Re: "Batteries included" Please pass the Fluke TrueRMS DVOM

It wouldn't be a catalyst if it got depleted...

Re: Windows 8 computers are safe

What handy grey "ignore" button??

@Steven Roper

NFC cards have two chips. One for the standard chip&PIN, and a separate one at the other side of the card for the NFC contactless payment. A stripe reader will indeed refuse to read the strip on a chip&PIN card, it's a security measure to minimize fraud due to card copying. It has nothing to do with the NFC pay-by-bonk functionality.

If you "fried the chip" by zapping it in a microwave or something similar you probably fried both chips. All you really needed to do was cut the antenna strip for the NFC chip, leaving the chip&PIN one intact.

Re: Thought this might happen...

> Only if one is a racist.

Curious, I didn't realise that Albanians and Romanians were racially distinct peoples.

I think you may have meant 'xenophobe", but of course that isn't as damning an indictment, nor illegal.

Re: Reg cruelty

Texan pounds are 3x as big as everyone else's.

Re: um

Well, Bluray sets a minimum of around 7MBytes/sec, so if these disks really can do the 180MB/s claimed, that is > 16 channels at Bluray definition.

I'd be more concerned with the "initial 0.55 per cent chance of drive failure per year.". Out of every 1000 drives they ship, more than 5 will fail in the first year? That's worrying.

As for the price, $175 seems more likely, looking at other 4TB drives on sale.

Moore's law acts against it

Intelligence may emerge, but by the time someone has spent 18 years "raising" it to adulthood, other more advanced intelligences will have been created. Who's going to want to spend the time raising an iRobot20 when they can get a new iRobot21 a year later for the same price?

Re: why not

> version number readers that crap out on the slightest mishap.

Ah yes, the ones that think 5.10 is < 5.9 :(

Re: I can see the future...

> slide the lid off a box containing a turd.

Doesn't fit their "razor blade business model", which relies on people having to pay for refills, though.

Re: My two cents

The Sun name is still there, all the Oracle hardware is badged with Oracle and Sun.

Re: The other

That's on Page 3 of the other Sun...

Re: fail

> Looks like s big win for WWW.amazon.Lu

Yep. Just one tablet sale moved abroad to save that 1% tax costs Hollande & co. almost 20% in lost VAT. If 5% of sales go abroad, it's a net loss.

You'd think he'd have learned the "look at the net picture" lesson from the way Depardieu & other big earners left to avoid the 75% "rich tax", yet despite the courts ruling the first implementation of that tax as unconsitutitional they're still trying to bring it in. The iShiny tax will have the same negative effect. No wonder the French schools in London are being overwhelmed by demand from expats.

Come on guys, you can't tax yourselves out of a recession! Where's la Madame Thatcher when you need one?

What makes a burger succulent and juicy is the exercise the cow's muscles got while the animal was romping around the field, building up all that tasty fat. I would expect that a testtube burger will probably have all the succulence and flavour of pureed Spam.

Re: "she emailed over copies of them... and then immediately began panicking"

> certain that at the very least - the email was going to *someone* at Apple.

Well, you can be certain that one of the recipients is someone at Apple. Since email is generally not encrypted or secured against any form of interception or copying, your ID details could have been intercepted by anyone at any of the ISPs it crossed, not to mention anyone the anonymous Apple employee forwarded it to, deliberately or accidentally.

Re: "shot dead at his house while playing dominoes"

Its absolutely forbidden for the card to leave the customer's sight, I've seen waitresses at Heathrow having to insist (to American customers) that they must bring the machine to the table, and cannot take the card away.

Re: Units.

Canteloupe?

Re: Sizes?

One is a drawn ingot, the other is a deposited coating.

Although a Humvee decorated with candles would certainly give one pause for thought.

Re: Never mind the quality - feel the width !

Hmm, it wasn't really the image I wanted to accompany my morning coffee, though.

Re: Whilst I can see the value.....@Tom Walsh

> And also when the gas central heating kicks in, and the electric pump starts drawing 7-800W of power itself

You might want to invest in a better meter, one that can correctly measure reactive power. A central heating water pump will never draw anything like 800W, 150-200W is more like it. What does the rating plate on the pump say?

Re: Getting the gender terminology correct

I doubt it. Look at France where terminology is gender-specific, we get "blogueurs" and "blogueuses" but the land of M. Chauvin doesn't seem notably better-supplied with female geek(e)s.

Re: Common sense !!

I agree, and it would be interesting to hear the views of any female commentards. I think that there is a big difference between "not choosing" to enter the tech sector, and "choosing not" to enter it. In my first job I'd have said that the number of women was >> 16%, but that was in a city wirh a large university CS department and lots of female students. My current employer does anecdotally seem to be around that 16% figure, for a much older workforce. Have the percentages been studied with age in mind?

There is clearly no physical or mental reason why the sexes shouldn't be equally represented (unlike building sites, for example), so there must be other causes. I see no sex-related difference in the quality of engineering or design work among my colleagues, although I have found female QA engineers to be better than their male counterparts. Whether they are more conscientious, or just better at delivering criticism I'm not sure!

It is clear that around age 30-40 women do take a larger share of child-raising tasks, and whether that is cultural pressure or personal choice is a sensitive subject for debate. It can result in a career stalling, someone getting a reputation for "never wanting to travel" etc. That may not be a problem for someone with the drive & money of a Marissa Mayer but not everyone feels like her.

It isn't unusual for someone to make a life/career balance choice in early life and regret it later, and the usual double-standards raise their heads. The man who neglects family to forge a career, and later regrets his poor relationship with his children, is a staple of popular drama and it's fashionable to criticise him for his decision. If a women puts family first, and later bemoans her lack of career advancement, it gets blamed on "society" or "industry" causing problems for the women. Criticising the woman is slammed as being sexist, or playing to stereotypes. Equality by the numbers isn't the solution.

Re: Reference position?

> I wonder how they get an accurate position in the first place?

They don't need one, all they need is an accurate relative position for the target.

Re: Inertial? no way -"Still, it would be WAY better to have that for a grenade launcher."

> If you must develop these things, make it so only governments can afford them.

Nice idea in theory, but the reality of modern technology is that anything a government can afford today will probably be feasible in a well-equipped garage in 10 years time. At least by having the big guns (pun intended) research & make these things there's some chance that they'll be able to keep such measures (and countermeasures) ahead of the amateurs.

Re: apple v the French

The French know exactly what to do with an apple. It's hard to beat a good Tarte Tatin.

Re: No

> So you can pay premium rate for your electrciity rather than economy7 or economy-super where you let the power company turn down your AC at certain times in return for a 50% discount

So what's different aboiut how it works today? They'll tell you that you can surrender control in order to get cheaper prices, and a year in you'll find that it isn't that much cheaper anyway.

Re: $600,000?

> Plus he got caught so his prospects as a criminal aren't too bright.

Funny how those two always seem to go together...

Re: I know who the fuck Neil Gaiman is...

> when trying to raise $300,000 on Kickstarter for a new album raised $1.2 million and then tried to enlist pickup musicians to play live with her for "hugs, high fives, and beer" (or some such insulting shite.)

Everyone loves a trier... More fool those who handed over the $1.2m...