Posts by M Gale

I'm sorry.

I can't see you. You're completely implausible.

Of course, to comply with the GPL..

..would mean making the source code available. How much does it cost for a server these days? At least, one with enough bandwidth for a few thousand people to be snarfing source code every month?

Even clubbing together with a few of your mates and using their cablemodems to seed the source via torrent could end up being a pointlessly complex exercise, once word gets around that you're selling software that is available for free.

Beta

See title. I'm sure it'll be sorted by the time it's ready for "proper" release. If it's not, you can lay the blame at the feet of the developers, not the OS. And are you saying that the iToy, iToy2, iToy3, iToy3gs, iToy4 and iToy Super Large Edition are not disparate devices with wildly differing specs?

Just think. If it was still in development for the Jobsian touchtoys, nobody would be playing it yet.

And no, no downvote from me. Takes a little more than simple ignorance for me to make with the little red 1.

But he does take his helmet off in the comic.

At least, in the comic adaptation of the film. Bit difficult to keep your uniform on when you've been dishonourably discharged and thrown in the clinker, eh?

Also yes, lots of interesting characters from 2000AD that need films making of them, and don't forget Starlord!

Ever tried to pierce a compressed gas canister? You might need DU cannon rounds...

"3)Hydrogen cars? What a joke. Not only does it take electricity to produce hydrogen, it is wayyyy more flammable than gasoline. If it does catch on fire, you cant see the flame. That's why firefighters were trained to wave broomsticks in front of them in a suspected hydrogen fire. If you are too stupid to even learn this, well you will burn in an event your hydrogen car catches on fire(if you don't die in the explosion)No thanks"

Hang on, what? So you have a choice, in the event of a tank breach, of dying by hydrogen flame or dying by petroleum BLEVE. Well, what a choice that is.

Do you know how armoured the average compressed gas canister is? How about "enough that you can slam into a brick wall fast enough to reduce yourself to a stain on the crumpled bodywork"? By then I don't think the manner of your conflagration is going to matter.

Yes, hydrogen requires electricity to produce by electrolysis. It can also be produced anywhere, say in sunny countries where solar is feasible. Or by a nuclear power source. Petrol, on the other hand, can only feasibly be produced by the fractional distillation of rock juice. There are other ways of making usable liquid fuel, such as methanol, however they also tend to use boatloads of electricity. By the way, methanol also burns with a near-invisible flame (I've nearly burned myself playing about with the stuff on a nice summer day), so you're about as fucked with that as you are hydrogen. What I would suggest for both types of fire is "if it feels all burny hot, get away from it quickly".

Hydrogen and fuel cells are probably about the best way you're going to get kilowatts of instant-on 'leccy into your car in an easily rechargable form. At least, until someone invents batteries that have the charge cycle of a capacitor, and all fuelling stations have their own miniature power stations (possibly powered by a gas pipeline) to deal with the demand.

Symantics?

Is that the thing that throws popups in front of full-screen apps and slows my computer to a crawl, while routinely forgetting which applications I've allowed access to the Internet?

Gets in my way all the damned time.

UK _based_ site...

...international news.

Or had you not noticed yet?

If you read my post...

...you'll see that I said the only thing wrong the electric vehicles is the batteries. I know they are bulky and limited, but fuel cells are vastly less so.

Still, not taking range into account, even with the bulk of a battery the electric motor puts out much better power:weight. You can see this on a small scale with the more recent RC aeroplanes out there. Sure, you can get a .40 methanol engine with an 8oz tank and it'll keep you flying at a sedate pace for maybe 15-20 minutes. Or you can put an electric motor in the same airframe and get 5 minutes of truly insane performance, even with that chunky 3-cell LiPo taking up weight. Think about it.. aircraft, especially little model aircraft, are somewhat sensitive to weight. In the last few years, brushless motors and lipo technology have made them not only the equal to methanol engines, but actually surpass them in power and responsiveness. Only disadvantage is.. as already mentioned.. the batteries, in this case taking an hour and a half to charge between 5 minute flights. Or maybe, for more ground-level endeavours, you can search youtube for the RC model car that, using a similar-sized motor and battery pack, gets over 140MPH. No, not a typo or "scale speed". One hundred and forty miles per hour. That little toy goes faster than some peoples' full sized sports cars!

Fuel cells will be the electric motor's saviour, and could transform personal transportation. There are already pipe networks travelling across many countries, and I'm sure some of them could be co-opted for hydrogen use. Even if not, building an infrastructure like that is an investment that should pay for itself once the government starts taxing the bejeesus out of electrolyzed water.

Additive mixing fail

Red and green make yellow.

Though I double dare you to call him that to his face.

Probably because when software DOES foul up..

...as it inevitably will, it will do so in the most hare-brained manner possible. You've probably seen the video of the passenger jet that, on a test flight, promptly ploughed into trees on the end of the runway and killed the crew on board. Know why it happened?

Someone had told the autopilot that if the aircraft is below 100 feet, to engage landing mode. The pilot was performing a low pass, and must have just edged below that 100 foot value. Autopilot promptly took over and performed a perfect landing in the middle of a forest.

So yes, computers might be all well and good but you need a manual override for when that lightning speed idiot of a CPU decides to plough you head-first into an oncoming artic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1FKAIrb0fQ - note what the narrator says.

The title is required, and must contain letters and/or digits

Not be locked by a password? When it's going to get recycled anyway?

Or by "recycled" do they mean "sold to a 3rd world country for £100"?

Hm. Wondering if I can bodge an old 4x CD ROM into an external IDE box with a parallel port cable. Those two PPC640s could definitely be usable.. with, erm, DOS and MSCDEX. Two 720kb DD floppy drives and no hard drive? Pfft. :>

There's an XKCD for everything.

http://xkcd.com/225/

Because it's plastic, not paper?

I'm going to guess that while the release mechanisms and tracking hardware can get away with not being made from dead trees, the covering is a significant part of the aircraft itself.

Plus it does tend to shrink to rather drum-tight levels, yes. And require perhaps rather more heat than a paper straw would like.

And on a similar if less complex note...

..I've been fighting with Virgin Media lately because they seem to have completely ditched their subscription dialup service (a hangover from telewest/blueyonder days when it was called 'surfunlimited'). The 179 number exists and dials a POP, but username/password is refused and my VM webspace doesn't exist.

Oh, and they are still continuing to place a "subscription dialup" item on the bill, despite the service apparently not existing. According to the last-line engineer I spoke to, 179 doesn't exist either (uhm.. yes it does, try it from a cablephone). My account exists. My customer number exists, but for some reason the subscription dialup service has without any warning or reason that I know of, just completely disappeared and nobody at VM has a clue. He passed me back to some Indian customer services rep who wanted me to sign up to a whole new 12 month contract for broadband (plus a £35 installation charge) when I'm not going to be living here for the next 12 months and the household has been with Virgin ever since they were Telewest. I feel like finding the nearest VM offices and having a nice long shouting match with them but I've a feeling it'll be as much use as pissing into a hurricane.

Still, at least someone was brave enough to loan me a T Mobile 3G dongle, so I can still enjoy my Fridays.

How big a roll?

Bear in mind that the balloon won't go straight up. If you've ever played with or made your own sky lanterns, you'll know that the balloon could quickly find itself ten miles along the horizontal for every thousand feet of altitude, and that's before it gets to jetstream altitudes. Now think of how much a couple of hundred miles of wire will weigh and the probability of part of it snapping. Also, what's going to happen to a couple of hundred miles of released monofilament under the influence of gravity and wind?

Though the idea of holding a balloon and paper aeroplane on the end of a fantastically long fishing line like a perverse high-altitude kite does amuse.