Posts by frank ly

Being Sensible

Has the cafe owner done any market research to determine if he'd have enough regular customers to make this worthwhile?

I'm sure I'm not the only commentard here who wouldn't want to be seen on the same street as this establishment.

WTF?

Who had the idea of putting 200% of the RDA of niacin in a retail/leisure drink? The RDA is about 15mg a day and the 'Tolerable Upper Intake Level' is 35mg a day. Excessive niacin is known to cause medical problems.

They should be sued and fined.

Really?

Is MetaPod a brand name or trademark? Isn't it just the name of one particular character in a well known cartoon story? If they have trademarked it then how can Cisco's use be confusing to potential clients or detrimental to the trademark owner?

Put a cork in it

To have been left with noticable burns suggests a large amount of something flammable. Could it have been methane leaking from the other possible source? I'd imagine that people under anaesthetic do tend to relax.

I'm wondering

Who replies to text messages from numbers they don't recognise or people who won't identify themselves?

From the website:

"NOTE: Nightingale only works in the United States. We are working on making it compatible with other countries in the future."

Is sound different in the USA?

Cause and effect

"... the critical temperature where superconductivity magically kicks in."

I'm not a pysicist (or a wizard) but I'm sure that it's not due to magic, in any form.

How high can you go?

"The key to solving the Feynman Grand Challenge is that the two-dimensional circuit can be stacked to create a three-dimensional device within 50-by-50 nanometres."

Maybe they need to respecify it as a 50nm cube.

Priorities

"NASA has pledged to have better fire control systems soon."

How about a foolproof battery management system that doesn't require someone to set it up properly.

??

"Although the classical cryptographic algorithms are more transparent, they are not as good as neural networks at selecting what information to encrypt."

How can you say that if you don't know what they are doing?

What is it with the expensive car collections?

I've read about this sort of thing before and I can't understand it. If I was in receipt of 'ill gotten gains' I'd store it in carefully set up offshore accounts or gold ingots buried in the woods. Why do they do this?

Typical government bureaucrats

"First time I hear from them and they open with threats."

A similar thing happened to me when I tried to sell a nuclear reactor I'd designed and made in my garage.

Missed opportunity

"But two years on, it had only pulled in seven accredited donors – and one of them has since pulled out, according to a report on the BBC."

Couldn't you have worked 'pulled off' into that sentence?

Motivation

"... P2P Napster. The latter was arguably the only piece of software that genuinely drove consumer PC demand."

I thought it was the cool games (and maybe the internet porn)?

Check the B-Ark 'guest' list

"These top contacts can also be shown in the bottom right of the screen and they can send you “shoulder taps” – basically emoji messages in 3D."

We need room for some software developers.

"...said it is joining Google."

Being assimilated by, surely?

Gamified

From an article about this in www.independent.co.uk:

"The developers were able to use information like that to find that the court’s decisions relied largely on the kind of language used, as well as what topics were mentioned in the court texts."

This would enable prosecution and defence teams to run 'what if?' simulations of their tactics against possible enemy tactics and counter responses.

News speak

"... will allow new company to: ..."

All videos, no articles.

After reading the linked article ....

The 'object' of interest is the SPP itself. The purpose of this is to get information to enable and improve the design of neutron SPPs.

Neutron holography has been done before, to get atomic resolution analysis of crystal structures but this is the first application to a largish object. You don't get a picture of the SPP, you get interference patterns that have to be computed from the detector output, over time. These patterns correspond to the OAM characteristics imparted by the SPP.

Prevention

"It will shut itself down if debugging software is found on infected machines, ..."

Does the debugging software have to be running, or just be installed? Can you recommend any debugging software to install or run?

Where do I send the picture ....

.... of my yellowing and deformed toenail?

This senior citizen (old man) ....

.... doesn't trust anybody when it comes to my computer, mobile phone or house phone. All of them have been abused as scam vectors in the past. Also, I've been reading El Reg for so long that I've turned into a misanthrope with a bunker mentality.

(Posted from the middle of the woods with a stolen mobile phone via a Tor network.)

An anonymous messaging app ....

.... that knows its location and sends its location?? (Have I misunderstood this?)

Plastic functionality

"... we will enable them over-the-air, together with a rapidly expanding set of entirely new features."

Can they also be disabled over-the-air? I wonder if Tesla have protections against MITM and other attacks on their communication security/validation.

I assume that Tesla owners will get an e-mail (or something) to tell them in advance that their car will have new features. Will they be able to opt out?

Auto-Journalist-Assist

"In a report today, the Public Accounts Committee said ongoing failures of leadership and governance must be addressed urgently if [- PROJECT IDENTIFIER -] are to deliver expected savings to the public purse."

Just put that into any article about government IT projects. Job done.

"AEMO is also less-than-thrilled about how much it didn't know regarding the ride-through settings – because vendors tried to keep the information to themselves: “AEMO will consider in the longer term the most appropriate level of disclosure and verification for settings embedded in proprietary software control systems”. "

Disclosure is easy, you ask the vendor to tell you. However, you need the skill and experience to ask the vendor the right questions and to let them know what level of detail you want.

Verification is difficult because you need to set up system level tests and that takes real skill and experience and quite a bit of time and money.

Did AEMO go through all this before system acceptance?

STARTLE .... NELSON

Are they acronyms?

From the Roke Manor website:

"STARTLE detects anomalous or threatening conditions by emulating the mammalian conditioned-fear response mechanism."

Over to you ......