 posts • joined Tuesday 20th July 2010 11:15 GMT
It's not really an invention
I suppose the 'discoverer' could patent his process of producing graphene sheets (using sticky tape on a lump of graphite), but I suspect there are now better ways of making the stuff known. Graphene itself has been known about (at least theoretically) for much longer, I recall being lectured on the stuff at university back in the '90s. It is, after all, just a single layer of graphite one atom thick. The Romans were using graphite for writing more than 2000 years ago, if that's not prior art, I don't know what is...
Eh?
Apple products ARE a social engineering attack.
But if we're not descended from Turks...
...What explains my fondness for doner kebabs?
Why the hell...
...was a project involving personal details of UK citizens handed over to a US company in the first place?
That is all.
Why not click on the link in the article and take a look?
Personally, I think the little graph thing is a good idea. I look forward to seeing this appropriated by other operating systems...
Can anyone enlighten me?
What is it that distinguishes a brown dwarf from a large gas-giant planet?
Wow, that must have been a REALLY dull episode
When they went over all of those chip designs in fine detail. Glad I missed that one.
...Or just maybe Samsung's patents originate in their R&D department, and Apple's in the marketing department...
The only problem with that...
...will be when the third party forum 'mysteriously' disappears from the Google search results...
As is the case with all medical treatments in the UK,
Yes.
It's down to your doctor to prescribe you the correct medicine, not the most effective used-car salesman in the snappiest suit.
This is why doctors spend four years at medical school learning how to diagnose and treat illnesses.
Posted in God particle back in hiding
If it doesn't exist...
...it's not bad news. What it would mean is that the Standard Model is incomplete, which opens the door for all sorts of new and interesting physics in the future.
Eh?
When the gameboy came out, it was cutting edge, with its little black and white screen. Of course, this is a complete nonsequitur, but then so was your post.
Guess what, the Vita's not a gameboy, and it's not a PSP either. As far as I can tell, the only thing it shares with the PSP is a similar form-factor and the name Sony. It doesn't rely on UMD (which was one of the main reasons the PSP didn't do as well as it could), and technically it is miles ahead of the competition (Nintendo DS) despite being purported to be in the same price bracket.
The thing is, that even though Sony have become a by-word for corporate arrogance in the last few years, I still want one of these. Unlike tablet PCs, I can see a use for it.
Except
The hardware in this sounds a hell of a lot more impressive than the 3DS
Quite
Also 3:2 ratio of glasses of wine:beer? With me, it's more like 1:50...
@Eddie
Counter example:
/* This is to be displayed to the user: */
var sometext= "You 'might' see a comment like /* comment */ in the code.";
Show me a trivial regex which simply removes the first comment, but not the one embedded in the string.
That's nothing!
Permanent markers are available with really fine tips these days, I reckon I could write at least 99999999999999999999TB onto one blueray disc.
...also...
...you'd have to deal correctly with matched pairs of nested quotes, possibly escaped, possibly escaped for interpolation into other protocols (such as SQL escapes). The phrase non-trivial springs to mind.
@Colin Millar
So, at the top of an included .js file, you wouldn't expect to see a comment stating that the file is under the GPL licence? If I could be arsed, I'm sure I could find several examples where this is exactly what you get.
Nice try
But why does Maxwell appear to be wearing the ghost of Newton's hair? looks like they haven't completely decoupled the different properties they are encoding information into yet.
Oh great, in 3D
Because nothing improves a film like a splitting headache.
Probably in this case, yes
Given that you would want to exclude the matches that occur within a string, which will be delimited with either single or double quotes (which JavaScript allows IIRC), possibly at some arbitrary point away from the match in question, the processing cost of the pattern match may be more than you expect. I seem to recall an example given in The Camel Book of a regex using lookaheads which would take longer than the lifetime of the universe to complete.
Code comments are not content
But copyright notices are, especially if the code in question is under the GPL. If I remember rightly, removing the GPL copyright notice from a GPL copyrighted file violates the terms of the GPL licence. Given that someone receiving the page may well look at the source, think "that's a useful piece of code", not see a copyright notice, and appropriate it, I would ahve thought that in this situation, T-Mobile would be liable for the breach of the GPL. (IANAL)
Comets are usually named...
...after their discoverer. Presumably a Dr* Elenin in this case.
*Please select correct title from drop-down list.
Wrong
_DO_ use thermally conductive keys, so that the heat is (hint in the name here) conducted away. Plastic keys, having low thermal conductivity, would retain the heat for longer, making this technique more feasible.
I see your pedantry...
...and raise you another pedantic comment:
Scotland and Northern Ireland, as noted by others, have their own laws, and Wales, being a principality, is technically part of England. This is an entertaining 'fact' whenever one finds the need to wind up a Welshman.
Mmmkay
I think you wanted this icon.
@Good one
...and the reason they're in front of you is that they just cut you up, without usign their mirrors or indicating.
Where do you get this idea of a 1:1 mapping from?
If you and a friend decided to both hold guns to someone's head and pull the triggers at the same time, you'd both get a full sentence for murder, not half of one each.
In the example you give, two crimes would have been committed; rioting, and incitement to riot. Just because nobody turned up to the 'riot', except this idiot and the police, doesn't mean that he didn't commit the crime of incitement, just that nobody was quite stupid enough in this case to actually be incited to riot. He has been sentenced according to the severity of the crime he committed, not the severity (or absence) of crimes committed by others as a result.
My thoughts precisely.
What a twonk.
I can imagine
It would more likely cause several rips in your forearms due to resistance from the aforementioned moggy.
If I was the Judge
I'd be worried about keeping my job. He clearly did a complete half-arsed job of assessing the evidence, failed to ask the plaintiffs to provide physical examples of the devices for comparison, and, reportedly, exceeded his authority in banning the thing anyway.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that he had recently become the owner of a manila envelope full of large denomination Euro notes. From a completely unrelated source, obviously.
@Poo, knickers, bum!
Did anyone claim it is? I think in the context, it was being used for emphasis.
Being smug and prudish in public isn't clever either. As noted elsewhere, those who eschew swearing are usually those with the most limited vocabularies, possibly because they can't fit any more into their tiny little minds.
Sherlock icon, because look! The alt-text has a rudey word in it!
As with any DLL
If you can't figure out what it's for, you should delete it.
Reminds me of Phorm
All of these parasites are the same - their business model relies on it being 'opt-out' because nobody in their right mind would opt into it.
This sort of thing should be made a criminal offence under international law - in my opinion, data gathering of this sort, which as you point out, is akin to stalking, violates the human right to a private life. Like piracy on the high seas, these pathetic excuses for human beings should be shot on sight.
Yup
The same 80% of people who think that any touchscreen phone is an iPhone, and that any tablet is an iPad.
The same reason we call vacuum cleaners 'hoovers', because the Hoover company were an early large manufacturer of vacuum cleaners.
This sort of tactic from Apple's lawyers is disingenuous at best, but entirely what we have come to expect from the Cupertino fruits.
Posted in Wikipedia: It's not for girls
Maybe...
It's because any person who has spent enough time watching Sex in the City to be able to write a wikipedia article on it would either be confined to a small comfortable room without access to electricity, let alone the internet, or would already have taken their own life?
In my (perhaps limited) experience, women aren't particulalrly underrepresented on the internet, but they seem to spend most of their time alternating between facebook and ebay.
The fact that few technical articles on wikipedia have much female input is perhaps more a reflection of the general lack of women working in technical fields. For example, in my career as a software developer, which has stretched over more than a decade, I have met exactly two female programmers, one of whom was technically very adept, and one who wasn't. I'd be very surprised if the percentage of women in this field reaches double figures. This is not due to lack of ability, rather than lack of interest. This is a pattern that is reflected in many technical areas, and if you want to change it, you first have to change popular attitudes (including those amongst women specifically) towards what is considered appropriate work for women. Good luck with that.
It is also worth noting that gender bias works both ways, and there are very few males working in areas such as nursery nursing. This is in part due to the attitude society takes towards men working in such roles, viewing them with suspicion.
Really?
In any dealings I have ever had with the police, they have been very well mannered, and those that I have had have mostly been with Avon and Somerset Constabulary, a force who reputedly are one of the less well behaved. Maybe it is your antagonistic attitude towards the police that causes the friction, rather than their attiude towards you?
Having said that; of course, ther are bad apples, it only stands to reason, but they are a tiny tiny minority. The ones at the top, however, could probably benefit from spending more time doing actual police work rather than political activities. ACPO should also be properly regulated, so that the orders that come down from the top come from accoutnable sources.
Posted in Watchdog washes hands of Lush hack
Eco-friendly products?
If I walk into one of their stores, I can only last a few minutes before my eyes start streaming from all the massively concentrated artificial fragrances. If this is eco-firendly, I'd hate to see their idea of pollution.
@Not illegal
Indeed. I believe soliciting is, so she might get done for that. She'd more likely just get the sack. No pun intended. Oh alright, yes it was...
Posted in RunPee
So presumably...
For anything by Michael Bay, the interval where you can go to the loo without missing any of the plot starts just after the trailers, and ends at the credits?
So...
...at what point does a bunch of thugs breaking into a warehouse, stealing stuff and torching it become a riot, or civil unrest?
When there's two of them? Five? Ten? When there's something else on fire nearby? When Someone else is doing the same somewhere else in the city/country? When the police turn up to try and stop them?
Reminds me of the Armstron and Miller sketch
Where the kitchen staff kill and cook the 'sweary chef'
Couldn't happen to a nicer man
Not sure who is more deserving of contempt, the crooked father in law, or the arsehole who makes his own children call him 'Chef' to plump up his ego.
Posted in School caned for losing 20K details
Ummm, unauthorised access to a protected machine?
Yes, I believe this is _technically_ against the law, in the same way as dropping litter is. I wouldn't expect the cops to give much of a crap about it, but I think there are laws concerning it...
If I ran a school's website and one of the students hacked it, I'd expect them to be disciplined, just as if they'd broken into school grounds at night and sprayed graffitti on the wall.
Posted in School caned for losing 20K details
Maybe...
Staff, ex pupils, enquirers, parents, carers, etc. etc.
Posted in School caned for losing 20K details
I hope the student was disciplined for this.
Hacking the school's website in the first place is arguably a criminal offence (depending on what the student did to 'hack' it).
And one has to wonder how or why a student was able to gain access to the database in question in the first place, regardless of whether they could guess the password. I seriously hope such a database wasn't accessible from the internet. If it was, then the School's IT management should probably also be the target of disciplinary action.
Previously unknown?
Previously unpublished perhaps, along with a lot of other trivial things. It's a bad programmer who trusts the user's system to tell the truth about such things as the system time.
Having said that, I have a number of instant messages sat on Skype which appear to be from the future because I reset my PC's BIOS and failed to notice that the clock setting was in 'merkin format (mmddyyyy) until I'd been using it for a few hours. I mean seriously, who came up with that? It's like telling the time with the seconds between the hours and minutes. And honestly, why does Skype not timestamp messages with a server time?
Posted in Antimatter close to home
Well, yes and no...
...If it was up there in bloody great big chunks, rather than as a rarefied ion plasma, then this might happen. As it is, things going through the Van Allen Belts get hit by the odd antiproton, causing the annihilation of a proton in the outer layer of atoms, the release of a high-energy photon (probably in the gamma ray range), and possibly making the atom that was hit mildly radioactive, depending on whether it can bear to lose a proton or not. This is kind of why they are known as the Van Allen Radiation Belts, the clue there being in the word radiation really.
Given the rarefied nature of the belts, something would have to stay up there for a serious amount of time to be annihilated by the antimatter; the orbit would decay a long long time before this ever happened.
Still, I'm not sure I'd want to spend my holidays there...
Not Strictly Accurate...
And there I was thinking the opening paragraph of George Orwell's Ninteen Eighty-Four was:
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. "
Your Quote, I believe, comes from the middle of the fourth paragraph. Nice to see someone who (presumably) has actually read the book though, before likening things to it's themes or characters...
My spidey sense is tingling!
Do I sense a certain degree of over-zealous moderation on legal grounds? A number of seemingly innocuous non-rabid comments seem to have suddenly vanished...
