* Posts by Francis Boyle

2735 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2007

Russian ChessBot breaks child opponent's finger

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Pluck Yew!

It's seems the robot has heard the old (and false) story about the French cutting off captured English archer's fingers.

SoftBank reportedly moves London IPO out of Arm's reach

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Sheesh!

This Australian thought you were being sarcastic until he checked. I will know have to re-evaluate the rubber duck comment upthread.

Behold: The first images snapped by the James Webb Space Telescope

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yeah, and there's

a guy works down the chip shop. . .

NASA delays SLS rollback due to concerns over rocky path to launchpad

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Re: Others use tracks

Tracks are associated with trains and trains are associated with communism. Also a monster truck!

Soviet-era tech could change the geothermal industry

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Re: Is 500°C (932°F) hot enough?

And done multiple times since then but at least last time round we got lizard lesbians.

Mars Express orbiter to get code update after 19 years

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Re: It never ceases to amaze me ...

But for the first 100 years of that, steam engines were condensing and worked at (or below) atmospheric pressure. A vacuum gauge would have been more useful.

Toyota wants 'closed loop' EV batteries in its future cars

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Re: Value in old things...

And when there's a market for it the car companies will introduce small cheap no-frills electric vehicles just like Chinese companies are doing right now. Either that or those Chinese companies will and it will be the 1970's all over again.

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Re: Monopoly

Kids from one of the world's poorest counties aren't able to make videos for the internet. Well colour me shocked.

Nothing says 2022 quite like this remote-controlled machine gun drone

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Re: Aiming?

I see a pivot and what looks like a hydraulic strut. That's tilt. Pan probably involves doing burnouts.

How one techie ended up paying the tab on an Apple Macintosh Plus

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Re: Tab and return

That confused me to. It's not like the concept of the tab key would be alien to someone familiar with typewrites. It seems like in this case we are dealing with a better fool.

Photonic processor can classify millions of images faster than you can blink

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Re: What it will actually get used for

Reverse cowgirl, 69, missionary (boring), I don't know WTF that is, etc. Could be very useful.

EU makes USB-C common charging port for most electronic devices

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Re: Apple's next move?

AFAIK wireless vehicle charging uses resonance charging which is what allows it to have an efficiency similar to a cable. I don't think any consumer devices have that at the moment.

GitHub drops Atom bomb: Open-source text editor mothballed by end of year

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Or aren't,

you know, controlled by MS.

Brute force and whiskey: The solution to all life's problems

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Re: Smells and not of whisky...

I don't know about your beef but I'm pretty sure someone was telling porkies.

That time a techie accidentally improved an airline's productivity

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Shower, Shit and a Shave"

That bit was cut out of Mr Bean for obvious reasons.

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Training or no training telling the user that the the thing that they have just asked to use is in use is a bloody silly thing to do.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

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Yes, it's a legal thing but if it is in any way effective it will limit what companies can produce, or at least sell. The trick is to get the balance right so that measures intended to limit reparability (like, say, welding the case shut) are banned but design features that are intended to improve the product (like welding the case shut) aren't. You see the problem. I'm no lawyer, and obviously I haven't read the New York law, so I can say how well (or even if) it addresses this but it something that right to repair laws need to do.

IBM's self-sailing Mayflower suffers another fault in Atlantic crossing bid

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No need to diss

one of Conan Doyle's finest fictions.

Drone ship carrying yet more drones launches in China

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Re: Carrier command...

It wouldn't exactly be mysterious given China's known expertise in making islands appear.

AI-designed COVID-19 drug nominated for preclinical trial

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Thing is

people like to get paid for their work. The alternative is problematic. And yes the profit motive has it's problems it turns out to be a very good way to get people to take risks.

Voyager 1 space probe producing ‘anomalous telemetry data’

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Re: Light bulbs

No, they "conspired" to make bulbs with known and reasonable efficiency. It's not difficult to make a bulb that lasts a hundred years when the filament is a slightly warm wire.

Astra Space to launch satellites from Shetland

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Re: Isn't it a bit far from the equator?

You still have to kill any easterly velocity either by launching west of north or by making the change once in orbit. I don't see any fuel savings either way.

RIP: Creators of the GIF and TRS-80

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Re: Does anyone care?

You're partly right, but that's mostly to do with word choice and pronunciation. The spelling differences are almost all down to Noah Webster.

Are we springing into a Y2K-class nightmare?

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Re: USA change its date format ...

Nah, wet clay is better for people with RSI. If you need permanence you can always just burn the library down.

Photonics startup Luminous Computing bags $105m

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Well, after reading the lede I was expecting an emergency medical hologram so I'm more disappointed.

Beware the techie who takes things literally

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Contact?

That would involve paying a lawyer.

Notepad Dark Mode and Android apps arrive on Windows 11

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Being Microsoft

I think we can rule out it being super-intelligent.

'Boombox' function sparks Tesla recall

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Re: Uh

The human brain is very good at filtering out extraneous information which means safety signals need to look/sound like safety signals. It's why you don't see many traffic signs using Comic Sans.

KDE Community releases Plasma 5.24: It's eccentric, just like many old-timers

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People give things names based on other things they remind them of. If you don't like it you probably should use your handheld pointing device to move your location indication symbol to the list of options activation area and then select the cease operations activation area.

Photon fantastic: James Webb Space Telescope spies its first starlight

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Who else is getting ads for 4wd wheel alignment?

Sorry mate, you may do big rigs but this one's probably a bit out of your league and you don't say anything about onsite service.

Out of beta and ready for data: 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS is here

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And attract the attention of Vlad's goons

No thanks!

Lost your mouse cursor? Microsoft's PowerToys 0.55 has you covered – with a massive crosshair

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Re: I put it down just a second ago, where'd it get off to?!

There's no need to keep buying batteries. Just get a set of USB rechargeable li-on battery of the appropriate size (AAA, in my case).

First they came for Notepad. Now they're coming for Task Manager

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Re: Stupid

Probably, the one that God* himself decreed to be 4'8½" and which has been known ever since as "standard gauge" and which according to Wikipedia constitutes 55% of all rail mileage.

*It might have been George Stephenson. One of those two.

If you want less CGI and more real effects in movies, you may get your wish: Inflatable film studio to orbit Earth

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Re: So Zero G Porn then...

Don't worry. I'm sure there's a Space Corps directive to cover that.

Tesla Full Self-Driving videos prompt California's DMV to rethink policy on accidents

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Re: As ever, fully autonomous cars

Still, it doesn't have to be perfect - just better than humans.

And when a million people die on the world's roads each year that's a pretty low bar.

'Admin error': AWS in dead company data centre planning application snafu in Oxfordshire

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Re: Swindon and Bracknell

ICL? Are you sure they weren't some species of hominids?

Weed dispensary software company's ambitions pruned after Spotify trademark clash

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Nailed it indeed. Just checked, they're still calling themselves Potify but are using a logo that looks nothing like Spotify's. (Bit boring though – at least the original was decent visual pun.)

Could BYOB (Bring Your Own Battery) offer a solution for charging electric vehicles? Microlino seems to think so

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On the contrary

commuting is serious business. Buying groceries is serious. It's the fantasy of cruising down the interstate that isn't serious.

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The Chinese are coming!

If your current car can hang on for a year or two you'll have no shortage of cheap Chines electrics to take its place (unless someone manages to organise a trade war to keep them out).

Scam, pyramid scheme, environmental disaster: Vivaldi boss shares his thoughts on crypto-coins

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Not a Fuckin Things are the digital equivalent of a piece of paper with "you own this piece of paper" written on it.

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Re: Wall Street?

Not the Government, the state or indeed just the people. Fiat currency doesn't disappear with a change of government or even of regime. Any not completely barking revolutionaries will honour the currency of the old regime because they don't want to inherit a non-functioning economy. They may however make modifications.

Or maybe not.

NASA confirms International Space Station is to keep orbiting through 2030

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Re: Should buy time for a new one to be planned and built

No, they obviously mean the obscure Doctor Who Character:

Drax.

Web3: The next generation of the web is here… apparently

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"Mildly amusing"?

I'd call it too good not to steal.

Apollo 17 samples yield fresh insights 49 years after mission left the Moon

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For a cosmologist

that's practically instantaneous.

Hubble space 'scope brings its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph back online

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Not

according to the Russians (or indeed the Chinese).

Say what you see: Four-letter fun on a late-night support call

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Surely

the obvious solution would be to put an 'F' for France in front of the first option.

AI algorithms can help erase bright streaks of internet satellites – but they cannot save astronomy

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Re: you do it to yourself, just you/You and no one else

A test on the maths describing a move to a different universe should do the trick.

50 years have gone by since the UK's one – and only – homegrown foray into orbit

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Well,

it may look like a lipstick but I bet it vibrates like hell when you turn it on.

Japanese bloke collared after using AI software to uncensor smut and flogging it

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I know I am

I wonder if this Japanese man has software to fix that.