Posts by James Micallef

"Until voice activation can work with 100% accuracy 100% of the time for 100% of its users"

That's WAAAAY above even the best human secretary, let alone one who's tired / hung over / distracted playing solitaire

Re: Question:

"It's incredibly easy to not even know what country you are in if you're not on the main motorways"

True, but this wasn't simply straying over the border... she must have crossed all the width of Germany, and the breadth of Austria, and surely she must have stopped for petrol at least once.

Re: Waterproof means no user changeable battery.

"I don't know why people in developing nations need multi-SIM"

phones are too expensive for everyone to have their own, so users own a SIM and share a phone

Re: @xyz - Good idea in theory

Last week El Reg highlighted a flexible panel that could act as a tablet touch-screen, I think that would be ace for this application. Rather than a 'watch' form factor (too tiny to do anything useful on), think of a large bracelet (sort of Predator's control panel bracelet). Battery and non-flexible gubbins can be fitted around the bottom part of the wrist, while the top part could easily accommodate a 4" screen. It wouldn't be suitable for a lot of things of course (anything that requires sustained staring at the screen), but as a combination of watch + media device + control panel (+phone with an added headset) it could work great. Plus maybe you can slip it off and fletten it out to do any more serious reading or other concentrated usage.

Re: Battleship?

Battleship has a seriously funny first 5 minutes (robbery scene) and from there nosedives so deep into the unwatchable that viewers risk nosebleed. That's possible even worse than being consistently crap from teh very beginning. I was prepared forer crap but teh first scene raised my hopes cruelly

Re: Friday 13th

"the debris will wipe out the entire continent and will fuck up the world climate for decades"

Alternatively, it will leave a huge amount of particulate matter in the atmosphere and turn down the dial on global warming, saving the world's climate from further destruction

Re: report calls for

" Blimey, are you drinking the concentrated koolaid?"

I'm under no illusions that many, many atrocities DO take place in Iran, and are sanctioned and encouraged by the state. Nevertheless, it's a small positive step in the right direction for them that such atrocities need a 'warrant', and such small steps are to be encouraged.

Re Menezes, bottom line is that "the police service" was found guilty and was fined (I wonder if any of that fine found it's way to Menezes' heirs or was just out of one gov pocket and into another), but no person was held responsible for their actions, even though it was individual officers and not "the police service" who were responsible for wrong intelligence gathering / analysis / execution.

" I think I see the probable cause of your "righteous" indignation."

Excellent! When someone cannot rebut an argument I make and instead descends to snide remarks or personal attacks, that's one indicator that what I said is reasonably correct.

Re: Two grains of salt to take with this data

"How do you extinguish fires? Kerosene?"

Pedant alert - Something I learnt from barbecue lighting FAILs - small fires CAN be extinguished with a bucket of kerosene. It's ignition point is quite high and it ignites very well as a vapour, not very well as a volume of liquid. A bucketload of kerosene can cut out the oxygen for a fire + cool the surrounding material as well as a bucket of water. As well as leaving the kerosene pourer embarassed and perplexed.

Re: So too much ozone is bad....

Solution - grow the eucalyptus trees in the stratosphere

Good on you, mate!

I'm a bit wary of people being very public with their charity, but always better to publicise one's charity than to not give anything at all. So well done Mr. Zuckerberg!

Re tax deductibility, that's the case now but I belive one of the tax provisions with a good chance of being stricken off in the latest round of US tax-code whack-a-mole is the charitable deduction. That's a big plus since research shows that deductability of charitable donations has very little effect on total charitable donations. So while I'm sure his zuckness will be happy to take any deduction, I am happy to think that he would have done it anyway even without the deduction

Re: How far away, far far far away

"What's that in linguine?"

Not sure, but I think there will be enough linguine for seconds all round*

*Assuming a few Tera-swimming pools of carbonara sauce, of course

Re: Iran

"Are MS even allowed to sell to Iran?"

I'm sure Iran won't be feeling too guilty about pirating a few copies

prosecutions, ahoy?

I might be confusing this with some other national legislation, but isn't it a requirement of data protection law that any breach is reported to the individuals concerned as soon as it is discovered? If so, any chance of a civil prosecution under data protection act?

Doh, silly me, as if any civil servant will ever be charged over something like this!

Re: "evil" countries

I agree completely with this:"I'm getting a little tired of this continuous "evil country" kind of thing"

There is no such thing as an "evil country", there's just countries with people in charge who do some terrible things. For the most part, the citizens of Iraq, Iran, N Korea etc are just doing their best to survive in difficult circumstances. When you don't know where the next crust of bread is coming from, you don't get too wrapped up in philosophy, and you better believe what the guy handing out the bread says or there won't be any for you next time.

Re: mermaids

Ah, but is it a top-half mermaid or a bottom-half mermaid?

Re: Damn, that is brilliant!

Amazingly cool and amazingly life-changing for so many people.

Especially this " advanced to the point where she doesn't have to consciously control each movement .... but she just thinks of the target action and the arm does the rest. " is key, because it means that with advanced enough robotics / prosthetics, para/quadri-plagics and amputees can have a range of freedom of action comparable to someone with 4 functioning limbs.

Although I guess it's also a first step towards our cybernetic terminator overlords :o

And the Lord said....

...let not your left hand know what your right hand is doing.... or something of the sort.

Maybe Windows users donate to charity through other means

Maybe Windows users are out volunteering while Mac users are clicking 'donate' from their sofas

Maybe Windows users are poor and NEED donations

Maybe Windows users are just cheapskates....

OR maybe the fact that Mac users donate more than Windows users through one particular donation site out of many hundreds means nothing more than that Mac users donate more through that particular site.

Re: The conference broke down for good reason

"The treaty allows governments to inspect the contents of Internet traffic"

Which treaty, the existing one or the proposed new one? The current treaty was conceived mostly in a phone-and-fax era. By the current treaty it must be OK for governments to examine content in their own jurisdictions as long as it complies with local laws (I would be flabbergasted to the contrary, otherwise international calls could not be wiretapped, and all western governments do this, hopefully under judicial review).

So clearly by the current treaty it's already OK for, for example, China to inspect content on any internet server that's physically located in China. So I still fail to see what the difference is and why the backlash.

My suspicion is that the authoritarian states want to get their intrusivenes enshrined in the treaty, not because they won't keep on snooping either way, but to give them some sort of moral high ground. The western states don't want to relenquish their own perceived moral high ground, and Google et al want to be able to feed massive volumes of data around without being forced to pay more for access, or see their traffic being bumped down in priority if real-time data like VOIP gets priority.

And no-one wants to admit their real agenda so they're all blustering about freedom

Re: One day, it's probably going to cause a big problem.

By Toutatis, the sky is falling on our heads!!

Goddam!!

CERN has identified a zombie Higgs Boson!!

Re: Hippies?

"People worried about earthquakes are largely irrational and poorly informed." - correct

"People worried about contaminated drinking water are largely irrational and poorly informed." sophistry at best, because the water argument isn't just about contamination. Even if there can be an ironclad guarantee* that the contaminated water used in the process will stay underground and not contaminate the water table, fracking uses vast quantities of water. That will put fracking in competition with irrigation, drinking and other industrial uses for a limited water resource.

As I recall from an earlier article, it might have been yourself promoting reverse osmosis to increase water availability, but without that, fresh water is too scarce and precious to be filling it with chemicals and pumping it underground.

*there cannot

Re: Proto-Mozzarella

Proto-Pizza!!!

Re: Centre of mass

I always thought about it in terms of centre of mass as well.

I think what the boffins are getting at is a bit more detail as to teh actual molecular mechanism of how a centre of mass works through communicating molecular bindings. While the slinky is attached at the top, it's part of a combined structure that has a completely different centre of mass somewhere else. The slinky only starts acting independently with it's own centre of mass once it's released. And since nothing can travel faster than light, the information that the top of the slinky has been released cannot be instantaneously transmitted to teh rest of the slinky, this 'information' is passed down the slinky as a release of tension between the molecular bindings making up the spring.

Or something like that.

Re: WT??? "such a hard time achieving anything"

"The ITU works entirely by consensus "

Yes, but how does one know when consensus has been achieved? Does it need unanymous agreement on every decision? Or is 'consensus' defined as X% of members and/or delegates being in favour?

Re: weird

" can't really afford the services of those sandwich-making accountants / lawyers."

What we REALLY can't afford are the services of the politicians who are much more amenable to the lobbyists' coin

Re: Nice

Yes, it's mostly the use of highly efficient LEDs that make this a fantastic idea. Most people who don't have electricity available burn stuff for light which is both highly inefficient and very dangerous (particulate matter + fire risk)

Also I read somewhere else that it could be made a lot more portable / practical using a wind-up spring to store energy rather than lifting a heavy bag. The gravity method necessarily requiresa heavy weight to store potential energy, while a spring can store the same energy in a smaller / lighter / more portable package.

But all in all, well done, good job!!

Re: eerr David Fincher?

"delivered altered states of conciousness"

on that criteria alone it's got to be Johnny Depp

Re: Scary thing is ...

"We are spending gross amounts of money, and showing zero return."

I'm sure the shareholders and upper management of Lockheed Martin, Boeing, BAE, Halliburton etc etc will disagree with you on the "zero return". It's basically war profiteering where there weren't any really good wars going on, so the wars had to be somehow conjured up