Posts by Graham Bartlett

How dedicated? Not very

Any company, anywhere, is dedicated to making money for the people who own it. If Jim High wants $30/hr and Kim Lo is happy with $10/hr for the same job, guess who gets the job. Hell, it's not just companies either - if you wanted someone to respray your car or build an extension on your house, you go for the cheapest quote that'll get the job done.

Granted, there is also the factor of how good a job they do. But when it's a job like production-line assembly, and there's a QA check downstream to keep them up to scratch, there isn't much difference there.

User-friendliness of controls?

I can introduce you to a large number of hang-glider pilots who regularly fly serious distances with no more controls than weight-shifting. It's no less user-friendly than steering a bicycle (although of course it's a lot easier to stop a bicycle). The more likely problem with Rossy's contraption is that it's inherently unstable, which would stop it ever being a practical tool. Of course, it looks cool for stunts though.

Personally, I'm looking forward to unpowered wingsuits that do the job properly, allowing you to land without needing a chute. That'd be way cool.

No surprise

When you look at end-to-end energy usage, if your electrickery is mostly coming from renewable resources then pure-electric cars are great. But if most of your energy is coming from coal, oil and gas, it's a pointless exercise - hybrids (and efficient "normal" cars) use that fossil-fuel-derived energy way more efficiently because it doesn't have to go through all the inefficient conversion steps along the way.

80s film "Runaway"

Anyone remember it? Primarily it's memorable for the robot spider critters. But the bad guy also had a gun that fired mini-missiles keyed to a person's body heat signature. Not a new concept, just a new implementation.

Ewan

To be fair to Ewan McGregor, since he was in the Star Wars films he's mostly done low-budget arthouse stuff, which is never likely to take megabucks. And he's mostly done good work, regardless of the dollar take.

It's a bit different from Will Ferrell, whose films are aimed square at the mass market, particularly the teen audience. But even a mass teen audience jaded from High School Musical and Hannah Montana is smart enough to see that Will Ferrell sucks. The mystery is not that his films don't make much profit, but that anyone goes to see them at all.

@AC

That's not the wider establishment, that's compliance of the CoS with legislation. A charity has various requirements for charitable operation. If you're running an explicitly for-profit organisation, you can't be a charity.

Which speaks volumes about the aims of the CoS. As ol' Ron Hubbard said, "If you want to get rich, you start a religion."

"And try not to fall on wood"

Not during the game, anyway. Save that for after the game in the locker room.

Missing line

I think the reporter missed the Judge's next sentence.

"... After all, he's no worse a shot than any other drunk redneck asshole."

@TeeCee

"There'd be a long, loud sucking noise"

So you've heard Lily Allen's latest single then...

Re de-orbitting the ISS

Remember that the Eiffel Tower was only supposed to stay up for a year too.

It's a shame they dumped Mir really. But by the end Mir was a godawful botch-job, full of short-circuits and riddled with a nasty type of fungus that was affecting astronauts' health and eating away at the circuitry, so it was too hard to keep it going.

Once there's enough ISS up there to do useful stuff, I expect it *will* get some real use. Crystal growth in particular is something which can be done properly in zero-G, and that's got real implications for silicon wafers and other real-world stuff. The problem until very recently is that there hasn't been enough ISS to allow more crew than required to keep the thing ticking over, so zero-G experiments just haven't been happening. Now they are, which is good.

The ISS problem at the moment is that it's in LEO which isn't a good place for most things. An ISS out at a Lagrange point would be significantly more useful. All current space-based observatories need to work 100%, and any failure tends to wipe them out. Having the ISS in reasonable proximity to WMAP or future Hubbles would solve the maintenance problem - you'd still need to send parts up the gravity well, but it'd be a lot easier if there's a maintenance crew on hand. Out at a Lagrange point, you're also outside the Earth's magnetic field, so it's a good opportunity to check how exposure to solar radiation affects people and equipment (and to test out your shielding), whilst still being close enough to get back home. As a stepping-stone to Mars, that'd be a good call.

The problem of course is how to lift it. The likely answer would be a VASIMR engine. That wouldn't generate enough impulsive thrust to affect ISS integrity, but it'd still provide enough push to move the ISS around at a reasonable rate. The ISS doesn't look much like a rocket or a space shuttle, but of course there's no need for it too - space doesn't need aerodynamics.

Wires? Maybe

There's nothing at all wrong with wires - *IF* as a guitarist you never want to go further than about 10 feet from the amp, or as a singer you never want to leave the spot where your mic stand is. Those are valid assumptions for a lot of performances. But it doesn't hold true for most performances on larger stages, or for any performance involving singers dancing.

If it's a gig where you just go to hear the music and there's no significant stage act, then fine. Mark Knopfler or Chris Rea could work just fine without radio kit. But a large part of the stage act for bands like Metallica is the on-stage running-around, and that's impossible without radio kit. In the same vein, stage performances by Michael Jackson from "Thriller" onwards would have been impossible without radio mics.

@AC "There views don't harm people"

In Ireland, their views included institutional physical and sexual abuse of women and children, sanctioned by the highest levels of the Catholic organisation, until the end of the last century. Look up the Magdalene laundries and the Christian Brothers. The last Magdalene asylum closed in 1996; the Christian Brothers are still operating today.

Today, the Catholic ban on contraception is directly hurting millions of people in Latin America - you *do* need contraception inside marriage if you want a planned family. As is the Catholic ban on all abortion, including a ban on abortion in cases of rape (even rape of children) which ensures victims are doubly violated. The Catholic organisation has directly interfered with investigations into physical and sexual abuse by clergy in all countries in which these investigations have taken place. Catholic priests in Africa have been allowed to use the church as a vehicle for ethnic cleansing with no comeback from the Catholic organisation.

Why bother?

A Predator (roboplane, not invisi-alien) can hang around for a while, can carry worthwhile weapons payloads, travels at not-bad speeds, and doesn't need to risk a pilot around those urban canyons where catching a wing on a building is terminally bad news. And it's small enough that a Predator which does snag a wing is only going to wipe out a couple of cars, whereas a full-sized manned plane is going to flatten the whole street. It should also be fairly straightforward to rig a Predator for building avoidance, so that it can fly itself safely in the event it loses comms temporarily.

For that matter, why do we need the jet capability either? The Eurocopter helo that Brit cops use has a rated max speed of 165knots. Even in a straight drag race, that's faster than most cars (including heavily-modified sports cars), and in any environment involving obstacles (junctions, corners, other road users) it's guaranteed to have the edge.

Oh dear, we need standby generators

As an IT-related company, you of course know that power outages happen, and during a power outage your UPS batteries are supplying all your servers with power. When the power is working normally your UPS is sitting in standby, and it costs money to leave it in standby. So by Lewis Logic, the best plan is to forget about mains power and keep trucking in car batteries to drive your UPS, because it's better to keep your standby running 100% of the time...

Back on Planet Reality, might it not make sense instead to keep the standbys but to use something else like wind power when it's available?

@David Edwards: Geothermal has the problem of needing a very deep hole drilling unless you happen to be somewhere with magma close to the surface, and the deeper the hole needs to be, the more likely it is that something's going to go wrong when the earth around it shifts. Rivers actually aren't that reliable either (there's not as much rain in summer), so you'd still need backups, but you're right that mini-hydro schemes do deserve to be more popular than they are.

Full equality - not always possible

Problem is that ultimately you're playing a game which inherently *requires* adequate vision and full motor skills in at least one hand. The ability to make text bigger and suchlike is an easy fix, but you can't be giving people an advantage by, for example, putting up a big pointer saying "go this way" if their sight is sufficiently bad that they can't see the orc they need to go and kill. That advantage would also need to be given to all fully-sighted people, and then the game becomes a heap of No Fun At All because you're just running on rails.

And Sony not responding to his letters and emails? Poor diddums - a billion-dollar corporation not responding to letters saying "you suck", and he launches a lawsuit. Did anyone see my sympathy? bcos I think I must have dropped it somewhere.

Gotta love the theorists

"Hey, our maths says there's an infinite number of universes out there, and they all really exist!"

My maths (thanks to a Monseiur Fourier) says that I'm not twanging a guitar string, I'm actually flipping a switch on an infinite number of sine-wave generators. Which of course must exist, because the maths says they do.

I really wish these guys could tell the difference between what's reality and what's a mathematical model which closely approximates reality.

Canuck accent

Even with the Canadians, you need to differentiate between French Canadians and the other sort.

A Canadian couple we know, one is French-Canadian and the other is "English" Canadian. The French-Canadian woman has a strange accent which prefixes every word starting with a vowel with an "H". So a typical greeting would go something like: "Hallo Hemma, how harr hyou? Hand how harr Handy hand Heddie? Harr zey hexcited hit's holidays?"

Lovely woman, but can be tricky to follow when you're not sure if she said "hangry" or "hungry"...

Power supply

Muscles manage to get energy from blood fairly effectively. Figure that one out, and you're sorted. Hell, if it uses significant power then a big light-emitting implant could even work as a diet aid by burning excess chemical energy from your bloodstream.

@The black helo brigade

"in the case of serious accidents - this already happens"

With a lot of guesswork. Wouldn't you rather have better info?

"Tell me, what exactly stops this device calling home twice a minute?"

Er - the fact that (a) the hardware needs to be there, (b) something needs to be receiving it, and (c) you're not important?

Bluetooth and wifi are both non-starters, unless the gov is considering putting a repeater in every lamp-post. (Which is technically possible, I guess, but if you think the gov is going to be doing that simply in order to get you for speeding, I suggest seeing your shrink ASAP.) The only possible way is using mobile phone networks, and giving your car its own SIM. Which might work, except that at yearly stats of around 250 hours of car driving per person per year, a message every 30s, and messages costing a penny a time, that's £18bn a year to run it. Nuttier gov schemes have been proposed, but not many, and not outside the MoD. Again, if you reckon "They" will stump that up to nick you for speeding, consult your shrink.

Never mind bridges - if you reckon this is a step on the way to tracking your every move, I've got a nice shiny UFO to sell you, fresh out of the ground at Roswell. Of course I can't post it on eBay, because They are watching there. Except They might be watching here too. Oh no, quick, hide!

@ACs

How desperate is the stripper not to mind the company of a 66-year-old? As desperate as any prostitute, I guess. Need money, have decent body, are prepared to compromise principles (or don't mind in the first place) - fairly standard (if depressing) female story.

And the last one, I suspect the phone call went something more like:-

Officer Wines: "Oh hey honey, I've got a guy here claiming to be an assistant D.A. at your office, a Mr. Corning, is that right?"

Mrs Wines: "Yeh that's right, he works here."

Officer Wines: "OK, I just stopped him, and you'll *never* guess what I've found in his car..."

"to actually do something musical"

No-one playing Guitar Hero (or its imitators) is doing anything musical. Just because the game of Simon is put onto a guitar-shaped bit of plastic, it doesn't mean you're doing anything musical. At least DDR had some relevance to dancing - Guitar Hero doesn't even have that justification.

Honestly, I really don't see why anyone buys it. There are plenty more interesting games, and many with better in-game music. And if you are delusional enough to think that Guitar Hero involves "doing something musical", you can buy a second-hand real guitar for a tenth of a price of the game and platform, or a new real electric guitar and amp for under half the price, and get a damn sight more enjoyment out of it.

@RegisterFail

"Exactly why we need EU"...

Because heaven knows, other politicians in the EU wouldn't waste £221k on installing a shower for a single event (which was never used anyway), £300k for a podium, £90k for a carpet... Err...

And of course, the EU wouldn't be wasting up to £700k per farm on paying French farmers to produce grain surplusses, which then puts farmers in the Third World (who don't get subsidies) out of business... Err...

@Jon Green

Unless you've noticed many submarine or aircraft-carrier navy personnel growing extra heads, I'd say shielding a mobile reactor is a solved problem, yeah?

It's also worth going back to the film (and book) of 2001. Arthur C Clarke couldn't write for crap, but he knew his science. His long-mission ships had a crew quarter at one end, the reactor and propulsion system at the other, and a half-mile of struts between them. On Earth you'd need massive girders to hold something like that together, but in space there's little in the way of external forces, and if you're using a VASIMR drive there isn't actually very much acceleration either, so you can get away with pretty flimsy struts.

At last!

Finally, someone's got one of these working. Took them bloody long enough - it's not like it's a new concept.

@ Stevie and Patrick: Yeah, watching a DVD whilst driving would be bad. But we're talking Augmented Reality here, so how's about a HUD incorporating millimetre-wave and IR overlays so you can see perfectly in the dark? Plus automatic dimming of other cars' headlights. Plus a big red outline on the car/tree/pedestrian it looks like you're about to impact with unless you brake NOW. And outlines around speed cameras. And a dotted line showing the junction you need to be turning off at. Who wouldn't buy that?

(Obligatory reference to Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" and Charles Stross's "Halting State" - if you ain't read them, get them bought now.)

God? No God? Who cares?

The point which the Humanist Society should have tried to get across with their ads is not that there's probably no God, but that it doesn't matter whether there's a God or not. But they had to go for the headline-grabber.

Point is, you should be trying to be a good person, which basically comes down to a lifelong Hippocratic Oath of "first do no harm". Every ethical position comes about naturally from that. And according to JC in the New Testament, it doesn't matter who we pray to - the good guys get to Heaven anyway, and the bad guys don't. The humanists and atheists are at an advantage here, because they can consider "first do no harm" without the laborious framework of how to do no harm which has built up historically around every religion - the utterly unholy Catholic doctrine of "every sperm is sacred", for example, which has no basis in the teachings of JC.

So it's the reverse of Pascal's Wager. Blaise Pascal reckoned that you should go to church regardless of whether you believed or not, because if the Christians were right then it'd get you to Heaven, and if the Christians were wrong then you'd not lost anything. But according to JC it's the other way around - you'll get to Heaven whether you follow a religion or not, so long as you behave well. And if there isn't a Heaven, you've still led a good life which has generally improved the world as a whole (even if only in a small way).

Besides which, there's a deeper point. Unless your god bases its decisions about an afterlife on the way you actually act, and the reasons you act that way, that god isn't worthy of worship. And if it does (cf. Christianity, Judaism and Islam), then it's handling admission to Hell, not Heaven.

"Boffin' a seal"?!?!

Is it just me who immediately thought of the old joke?

An Eskimo's Skidoo breaks down, so he sends out a distress call on the radio and waits for help. A few hours later, his mate turns up.

"Hear you've got engine problems, dude. Eh, have you blown a seal?"

"Nah, it's just the frost on my moustache."

It's easy!

If not breathing, person is either dead now or soon will be. Job done.

@AC 21:23

Awesome, dude. I completely disagree with your analysis (that which doesn't kill you makes you a tough little critter), but I'll defend to the death your right to say it, especially when it's done with style. ;-)

I would stay longer, but I need to go and entertain my hedgehogs...

Incentive to run faster

I notice the anthropologists don't mention whether there were lion-like footprints close behind the Aboriginal footprints... ;-)

It's hardly a surprise though. I used to do a lot of long-distance walking, and it usually took me about 4 days to get up to fully fit. The longest I did in a day was 26 miles (Coast-to-Coast Walk across the Vale of York), and that only took me 7 hours and didn't overtire me. The main reason to stop was usually getting to a convenient campsite/pub which I'd chosen as the target for that night, not because of tiredness.