* Posts by Francis Boyle

2735 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2007

'Windows 11 has been successfully downloaded,' says update for Xbox version of Microsoft Flight Simulator

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You make your own luck

by turning off secure boot.

Astroboffins reckon they've detected four hidden exoplanets by probing distant radio waves

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Re: Not for long

We can't be sure it's come too far.

Electric car makers ready to jump into battery recycling amid stuttering supply chains

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They have been

but because the batteries last longer than the naysayers predicted and because a battery that no longer has the capacity for vehicle use is usually fine for static installations, recycling is only just now becoming commercially feasible.

How not to train your Dragon: What happens when you teach an AI game sex-abuse stories then blame players

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I think

you have just created the profession of AI Dataset Curator and probably won some sot of buzzword bingo in the process.

California Governor signs bill protecting warehouse workers from unsafe quotas

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I don't know about IBS

but I've certainly had FFBS.*

*Yes, the first 'F' stands for what you think. The second's your choice.

UK funds hydrogen-powered cargo submarine to torpedo maritime emissions by 2050

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All I see

are some drawings and some renderings and a desperate plea for someone to notice them.

Facebook building 'on-demand executable file format' that self-inflates using homebrew compression

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I think you forgot to mention

that the process is lossless.

Astro Pi 2: New Raspberry Pi hardware with updated camera, sensors to head to the ISS this year

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The ISS is pretty old

I think it only comes with cigarette lighter sockets.

You can now live life like Paul Allen on Microsoft cofounder's luxury yacht for '£1m a week'

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Re: Lend-Lease gorn mad?

Not to mention it's the Denmark Strait (between Iceland and Greenland) not the Straits of Denmark which presumably are between Denmark and Sweden/Germany. Yes the Denmark Strait is somewhat inappropriately named but since it's right next to Greenland that's par for the course. Probably named by the same real estate sales-Viking.

Woman sues McDonald's for $14 after cheeseburger ad did exactly what it's designed to

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Re: For those who believe in such things...

In the Jewish tradition (see the book of Job) the Devil is more like a secret shopper employed by Yahweh to keep people on their toes. Which, in my book, makes the comparison unfair to the Devil.

Ch-ch-ch-Chia! HDD sales soar to record levels as latest crypto craze sweeps Europe

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On the other hand

I'm thinking it'll be an implosion where all the crypto pseudo-wealth collapses into a singularity and nothing of value is lost.

International Space Station actually spun one-and-a-half times by errant Russian module's thrusters

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Re: Official name for a rotation unit?

Or maybe DNA is now secretly writing reality from some other place. If so, might I humbly suggest that the mutant virus plotline has run its course and it's probably time to get back to the dual headed aliens.

Tesla battery fire finally flamed out after four-day conflagration

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As far as I can make out the unit that the fire started in and the one it spread to were in the same "megapack". The other megapacks may or may not have been damaged beyond some burnt paint (I doubt anyone's interested in checking them at the moment) but they didn't catch fire which suggests someone did their sums correctly.

Have you turned it off and on again? Russia's Nauka module just about makes it to the ISS

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Tristan da Cunha?

You'd have to hollow out the volcano and you'd probably find that Bezos or some guys called Tracy had got there first.

Try placing a pot plant directly above your CRT monitor – it really ties the desk together

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Giving them

very firm bowel movements is my guess.

Richard Branson uses two planes to make 170km round trip

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Re: Awaiting FlatTards....

Eric Dubay who started the modern flat earth movement is a bullshitter of the first order but most of the others I suspect are genuine dupes.

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Re: Blue Origin "Design"

Not a fan of Bezos or indeed Blue Origin but I do like the look of New Shepard even if I have a sneaking suspicion it was designed for a remake of Flesh Gordon.

After 15 years and $500m, the US Navy decides it doesn't need shipboard railguns after all

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"subaquatic sidewinder missile"

You mean like one of these.

Florida Man sues Facebook, Twitter, YouTube for account ban

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That three me for a few seconds

Shouldn't he be known by his correct title "Florida Man in Chief".

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Are you perchance

somehow unfamiliar with the works of the esteemed jewish auteur Melvin Kaminsky.

Intrepid squid mission may help in kraken riddle of why zero-g makes astronauts sick

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Only squid?

Why not throw in a few of those immortal jellyfish as well. There's no way that can go wrong.

Hyundai takes 80 per cent stake in terrifying Black Mirror robo-hound firm Boston Dynamics

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If the 'dog' can see

why do you need a dog? Just make a Trek-style visor.

Debian's Cinnamon desktop maintainer quits because he thinks KDE is better now

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Speaking purely a user I now longer care

about desktop environments. Not because I have any problem with them. On the contrary they just work. Even the lightweight ones tend to be sufficiently customizable that I can set them up to preference and not really think about it from then on.

Honda links arms with JAXA to prepare humans for life in outer space with 'circulative renewable energy system'

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How about?

Honda, creator of the worlds most useless robot.

Inventor of the graphite anode – key Li-ion battery tech – says he can now charge an electric car in 10 minutes

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You also shouldn't lick their terminals.

Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes-Benz? Detroit waits for my order, you'd better make amends

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Makes a change from

aircraft carriers.

Virgin Galactic declares May day for next test space flight

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Have you

even heard of Richard Branson?

Yahoo! Japan! offers! free! comment!-moderation!-as!-a!-service! API!

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constructive comment ranking model vs amanfromMars

Showdown of the century.

Google and Samsung merge their wearable OSes, tease Fitbit baked into the combo

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"exciting new wrist-based experiences"

And here's me thinking those sort of apps were banned.

Space is hard: Rocket Lab's 20th Electron launch fails

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Re: "Space is Hard"

yes, but at the altitude the 'anomaly' happened I think it's more of a fluffy vacuum.

Open-source developers under corporate pressure to adopt less-permissive licenses, Percona CEO says

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Re: Stupid question

Except that they're not "reselling" the software, they're making money providing their customers with convenient access to that software just like the people who used to make money selling distros on DVDs. Legally and practically it's just another commercial use of the software. Certainly we want outfits which make big money using OSS to support the developers, but that applies across the board not just to SaaS companies.

Man paralyzed from neck down uses AI brain implants to write out text messages

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Re: A new torture device?

I've managed to get through five decades with no backspace in my audio output system. Yes, there are times when I would have dearly loved one, but sometimes communication is more important.

Compsci boffin publishes proof-of-concept code for 54-year-old zero-day in Universal Turing Machine

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By jingo , I think you've got it

If you can't understand it you can't exploit it!

WTH are NFTs? Here is the token, there is the Beeple....

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Re: Prior Art

The story I heard was that after he became an international celebrity he would doodle on his cheques because a signed Picasso was almost always worth more than the value of the cheque.

Spent Chinese rocket stage set to make an uncontrolled return to Earth

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There are indeed good reasons to make your boosters solid-fuelled mostly related to avoiding unnecessary complexity but they're hardly definitive. Boosters are essentially extra first stages* so there's no special concerns here. Of course, when you've got as many engines burning as you have on a first stage Soyuz you might appreciate the simplicity of a solid-fuel engine. The Russian obviously didn't as the Soyuz is all liquid fuelled.)

*Interestingly Wikipedia is still insisting that all first stages are boosters. I don't think that's correct but I don't like my chances of getting a change to stick.

Bitcoin is ‘disgusting and contrary to the interests of civilization’ says famed investor Charlie Munger

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Re: A big battery in Texas

The Hornsdale battery is nothing to do with wind and solar being intermittent. It's was built solely to prevent a repeat of the blackouts that happened in 2016. That and to make a nice bit (a lot) of money doing grid stabilization but that was just happy side effect.

NYPD puts down $94k robot canine contract after outcry

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Re: Damn. Just After Tests as How to Foil Piggie's Dog, They Lock it up!

Thirded. I much rather have one of these in my home than a jittery cop with a gun. Of course you could reduce the jitter by reducing the chance that the cop is going to be confronted by an equally jittery person with a gun, but we all know that that's not going to happen in the US any time soon.

China has a satellite with an arm – and America worries it could be used to snatch other spacecraft

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Re: Low earth orbits will be unusable ...

As if the X37 doesn't have an arm.

Yeah, for all I know, it might carry a giant inflatable penis in its equipment bay but I think an arm is more likely.

Pentagon confirms footage of three strange craft taken by the Navy are UFOs (no, that doesn't mean they're aliens)

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I'll wait

Those videos from last year have been thoroughly debunked. Turns out, when you're looking at the output of a long-focal-length stabilised tracking camera what you see quite unlike what you would with a naked eye. The correct question in this case is not "what am I seeing" but "how am seeing it". When someone works that out I'll be interested in what they have to say.

On a dusty red planet almost 290 million km away... NASA's Ingenuity Mars Helicopter flies

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That was merciful

If they'd wanted to kill them they'd have sent them Vista.

Quality control, Soviet style: Here's another fine message you've gotten me into

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Exactly. It's not simply profits but investors' demand for maximum return on their investment that drives investment.

A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

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Re: UK to Netherlands

They were definitely looking for pr0n. And were no doubt very disappointed.

What happens when back-flipping futuristic robot technology meets capitalism? Yeah, it’s warehouse work

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Re: exactly the sort of thing we want machines to do.

Except you do need some sort of plan for when those who move fast and break things start to break people's lives.

Distorted light from ancient explosion when the Universe was 3 billion years old helps point astroboffins to intermediate black hole

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Re: "electro-magnetic photons"

In my day all the best photons were steam powered. I mean, these new fangled electro-magnetic photons may be clean and fast but where's the atmosphere.

Being asked to rate fake news may help stop social media users sharing it, study finds

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Re: Pointless.

There seems to be a stray word in the first sentence of your post.

Web prank horror: Man shot dead while pretending to rob someone at knife-point for a YouTube video

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On the contrary

Stupid and grossly irresponsible everywhere, only in America, suicidal.

How do we combat mass global misinformation? How about making the internet a little harder to use

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Sounds like a search bubble effect

If you regularly search for rubbish Google will give you rubbish.

No ports, no borders, no hope: Xiaomi's cool but impractical all-screen concept phone

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Yes

The wireless charging premium is around 50% – so nothing like going from a Prius to a Hummer.

Europe promises all-out assault on batteries to counter China’s lithium-ion domination

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Re: Grid applications? ROFLMAO!

The Hornsdale Battery was a direct response to 2016 South Australian blackouts. Musk, being the consummate showman, he is simply identified the PR opportunity and made the SA government an offer they couldn't refuse. (There were many other proposals but presumably the companies behind them were constrained by having to make a profit.) The installation's primary function was always the prevention of load-shedding (by holding the until backup generation capacity can come on line) not grid storaage.