Posts by bonkers

Re: Everything is an innuendo

Even innuendo is an innuendo, to an Italian.

How can I put this...? Innuendo?

Re: ... so the same as the Electrolux Trilobite then...

Dyson Airblade hand-dryer

Sounds better in a Glaswegian accent

"how's the earbleed technology getting on"

seriously I've never heard anything quite as loud, especially in the high frequencies, its easy for the hands to operate as whistles well into the 10's of kHz. It sounds to me a lot more damaging than the live performance SPL limits.

Re: Transmutations are already here.

you should bother to do the "math" - look at my post earlier, the "8MeV per Oxygen atom" sure does add up, its the cost in energy terms of breaking it back down into protons.

It's worse even than my first calcualtions - there are 16 nucleons in Oxygen, so its 128MeV per atom - and if you do break it down in to Hydrogen, what do you do with all the neutrons?

Somebody's dropped a minus sign....

Re: Hilarious

Ahh, the wonders of policy-based evidence.

We've seen the evidence now, let's guess what the incoming policy to support it might have been..??

Re: Great Article.

I love this stuff, long been interested in the weirdo elements, Europium, the Erbium family, working out what these powdery grey metals are actually "for" .

Where else would you read that Hafnium is a by-product of Zirconium production?

Question though - what' s the Lithium situation really? Here seems to be one we might run short of. Can we have an numerate update Tim?

thanks for that - I wasn't aware of Beebem, sounds simpler for what I want.

Have you all seen the Java simulation of the 6502 core? - it really is "right down to the metal" - you can see the instructions being decoded on the metal lines.

http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/

Re: Edward Snowden?

Let us not forget the inherent security flaws that were built-in to the said protocols to facilitate access for the g-men, like the NSA "random number generator" - Dual_EC_DRBG.

Nor the fact that compromised encryption has been the only sort allowed for many years, and it is only a matter of time before the exploits become known first to the crims, then to the public cryptology community. (look at SAT solvers..)

~The fundamental issue centres around what citizens are permitted to do, and thus the effort needed to police them, and thus the degree of compromise built into their privacy.

We are not allowed to interfere with the governments and corporations through any sort of meaningful protest, instead we must watch the globalisation of, for instance, medicine (astra-zeneca-smithkline-beecham-etc-etc), the unbelievable abuse that is PFI, and too much more.

Legitimate contempt and protest must be suppressed or big money gets upset.

Re: too far?

If you worry about whether these new devices will work or not, don't...

We are already some way beyond even remote feasibility - the last lot used "a handful" of electrons (reckoned to be about 80) on the floating gate capacitance to store information for 40 years.

The new ones count these electrons into tens and give you three bits of information per cell.

.. and I thought I was bonkers...

Re: Give us your ideas, too

correction, a maximum of six winners shall be awarded a peanut, the rest of yours idea are all belong to us.

Re: Timescale

Yes its a weird one this, I had to go and check the numbers - I was going to suggest that "time-of-flight" was where the other billions of years had gone, that's the normal answer to the very-old-stars-observed question.

Not in this case however, this star is only a few thousand light-years away, right next door on these billion light-year scales.

I wonder if it must be from an unusually sparse region of the universe that has not seen much if any star formation. Perhaps only relatively recently (in the last billion years) did this one have the mass to collapse into a star, accretion can be very slow if the primordial gas is thin enough. Is it a dinosaur born late?

The paper covers some more interesting theories, suggesting that all its neighbours must have self-immolated into black holes carrying all their iron etc with them - though normally even in the "full collapse" scenario a load of metals get spewed into space. The "gentle supernova" they propose sounds unlikely, even if it does then solve the Lithium problem.

Re: A question for the astronomers

That's exactly what does happen, the "metallicity" of first-generation stars is zero - there are no elements heavier than Helium (astronomers consider oxygen and carbon to be metals).

The cinders from the first stars and a fresh supply of interstellar hydrogen make the second generation - and make more of them (there needs to be gain..) - and so on...

If you go several generations down this path then you get enough "metal"-rich junk to form planets etc.

I can see why the fundamentalists prefer their version of things... :-)

Re: re: that's when Betty is on most channels...

You're quite right, sorry.

Keith and Brenda it is.

FWIW, Charles and Diana were Brian and Cheryl.

Its funny how the nicknames fit them all much better...

redundancy

That's a plus point, the multiple motors can suffer failure much like a RAID drive. Obviously you would need to double-up (or more) the battery and control systems, but that doesn't add much cost, the batteries are still the same volume/power, just split across 3 or 4 supplies. Making it safe with 75% or even 66% of lift is reasonable. I'll bet they're Switched Reluctance motors, huge power and speed and only one moving part, a funny-shaped lump of iron. Absolute bastards to control though, as I'm finding out...

Re: I'm Curious

I don't get it, the FM band is a worldwide simple standard. They can't easily sell it off because it would still want to be used for sporting events etc. In any case the bandwidth is small, only 20MHz all-told, and the useability is not good, you are reckoned to be able to use 1/15th for big transmitters (i.e. national networks), the figure for little low-power users cannot easily get below 1/4 due to the 4-colour theorem.

So, in all, maybe 5MHz of bandwidth in any given place. Get Tim Worstall onto it, he will agree that there is no exploitable resource here.

The DAB bandwidth, on the other hand is 174MHz-239MHz, or 65MHz, over three times as much. We currently use just seven of the available 40 bands, in London, broadcasting about 80 stations. I can't see us ever needing much more than this, if you really can't get enough christian thrash metal genre, then get a computer, or a life.

So, they could sell the DAB band, or half of it, for more money, it doesn't need such a long antenna, half what the FM band needs, but I can't think of a use for the bandwidth, given that there is "white space" radio spectrum coming along that allows all users to use what they like within reason and license-free. There will be no market at all for odd bits and pieces of RF-bandwidth when this comes in.

Don't bash DAB, it is a really good system, its hugely efficient in BW terms, allowing a national network using only one frequency and greatly reduced megawatts, it just needs more time. Also, sure, really don't abolish FM, there is no need to and no benefit forthcoming from it.

Re: 'Cersium' eh?

Cersium? Cesium?

What's wrong with Caesium? - from the Latin word "caesius" meaning "sky blue"

Come on Reg, your a British site, and proud of it, adjacent vowels are not errors.

QMS

Me too,

mass-spectrometers no longer have a huge magnet and a curved vacuum path, look up "quadrupole mass spectrometer" - no that's not four of them, its a clever oscillating field where only the particles that are neither too heavy nor too light (for their charge) are the only ones that stay on the beam line. They're about the size of a KT66 thermionic valve (tube).

Re: Impossible to forge?

Thanks for the offer, I will say what I like about the "smartness" of bankers, didn't they just knock on the door asking for 1.4 Trillion?

We all know how easy it is for investors to buy into a bubble, it can even be good policy if you're out early.

However, the list of failed products with "amateur crypto" technology is most alarming, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_decryption for starters. Then have a look at MiFare, Megamos, all of the audio and video copyright protection schemes, the entire antivirus/PC security nightmare - then tell me that we're probably wrong to dismiss this latest breakthrough in analogue security.

,

really?

I'm no expert I have to say, but I'm pretty sure we read the intended font most of the time. There seem to be many ways to achieve this - with of course a fall-back to a substitute font if needed. there is much more detail here: http://blog.themeforest.net/tutorials/how-to-achieve-cross-browser-font-face-support/

The browser chooses the intended font, unless it can't. - Not really "it's" choice then, is it?

Blackadder had a word on this...

Queenie: Oh come now Lady Farrow, crying isn't going to help your husband now.

Nursie: No! Ointment! That's what you need when your head's been cut off! That's what I gave your sister Mary when they done her. "There, there" I said, "you'll soon grow a new one.

Queenie: Shut up Nursie

Re: How would the professor know though?

well put. Its an outrage that Sugar puts himself forward as some sort of computer guru, his philosophy always was simply beating the shit out of suppliers - for most of them it was their last deal. His affordable PC breakthrough was a fire sale of ill-conceived non-compatible PC things.

That said, I do find his judgement good, he sees through most or all of the cuntestants pretty easily.

As others bemoan, something with the germ of an original idea and some real progression would be so much better than all the vapid marketing bollocks.