* Posts by Faye B

145 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Oct 2012

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Tiny Robot Smartphone: Invasion Earth 2016 – prepare to be facially recognised humans

Faye B

Re: It's an awkward shape

I think it will be programmed to crawl up there by itself.

Wanna free web domain for a year? Hey, it's not rocket .science

Faye B

Got One

Yay, I managed to get FABakerBooks.science for my book website domain. Now I can put up my book The Search For Cern on my new website. Hopefully it will be a bit better than my WIX website http://fayeb767.wix.com/fabakerbooks

Vulture 2 takes a battering in 100km/h test run

Faye B

Unideal

That extra battery pack is going to affect your CofG so be careful, but at least I learnt a new word today.

The Register editorial job ad

Faye B

"considered to be printed press on paper"

A pity you don't apply your editorial vigour to your own English then.

Faye B

Technology Hack

I don't think my liver could take it these days. I'll just stick to being a commentard.

Boeing to start work on most powerful rocket ... EVER!

Faye B

Re: Totally wrong type of rocket,

Unless this is NASA's way of saying that building things in space is next to impossible. They have had the Space station up there for years doing 'experiments' but they haven't managed to build much while up there. This may be NASA saying the only way we will get a rocket ship to mars is if we build all of it on earth in one go.

Experts suspiciously eye LOHAN's cantankerous canards

Faye B

Test flights

I still think you should give it a few test flights by gliding it down a slope. Find a nice soft meadow on a hill and hand launch it. Even a short flight will give you an idea of how the controls are going to respond.

Faye B

Re: Will you be using asymmetric canard control?

I think he meant asymmetric as in a canard will deflect more in one direction than the other. You may find that you need more control in one direction than the other with canards. Especially swept wing ones.

Faye B

Give us a lift

I think the pivot point may be correct as it looks like it is just forward of the centre of lift, which will provide better control stability. Air pressure will sort out the canard travel problem (i.e. it will be easy at high altitudes giving full swing, and reduced at low altitude by drag). The bearings do look a bit weak though but I assume you are not going to try and pull some high G acrobatics while flying it so it should stand it for one flight.

LOHAN seeks X-Plane bod for simulating relationship

Faye B

Try before you buy

I am surprised you didn't get to see a simulated flight envelope from the Southampton boys. You could always get an estimate of the flight characteristics by making a quick balsa wood scale model and chucking it down a hill (slope soaring). After a bit of fiddling around with the CofG you might have enough confidence to do the same with the rocket provided you find a slope with the same glide angle.

Alternatively you could ask Burt Rutan's mob over at Scaled Composites if they could wrangle some flight data as they have lots of experience with canard designed craft. They should have something similar sitting around somewhere.

Watch this: Using Foundation for responsive design

Faye B

Illegible code

Sorry I had to give up on this talk as all of the code examples were too blurred to make out. There were also issues with the sound and vision that disrupted everything.

Japanese finally produce a ROBOT which isn't DEAD INSIDE

Faye B
Terminator

The Daleks are coming!!!

Can't climb stairs eh. Well that didn't stop the Daleks from ruling over half the galaxy. Luckily it only RECOGNISES emotions, it doesn't actually have emotions as that would imply intentionality and self awareness. It can only emulates emotional responses, pretty much the same way a puppet can. So why the big hoo-har about this plastic pal that's fun to be with.

Emulating an emotional response will seem like total insincerity by the observer, leading to annoyance and eventually violence, when the perceived response is seen as some kind of robot sarcasm. "please ignore that I am pointing this gun at you and look at the sad expression on my face. That shows how much I regret having to kill you".

Tech talk bloke compares girlfriend to irritating Java tool – did he deserve flames?

Faye B

Overreaction and zeitgeist

I think there has been a lot of overreaction about this, considering it is a fairly mild joke that could just easily have been applied to any significant other (especially if the word beautiful had been replaced with lovely). However, the twitter-sphere is merely a reflection of the zeitgeist prevalent among the intellectuals in that everyone must be seen to react strongly to any slight in order to prove that they are so cool. I suspect most of the tweeters and re-tweeters don't give a damn whether anyone was insulted just as long as they can be seen to be in with the in crowd (the 'me-too' syndrome).

Humans tend to conform to certain stereotypes and those stereotypes can be used as metaphors for illustration. Comedians have long picked up on stereotypical behaviour as source material (think of all those old mother-in-law jokes that are now passé). Using a bit of humour to brighten up a dull talk can't be a bad thing, surely, especially if it illustrates a point. And the bullets referred to his specific mythical girlfriend, not all girlfriends and certainly not all women. Finally, if a woman had stood up there and put up the same slide but with the word boyfriend would anyone have complained about men being insulted. I think not.

Pixar frees its production-grade RenderMan software

Faye B

Any development tool is useless and pointlessly expensive if you don't have any developers using it. This freebie allows more animators to get skilled with the tool (much like learning to use a pencil or paintbrush) so that Pixar have a bigger pool of ready to go resources when the next film comes along. Shaving even a day or two off the start up time is worth the price of a seat.

100% driverless Wonka-wagon toy cars? Oh Google, you're having a laugh

Faye B

Re: Things I would like to see

It would deliver itself obviously.

Come with me if you want a lid: Apple bags Terminator-esque LiquidMetal mobe patent

Faye B

Windows Framed!

So Apple have invented a high-tech putty for holding in windows.

Tesla's top secret gigafactories: Lithium to power world's vehicles? Let's do the sums

Faye B

The Li of the land

Is Lithium the ultimate element for batteries. There seems to be a step change in battery power with each new chemical mix so who know what will be the next big thing. Should we start stripping the planet of elements now or wait for a more efficient process.

Brits to vote: Which pressing scientific challenge should get £10m thrown at it?

Faye B

Metacameron

I this Regs new measurement for selfish greed.

Faye B

Is this the 10 million pound idea

For 10 million quid you could:-

convert old petrol tankers into solar furnaces that boil water to generate electricity with the residual steam condensed into pure drinking water. The electricity can be used to power refrigeration and other useful products like computers. This enables better education in remote villages and better health care and better agriculture. Also improves communications and trade. By reducing poverty you free up more resources for research into things like paralysis and dementia. It also reduces pollution and increases habitable land.

Fix capitalism with floating cities on Venus says Charles Stross

Faye B

A brief restatement

Surely what he is trying to say is that we might as well try and get rich people to pay for balloons on Venus as try to get them to part with their cash in a bid to solve the crisis in capitalism. That crisis being, as it as has happened before, that the poor are now so poor that nothing can make a profit for the rich. This is usually resolved by the banks collapsing or the stock exchanges failing so that the rich get financially slaughtered, but this time the banks and exchanges got propped up by governments so now the Fat Cats are now even more fatter and harder to support, while at the same time even more reluctant to allow their wealth to be used to support the economy they feed off.

Basically the only solution is for them to be the first against the wall when the revolution comes! Don't believe the propaganda put out by the wealthy that redistribution of wealth stifles investment and closes factories. It does exactly the opposite. A prosperous middle class is more likely to invest, save and purchase goods than the impoverished masses we have today. Small businesses flourish when they don't have huge multinationals undercutting them, doing backdoor trade deals and dragging them through the courts to protect their profit margins. Small local businesses also PAY TAXES unlike some companies I could mention. We need to stop listening to the threats made by the rich and bite the bullet with radical tax reforms. With over 50% of the country's wealth held by only 10% of the population there has to be a point where the system will collapse, either in revolution or anarchy. The alternative is to wage a war on your neighbours, just look at what Putin is doing!

Behold! World's smallest 3D-printer pen Lix artists into shape – literally

Faye B
Meh

Solution in search of a problem

Sorry to sound cynical over such a cool gadget but exactly what would this be useful for, except some 3D doodling. The filaments are too thin and weak to make anything useful and you need a very steady hand to make anything that looks good. I think even kids would get bored with this pretty quickly (like the old etch-a-sketches) as it is so limited and slow. It's basically a boy's toy for geeks.

Grad student creates world's thinnest wires – just three atoms wide

Faye B

Currently challenged

At three atoms thick, just how much current could it pass before destroying itself. Doesn't sound practical to me.

Look out, bankers! It's Lily Cole and her (Brit taxpayer-funded) WISH-PRINTING ATM

Faye B

Value for money?

I can't believe they spaffed £200K to produce such a crappy website. Not only does it look cheap they have no idea when it comes to usability. Where are the directions, where is the message or goal. They should at least have splashed some of that cash on designing a decent logo or banner.

At 12 year old child could have come up with a better website than this.

Over half of software developers think they'll be millionaires – study

Faye B

USA USA USA!

Americans have always been an optimistic people. Plus software developers really are appreciated in a lot of big American multinationals (just look at the effort that is made to improve their work environment). Try doing this survey over here in the UK and see what answers you get to things like job satisfaction, pay levels and the prospects of becoming millionaires. Over here software developers are seen as an unnecessary evil to be paid as little as possible by threatening to outsource their jobs overseas.

'Hello, is that the space station? NASA here. Can you put us through to Moscow?'

Faye B

Re: Quick get the oxycetelyne torches

It only needs to be 'man-rated' for the return journey as a rescue mission. The difficulty will be in docking with the ISS for the transfer, though it may even be possible to do an extra-vehicular jump from one to the other in space suits (a la Gravity).

Faye B

Quick get the oxycetelyne torches

It looks like NASA may have to do a quick conversion job on its X-37B Space Planes then. Though I suspect the option of carrying stranded astronauts has long been in the pipeline.

Soccer's dull? A MIND-CONTROLLED robo-suit will be used to take first World Cup 2014 kick

Faye B

Future employment

If they do manage to get a mind controlled exoskeleton working then these guys could be called on to control robots that go into hazardous areas (like Fukishima) as the ultimate in telepresence. Could even be used in space for extravehicular work instead of risking going out in a spacesuit.

CERN team uses GPUs to discover if antimatter falls up, not down

Faye B

Aha!

I claim my prize for April fools spotting. Everyone knows that anti-matter falls inwards not upwards.

Meet the man building an AI that mimics our neocortex – and could kill off neural networks

Faye B
Paris Hilton

New thinking or rehash?

I can't feeling that Hawkins is simply rehashing previous research in the hope that something will work if you build it big enough. Hierarchical learning ideas have been around a long time ( I did my degree paper on hierarchical learning in rule acquisition using a Pole and Cart simulator) and much of what he is proposing can be equated to the ART algorithms of the 1970s. I am also surprised that he considers the use of binary inputs into neural networks to be effective unless he is using his 'data streaming' approach to replace 'weightings'. Personally I think that AI should be looking at harmonic resonances in neural 'circuits' as an approach to recognition and temporal processing but sadly my mathematics is insufficient to the task of writing a paper on it.

Paris? well we are talking about an artificial intelligence here..

NASA: Vote now to put flashy lights on future spacesuits

Faye B

The big issue

It good to see NASA embracing the growing trend of obesity in the US by making their suits fit the big figure. I'm surprised they haven't fitted a cup holder to the waist band.

Google pulls SCHAFT out of military honeypot, sprays gold at bot team

Faye B
Terminator

One Thing to Rule them all

I always knew we would be Schafted by Google one day. Didn't think it would look like this though.

Intel reinvents the PC as giant 'Black Brook' fondleslab

Faye B
WTF?

Huh!

Where on earth did they come up with the name Black Brook? Surely everyone is going to call it Black Book or is that the idea. Or is it an amalgam of big overblown brick.

GitHub probes worker's claims of hostile, sexist office culture

Faye B

Re: Code ripped from projects

If it represents your input and effort for a company and your reputation as a coder stands on that input then, yes its your code (that's why there are comments at the top saying who wrote it). You, as the coder, are responsible for it and your professional standing is judged by it. The fact that someone else can use that code does not give them the right to remove it from the company's stock of software, only to stop their personal use of it. If her code had already been peer reviewed and accepted by the company then there was no reason to remove it from the code base.

WTF is … the multiverse?

Faye B

The long drawn out tea-time of the soul

Have they considered that instead of a multiverse, the 'missing' energy is simply the dimension of duration; such that the total energy of the system defines how long the universe will exist before it winks out of existence. With a bit of clever maths they might be able to predict how many billions of years we have left before it all collapses to a dot and the next Big Bang occurs.

If you consider that energy devolves into the triumvirate of observable dimensions of reality, space/time/matter, the universe is a whole singularity of energy split (or observed) through these three dimensions.

Bill Gates-backed SOLAR POO RAYGUN COMMODE unveiled

Faye B

More shiny shiny!

In fact this could rank as the ultimate in shiny toys for the rich boys looking to splash the cash. Why go to all this expense and technical jiggery-pokery when compost heaps have been happily digesting waste, often creating enough heat to actually burn, quite naturally. It's a huge sledge hammer of an idea to crack a relatively simple nut. Humanity has been disposing of sh1t for centuries, with or without water, so why the need for this hi-tech monstrosity. Again all I can think of is this need for rich guys to have the biggest shiniest technology they can point to and say 'I did that'.

Education about treatment and dispersal of sewage and simple sanitation techniques would solve this problem much more easily and cheaply, but then there would be no big hi-tech toy to play with.

Slash tuition fees for STEM students, biz boss body begs UK.gov

Faye B

The price is right!

Why would someone do a difficult, mentally tiring job all day for the same wage as a person who can stare vacantly out of a shop window and pretend to know something about phones. The wage differentials these days are ridiculous; I have seen software jobs being offered at the same rate as admin staff or labourers. Maybe the job shortage is due to so many people leaving the technically arduous engineering world to become plasterers or plumbers, where they can earn much more and worry less.

Heroic Playmonaut wowed by LOHAN's bulging package

Faye B
Paris Hilton

There'll aways be Paris

I vote for our dear Paris Hilton to be the model for the sexy co-pilot/stewardess. Do they do a play-mobil figure of her (presumably it's a very expensive one).

Facebook: We want a solar sky cruiser comms net that DARPA couldn't build

Faye B

Big and Shiny

Why do these rich biz kids always have to go for the big , shiny and hugely expensive solutions to solve 3rd world problems. Most of Africa doesn't need BB coverage, just the towns and villages in areas that has access to electricity. It would be simpler and cheaper to have small drones flying at say 200 ft with wifi connectivity such that they form a peer to peer network (think of it as a flying internet). Each little drone would provide coverage for say up to twenty connections (a bit like a mobile telephone mast does) and the density of the drones would match the density of the population. With redundancy and gap filling it should be easy to set up a tailored network much more cheaply than building huge, technically difficult, mega-stations pumping out unwanted radiation. Or isn't that solution shiny enough for Zuk's ego.

It's a bit like the power companies insisting that only huge and expensive centralised power stations can be used to supply power to homes and businesses, when what they really mean is that it allows them to control the price of the supply and ensure big profits.

Steve Jobs statue: Ones and ohs and OH NOES – it's POINTING at us

Faye B

Art for Art's sake

Artist's eh! don't you just love em? You can always rely on a sculptor to be so arrogantly fixated on their own idea of 'Art' that the subject matter gets completely ignored. I'm surprised he managed to remember to put Job's head on the top of it; which probably explains why it looks like it has been stuck on at the last minute just before the approval committee arrived.

I can sum it up with two words "bloody dreadful".

Reg readers fret over misty-eyed LOHAN

Faye B

Re: The title is too long.

With all the electronics already inside the fus. burning the leccy it should be lovely and toasty warm in there anyway. No need to add extra heat.

Faye B

Re: You have a head start.

Yes Reg, where is your embarrassing video with the cheesy music?

GPs slam NHS England for poor publicity of data grab plan

Faye B

Making it difficult to opt out.

Instead of allowing you to fill out the form online, like so many other things can be done, they really are trying to put people off opting out. First you have to print out the form (or write your own version from scratch if you don't have a printer) then fill in the details remembering to tick both opt out boxes but worst of all is you have to get your doctor to action it. How many people believe their overworked GP is going to spend their precious time entering all these requests from patients. As others have said 'they haven't had any confirmation of it being done'. This is the escape clause for the government. By the time you have found out that your opt out request "hasn't been actioned", it will be too late to object. The information will have been uploaded and no amount of whinging (to who?) will get it removed again.

KA-BLAM!! Marvel Comics opens super-powered data API to web devs

Faye B

Limited appeal

Surely is API can only be of interest to comic book collectors/readers, and only ones that know enough software to be able to query the database. Apart from allowing someone to be even more nerdy by giving them instant access to every detail (which most comic book fanbois already know), how would this information be used. To avoid legal litigation perhaps? To prevent plagiarism maybe?

LOHAN's handsome young autopilot springs into life

Faye B

Re: Ye Gods!

I think that's what the metal tube pointing out the front is for. (It makes more sense than a pitot tube).

Tell us we're all doomed, MPs beg climate scientists

Faye B
Mushroom

The elephant in the room

There is one climate policy that no MP will openly discuss, that would actually work, as most of climate change is down to their being far too many people in the world. No one wants to propose that a cull on humantiy would solve so many problems we have. They are all just hoping for some natural disaster, like a global plague, to happen because big world wars are now too dangerous to contemplate. The alternative is a dystopian future where we fight each other for fewer and fewer resources until total anarchy reigns.

Japanese quantum boffins 'may have the key to TELEPORTATION'

Faye B
WTF?

Squeezed Vacuum

How the hell do you squeeze a vacuum? I sometimes think these physicists are just making things up to get more grant money.

Radio boffins remember the future-ture-ture: From the Cold War to (White) SPAAAAACE

Faye B

Big valves

Come on Reg, you can't do an article like this without some piccys of valves glowing away nicely.

Facebook will LOSE 80% of its users by 2017 – epidemiological study

Faye B

So long and thanks for all the fish

I have noticed that the frequency of posting has slowed down considerably over the last few years. And most of the posts are just shares of other people's postings. There is little social interaction going on now. I guess Twitter has soaked up that form of commentary. So I can easily see FB sinking into the mud of internet history as it falls out of fashion.

Handsome young autopilot reports for spaceplane duty

Faye B

Weighty matters

With all those electronic gizmos installed the battery is going to have to be enormous. At this rate the rocket ship is going to nose dive straight into the ground after launch with all that weight in the front.

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