Posts by rh587

Re: An amazing experience will be lost

"I will be voicing my displeasure to the Heritage Lottery Funding, and if anyone has details of the Bletchley Park Trustees, I'd like to understand exactly what they think they're doing, because their responses thus far, in my opinion, have been entirely inadequate."

List of Trustees at:

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/content/about/BPTrust.rhtm

No individual contact details but since it lists a mini-bio for each I'm sure everyone on here is capable of tracking down such things.

As for the CEO, I'm pretty sure the Trustees have fairly firm grounds to dismiss him on charges of bringing the organisation into disrepute if they took a mind to it.

One bit of devil's advocate I would play is that building your attraction on the experts who were there at the time isn't a long term strategy, because sooner or later nature will take it's toll (noone lives forever).

So you do need to ensure you've got attractions that will stand the test of time regardless of who is manning them (although even younger guides need to be properly trained, not just a numpty who can say "and here we have another information board you might like to read"), and also that your buildings don't fall over - rustic dishevelment only goes so far.

That however does not mean it needs to be oriented as a "Key Stage x approved learning resource" to the exclusion of all else, nor that the gift shop needs to be filled with tat.

Nothing wrong with Visitor Centres for a bite to eat, nor Gift Shops if they've got relevant contents (books on maths and ciphers/codebreaking, codebreaking kits - including kid-friendly but not dumbed-down stuff, not just hefty degree-level tomes, relevant electronicry to support TNMOC , etc). It's just they usually burn all their money on a shiny building and then run out of time to source decent merchandise.

Re: quackery

"Is there ANY scientific evidence for any of this ?"

Evidence for what? People developing persistent aches (or spinal problems) due to prolonged poor posture?

Fuckloads, lots of people working 9-5 in offices end up with aching necks and backs if their chair, desk and monitor aren't all set up at the right heights.

Communal network printers don't just economise on having a printer on every desk - they force people to get off their arse and stretch their legs for a minute since many employers don't have adequately adjustable furniture to properly suit every shape and size of employee.

The boss works standing now as he was getting tingling in one leg which was found to be a trapped nerve in his lower back from slouching at his desk. Works for him. Hard work at first as his leg and core muscles needed to build up to deal with the additional exertion of standing up instead of sitting, but he swears by it now.

Re: The NSA is just a symptom ot a (corrupt) Corporatist obese and evil government

"So what you're saying is... you need more guns? So, how's that working out for the USA so far?"

Well, Kennesaw, GA went as far as to mandate that every household maintain a firearm and ammunition.

Between 1982 and 2005 burglaries fell massively and remain well below the national average.

Chicago has incredibly tight gun controls and massive gun violence involving black market firearms and organised criminal gangs.

So, what you're saying is... massive cities are the same as rural Georgia.

How are those massively sweeping statements working out for you?

Presumably because they expected something else to break before the panels became an issue, or they expected electrostatic cling to require more than a puff of air to clear the panels and the weight of a suitable system would have taken the place of instrumentation. The weight envelopes on these rovers is miniscule.

I remember seeing a documentary about the lead up to Beagle 2 and they found the parachutes were going to weigh more than expected. The science groups were working out how much they could file off this arm or the edge of that PCB to save a gram here and two there.

Re: Hmm

"My Hero HD 3+ Black is a 4k camera you can hold in one hand (between two fingers in fact) so thhpppt! And it only cost 350 notes.

Okay, it may not have all the bells and whistles, but it works underwater..."

By bells and whistles you mean a functional framerate? It only shoots at 15fps in 4K mode. Good for timelapses, or something you intend to speed up, not so much for slo-mo action shots (the Hero's normal stomping ground) or even just normal video.

Great bit of kit but the 4K functionality is a bit gimmicky at the moment..

Now 60fps 1080p you can get your teeth into, which the Hero does very well, or 30fps at 1440p to give you a bit of crop room as you hurtle down a mountain.

Re: The Internet. Yes, it was too good to last.

"Bad move. Cheques are being phased out over the next 4 years:"

And are being replaced by a cheque-like system which works in much the same way for the user but is much more efficient for the banks to process, because although the number of cheques are falling, the remaining ones are really difficult to find alternatives to - for instance paying annual subs to local sports clubs which typically don't have a phone line or means of making card or electronic payments (unless they've got a web-savvy member and the Treasurer is willing to sift though statements checking who has and hasn't paid), and where the Treasurer would far rather have a small stack of cheques to pay in than having to store £5k on behalf of the club until they can get to the bank...

Similarly for clubs, there is no solution yet to replace double-signature cheques (other than a cheque-like replacement). I've yet to see a double-PIN debit card that requires authority from multiple signatories to withdraw cash.

Re: If loose lips, sink ships ......

"IANAL, but AFAIK it is the only law where you are legally required to incriminate yourself."

Try telling the Police that you can't remember which named driver was in control of the car when it got flashed by a speed trap and see how far you get.

Re: Not falling for the hype

As Dave126 says, I think the expectation is most users will be working with massive datasets and files - big project files that are stored on a NAS/SAN, not on the local box.

Have enough storage locally and the rest will be stored separately, with lots of external connectivity for BMD stuff, Red Rocket boxes, 4K/8K/16K graphics cards as required. A fair few PCIe breakout boxes are popping up with a thunderbolt cable hanging off a box containing one or two double-width PCIe slots and a chunky PSU. Self contained in that it doesn't affect the cooling or power drain on the Mac Pro.

As others have mentioned, if your Mac Pro fails, or you go on the road with a laptop, being able to simply unplug your TB chassis and move your Red Rocket / [insert other expansion here] over to the MacBook is incredibly useful.

Re: Oh crap.

It's not supposed to. it was supposed to develop manned spaceflight technology.

There's a whole heap of medical issues that you could wing with a quick hop to the moon that'll make you terminally ill on a 6-month voyage to Mars. As Chris Hadfield was saying on Stargazing Live last night, over the past 10 years they've overcome most of them, bar maintaining bone density, particularly around the pelvis.

It's a whole set of different challenges to living on a Moon or Mars base where you have a modicum of gravity, and can bury yourself to weather solar storms, etc.

The other problem with Space Races is they tend to have a goal, and when you hit that goal everything stops, as compared to the incremental progress we're making now.

Which is not to say that it isn't intensely frustrating that we don't have a Moon base nor a Mars base yet, but that's down to the whiplash inducing u-turns of the US Congress and POTUS - Cameron has nothing on them! "We're going back to the moon!". 2 years later "We're going to Mars! By 2030. Scratch Consteallation and the Moon programme" Yeah, and your successor will have a different idea, as will their successor, and 3-4 presidents down the line we get to 2030 and have still gone no further, but will have the half-baked recipes for 3 separate programmes filed away, each with about 5 years work done on them.

The politicians are stifling it, which has nothing to do with the ISS - as Cunningham was saying on SGL last night, Apollo 7 that he flew on was an orbital test. If it had gone badly, Apollo 8 (a mere two months later) would have repeated it and sought to get it right instead of going around the Moon. Changing the mission profiles and goals was at the behest of the controllers and engineers. These days you'd have to go back to the Congressional Funding Committee and plead your case to a bunch of non-specialists who will then spend a few months debating whether the engineers are allowed more test flights.

Re: I think that ...

@jake "Humans (and our technology) will not last forever, but geology will last for the duration of the planet."

No it won't. Subduction and recycling of geology means we actually have no "original" rocks from the point where the Earth cooled from a blob of molten rock and started to form a crusty surface.

The oldest samples we have are dated at around 4-4.4Ga. Odds are all (or all bar a vanishingly small handful) of the rocks on Earth today will not exist in their current form when the sun goes red giant (estd. 5Bn years), on average they'll have been subducted and recycled by the time we're all swallowed up by the sun.

Re: Parody exception

"except maybe that pride and prejudice is in the public domain and anyone can do anything they like with it now. Not a great example there."

"Barry Potter" or "The Hunger Pains" as published by the Harvard Lampoon, not to mention "The Wobbit", which has managed to outdo a small (but very fine) Southampton pub in not getting sued for blatantly riding on the back of the franchise.

Massive franchises parodied for commercial gain by HL.

No reason why a parody song could also not be used for commercial purposes whatsoever. Al Yankovic has built a career from doing it (although he always get permission as a personal rule, but he doesn't need to).

Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music found commercial parody can fall under fair use. It does not automatically do so, but the argument's "it's an advert, there's the problem" do not hold water.

How Goldieblox have handled themselves with pre-emptive lawsuits and the rest is pretty dodgy, but parody for commercial usage? Go nuts.

Re: i wonder..

"Since modern papers aren't much better than tapes & the like why not use metal storage?"

Paper is fine. If it's acid-free archive stock, not the bleached rubbish most people feed through their printers.

Plenty of paper records have survived through history because they were made of substantial paperstock (they couldn't make it any thinner with contemporary technology), and the surviving ones are the examples here paper makers struck on a pH neutral/slightly alkaline formula, giving the paper a stable chemistry (whether they realised it or not at the time). All covered by ISO9706. One manufacturer claims a 200year guarantee (provided it's stored properly, not in the bathroom), which I think shows remarkable faith in their business prospects! We can rest easy knowing our descendants will be able to sue their descendants if our archive crumbles to dust in a mere 195 years...

That said, a ream of that stuff costs £20+, so a substantial markup on normal 80gsm office fodder. You wouldn't want to go printing the Internet on it...

@Nigel Whitfield

"There are also legions of people who, thanks to the 'free film' now experience amazing destinations not with their eyes, but through a small screen on the back of a camera. I saw many of them when I was in Italy this summer, and I wonder how many of the photos will even be looked at more than a couple of times."

Couldn't agree more. I was in the Louvre this summer and was astonished by the number of people crowding round the Mona Lisa taking photos on their iPads.

Why? What's that supposed to prove? That you were there? Maybe they were all on a scavenger hunt!

No way you're going to take a meaningful picture from behind the guard rail, through 3 inches of bullet proof glass with a phone or tablet, or even with a DSLR like I was carrying.

When people photograph paintings for insurance or reproduction purposes they have it out from behind the glass, they can shoot it from whatever distance they like - one metre or three, set their own lighting, etc, etc.

I do take a lot of photos - my girlfriend despairs sometimes - she looks around and finds I'm 100metres behind having been distracted by a subject, but I do stop and soak up the atmosphere of wherever it is I'm visiting and not live the holiday through a lens - I didn't waste my time getting a crap photo of the mona lisa (I'll buy a proper print in the gift shop if I want her on my wall), but I did get some delightful macros of some Egyptian artefacts that caught my eye, one of which is now on my living room wall. Get down on your knees, lens against the glass and take a decent photo (cut out any reflections, lots of zoom and a shallow depth of field to isolate your subject from the other artefacts in the cabinet).

Likewise in one very fine gallery in the Louvre I saw people waving handycams around in the general direction of the beautiful ceiling frescos. Really? Are you going to sit down and cut that shaky-cam footage together into a home video, and actually watch "Our Holiday to Paris" again? Crap footage that will get deleted or forgotten about in a dank corner of a sub-sub-subdirectory. Just look at it and enjoy it.

All that said, I'm the sort of person not embarrassed to lie down on the floor of a museum (or on one occasion a State Legislative Building) to get the photo I want, even I do get a few funny looks, which (I like to think) means I get slightly more imaginative pictures than a lot of people (as well as a few that - on review - I think "What the f- was I trying to achieve there?).

@Ledswinger

"Back in the day of real fim the pros had motor drives for exactly that reason, along with high capacity backs because 36 shots wasn't enough, and even landscape photographers with expensive 6x6 film would always take a few reels before coming home."

Very true, especially for sport, news or nature where you can't ask a tiger to go back and have another go, or asking a footballer if they could just loop the ball over into the goal just the same way again.

I do try and make my photos count, even though on a 16GB card I can fit lots, even shooting RAW. When I was on safari in India though it was a case of hedging my bets. Every shot taken in triplicate, bracketing my focus because when you do spot a tiger you want to get home and have a decent shot, not 3 blurry options. I'd have done the same with film, but this saves having to crack the camera open halfway through. Obviously I'm aiming for them all to be good, but in the back of a jeep with a lead-footed driver they're simply not going to be!

Once I was reasonably happy I'd got a good photo though I put the camera down and just enjoyed his majesty.

All told I had 200 shots to review from that morning, including a couple of absolute corkers of our big Bengal male and a bunch that - with the best will in the world, were pretty blurry because the driver had chosen that exact moment to move on!

Re: You know why its 6000 and not ~50.

"But at least those 6000 companies only have to check the 50 something companies they might be buying processed Ta from." phuzz

Yeah, but what if you're buying chips off someone - who buys their own Ta for their own chip foundry?

Tim's point is you're not just having to audit your raw materials suppliers, but everyone who sells you a component or finished product - because they or their suppliers might have used conflict Ta as part of their process. That ends up being a really long chain. And a company like Apple or Dell would have many of those long chains to chase up.

For instance, let's take a company like Apple.

We'll pretend for the sake of the example they only have one supplier - Foxconn.

So Apple ask Foxconn "do you buy conflict minerals"?

And they say no.

But that's not the end of it.

What about the screens that come from Samsung? So now we have to interrogate Foxxconn's suppliers - every supplier of chips, circuitry, panels, batteries. Every cable, speaker, RAM modules, etc. Only they won't buy raw minerals either, so we have to go to the processors they buy from, and from there back to the ore smelters.

They can't just go straight to the few smelters, because at this stage they probably don't know where their raw materials come from - although auditing all of them on the off-chance you MIGHT buy from them would probably be cheaper. Although unless you certify all smelters conflict-free, you're still having to say "we might have conflict material in our products, but we can't say for certain".

As Tim says, forcing every major American company to do that is utterly ludicrous - you're going to have auditors from every major US company, knocking on the door of the same 50 or so smelters, having got there via a circuitous route of thousands of different processors and intermediates.

What would make more sense is for the US Government to certify those smelters who do fall under US jurisdiction, and then offer a voluntary certification service to non-US smelters.

And then ban US companies from importing any product that does not come from a certified smelter.

There's still going to be a compliance workload but it's more a matter of collecting the issued ore-origin certificate that's been passed from smelter to processor to chip fab to assembler, as compared to every company setting up their own certification system, which is unbelievably wasteful.

That would dedupe the effort of tens of thousands of compliance officers doing the exact same thing for thousands of companies. Go to source, far easier than the bureaucratic clusterfuck Tim describes, and a lot more effective.

Or for $4Bn we could just send the peacekeepers into Congo or set up a minerals blockade from Western Africa and make sure conflict ore never makes it out. It's actually a reasonably good reason to go, compared to our recent efforts at liberating people.

Re: I love innovation

To be fair, if the beam forming works as advertised reducing signal in the direction where you're not located, then neighbourhoods may become "quieter" as access points aim their signal at their clients rather than just blasting out a big spherical signal, which could reduce leakage.

That said, I doubt it's going to get good enough to make an appreciable difference in an apartment block, so especially high-density environments will still struggle with congestion, but if of the 10-12 networks you can see, the 2 or 4 furthest away can beam-form and don't leak as far as you, then that's 20+% improvement.

As people upgrade their kit and increasingly use 5GHz though, one would hope that congestion also eases, as people migrate to a band that naturally resists leakage (admittedly sometimes resisting leaking from the hallway into the lounge, which is inconvenient), so geographically you should see less of the neighbourhood's traffic pouring in through your windows. If your wifi only propagates next door rather than halfway down the street (and if everyone else's does the same), then you've suddenly got a lot less congestion.

Re: Supermodel ?

She's been in a handful of films - including the first of the new St Trinians films, and is the global face of Rimmel London (I spied a big hoarding with her on in a Rimmel store in New Delhi no less).

I'm going to take a wild guess you're not the target market. She's well known amongst their intended users, which is kind of what matters.

Re: London Aquatics Centre...

I hadn't noticed, but in light of her new stadium, yes, yes it does... I wonder if this is all a practical joke on her part. So bets chaps, what will her next effort be - a surreptitious phallus, a stunning pair of norks, or something a little more inventive?

Re: Won't someone think of the children . . . (no, really)

I've thought this for the long time.

The real "Inconvenient Truth" is not that there might be anthropogenic global warming, but that there ARE, RIGHT NOW, real, quantifiable health issues with fossils.

Aside from the economic idiocy of signing over our energy security to Saudi oil and Russian gas, there are clear and proven health risks associated with a whole raft of avoidable modern industrial processes.

Why is California so hot on emissions? Well because their topology traps pollution over the city, same for Mexico City. New Delhi is the first place I've seen a sunset where the sun didn't actually go below the horizon - just got closer and closer to the ground until the smog blocked it out.

But that crap is still floating around you whether you're in London or Delhi. It's just at a low enough density that you're not constantly aware of it. Funnily enough, we don't use coal train on the Underground any more, because it's obviously bad. Older buses are little better, but it's outside, and we're not forced to address the poison pouring out the back.

A lot of that comes down to particulate matter (certainly when you're discussing asthma and endemic incidence of respiratory complaints, etc), but gases play their part as well.

TfL runs a fleet of 8000 buses, mostly diesel. Converting them to electric or hydrogen would have a direct and measurable impact on air quality in London, especially if the London Taxi Company joined in as well (there's 21,000 black cabs running round London, of which 5 are prototypical fuel cell models).

Yes, okay, the electric comes from fossils, but from an industrial power station boasting far better PM filtering, de-sulpherization, etc than can be squeezed into a car's exhaust system (even assuming the car is maintained properly), and when (if) the politicos pull their finger out and build some nukes, then the infrastructure will accept their power just as readily as it accepted coal-derived electric.

No doubt someone will point out there are 2.5million cars in London, and sorting 30,000 vehicles is a drop in the ocean, but of course most cars are driven to/from work and are off for >20hours of of the day/night. Bus and taxi fleets run almost 24/7, with vehicles handed from one driver to the next to maximise utilisation and ROI. Cutting their emissions has a far greater impact than those of commuter cars.

Taxis are probably better suited to Hydrogen unless they're depot based. Buses could use either - being based at depots means a sane design would allow the batteries to be unloaded off a roll-out sled in 5 minutes and replaced with a charged unit allowing turn-arounds no slower than diesel units.

Tesco understood this, recognising that Modecs, even with their limited range, were perfectly suited to in-town deliveries, where you spend half your time idling at traffic lights anyway, only cover a few miles a day (and they don't want to deliver at night because customers are asleep, so you can charge overnight).

Forget global warming, and think about local level air quality and environmental pollution.

It's funny that Al Gore completely missed the point with "An Inconvenient Truth" - most of what he advocates is absolutely necessary, but he could have justified it all with proven case studies and verifiable fact, rather than campaigning on the back of a contentious and debated phenomena.

I've used London there because TfL numbers were easy to get. Scale that out to a location that suffers major smog and pollution issues and the benefits become clear.

Re: Money, money, money

A charity still has to pay it's bills, especially if they want to continue developing, promoting and selling the Pi and getting it into schools.

To do that the bottom line still needs to be black, even if the the margin (profit) is not important.

Obviously they're not on the verge of bankruptcy or they'd be squeezing every penny, but as it is the thing is selling itself and they're evidently not having to pore over the sales figures to closely.

Re: Flaws to be expected in a new console?

Components, Line and Inspection. Also shipping times and logistics.

On this sort of scale they'll have surface shipped those consoles months ago to get them to retailers ready for launch, and obviously will have been loaded with whatever firmware version was available at the time. The "brand new" OS build will be completely obsolete now.

Given how they're going head to head with Microsoft for Christmas with launch dates pretty much on top of each other (unlike the 360/PS3 launches 12 months apart). Hardly surprising that they shipped as soon as the firmware was "good enough" (and as late as they could whilst guaranteeing delivery for Christmas), and then carried on bug-fixing whilst the hardware was in transit, which is how they've got updates ready to roll out 3 days after the NA launch.

If we make the bold assumptions that the project is totally successsful in eliminating malaria, and also that the law of unintended consequences fails to rear its ugly head, so what? The people who would have died from malaria will instead die from whatever is the next most communicatable disease in their environment.

Which is starvation.

Far more people die from lack of food than from malaria, aids or any of the in-vogue afflictions (famine is so 1984), but eradicating malaria only makes that problem worse.

Broadly speaking (and mileage will vary from country to country) there is sod all point vaccinating against Malaria unless a country has reasonable levels of nutrition and food security, or is adequately investing such that they'll have reasonable security in 5-10 years, because otherwise you're just accelerating the growth of a population which you're already struggling to feed. That doesn't mean you shouldn't but "we'll eradicate malaria in Africa" is just laughable. Not until you've eradicated famine first. It's only going to work in specific locales where the local population can keep it going on their own and westerners are just getting the ball rolling with seed funding if you will. If the Gates Foundation has to set up a permanent clinic there for the rest of time then that isn't sustainable and isn't achieving it's goals.

The development of non-subsistence farming goes hand in hand with the formation of industry and local economy. Farmer now has cash (instead of eating what he grows), so he can buy mosquito nets from a local weaver (instead of being given foreign-made ones by aid agencies), and all of a sudden you have a functional economy. Hand in hand with that goes education, the resources and ability to learn new farming techniques, construction techniques, etc.

It's a funny one because we see modern buildings or infrastructure go up and think "that's a solid growing economy that", but that doesn't mean the local population fully understand the imported technology. A classic example was provided by a natural hazards lecturer at uni - he was working in an african earthquake zone and a local community were very interested in reinforced concrete as they'd heard it stayed standing better than their brick/masonry buildings had done in the recent quake. One of the other agencies working in the area thought this was a jolly good idea and procured some funding. The locals proudly rebuilt their school and core community buildings in reinforced concrete. Panels.

On close inspection it was found they'd formed the walls and ceilings with pre-cast panels and lifted them into place. None of the walls was attached to it's neighbours, nor the ceiling beyond some dubious screwed-in cross-ties that probably wouldn't hold up a shelf of textbooks. A concrete house of cards, substantially more dangerous than the previous brick and thatch-roofed affair it replaced. In the previous jobby you might get pinned under a beam, but most people would climb out from under the collapsed roof with minor injuries. By contrast you were into strawberry jam territory for any unfortunate soul trapped inside the concrete building (i.e. all the kids if school was in session). The panels themselves were immensely strong, but not attached to any other immensely strong thing...

So food/water, and education, education, education. Because a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and all the drugs in the world won't help you if you're so malnourished your body can't fight off an infection even with antibiotics.

Re: Inevitable question

Unless the consumer was a pumped storage company, which is pretty much the only way to sensibly use wind without also having to pay to keep on-demand sources on hot standby (which we all know is unbelievably wasteful).

Re: Been to India, nearly caused a riot.

RE: Been to India, nearly caused a riot.

And I wonder how many were genuine street kids?

As my mum was cautioned when my parents moved out there - if you're feeling soft go buy some little bottles of water, and when they come tapping on your window at the traffic lights hand them out instead of money.

Without exception they get dumped on the floor as they walk away, and if you keep an eye out you can normally spot the pimps on the corners - kids go out wide-eyed, collect in the money, hand it back to the adults who send them off at the end of the day with a few rupees each and pocket the rest themselves.

Genuine street kids are a single colour - the same sandy brown head to tail with matted hair.

You get the kids in ironed shirts and clean hair and you know they're from a home - not rich by any means, but not street kids either.

Not that it matters because you don't give money to any of them. You find a small charity without much bureaucracy that puts the money directly into their projects and give that way (rather like me giving to a local hospice rather than the NSPCC, I know where my money is going, and that it isn't going into the 20m+/yr the NSPCC spends on advertising, or the half dozen staff on >£100k/yr).

RTFA

"I just can't see these guys making a maglev, vaccum-sealed tunnel while also cutting 75% of the cost of a conventional tunnel."

You really ought to read up on what hyperloop is - not what you think it is.

They're not proposing a maglev, vacuum-sealed tunnel.

They're proposing a partial-vacuum, which is important because levitation is by means of air bearings, not hundreds of miles of magnets. Acceleration/Deceleration is by means of linear motors but that's it.

So you're making life easier for yourself by doing away with the expense and complexity of trying to maintain a perfect vacuum, and actually using that fact to your advantage.

Costings are still hysterically optimistic though. As others have said, you might well be able to build out 95% of the tube near budget adapting existing pipeline technologies, but it's the last few miles getting into the cities to terminate at existing mass-transit hubs (i.e. somewhere useful) that will be expensive and controversial, even if you are only buying small plots to place pylons and overhead rights.

Terminating at an out-of-town location with a shuttle train or bus in (akin to an airport) negates most of the gains you've made with a short travel time.

Re: 80:20

"Even with a modern smartphone in areas of network coverage there's often topographic circumstances where the typical cheapy phone GPS receiver doesn't work with any accuracy for point locations, even though the software makes a good fist of your location as you drive, so rushing out a handset based measure could be a half baked fix that then becomes a barrier to a better, if slightly pricier network solution.

Wouldn't you rather have the best affordable solution, rather than the quickest knee jerk solution?"

There's often topographic circumstances why triangulation is less accurate than GPS.

Why not both? Why limit it to phone OR network?

Some phones don't have GPS, whilst some calls may have GPS available but come from the edge of coverage where they only have the most tenuous of signals from a single mast, rendering triangulation not especially helpful.

It doesn't seem too difficult for the call centre software to parse the call/text for embedded GPS coordinates - and on failing to find them, falls back to requesting triangulation data. Reduces the burden on networks, provides coverage in both areas where triangulation wouldn't work as well as areas where GPS is compromised.

Also, your assumption that phone GPS chips provide a poor point fix is a bit sweeping - some phones may have decent chips, and indeed over the next 5/10/15 years superior affordable chips may become available for handset manufacturers. In which case they might make your pricier network solution look rushed and inaccurate!

Intellectual property distribution is an serious civil infringement that is costing earning the UK economy legal industry hundreds of millions of pounds each year.

Re: eh?

As a cub/scout in the 90s I remember a prayer at the end of each meeting (based in the village hall). Only other religious connotations was the Remembrance Day and St Georges Day Parades which both led to the church for a service.

On that not, I do find it unfortunate that atheists have a lack of options when it comes to attending an organised Act of Remembrance, as they're invariably centred around the local church. I just tend to go to a service and hope the hymn selection is one that represents memorial and thanksgiving to the fallen, and focus on the act of giving thanks rather than the bible bashing about how we must love one another because of God's love. No, we must love one another because napalming each other is brutal and nasty.

Re: What a bunch of charmers they are to be sure.

"Is there going to be a global Big Brother database somewhere that records who owns every single 4K device?"

Presumably with the pervasion of "smart" hardware they're expecting everything to be plugged into the internet and registered to activate the app store for iPlayer/LoveFilm/NetFlix/etc (simply make it compulsory to register your warranty to unlock the smart functionality, which then ties your identity to that serial number). It's not an entirely unreasonable supposition either - I'm hardly likely to spill for a smart TV and then go to the effort of plugging a laptop in to watch iPlayer when the TV has it built in. Pretty easy to get a device-purchaser list together.

Of course what happens on the second hand market is another matter!

Re: It's in da nose, stoopid!

"With my cheapy modern compact or my phone though, it's blurr-o-vision. I think it's my nose-tripod (nose-pod?) which is providing camera-shake compensation."

Pressing it against your nose might be reducing movement slightly, but also the simple act of bringing the camera back to your face means you tuck your elbows in against your torso which both braces the camera against your body as well as transferring some of the weight to bone structure rather than muscle action. With a digital screen you're moving the camera and your hands away which mean your elbows are in free space and able to move.

Imagine holding a bag of sugar under your chin. Both parts of your arm are near vertical. You could probably hold that position for a while because the weight is being mostly borne by your bone structure. Now hold it with your arms outstretched in front of you. Was that 5 or 10 seconds? The weight is 100% on muscle, and muscles tend to twitch, and eventually fatigue.

Read the "Standing" section of "Ways of the Rifle" for more information on standing really really still!

Basically, muscles twitch, bones don't. If you're using muscles then they're going to tire. Bones don't tire as such, so make the most of their mechanical strength to bear the weight, and brace your arms against your body - it's one less direction they can move in.

Re: Good old feminist outrage. .

No, it was the father of a 9yo girl. So he's not even offended, he's assuming that IF he were female he would be offended, and is expressing his hypothetical righteous indignation on behalf of women. The fact that he was offended apparently means his opinion is worth more than the opinions of those who had a chuckle and passed it off as the silly thing it is, rather than trying to whore some media attention.

" Jordan signed up for the hackathon to encourage his nine year old daughter, Alexandra to pursue her interest in technology. Currently taking online coding classes, she was present for both presentations.

"I felt uncomfortable and I thought if I were a woman, I would have felt tremendously like this is not a group of people that are letting me in," Jordan told CNNMoney.

Had both presentations been met with silence, Jordan said the impact would have been less severe.

"But when they're getting cheers," he said. "It's like the whole room's not with me on this." "

That was probably because the whole room wasn't with him on that...

Whilst it's moderately unfortunate that there were kids present, the fault really lies in the oversight of the organisers to adequately check what was going to be presented.

The proper reaction from the (adult) females present is to go away and hack a cock-mash app that lets them compare men or something. Lets them poke fun at men, gives everyone a chuckle and gets the point over without resorting to rather childish mud-flinging in the media

"Muuuuuuuuuum, man made an offensive joke"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-IX69mjpcA

Re: Truth or consequences

In fairness, the school typically provides a reference as part of your UCAS application. If the headmaster wishes to retract or amend that reference based on new information relating to that individual's character then he's well within his rights. Particularly if it's the case that 'Since we provided that glowing reference the applicant has done something that caused us to exclude him".

He's probably more concerned that if they've given this guy a good reference and then he gets himself kicked out of Glasgow (rare, but people do get booted from uni for reasons other than failing academically, although it takes more than a few sweary blog posts), then Admissions at Glasgow might cast a more critical eye over supposedly good applicants from his school if they don't feel they can trust the word of the tutors there.

By contrast, going to the Police is well out of line. If it's libel then the civil courts are open to him, otherwise he should just pipe down. Sounds like a bit of a bell end who likes throwing his weight around "I am Head, hear me roar!"

Re: CGI has never IMO come close to the models

Or the creature effects team from the Harry Potter films. Sadly the creature effects only gets a small corner of the studio tour at Leavesden compared to the sets (although the sets are a marvel in themselves for the attention to detail and love that was lavished on them over the decade of shooting). The craftsmanship on display is utterly breathtaking, as is the castle model that they used for composite shots of the outside. The place is well worth a visit even if you're not that into Potter just to look at sets, props and displays from the art department (they've got something like 20k+ visualisations and concept art pieces tucked away somewhere. They had a lot on display but I'd love to go trawling through their archive).

"BTW, it may be true that nobody was radiation poisoned from the Fukushima accident, but the prolonged evacuation of hundreds of square kilometers comes at a staggering human cost."

As opposed to the staggering human cost of making way for the exploitation of hundreds of square kilometres of tar sands, or setting fire to the subterranea of Pennsylvania. Or the human cost of war that seems to go hand in hand with fossil fuel extraction in parts of Africa and the Middle East....

Re: nfc?

"Shame it's going imho."

Really? I'm glad to see the back of it. We do a niche app for an industry's trade shows. 9/10 customers wanted a QR reader built in. 1/10 wanted an MS Tag reader. We haven't done that yet, and now we can legitimately tell them to just conform and use QR which is as close as you can get to a standard.

Have to say I've never really had a problem reading QR codes (QR Code Scanner PRO for Blackberry), and nor did the people scanning our polo shirts at the last such event.

Face it, Tag is just a PITA. Every different tag system requires the user to have the right app on their phone to scan that particular. QR is the de facto standard, some phones come with a QR scanner pre-loaded. An MS Tag scanner? Not so much...

If you think you might want to change where the QR code directs to (MS Tag's one selling point) then point it at a dedicated HTML page and do a redirect to whatever PDF, vCard, email address or web address you actually want it to go to this week.

The only issue I've had is when I was handed a flyer for a competition at a neighbouring sports club. Entry forms could be downloaded via the QR code on the flyer.

Nice idea, but there were three problems with this:

1. No URL was provided for those without a smartphone.

2. The left hand control square of the tag had been cut off by the printer, so it didn't scan.

3. It would have made more sense to just print the entry form on the back of the flyer, then I don't have to download/print anything.

That's not the fault of QR though, but that of the muppet who did the flyer.

And as for NFC. Really? No. Give it a few years but something camera based is far preferable for the vast majority right now.

Re: Top speed?

Define "low level". A BRS can deploy in as little as 260ft. Unless you go belly up during landing or takeoff (the most dangerous stage of any flight, whether you're flying fixed wing, rotary or "other"), then this should be relatively safe given most of your flight would surely be at 1000ft, but most likely making partial use of it's 8000ft ceiling.

Flying into buildings or pylons is a hazard in any light aircraft, helicopter, ultralight or other aircraft that isn't following a monitored and defined route from ATC up to 30,000ft.

And yeah. 45 litres for 30km is an expensive way to travel.

I had thought it might have a niche application for those first responders who tool around single-crewed assisting ambulance crews and dealing with bits and pieces that perhaps don't need a full ambulance + crew. However, as the maximum payload (with full fuel) is 100kg including pilot and gear, you're going to need a skinny pilot and (s)he'll barely have enough spare capacity to carry a triangular bandage with them. They're going to need to work on the range/payload profile a bit.

That said, it's an early product. Just as the Model T was. They will sell a few, because there are enough people out there with £130k to drop on a toy (which is pretty much what early motor cars were, barely a match for a horse and carriage beyond novelty value), and various militaries will have a few just to play with, even if they don't end up actually using them for anything.

Ultimately one would hope they'll develop from there into something moderately useful.

One has to congratulate them on bringing a vaguely saleable product to market in a mere decade compared to Paul Moller who has essentially nothing to show for 50 years of work beyond some pretty models and a collection of prototypes that can only fly with the assistance of a crane. Start small, get something to market and develop your product range once you've actually generated an income stream and have a working product to show prospective buyers and investors...