Posts by JulianB
50 posts • joined Friday 9th September 2011 09:20 GMT
Re: Tedium.
Perhaps it's just prejudice, but the word "Studies" in the title of a degree or other academic course makes it seem less worthwhile to me.
Re: Desire for a brand new combine harvester
Indeed. "I've got a brand new combine harvester" seems to imply that I've got one, not that I want one.
Re: Values
Check out the photo of the home in the Sky News link. Somehow, it just fits the story perfectly.
"Lets users search for recipes on their Android phones and then transmit them to the cooker"
And then what? The rice cooker reads the recipe, assembles the ingredients, skins, chops and browns the chicken, peels, slices and adds the onion... (depending on the recipe, obviously)?
How can it do anything more complex than "Boil the rice currently inside you, using the water also currently inside you."?
Re: I'll admit I'm not as experienced as I'd like to be
"Unless you're a fanboi..." Suddenly it all makes sense. I had read the article as implying you're using a phone while having sex with another human being
Re: Earth is 9,000 years old...
But didn't creation occur in 4004 BC according to literalists? It's AD 2012 now. That's only a touch over 6000 yrs. Where have the other three millennia come from?
Burn the heretic!
99% of contractors say they do a good job
Who'd have thunk it?
And presumably permanent staff wouldn't similarly blow their own trumpets?
Not convinced
Firstly, I'm not convinced that having this thing wandering around the office talking to my colleagues while I'm at home is any better than me phoning or instant-messaging them. But let's accept that it is.
What then if a colleague in the office while I'm at home wants to talk to me? Do they have to find my bot? Presumably they'll bypasss it and call me direct anyway.
Part of my reason for working at home is that I have colleagues in various offices in at least five countries (as, of course, do those colleagues). So we each need a bot in each office. Unless we all decide to work from home and have one central physical office somewhere in a cheap part of the globe entirely staffed by bots and bot-maintenance technicians.
"site"?
You'd hope the California Science Center knew the difference between "sight" and "site".
Reducing truck mile?
" [The bins] use their embedded phone to call up a truck over Vodafone's GPRS network when they're full, reducing the distance trucks have to drive."
I find it hard to believe in this reduction. Say I fill my bin on Monday, so they send out a truck to empty it. My next-door neighbour fills his on Tuesday, so they send out a truck to empty it. Next-door-but one fills his on Wednesday...
Assuming random bin-filling, they have to send a truck down every street every day, instead of once a week.
Ok, maybe we don't each fill a bin per week, but in a street of any reasonable size, there'll be at least one trip needed per day.
I can only assume they don't in fact empty bins on demand as soon as they are full, perhaps they come once a week and empty only those bins known to be already full, but the saving there would be marginal.
Ancestors?
Don't worry, even French courts will give little credence to anyone claiming to be an ancestor of the Paleolithic artist. Unless they can demonstrate that they're really, really old.
"In the tanks that only held one kind of wasp, the second went extinct within a few generations"
That makes no sense at all.
I follow the thrust of the argument: that if one predator goes extinct, its prey thrives, outcompetes another prey species, second prey species either goes extinct or is at least severely reduced in numbers, predator that preys on now extinct prey species goes extinct.
But I don't think the predator that wasn't in the tank in the first place would take "a few generations" to disappear.
The government makes the rules; the companies obey them(1). The rules effectively say "If you're based in the UK, you pay this much. If you're a subsidiary of an Irish company you pay that much. You choose.". Up to the MPs to get the rules right rather than whinge about it.
(1) OK, some don't, but that's a different issue.
Good luck with that
Searching Google Images for my name (even using quotes to avoid hits on only my first or last name and including only those that show a person) gives well into double figures. Especially if you include the ones with several people in one picture. Is a member of staff expected to memorise all of those and associate them with my name just in case any are actually me? One is, as it happens. but were I not in a particular voluntary role, that wouldn't be published.
Re: Depends on the claim
Indeed, and tying in with the DFS comment above, such places usually have a discreet notice saying something like "Higher price charged at our Loughborough store between 31/5/2012 and 14/6/2012".
Cat out of the bag?
@Steve Evans - you might be thinking of buying "a pig in a poke".
a pig in a poke
something that is bought or accepted without knowing its value or seeing it first.
[with reference to the formerly common trick of selling a cat concealed in a bag to someone who was expecting a pig] - OED
Anyway, if one of my friends or colleagues offered to sell me a laptop, I'd want to see it, and see it working. How stupid would I have to be to to buy it unseen, off a stranger? And I guess this is racist of me, but somehow a stranger with a foreign accent is even more suspicious.
Re: Mix and Match
That's a *furlong* long and a chain wide, I think.
Re: Re:Route sucks?
I read it that way too: "Re:Route sucks in [terms of] travel recommendations..."
Posted in Intelligence a genetic mistake
Re: Didn't take long did it?
Presumably asdf had a knee-jerk reaction to the fact that the article appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and felt no need to read further. It's probably worth pointing out that "Christian Science", in this sense, is well outside anything that could be considered mainstream Christianity.
Re: Do tell again...
And how many does it take to fill:
a) an Olympic sized swimming pool
b) Wales?
Posted in Indiana cops arrest violent 6-year-old
Re: I suppose it's a bit late to suggest...
"When a police officer ... is capable of calming down the "unruly" subject..."
I don't know the law in Indiana, but it might be as simple as a police officer being allowed to use reasonable force to restrain an offender, but the school teachers not.
Re: Retaining essays
Isn't it a condition of using Turnitin that you contribute to its database?
Re: The problem here is....
It is theoretically possible, yes, but very unlikely, that the same ideas would be expressed in exactly the same words, sometimes including misuse of words or grammatical mistakes. It would then be up to the student(s) to convince their examiners that it was convergence. I know of one recent example where a Nigerian student was unable to account for why his thesis was almost identical to that of a Taiwanese student (even down to apparently having got his data from Taiwanese institutions while resident in Nigeria). He failed to so convince his examiners.
Re: He's obviously a heretic of some sort
>>Not like it's environmentally friendly to burn them at stakes, is it, now?
I's ok; it's carbon neutral unless you douse them in petrol (and as long as the stake is from a sustainable source)
So if I'm understanding this correctly, the patent owner is effectively saying "feel free to use the idea I've patented, but you can't patent it yourself and charge me to use it". Is that right?
In which case isn't it simpler to publish the idea, thus establishing "prior art", without patenting it?
Posted in Laptop computers are crap
Re: What bugs the crap out of me
Is the "nothing greater than 1080" problem because everything now has a wide-screen format? For a given diagonal size, I'd rather have the taller screen shape - at least until it reaches the equivalent of A4 vertical
"hominin"?
That's a new one on me, and the OED. Likewise "homonin" in the article summary. Is this an accepted term in the field, or just a typo for "hominid"?
Posted in Social networks breeding spatial junk
Re: sounds like they are bloody lazy
Not sure the name of the "Mom's kitchen" chain is relevant, or cafes called "The Cafe". Presumably there's as much bad data from users in "Tescos", "Starbucks", and any other business name. I'd have thought the biggest prolem would be places like "home", "school", "the bus".
Granada
not Grenada (the one in Spain, that is)
Re: What a nice neighbour
I don't think it said the neighbour reported it to the police. If I received personal confidential mail meant for my neighbour, I'd just pass it on (I wouldn't know what it was anyway). If I found my confidential info had been passed to them, I might well make life difficult for whoever did it.
Quite
My first thought on reading this "another set of sensitive info lost in pub" story. Why is anybody taking anything like this into a pub in the first place? Presumably it's a matter of stopping off for a quick drink on the way home rather than going out for the evening carrying your work with you. No harm in that in itself, but if the employee is so desperate for alcohol that it overrides common sense, he shouldn't be employed in a responsible job.
Works for me
2 days/wk at home. Trouble is there is some pressure to be seen in the office so that the building looks full, else they might sell it off and make me commute further on the days I do go in.
Autocomplete?
May be showing my ignorance, but if you start typing "Lyonnaise de Garantie", at what point would an autocomplete function think you meant to type "escroc"?
...and can English speakers not speak English across a CT network?
...or even 1097
Unless they go on to tell you that it "turbocharges the Internet"...
Posted in Headmaster freezes schoolkids for Gaia
Another small point
"lots more energy is used to convert the wood into charcoal,"
No, the wood itself is partially burned, using that energy to turn it into charcoal. Admittedly a match or other source of flame is used to light it in the first place, but that's not "lots" more energy.
Why bother with planets?
If we had the technology to build ships to travel 600 light years, which would take considerably longer than 600 years, and these ships could support a viable population over many generations, it seems to me the ship is itself a permanent "new Earth" colony, and an actual planet is superfluous.
"providing excellent customer service...which very few of them do"
Yes, my first thought on reading that Brits are taking to online shopping faster than the rest of the world was that maybe it's because real-life shopping is less pleasant in Britain than elsewhere.
Is a criminologist not. of necessity, an academic?
"computer simulations show no reason why is should not exceed expectations"
Does that actually mean anything at all? (even ignoring the typo)
If it does, it's probably something like "Based on the computer simulation, we expect it should do X well, but we don't trust the simulation, so it might be better, or indeed worse"
Maybe I'm boring...
but like many respondents above, if I had a spare $102,000 a space flight wouldn't be the first thing I thought of to spend it on. It's not that unexpected that most people have other priorities or more pressing needs.
Also "The ground beneath her feet"
I think it was called that. Lyrics by Rushdie, music by U2.
Posted in Google indoor Streetview images go live
Six inches tall?
Given that you claim to be only 6" tall, I'm not surprised the camera can see over fences that you can't!
Just Googled mine, which is far less common than John Smith. On the first five pages (got bored after that), one photo was of me but none of the articles related at all. It does concern me that a prospective employer might look me up on the web and find someone else's employment history, publications, holiday photos, even before we get to criminal records and distasteful political opinions.
Since when is Thailand a little city in Louisiana?
I didn't see the bit about '*better* than medical experts can ever comprehend'.
From the article, it seems the idea is that it will come to the same conclusion as a doctor would, if the doctor had all the relevant info and analysed it thoroughly. A doctor will then check the conclusion, and say "By Jove, I think it's got it".
At least initially. I imagine the long-term hope is automatic diagnosis without a human doctor at all.
I'm inclined to agree with you (that it's insane), but clearly others are not. Hence there should be a debate.
Of course, those that started the various counter-petitions are also missing the point. The government was never undertaking to implement any petition with 100,000 votes, just to debate it. If you strongly disagree with an e-petition, you should sign it!
(Or at least, that would be true if it was actually going to get debated)
Yes, I had a go at that one and then realised I hadn't a clue, even for this office let alone others UK or worldwide, subsidiariy companies, recent acqusitions and so on
