Posts by The Man Who Fell To Earth
171 posts • joined Monday 9th January 2012 17:36 GMT
It's the only way
Nuke the Cumbre Vieja volcanic on the Canary Islands from orbit. 100 megatons should do it.
Posted in Engineer designs glass slipper on Quora
Re: Fir?
Try reading the link in the first post.
In terms of engineering, this needs to be looked at in terms of low probability high impact event (LPHI) in that failure of the slipper would sends shards of glass deep into the wearers foot, particularly up the heel. Unlike today where idiots abound taking stupid risks because they believe modern medicine will save them from arbitrarily bad injuries, in the Middle Ages a chunk of glass 10cm up your heel would easily prove crippling for life, if not outright fatal. Hence the need to have very large margins in the glass slipper design.
Posted in Gavel fails to fall for Apple 1
Was crap then and is still crap
The Apple 1 was crap in 1976, and it's still crap today. There were plenty of better hobby computers around then. As one of the previous posters pointed out, the Apple 1's only "virtue" is that the company is still around.
All this failed auction proves is that even wealth Apple fanboi's are not completely stupid.
$150M too costly?
Sprint mulled spending $8B on MetroPCS, yet someone thinks a $150M penalty would scuttle the deal? Not
likely.
Posted in Google spikes old MS file formats
But MS Office isn't backwards compatible.
Modern versions of MS Office can't open really old .doc or .ppt files. Power Point 2010 for example, can't open my old ,ppt's from 1996 created by Power Point 97. When I need to reach back in time and open a file that old, I have to fire up a VM that has MS Office 97 on it.
Re: retain data for hundred of millions of years...
The speed with which quartz (which is SiO2) will diffuse and degrade is entirely predictable. Furthermore, the relationship of that speed to the absolute temperature is also known. That is why they raised the temperature to 1000C (1273K) for two hours. That two hours at that temperature caused the same level of degradation as an enormous amount of time at room temperature.
Nothing new here, move along
This trick is very very old one for folks trained in the field of Low Temperature Physics. I remember seeing this done in the 1970's while in graduate school, and the person who did it was in his 60's and claimed to have first seen it when he was in graduate school.
Re: "far too slow for a data channel"?
Obviously the "too slow" label by the reporter was a stupid remark on his part. The real value of quantum cryptography is for military communication, not surfing the Internet. And for military communication, 120 bits per second is very useful. Present VLF data rates in the 3-300Hz band for submarine communication have data rates in this range. If it's a fast enough data rate to order the launching of nuclear ICBM's, it's not "too slow for a data channel".
Re: more intelligent rubbish containers
Since recycling is free, people will start putting trash into the recycling containers. That is as predicable as the sunrise.
Idiots
The single biggest issue with Tor is all of the idiots running nodes who given them host lookup names that identify them as Tor nodes. My company, for example, blocks any connections via the Tor network, which is easy to do most of the time because of all the Tor node morons who self-identify as Tor nodes (e.g. Host name: tor12.anonymizer.ccc.de, IP address 62.113.219.5). Gee whiz, might that be an anonymous proxy? And if the name isn't enough, they usually assigning the node an ISO 3166 Country Code of A1 (anonymous proxy).
Hey! Don't look at me! Nothing to see, move along...
Re: WTF Wales?
Just seems odd that Wikipedia doesn't already default to https connections. Same for Google.
Posted in Bitcoin exchange shuts after heist
Big suprise
When the founder can't write a grammatically correct sentence, why trust any other aspect of the operation?
Re: Hahahah. Dick.
This "Steve" writes English like he's Chinese. Scams like a (poor) Chinese businessman as well.
Re: Written
Try reading the article. It merely confirms the British findings on organic food already published.
Agreed
I too use wireless charging on my HP Touch pad and it's fantastic. I'd love to find a cell phone that allowed wireless charging. Every cell phone in our house (including iPhones) never makes it through the 2-year contract without the charging connector (USB or that awful Apple iPhone connector) getting a contact buggered up and having charging problems.
Throw it all away
Clearly, the fact that the data was being stored on tape whose drives "are hard to come by" says that the data is never accessed. If it is never accessed, then it is never used. If it is never used, then throw it away. This sounds like needless data retention due to a lack of intelligent policies, which wastes money.
Any decent mechanical engineer
Could tell right off that the thread on this screw is the wrong shape. Very wrong.
Still too chilly
The natural state for this planet during the bulk of its history is to not have ice full year at the poles. During the bulk of this planets history, Antarctica has been at the South Pole, and has stayed there even when Pangea started breaking up 200M years ago and the other continents broke off and started drifting about. Yet during the bulk of this planets history, Antarctica has been temperate, not ice bound, and covered by temperate forests.
Perhaps once the snow melts for good in Antarctica, I can move back into my summer house there. I wonder how much wear and tear it's gotten after 65M years?
Re: Does make you wonder.
Makes me wonder about Kasperski. Since Stuxnet code is now available for anyone to co-opt, how does seeing something new in the wild which uses parts of that code implicate the original authors?
Does it really matter what the American public thinks?
The majority of Americans think the Earth is less than 7000 years old and that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
There's that little stock thing
You know, where the same quarter earnings were tanking but before it was publicly disclosed, insiders dumped half a billion dollars in stock? Part of that pesky shareholder lawsuit.
Re: Cough...
Yes, but giving Apple credit for non-Apple innovations, inventions and development firsts is typical Apple fanboi behavior.
Libel
Wales is right that there's a huge difference between libel laws in the US & the UK. In the US, no matter how much some statement may defame another, if the statement is true, it's not libelous. Under UK Law, even true statements can be libelous.
It's much worse than Facebook claims
I used to have two Facebook accounts, one real and one fake. The Facebook nazi's decided my real one was fake, deactivated it, and demanded I authenticate it with documentation if I wanted it reactivated. My response was "screw you", and so if and when I ever "need" to log into Facebook, I use the fake account.
A while back, in my workplace, we had a discussion of this and what was surprising was how many people, like me, had their real Facebook accounts flagged as fakes, and like me, chose to not provide Facebook with proof they were who they claimed they were, and instead just keep using their fake account.
So despite Facebooks admission that almost 10% of Facebook accounts are fakes, the real percentage has got to be higher. Much higher.
Re: Read it properly
Agreed. Everything is couched in terms of "intent", not in terms of the scope of the functions.
And this matters, why?
So Twitter went down for a couple of hours, and the Twits who use it had no Tweets. It's not as if Twitter provides a service that actually matters.
Stock Fraud?
In April, Zynga conducted a "secondary stock offering" in which insiders dumped 43 million shares of stock at $12 a share, raking in about $516 million.
Yesterday, four months later, Zynga reported a horrible quarter, and the stock plunged to $3.
In other words, Zynga insiders cashed out at exactly the right time.
In fact, they cashed out in the same quarter in which Zynga imploded.
http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/daily-ticker/zynga-insiders-cashed-just-stock-crashed-144334658.html
Harley Davidson
Well, I know my next bike won't be a Harley. Even with an Indian outsourcing company humoring a client by setting up a local token office, the dollars spent are still going overseas.
Re: The US patents procedure is braindead.
Agreed. Proof positive is that the USPTO is working on Halliburton's Application Number 20080270152, "Patent Acquisition and Assertion by a (Non-Inventor) First Party Against a Second Party", which is a patent on the business model of Patent Trolling. No doubt, it will be granted any day now.
Re: Pay the royalties?
Sending the RIAA to Iran to collect royalties on their infected machines would be just too evil.
Better Worm
The "hacker" who made the worm play music was an idiot. He should have had the worm put gay porn on all of the machines, and sign the scientists up to gay social networks. Being gay is a capitol offense in Iran, and the Iranian Revolutionary Court is stupid enough to execute their own scientists if it suspected they were all gay.
Re: That and...
Agreed. eBay grabs 9% and then PayPal grabs another 2.9% plus a $0.30 service charge. On top of that, eBay facilitates buyer's committing fraud via their "Buyers Assurance" program whereby the buyer claims the item was not described properly, gets an instant refund (yet the seller still has to pay all of the fees) and the buyer ships an empty box back (since eBay wants a tracking number). You the seller are then down basically 112% since you are out the money. fees and the item.
It's small wonder PayPal's association with eBay is causing it to lose market share.
Just about everyone I know has a fake Facebook account
In addition to their real one. Me, I only have 3 fake Facebook accounts, and 0 real ones.
Re: Good News Everyone!
Too bad all Deepak Chopra knows about Quantum mechanics is the buzz word.
Re: Deepak Chopra?
I disagree. Deepak Chopra is less substantive.
I believe that is covered by Hamiburton's patent of Patent Trolling
"Patent Acquisition and Assertion by a (Non-Inventor) First Party Against a Second Party", Halliburton Energy Services Inc., US patent Application 20080270152.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2008/0270152.html
Re: Mail without a mail client
Only fools (or foolish organizations) move to web based email and cloud storage. If you don't maintain control of your data, then someone else controls you. And remember, in the United States, under the Patriot Act, all of the data you have stored by a 3rd party is subject to secret subpoenas, where the party providing data services to you is forbidden to inform you that your data has been copied and turned over to the government.
Re: Why would anyone trust a British satellite expert?
That type of ill-logic is why Physicists like to point out that real Sciences don't feel they have to explicitly put the word Science in the name of their field. (Like Computer Science or Social Science do.)
Why would anyone trust a British satellite expert?
On a topic of biology?
That's like asking your barber to defend you in court on a criminal matter. They might be a good at cutting hair, but they are not qualified to practice law.
Aderin-Pocock might be a decent person to discuss satellites, but she's fundamentally unqualified to discuss terrestrial biology, much less astrobiology.
Yes
The part Apple is patenting is the lie "...it affected a small number of users."
What Mr. Myslewski failed to mention...
What Mr. Myslewski failed to mention, probably because he does not know any physicists of the time, was that the overwhelming majority of members of the American Physical Society, the American professional physicist organization, opposed the SSC being built and were very vocal about expressing their opposition.
Re: Have
Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) is a guidance kits, which have been around for about 20 years already are GPS spoofing-proof. JDAM kits contain an integrated inertial guidance system coupled to a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver. Inertial guidance systems cannot be jammed, although they do suffer from integration errors. Other military munition "GPS" systems are also inertial + GPS.
Re: AND @ metavisor
How can you insult the clap like that? What did it ever do to you?
All I know is...
All I know is the best way to keep my secrets is to (1) only write them down on paper, (2) burn the paper, (3) scatter the ashes, and (4) then shoot myself in the head. The step order is crucial.
Re: TSA fun continues
TSA policy is to preferentially hire people of below average intelligence. They don't get bored as easily with this kind of work. Unfortunately, there are unwanted consequences to this hiring policy.
Huh?
Where I live, Comcast does not run ANY analog TV stations over the cable. None. Nada. They did for quite some time, but as of June 1, they stopped. Prior to that, there were about a dozen channels sent down the wire that my analog sets could get directly without a box. Now, only digital signals.
The TLD owner can decide
Basically, if the owner of the TLD .lol wants to, they can sell registrations for .lol domains.
@AC Posted Friday 8th June 2012 20:51 GMT
You didn't look very hard. My coverage (subsidised by my employer) is $150, and I have what is colloquially referred to as a "Gold Plated Cadillac Plan", which means they have to cover me for a whole lot of frivolous stuff, like a sex change operation if I want one.
But on the original topic of taxing internet traffic, the main rational seems to be that some bureaucrats simply don't like the present "winners" and want to skew the playing field.
Re: Vandenberg?
Yes, polar orbits are for spy & mapping satellites, and that's what Vandenburg is for - they launch south so the stage drop zone is in the Pacific. But Vandenberg is a no-no for launches to geosynchronous orbit, which are equatorial orbits, both due it's being too far north as well as one is not allowed to launch eastward from Vandenburg as then the stage drop zone would have to be somewhere in the United States mid-west. That's one big no-no. All geosynchronous US launches are from Florida.
Trust me. I really am a Rocket Scientist. (Or used to be.)
Re: Same old, same old
More to the point, many times when people destroy a field of GM material, they end up releasing it into the wild by accident.
