Posts by Francis Boyle

"arbitrary code execution in backend”

I think I saw that in a video once.

Re: So . . . . .

1. The energy doesn't run out it just gets spread progressively thinner (at least for light in a vacuum and gravity waves that's were your model falls short).

2. The same analogy applies to light and yet we manage to see distant galaxies.

3. It helps to have a very energetic source and a very sensitive detector.

Why

not?

That's crazy

For really high temperatures you need a jam-based pastry.

seems

you missed the section about pronoun dropping.

The answer to that question

Is probably the same as to "do you intend to keep the same phone for the next 12 years".

Re: I'm fairly sure....

Well if they projected it on the white wall they used for the filming. . .

Because "Leftists, liberals and fundamentalist progressives"

have been conspiring to destroy the US public education system since forever.

No better regulation

We hear these stories again and again because in any regulated system a culture develops of doing the the absolute minimum needed to comply with the regulations. No that might be acceptable in the exciting field of, say, stationery (sorry, David Brent) but when it comes to my money I want a proactive regulator that's prepared to continually enforce good and just not just "good enough" (which never is) practices. Of course in the current cultural/political climate I'm dreaming.

Aeroflot Flight 593

Thanks I was trying to find that to cite as a reply to all those blaming Bin Laden for not been allowed in the cockpit anyone. Short summary for those who don't know the story: Captain allows son and daughter to sit in the pilots' seats. Son somehow manages to disable the autopilot. Everybody* dies. One of the more truly horrific aviation stories.

*73 people according to the supposedly unreliable Wikipedia.

"most of wikipedia is 'adapted' (i.e. pinched) from other people's sites/work and reworded"

Er, that's how information works. Always and thankfully still.

Well of course

Boko Haram is basically just a criminal gang and criminals have a habit of stealing things.

From there to everyone in the third world is corrupt is a big leap.

"....a sysadmin wants either to do it for real or to go and play a game where you shoot people and blow things up."

But I hear Daesh are very interested and Lewis Hamilton is thinking of throwing in a few quid.

And the problem was that

the Shuttle was huge. All that mass hoisted to orbit just to bring back seven astronauts. (The contents of the cargo bay were almost invariably on a one way trip.) That was the tragedy of the Space Shuttle system - wonderful tech made horribly inefficient because the USAF thought they might like to snatch satellites from orbit.. Much better to provide a low-g landing system for just the cargo that needs it and dump the rest of the mass.

Re: Had to...

"Shall we keep it as the FAR side of the moon then?"

But then El Reg would be compelled to illustrate the article with a Gary Larsen cartoon and nobody wants that do they?

Re: SItuational Awareness

The parallel with cars doesn't hold up. A self driving car needs to be 100% autonomous. There's simply no time for a driver to take over when another vehicle does something random and unexpected 10 metres ahead. Not that it would do much good - absent Lewis Hamilton at the wheel a human's not going to do better than a computer. Now, the same applies in the air. If the system haWhere a pilot has an advantage is in those situations (Gimli glider etc) where they can draw on experience to pull something original out of the hat. But those situations are by definition rare. And it conceivable that the same thing could be done remotely. Indeed in the Qantas engine fire incident it was the pilot plus a large team on the ground that was responsible for the successful outcome. (Someone above mentioned airlines not wanting to pay for bandwidth which may be true for day to day operations but in an emergency different rules apply.)

Re: Pfffft . . . Human arrogance

If efficiency is what you want it's hard to beat steel wheels on rails. But as most people are probably not to keen on having a railway in their home it would be useful to have robots that can handle the environments we have built for ourselves.

Re: your tax money at work

If Google had just paid itself standard rates for all the views of the Big Dog, Cheetah, etc videos it wouldn't have needed to get that $32m from DARPA.

Yeah, I can't stand these sort of capers.

Re: Keyboards

I almost miss ball mice. Cleaning the ball gave me something to do while Windows was updating.

To misquote Randall Munroe

I'm pretty sure SpaceX is an Orbiter shop.

No for that

you need UTT (Under The Top) bu only if yo're that way inclined.

I was thinking the exact opposite as I watched the (the very much not live) video

It might be a lot easier to get to space if the rocket could stop to buffer every few seconds.

In reality space is an unforgiving mistress and people don't like to die, which is perhaps why the heroes of space today are robots.( Seriously who here ever expected to live in a world where the surface of Pluto is as familiar as the white cliffs of Dover or the Grand Canyon.)

Re: Economic migration

" they have been described as fit, wearing good clothes and many using gadgets like iPhones and other expesive gear."

Reminds me of the old story about the famous Jewish violist who was asked why there were no famous Jewish pianists and replied "because it's hard to flee with a piano". You're no less a refugee just because you flee with a Stradivarius.

Re: Because the Pegasus worked out so well for Orbital.

I think there might be a bit more to it than that. Hint: LOHAN.

On the upside

I think we have the basis for a Doctor Who story.

Don't blink and whatever you do don't open your eyes.

Re: Not really off

There's an app for that!

OK, wrong company, but whatever Apple can do Google/Alphabet can do as well, just without hip slogans.

"If anyone here dislikes what I do, I am more than happy to receive £141.80 per hour to keep doing it."

Which is the point of the exercise.

"How can you tell when a "How can you tell when a music rep is lying?" is lying?"

The usual answer works well enough for politician (they have to be seen to do some good). For a music rep (or anyone in promotions/PR etc) I think the answer would have something to with the presence of a discernible pulse.

Not when the topic is literacy

Just I don't need to know what a gerund or a phoneme is to be literate I don't need to know what a cpu or a function is to be digitally literate. It's just a matter of the users knowing how to use the (high-level) tools. Sometime we techies just have to accept that it's not about us.

Re: Well that's a good solution

Come on, that's just stupid. The Bible clearly says pi is three. (yes,I know - Muphry and all that.)

Re: Terroirists?!

I'm thinking Russian "Subtteraneans" lurking under our streets.

Re: "...who-thought-of-this-name Brillo..."

Seconded. It's easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and easy to google. Plus no intercaps. What's there to complain about.

Also they could have called it 'Vim'. That would have been confusing.