* Posts by Francis Boyle

2735 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2007

Cygnus cargo ship makes it to ISS with blanketed solar panel

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Re: Human tissue printing?

It will a while before anyone prints a something like human kidney but 3D bioprinting as it's called is well established. As I understand it simpler tissues like cartilage and skin are currently possible. (Hence the reference to the knee meniscus.)

Look! Up in the sky! Proof of concept for satellites beaming energy to Earth!

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Or you could simply build more panels (and wind turbines) and connect them with long distance interconnects. Not cheap, but nothing like space prices either.

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The calculation has been made many times

including on these very pages if I'm not mistaken. I won't repeat it but I will point out that the power consumed by humans is roughly equivalent to the sunlight falling on a small country, i.e. insignificant on a planetary scale.

This ancient quasar may be the remains of the first-gen star that started us all

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As Douglas Adams said

The main problem with time travel (and this applies to looking back in time) is not the risk of accidently becoming your own grandfather but getting the language right.

All of the norths are about to align over Britain

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At least farcical aquatic ceremonies

are a step up from whatever method the UK uses to choose its PMs these days.

Hardware makers criticized for eco double standards

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Re: @Captain Scarlet - Companies as well

Hence the need for a standard – something for the managers to cover their arses with.

Lenovo reveals rollable laptop and smartphone screens

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It's needs a dash of

quantum but I take your point.

How to watch NASA Jupiter probe's flyby of Earth

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Nah

Nasa uses Orbiter. Citation.

More than 4 in 10 PCs still can't upgrade to Windows 11

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Anywhere you want

Any decent machine will allow you to turn off secure boot.

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Here for the two types of comment comment

and not disappointed.

Make your neighbor think their house is haunted by blinking their Ikea smart bulbs

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Well that's

my Halloween project sorted.

Amazon halts work on ‘Scout’ delivery-bot that delivered parcels no faster than humans

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Doesn't

a "unique delivery experience" usually involve cutting a hole in the bottom of the pizza box?

Google reveals Pixel 7 phones with 1.7 Stadias of security fixes promised

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Don't be silly

You get a choice of pita bread or a slinky encased in pastry.

Waxworm's spit shows promise in puncturing plastic pollution

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Re: Doomwatch

Water is the deadly enemy of paper and yet we have libraries on a planet that is covered in the stuff to the extant that it falls out of the sky.

I'm not really worried about rogue worm enzyme dissolving my tupperware.

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Re: Terms and conditions

Not at all. The best way to eliminate a waste product is to turn it into a resource.

Google Japan goes rogue with 5.4ft long keyboard

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Those super sleuths

at NCIS are going to love this.

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

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That's what I've heard

which is why I was care to say 40 years which happens to about as far back as my memory goes.

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It's been 30 years away for the last 40 years but recently I saw someone make the joke with the reduced value of 20 years so that, I suppose, is progress. (Personally, I'd be prepared to wage a modest sum on 10.)

Delivery drone crashes into power lines, causes outage

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Browns Plains

is just south of where I live. Definitely not the outback.

Fixing an upside-down USB plug: A case of supporting the insupportable

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That's #1178

on the list of useless information I still remember. The lesson that people who should know better often don't, however remains useful.

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For reasons

too tedious to go into I have done far too much dimm-plugging in the last few days. One of the things I noticed is the the contact edge is not straight, but slightly but distinctly convex. Presumably the convexity is intended to help with rolling method of insertion.

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

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Yes, we did

Mainly because he wouldn't shut up about it.

See also 42, 69, and probably some other numbers I'm too innocent to know about.

Autumn's GTC shows who Nvidia really cares about

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I play

quite happily using my Radeon. Got tired of Nvidia's shenanigans* years ago.

*like effectively killing hardware physics.

Was there life on Mars? Perseverance scrapes up promising samples

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Acronym Fail!

They got as far as SHERLOC and couldn't be bother adding a 'knowledge" at the end.

Anti-Metaverse package 'explosion' at college VR lab probed by investigators

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If you must

stage a protest against VR do it in VR. Flying penises are traditional but not compulsory.

Boffins spot baby planet forming around young star – and that's rather cool

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You forgot

the XKCD.

Nvidia buys Arm ... Neoverse V2 CPU cores for Grace chip

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Dammit

You had me there for a moment!

Backblaze thinks SSDs are more reliable than hard drives

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Maybe

they know of a good backup service.

Seriously any data that's stored in only one place, on whatever medium, might as well not exist.

Chinese researchers make car glide 35mm above ground in maglev test

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Re: Fail open? More like open fall!

It just an underslung monorail like the Wuppertal Schwebebahn – but with magnets! No danger of falling as the maglev system is contained in a conduit with just a slot for the connection to the car. There's probably wheels in there too, for low speed operation. I doubt the speed really justifies the expense of a maglev system but I suppose at least it will be quiet.

I suspect in the case of an earthquake it would be one of the safer places to be. At least it's should be properly engineered. There are plenty of buildings in China which aren't exactly built to modern safety standards.

South Korea takes massive step toward sustainable nuclear fusion reactions

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But suspect at

100 million kelvin. I'm pretty sure you can run a fusor for more than six minutes. It's the combination of temperature and duration that's impressive.

The answer to 3D printing equipment on Mars might lie in the Red Planet's dust

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Re: So much for commercial space flight

"you have to accelerate in to a path to get you back to Earth"

Which you can do with a reusable ion-drive tug.

"and then slow down when you get there."

Tell that to the Apollo astronauts.

USB-C to hit 80Gbps under updated USB4 v. 2.0 spec

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Re: To the downvoter

Magnetic tip cables are great. Now to get them to work with fast charging.

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Re: Usb-c is a giant cluster

I disagree. Relying on unique connectors to identify cable function was never sustainable. Barrel plugs anyone? At least with USB, if you can plug it in you get some basic functionality and nothing's going to be cooked. Sure, you still need to know that you need the appropriate cable to, say, charge your laptop but it was ever thus. And at least with USB there's some prospect of automating the process. Window's "this device can work faster" leaves something to be desired but a wizard complete with pictures could be very useful for those that need some help.

Now, one thing that is a clusterfuck is the labelling but even that's been sorted out. Apparently the new standard is to label cables with the maximum data rate and power capacity. Two figures, and really all you need to know.

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Re: 240 volts?

That's already a thing. You can buy the cables though good luck actually using them at more than 100W.

Not sure if it's been reported here though.

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Re: 240 volts?

I believe that was a quantum joke – it collapses to a joke or not joke when read though in either state the humour content is elusive. If you got the non-joke version, well we are already up to 20v. I suppose it would be

possible to go higher but I imagine it would be limited to around 40/50v like PoE.

Oh no, that James Webb Space Telescope snap might actually contain malware

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I consider all Perl to be malware

based on what it does to my brain.

Toyota plans to spend up to $2.5b expanding North Carolina EV battery factory

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So Toyota have invented BMAAS

battery manufacturing as a service. An aas I can get behind.

Woman forced to sell 4-bed house after crypto exchange wrongly refunded $7.2m

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Re: Australians have a long history of Criminality

You know how it goes. They sent the honest thieves to Australia and the religious nutters to America. (I'm Australian but have no convict ancestry. If I did I be practically royalty.)

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Re: an account number was accidentally entered into the payment amount field

Well, when you get used to dealing in play money. . .

California to try tackling drought with canal-top solar panels

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Re: 13GW from four thousand miles of solar panels...

There were plenty in the east, just not California.

wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal.

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Probably

the fact that these are irrigation canals, California being California (i.e. dry). Neither the native American or the Spanish population showed much interest in transport by canal and by the time the Usanians arrived they had railroads to do the job.

(Dammit, ninjaed!)

Japan to change laws that require use of floppy disks

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I see

I'm not alone in wondering how Pinniped Post would word.

Software developer cracks Hyundai car security with Google search

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Or public-pubic

as in cock up.

How Google uses mirrors to dynamically reconfigure its networks

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Holy pleonasm Batman

It's so dynamic even the Dynamic Duo would be dynamically envious.

This tiny Intel Xeon-toting PC board can take your Raspberry Pi any day

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What's the actual resolution of an electronic billboard? I can't really see it being beyond the 4k that a Pi can provide.

Northrop Grumman to use Firefly Aerospace tech in its de-Russianized Antares

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Re: The history of NASA backwards

You seem to have forgotten that the Lunar Module was built by an obscure company called Grumman.

Scientists use dead spider as gripper for robot arm, label it a 'Necrobot'

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Well

if we can have horse whisperers, why not lion hypnotists.

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There's no way this won't

make an awesome horror film.

I've been fired, says engineer who claimed Google chatbot was sentient

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Check the muon article where he literally goes loopy.

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Well I'm pretty pro-noun in general. I just wouldn't want my daughter to marry one.