Posts by Peter Ford
194 posts • joined Friday 13th July 2007 10:34 GMT
How cold?
"a 2 ton scanning tunnelling microscope operating at -286 degrees Celsius"
are you sure about that temperature?
Re: I checked last week
You can get a basic {Satellite HD box, dish and cable} kit for less than 80 quid, although it's not Freesat-branded so the EPG is crap...
I bought one to see if it would work: now all I need to do is upgrade the box and I should be able to go without terrestrial telly if need be...
Re: I seem to recall...
As far as I am aware, VED is not ring-fenced, so yes: VED does contribute to the total tax income available to the government, some of which is spent on roads. However, the sort of roads that cyclists are allowed on are funded by local authority taxation (council tax, business rates, car parking income etc.), so assuming a cyclist is riding in his own county he probably pays for a fair bit of the road he rides on. Add to that the impact of a bicycle on the road surface compared to a motor vehicle, and I think the costs are pretty much covered. If everyone rode bicycles for local journeys (ever been to Shanghai?) there would be immense savings on road repairs...
The roads that are funded by national government in the UK are motorways and trunk route A-roads, which are usually out-of-bounds for cyclists anyway...
Err...
I don't want to p**s on your chips, but in my experience the white water flows *from* the glacier...
Posted in Boffins spot Luna-sized exoplanet
What about a?
So there's Kepler-37b,c and d
Are they expecting to find another one even closer?
Didn't Oxford do something like this?
Years ago, they put some buses on a limited route with a charging point at the railway station. Those buses I think used a big flywheel to store the power, which was spun up by induction while it waited at the stop.
To me, the bus application is a realistic use of something like this: the stops are fairly predictable and at the ends of the route are often a couple of minutes idle time to spend charging. Add in the fact that bus engines are not the cleanest things on the road, and that electric drive gives you the sort of low speed acceleration that works well on a bus, and you're sorted.
HGV's could probably get some use from this sort of thing, although it would be simple just to plug them in at service stations while the drivers take their requisite tacho breaks...
If we could remove stinky diesel engines from public transport and freight that would cut a big chunk of the pollution and emissions problems, even if the cars all stick to internal comustion engines...
Wot, nah Biffa?
Had awa' an shite, man!
Posted in ESA proposes 3D printing on the moon
Re: more techo-wanking
Problem with any type of cutting (like the CNC router) is going to be cooling it: although the moon is pretty cold there's not much atmosphere to dissipate the heat. Traditionally, cooling would be done with water, and that would need a lot more of it than making cement or printing like this.
Laser sintering might work, but again stuff is going to get pretty hot with no breeze to carry the heat away.
Safe to transport?
Hang on a minute: this 10nm silica reacts with water to produce hydrogen gas, so it think transporting it is going to require careful waterproofing. You're not going to cart it around in open-topped railcars on a rainy day, that's for sure...
OK, there's established systems in place for bulk powders (like gypsum, for example) that react with water, but that will add to the costs. Perhaps to a level comparable with fuel tankers?
Oh, and don't eat it (unless you're a firebreathing act...)
So if it's as expensive to produce than petrol, just as tricky to transport and produces a waste product that doesn't just blow away in the wind, is it really any benefit? Maybe when the oil runs out the economics will get better...
I was hoping that the 10nm silicon would be a catalyst, rather than consumed by the process. Now *that* would be a win, even if it required regeneration every thousand litres of water or something...
Posted in Boffins develop microwave weed-zapper
Re: So Aussie BS knobs go all the way to eleven too!
"...how is this better than a hoe?"
A hoe has difficulty weeding my patio: this sounds ideal as long as I don't point it as the fish pond...
Doing IMAP right
If you want a *server* that does IMAP right, then Courier MTA is the one to have: Sam Varshavik has slavishly followed the various RFCs and standards to make a system that is totally standards-compliant.
However, you might need some help getting a client to work well with it...
Having said that, my own installation seems fine with Thunderbird, Apple Mail and the stock Android email app...
Re: Ping Time
I would say that it is within the scope of our current tech to get an autonomous probe there which could at least gently crash and send back a squawk of data about surface, atmosphere etc. before being smashed by the indiginous chimpanzee analogues...
Not sure how long it would take to get there (certainly much more than 12 years), and we'd have to wait another 12 years for the reply, but that's not a problem, is it? Voyager and Pioneer have been out there for decades and are still going. We'd need to kick our probe a bit harder than those to get it to Tau Ceti in anyone's lifetime, but they were tasked with looking at stuff on the way out, whereas this probe would be more single-minded.
Maybe send half-a-dozen: how about the next X Prize?
"We describe it as a mosaic of human and novel non-human sequence"
Or, as we skeptics would say, "Made up"
Posted in BOFH: Hasta la Vista... luser
Hang on...
What sort of person installs the printer in darkened stairwells?
Oh.
I see...
Re: 2nd TV
It's got a HDMI input, so a I don't see why you couldn't hook up a FreeSat or FreeView box to it: that was my thought when I saw it...
Set a thief to catch a thief
obviously...
Re: "...tiny aerial equestrian"
Even more important, Jockeys evolved from springtails!
Just think of the numbers
P1 = Probability of getting trapped in amber: fairly small number (like 0.0000001)
B = Number of bugs at any one time: very large number (like 1 billion)
T = Amount of time available for it to happen (when trees and bugs exist at the same time): large number (say, 100 billion seconds)
P2 = Probability of that blob of amber fossilizing, and being found by someone: small number (like 0.0000001)
Therefore, expected number of bugs in amber = B * P1 * T * P1 = modest number (about a million)
These numbers are guesses, but you get the idea...
Kubuntu is still there!
My home PC runs 12.04. Kubuntu - I really couldn't get work done with Unity...
Posted in BOFH: Uninterruptible patsy supply
Re: There's no excuse for IT to bypass UPS issues.
Been there (nearly)
Luckily, I got ours out before it exploded.
But it was in the *top* of the rack, which is a tricky place to put 40+kg of batteries in the first place. When they've pinned themselves into their hidey-hole (humuhumunukunukuapua'a-style) it becomes a real mission...
A recent case highlights the wrong here
I read of a case where a person had used a car park which has two entrances/exits as a through route to get to another (private) car park. They were spotted by ANPR going in, and then spotted coming out some hours later, but never actually parked in the car park. The parking company hounded them for money, but couldn't actually prove that the car had been parked in the car park!
So when challenged, you say "Prove that my car actually occupied a space in your car park, and then I may consider paying!"
It is much simpler to employ someone to walk around checking, surely?
Never mind the birds
the algae will love it...
It's clearly different - no case here!
The minute and hour hands on the Apple version are rectangular against SBB's trapezoidal. The Apple minute hand doesn't reach the tick marks, while the SBB one sweeps over the ticks. The blob on the end of the Apple clock is rectangular against round on the SBB clock.
Distinctions of this sort would be enough to identify font designs, so why not a clock?
Re: Rip, Old Boy Network Britain
But it *was* a military operation: how else do you explain the missiles on roof-tops, gunships in the Thames and soldiers on the gates??
It was all an inter-services exercise to test our response to terrorist threats - very successful, as it turns out :)
Role play
That's a very good point - my two girls (now 6 and 8) are lego users since birth (we started with Quattro, through Duplo and now onto the hard stuff)
The way they play with Lego is very different to the way I did: my aim was realistic and technically challenging construction, even more so when Technic came along (and I won a competition which got me the car chassis of the time - the rear-engined flat four one...).
They make approximations of birds, aeroplanes, cars, whatever: but they then make up stories and scenarios around those models and that's more important to them than the building.
I suspect that Lego's marketing people have seen the same thing, and the Lego Friends stuff fits that pattern very nicely. It could do with a bit more depth, perhaps, than beauty and shopping, but I think the kids can work that out for themselves, especially if they have a bucket of bricks on hand for the cars, aeroplanes, ships etc.
I haven't bought my girls and Friends yet, although we did get a couple of the pink buckets for them - that just adds a few more colours into the mix.
And their little brother is showing balance - trucks and diggers all the way for him :)
Nothing new here
Many years ago we used to use bits of Yoplait (yoghurt drink) bottles to do field repairs on the plastic kayaks we spit on Alpine rivers. The kit was a bit less sophisticated - usually a gas stove to heat up a knife blade and melt the plastic into the hole...
Re: I'm so over pendantry.
Probably shoud be exsprogulation. Desprogulation sounds more like what you do if you don't want the sprog...
Re: The big question is...
Nobody gets sued, 'cos in the rosy future world where are cars drive us around, we've finally gotten around to shooting all the fscking lawyers...
Aww, diddums...
Did oo get or ickle fingies burnt playing wiv dat nasty fire?
Posted in Exploding dinosaur theory EXPLODED
Sorry to be pedantic...
... but ichthyosaurs are (were) not technically dinosaurs.
Re: Fake but it doesn't have to be...
They even flew one across the English Channel (Gossamer Albatross, I think?) - thought that may have been a two-person-powered thingy - need to look it up
How about some kind of net - maybe a four-piece satellite that is deployed spinning so it opens out and stretches a net between the pieces.
Let it drift through orbit for a while, catching little bits of junk, and gradually the momentum of all the bits slows it until it makes the death plunge (perhaps a set of small retro-thrusters could hasten it's demise...).
The net would have to be pretty strong - carbon fibre or perhaps just kevlar - to catch things rather than being punctured by them
Wales
certainly would
Given sufficient incentive...
I suggest that if it were important, it would not be too hard to develop a vehicle that could deliver a small probe to a planet 22 light years away in less that 100 years. It wouldn't take very long under a level of continuous acceleration currently achievable to reach 0.25c or faster.
The first hard part would be getting that much fuel into Earth orbit, but maybe a nuclear heater and a big block of something like CO2 or ice could be made to work.
The second hard part would be steering the probe when it got there - I guess it would have to be autonomous enough to find the planet and land (crash gently).
At least the 'Got Here' message would only take 22 years to get to us...
Of course the USA if full of corruption!
It was originally settled (to some extent) by a group of religious zealots!
Compare with Australia: not entirely clean but not bad considering most of the early settlers where criminals to start with...
It seems that the the problem is leaking into British politics too - government not prepared to act on the economy for fear of scaring the financial industry (the only industry we really have left) away!
Can we send the politicians away on a space ark and start again please?
Microwaved from spaced
The downlink would fry birds that flew through it...
Ferromagnetism and Anti-ferromagnetism are not opposites
It's not like matter and anti-matter: they're more like different behaviours of a material - think of having an elastic material alongside a plastic material...
you missed...
... the room full of STM to store (and then read) the data. Or are STMs a bit smaller than they were when I did my PhD?
Posted in Lunar mineral turns up in Oz
Useless?
Have they tested it for superconductivity? all that Yttrium and stuff sounds like it should be a possibility...
Posted in God particle may be within our grasp
Once they have THE ANSWER...
... then they need to start looking for THE QUESTION, obviously.
It fits your criteria...
I suspect that locating and downloading all the content, and then pushing though a piece of damp string (sorry, USB2 connection) to the drive took quite a few hours of time...
And it is shiny...
Nearly there...
"Both Voyagers 1 and 2 are currently at the outer limits of our solar system, in the region of space known as the heliosheath, the outer shell of the bubble of charged particles around our Sun. They will soon reach interstellar space, the space between the stars".
So they'll hit the glass sphere soon...
See it?
No. It's black.
Posted in BOFH: We don't need no stinkin' upgrade
Courier MTA is a good example of this
The chap who created it has got to about 0.66.3 at the moment. Several large organisations are using this (very good) mail server package for production, and it's been around for years: I came in at about 0.47 six(?) years ago...
It's very stable, very safe, and conforms carefully to RFC and standards, but will it ever be 1.0? Not in my lifetime, I suspect.
Kevlar is yellow
That *looks* like carbon fibre to me...
Complex is good!
Some of us like complexity - we don't all want our computers dumbed-down.
And cheap is always good :)
Posted in DeLorean goes electric for 2013 roll-out
Explosive bolts
The Mercedes solution to the problem of how to open the doors when it's on its roof...
Posted in NASA Legonauts set for Jupiter voyage
That's an awfully big rocket
to launch a teeny Lego figure!
I guess they need a lot of life support kit to get it to Jupiter
It's not just the pilot...
To have a man in a plane requires a pressurised environment (so he can go above 10000ft without passing out), and ejector seat, pedals, stick, instrument panel etc.
A lot of weight and extra space that could be left out as well as the 80+kg for a pilot in survival suit, boots and helmet.
UAVs are a lot smaller and lighter than manned planes, or have much longer endurance, but are fairly specialised in their mission capability. Having a man in the plane is a compromise between weight and operational flexibility: on a carrier you probably want a fair bit of the latter...
I think you'll find...
... that "tabliods" is the correct spelling.
At least for Grauniad readers
