Posts by Graham Dawson

Re: So, let me get this right...

It's putting the kernel in debug mode, not the entire system.

Absolutely. My xperia pro is still serving well, despite the aged OS. I've been considering dropping jellybean on it but I have no idea how well it would perform.

Re: "They have supplies to keep them in orbit for many, many days,"

Th Soyuz carries crew. IISS supplies are taken up in separate, dedicated craft.

Certainly a pain for poor William...

So you have an objection to being viewed through a lens attached to a memory store and a set of mechanisms capable of transmitting the information stored there received to third parties?

Seems fair.

So should we ban people from locker rooms, or just surgically remove their eyes?

Re: Deiberately missing the point???

You keep going on about these "rich landowners", as if all rental properties in the entire country are owned by some old-world duke on horseback waving a riding crop at everyone who dares look him in the eye.

You have absolutely no idea of the economics of the rental market. I was going to wheel out a big pile of statistics of who owns most of the rental properties in the country (a hint: they are not rich) and explain just how little money renting actually brings in, but frankly it's not worth the effort. You'd either ignore it or resort to knocking down another legion of strawmen in your response.

Re: And somewhere in the multiverse

Upon which can be found a disc, containing a city in which there is a university, home to the Disc's first computer and a tiny globe enclosing an entire universe...

Cron I have never used you before. I have no commands for it. No-one, not even you, will grep if we were good users or bad, why we hacked, or why we logged out. All that matters is that two sysadmins stood against the lusers, that's what's important. Consistency pleases you, cron, so grant me one request. Grant me file integrity! And if you do not listen, then to /dev/null with you!

Excellent! Just one small question. Do you own a guitar?

Re: Meter

The foot was not based on anyone's actual foot. It's a silly myth made sillier by the fact that the measurement has been near-constant since minoan times. It's only the French that ever changed it (leading to the myth that Napoleon was short).

You can derive the foot from the motion of the stars:

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/13/making-an-english-foot/

https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/06/06/chasing-the-greek-foot/

Samsung had patented and were tossing around similar ideas - including mock-up prototypes - over a year ago.

Nice try though.

Re: Question to someone sciencey.

Who said anything about high pressure tanks? You only need to compress it enough to reduce buoyancy, which wouldn't take much pressure at all.

Re: Costs

@AC, Since they figured out that running away from the bullets and blockading calais tends to get positive results for the French.

One good example: They dropped out of the Eurofighter program early on and built their own Rafale instead. It came out lighter, more manoeuvrable, more versatile, capable of carrier service from the start, cheaper and was flying sooner - and they didn't have to faff around waiting for guns to arrive after the plane was officially in service.

They know their stuff, the French.

Re: Good article @trollslayer

Bated. You only have baited breath if you're a cat who ate some cheese to attract the mice.

Re: It is rather sad

Algebra is an arabic word, but the mathematics it names come from India. As do our numbers. Arabs didn't invent these things (or the 0, before someone leaps in with that myth).

I'm getting very tired of all this cultural one-upmanship and willy waving going on these days. Mediaeval Europe wasn't a barbaric cesspit and the arabs weren't enlightened beings bringing science to the unwashed masses. Both sides advanced and retreated at different times and in different ways.

Re: A++?

much boldy, very go, such space. wow.

Re: Value, what value?

Vince, are you seriously saying you want the government to start setting prices for these things? Think about who would have the most influence over that price? It won't be resellers or owners. It'll be members of FAST, and the only price they'll tolerate for second-hand licenses will be one so low that reselling is no longer viable. Preferably zero.

At the moment the market determines a price for second-hand licenses and the system works quite well.

I never understand this urge people have to say "there should be a law". It's like they don't realise who writes the damn things.

It's also worth mentioning that hydrogen is ridiculously reactive with just about anything you use to store it. Liquified, it only contains about a quarter of the energy by volume as petrol, and even to achieve that requires cryogenic cooling. Compression adds to the complexity and the danger, because now you have a cryogenic, highly reactive liquid stored at high pressure. It's pretty much just a bomb waiting to go off at that point.

And to top it off, hydrogen leaks through just about ever seal we can contrive.

The only way to store hydrogen effectively is to stabilise it in a compound. You can oxidise it and get water. Or you could pick some other element, something known to form stable bonds through a wide range of temperatures. Carbon, for instance.

Re: @Graham Dawson

Given these are all issues that need to be overcome anyway if we're ever to get a permanent presence off this rock, I don't quite understand your objection.

Re: @Graham Dawson - Leave it out

Avoidance is not paying taxes that you aren't required to pay. What's unethical or immoral about that? Expecting people to fork over money they don't owe is what's immoral.

@anon

I've had one running for two years now and it wasn't that difficult to set up. Nightmare? Maybe if you're scared of text...

Re: "unmodified Androids provided they were connected to a computer."

One detail missing: do you have to turn on USB debugging before you can compromise the device by connecting it to a computer?

Re: I wish ...

You mean who had the idea of selling their own products in their own stores?

Random example: Greggs. They make their own pastries. You can't buy them anywhere other than at a Greggs bakery. Sure it's not exactly high tech, but it's the same essential model.

The idea of product-exclusive retailers owned by the company that makes the product is about as old as the idea of, well, the entire retail industry.

Re: Don't Panic

You're forgetting how the EU works.

This won't be funded by the Member States through ENLETS or through another EU institution. Instead the EU will issue a series of memorandums and guidelines on the harmonisation of technological measures for law enforcement and encourage reciprocity between member states on the sharing of technology and information, as well as encouraging cross-border cooperation on such matters. Member states will start implementing their own schemes to work toward a common operating procedure and common technological solutions to the problem outlined - without a single, EU-wide budget.

Eventually the EU will start to issue regulatory and technical directives (which are not debated or voted on in national legislatures, but implemented directly into law) on key areas of the scheme in order to further harmonise and standardise the technology and procedures involved. Then it will issue a final set of directives on the broad scope of the scheme, at which point there will be a de-facto EU-wide traffic law enforcement system that is nominally run by local police forces, but is in fact almost entirely divorced from them.

And so it goes.

Meanwhile, ENLETS will get a small budget increase and continue to write memos.

Re: We the sheepeople...

I do seem to like to use the word broadly a lot...

Re: Tizen is a total basket case

Sounds like Symbian...

@Jonathan Richards 1 Re: No constitution, remember...? @BongoJoe

You're correct that we don't have a document called "The Constitution", but you aren't correct that we don't have a constitution. A constitution is simply that which constitutes a thing - and we have that in spades. We have the founding documents of the modern United Kingdom, the Parliamentary Bill of Rights and a few other bits and pieces of legislation and treaty, and accompanying that we have legal precedent as set by the courts over about a thousand years.

Together the form our constitution - they constitute the legal foundation of Parliament and grant its authority to govern by the will of the people.

Up until about seventy years ago it was common for people of a certain sort to discuss British constitutional issues. Knowledge of the constitution of our nation was taught widely and in rather great depth. Not any more. The lack of knowledge of our constitution allows the current governments to sweep away huge swathes of our ancient liberties without even bothering to convince us why, and people aren't able to properly protest because they've accepted the idea that we have no constitutional body of law defining the limits of Parliament's power, and outlining the source of that power.

On top of that: courts can and do overturn legislation all the time. Our legal system rests on the assumption that the courts have the authority to overturn legislation that is unjust, or goes against the rights of the people, or when a precedent exists to contradict the legislation in place. The courts used to limit the power of the legislature rather nicely by this mechanism.

Where do you think the Americans got the idea in the first place?

Re: @fink

Seriously?

Engage your critical thinking for a moment.

First: would they release an image with such a fundamental mistake if they were faking it?

second: the LEM had this great big firework strapped to the bottom; it blew away a lot of the regolith and revealed the darker material beneath as it touched down.

Even if you're joking about this: shut up! I am sick to death with people coming up with all this conspiracy bullshit about the moon landings. it's as if you can't bring yourself to accept that we as a species are capable of achieving anything of note.

Re: The proof, of course, will be in the pudding.

Could be a christmas pudding. Plenty of proof in one of those.

Re: What an amazing man!

True. Should be "received several electric shocks" as electrocution is what happens when you die from a shock.

Speaking as one who has had qiite a few shocks in my career, they're not all that much fun even when you don't get electrocuted.

@phuzz Re: And cry you might

Perhaps he's been trying to install it on a dead badger?

@h4rm0ny

Notice I made no comment on the "goodness" of the pledge; just that the perception of its political alignment has changed.