* Posts by Francis Boyle

2735 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2007

Sysadmin crashed computer recording data from active space probe

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Re: Hmmm ...

"You don't need to mop up the zeroes, only the ones - they can also be recycled."

A common misconception. Because the ones are slender they lie in the cracks and don't cause any problems. The zeroes, on the other hand, just pile up and make the floor slippery.

Zombie … in SPAAACE: Amateur gets chatty with 'dead' satellite

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Come on it's not that old

It's probably on a Zip disk.

Google yanks cash firehose from Lunar X Moonshot comp. The actual Moon shot one

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Why

Are you thinking of going home?

Fancy coughing up for a £2,000 'nanodegree' in flying car design?

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And by my calculations

the study time should be measured in milliseconds.

Not even time to plug the electrodes in.

FYI: There's now an AI app that generates convincing fake smut vids using celebs' faces

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Re: Not just faces

Except that most of the things you mention are routinely done for film and television productions and can be done by anyone with a copy of After Effects and a few hours to spare to learn the necessary skills.

The real benefit of this particular software is that, at a stroke, it has rendered revenge porn almost completely ineffectual. (Granted, it won't make the abuse of trust any easier to deal with, but the power of revenge porn is the social shame and with plausible deniability on their side victims will much less to deal with.)

(Apologies to those who make the same point further down.)

Perv raided college girls' online accounts for nude snaps – by cracking their security questions

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"It's not immediately clear why the large number of such images on the internet did not suffice"

Because like the rapists and the Harvey Weinsteins of this world he gets off on the violation of his victims not the literal sexual element.

Electric cars to create new peak hour when they all need a charge

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Re: here are a number of companies out there...

Except electricity is 100% fungible - there are no renewable or non renewable electrons. So if a company owns, say, a solar plant that puts 1GW onto the grid, it can legitimately sell 1GW of renewable electricity to its customers. And capitalism being what it is there are ways to trade the right to sell that electricity so one company doesn't have to be involved at both ends of the supply chain. It's really not a difficult or abstruse concept - it's just the way things work in any society that has evolved beyond bartering.

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Re: actually no

I can't see this as as serious problem. Even a moderately specced electric car (i.e. anything that's not a Tesla) should be able to do an 45-minute-each-way commute and still have juice left over for a trip to the shops or any of the other in-your-suburb tasks people might want to do on a whim in the evening.

'There was no monetary incentive for this' = not what you want to hear about your tattoo

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"so when his wife suggested he add Redgate’s brand, it made sense to him"

The disturbing thing is that it made sense to her.

Then again, the fact that she married Florida Man might explain it.

We're cutting F-35 costs, honest, insists jet-builder Lockheed Martin

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I'm sorely disappointed

Eighteen comments and not one taking up the purple knobbly knob joke.

Job ad for designer proves its point with MS Paint shocker

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Re: Whoosh...

Of course they are.

How many Routemaster bus seats would it take to fill Wembley Stadium?

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Not if it's also a Tardis

See Iris Wildthyme.

note: being a Tardis it can simultaneously be both spherical and bus-shaped.

Hawaiian fake nukes alert caused by fat-fingered fumble of garbage GUI

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It could have been a lot worse.

XP is a masterpiece of GUI design compared to anything that came after it. (And I include the Windows 7, "let's put the entire start menu in a little box" decision in that.)

Infamous Silicon Valley 'sex party' exactly as exciting as it sounds

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But did anyone think to check

under the pile of coats in the second bedroom. Oh, wait California. Must have been some pot, at least.

What do we want? Consensual fun times. How do we get it? Via an app with blockchain...

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Multi page contracts

I don't know about you, but even as a lawyer, I rarely insist on multi-page written agreements before having sex.

Agreed, I prefer to use a haiku.

I want to fuck you.

Do you want to fuck me too?

If yes sign right here.

Ice cliffs found on Mars and NASA says they’re a tap for astronauts

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Note to Mark Watney

Dig for ice on Mars but if you discover a large green humanoid you probably should try somewhere else.

Transport pundit Christian Wolmar on why the driverless car is on a 'road to nowhere'

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Re: Trains..

Because there's no "huge cost benefit". When you're moving 500 or so people at a go, the real costs are in the infrastructure that makes that possible, not in the one driver per train.

Beer hall putz: Regulator slaps northern pub over Nazi-themed ad

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Re: re Barmaids in skimpy lederhosen

"You should probably also include some Herren in lederhosen"

You mean like this.

1980s sci-fi movies: The thrill of being not quite terrified on mum's floral sofa

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Re: monkey business

I think quite a bit of the CGI for the Apes movies is based on live action motion capture, so likely to be more convincing than some other CGI which is, let's face it, like watching a cartoon.

Most CGI characters are created using motion capture. If it looks like a cartoon it's probably just Keanu Reeves wearing the reflective dots. (Andy Serkis can't be everywhere at once.)

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Re: "BTW, why does everyone think Alien was sci-fi, not horror?"

Alien 3 walked all over the ending of Aliens so I can understand the hate it gets, but taken on its own terms it's pretty good.

Astroboffins say our Solar System is a dark, violent, cosmic weirdo

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Which makes the argument somewhat self-defeating because Jupiter and Saturn didn't just appear one day in the solar system: they are an integral part of it. So the question really is: why did we get Jupiter and Saturn?

Which is how science works. Every time you answer a question you end up with one or more equally interesting questions.

@Brewster's Angle Grinder

Nicely spotted. Raises the question: Who's been stealing our inner planets?

Mystery surrounds fate of secret satellite slung by SpaceX

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Re: ... the threat of a nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea

"I'd expect the Chinese to be very upset"

But with whom? Maybe with Kim.

Quite possibly. The thing is, it doesn't matter who starts a war, or who responds to whom, ordinary people on all sides will die. And while I dislike the North Korean regime I'd like ordinary North Koreans to be liberated not killed.

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Re: ... the threat of a nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea

If the Norks managed to hit Guam with their tinpot missile and Trump responded in kind, then, yes, I'd consider that an exchange. No, it probably wouldn't escalate into a nuclear war (which is why I'm not particularly concerned about an On The Beach scenario) but I'd expect the Chinese to be very upset. Not nuke-the-US upset but certainly angry enough to spill blood.

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Re: ... the threat of a nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea

Well, then, it was Kennedy and khrushchev. Now it's Kim and Trump.

That's why I'm worried (and why I'm glad I live in the Southern Hemisphere).

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Re: That's what they want you to believe

Trump doesn't want to win? I'm not sure what you think I'm suggesting, but the problem with Trump has always been his need to win - his need for Donald J. Trump to win and his complete lack of concern about who get's hurt along the way whether it's a few people or a few million. I was joking about the USAF putting the satellite in orbit above North Korea. I assume all the US intelligence agencies have been watching North Korea at the highest priority ever since Trump started spewing out his nuclear armed schoolboy threats. But if you don't think the threat of a nuclear exchange between the US and North Korea is something to worry about I don't know what to say.

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That's what they want you to believe

Of course it's now in a polar orbit at E125.

Nice to know the USAF is doing something to protect the US against Trump's stupidity.

Take notebooks: About those new Thinkpads...

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All my cameras have full size SD slots but I don't think I've ever used any thing but micro SD in them. Agreed, micro SD is pretty fiddly but it's easy enough to keep them in the adapter. If I needed to do regular transfers in the field and only had a micro slot I'd probably just use a USB adapter.

South Australia bins emergency alert app, contract

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On the other hand

I'm sure it has a good UI and many alert choices.

If you won't use your brain our machine will use it for you, Nissan tells drivers

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Their stomachs

With this tech you'll never be able to drive past a McDonald's again.

Nvidia: Using cheap GeForce, Titan GPUs in servers? Haha, nope!

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Re: UK Rules!

Obviously that's a Centralised Computing Facility. Data Center* - never heard of it.

*A "Center" - what's that?

Now that's sticker shock: Sticky labels make image-recog AI go bananas for toasters

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I was taught that bananas make excellent weapons

But then I had a very silly teacher.

When neural nets do carols: 'Santa baby bore sweet Jesus Christ. Fa la la la la la, la la la la'

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I could have sworn

it was the B-side to "The Fastest Milkman in the West".

Long Island Iced Tea Corp renamed itself to Long Blockchain – and its shares went bananas

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Re: Maybe El Reg should jump on this valuation

I'm thinking you missed DevOps but maybe that's too last year.

Murdoch's Fox empire is set to become a literal Mickey Mouse outfit

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Of course not

The kitten videos have already won.

Ex-Microsoft intern claimed one of her fellow temps raped her. Her bosses hired him

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If she had passed and was penetrated forcibly or otherwise, then yes, she was raped. See: Turner, Brock.

Francis Boyle Silver badge

History Fail

Ironically Zola's J'acuse resulted in exoneration of Dreyfus and the exposure of systematic anti-semitism in the French establishment. I don't think the historical parallels are what you think they are.

New battery boffinry could 'triple range' of electric vehicles

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Re: How many battery "breakthroughs" is that this year?

It seems like every week or two for the past 5-10 years there's an article here about some interesting battery technology research followed a comment about how battery research never bears fruit. It's almost as if we've erased from our collective consciousness the horror that was NiCad.

SpaceX to try reusing both rocket and spacecraft for historic ISS mission

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What?

That wasn't part of the preparation?

New Jersey lawmakers propose ban on folks drunk droning

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Re: Inner Scrooge disappointed

I was hoping it would apply to all drunks who just won't shut up.

Nokia 8: As pure as the driven Android - it's a classy return

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Re: Sounds nice

"I think they call "Bokeh effect" depth of field on proper cameras."

No bokeh is the quality of the out of focus areas. Some lenses have a pleasing bokeh and are therefore suited for shallow depth of field shots where you want an attractive but non-distracting background. Others, not so much. Calling a fake depth of field effect, 'bokeh' is hopelessly confused.

Huawei Mate 10 Pro: The unfashionable estate car wants to go to town

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Yeah, that's a station wagon

and it's probably full of tapes.

Drone collisions with airliners may not be fatal, US study suggests

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Re: How is this different than birdstrike?

And I hate to be that other guy but it is also Mythbusted.

Total recog: British AI makes universal speech breakthrough

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Idea for a Candid Camera style video

Approach random people in the street and ask them in English how to say "thank you" in English. See if they do any better than a computer.

Clone poster girl Dolly the sheep's arthritis was 'normal for her age'

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Re: All well and good but...

" but doesn't the article you link to have serious flaws of it's own?"

Short answer: no. Nothing you mention is anything other than standard practice. Certainly, there are alternative styles that could be used but they're just that - alternatives.

'It's back to the drawing board...' Innocent axions found not guilty of dark matter crimes

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Well,

that's the problem.

576-megapixel 'Zwicky Transient Facility' telescope sees first light

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576-megapixels

is only 32K. Probably be the big thing for next Christmas.

Brace yourselves, fanboys. Winter is coming. And the iPhone X can't handle the cold

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I was going to suggest using the official scale

but I just checked and apparently the El Reg unit of temperature is the Hilton. Compared to that the Rømer scale is positively up to date.

Teensy weensy space shuttle flies and lands

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Finally found it

The 'real Steve Austin'.

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The lifting body spaceplane lives on

Nice to know Steve Austin didn't lose his legs in vain.

US government seizes Texas gun mass murder to demand backdoors

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Sovereignman.com

Now that'll be a level-headed, balanced site utterly devoid of any agenda.