* Posts by Marvin the Martian

1513 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2007

Librarian of child abuse networking site jailed indefinitely

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

And Dewey?

I think we should be told what system he was using to index the 2*10^5 images.

I don't remember Dewey reserving a default index 0 (legal) so these #*$&#s could qualify their categories 1 (unacceptable, illegal) to 5 (scarring the viewer for life).

Dollar surge helps software vendors soak customers

Marvin the Martian
Stop

It's the rupia, stupid!

Most costs by an American software company will be in dollars, so not subject to course fluctuations: it's not like they're importing Cech bits, French for-loops or handcrafted Delft subroutines.

Outsourcing is most likely to India, however, so that's the relevant currency not the Euro. I haven't checked the fluctuations, but if it's rising then the cost is going up for them. [... think...] It would equally affect their US costs not just oversees, I guess that's an oversight somewhere.

Clearly if the dollar falls again, they'll lower their Euro prices again as they surely did before? Hm.

Weak.

French cough in to filthy restaurants

Marvin the Martian
Unhappy

Blaming sunflower oil?!

Ok, so did they take their field spectrometer kit to all 9200 culinary purveyors and check their sunflower oil for contaminating mineral oil? No, I didn't think so.

Don't just start lying about causes, mr.

I remember the famous Fouquet's being closed a few years back for egregious crimes against gastronomy. And in Avignon I met a bunch of workers from reputed establishments that refused to eat the free food they were offered as they knew better.

Ofcom knocks back spectrum auction

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

300million extra?

Do they plan some mass-migration (presumably from the unliveable North), or it it 6devices per person, concurrently in use? I think we should be told.

If neither, the only remaining thing is to label anything that moves and add a GPStransponder: after tagging about 300million animals, anything upwards from hedgehogs really, you can combine with GoogleMaps this real-time info to avoid hitting them --- this will improve car safety no end: similar to the Gatso-alerts-stuff, a beep whenever wildlife is dangerously close to the road.

Yahoo! knows! where! you! are!

Marvin the Martian
Gates Horns

Combine GPS and twitter?

So this way I can broadcast my actual postcode (while driving around) to all my so-called friends? Updated every 20sec? Useful!

I suspect if I then fill in my housenumber as "13" or so, anybody living in nr 13 of any street I pass can get advertisements targeted at uprooted people: moving companies, change-of-address-notifications, keep-in-touch stuff, local-whore-directories etc. Much chaotic wasteage will ensue... excellent.

MySpace elbows into the Cloud

Marvin the Martian
Dead Vulture

Apologies are in order.

Dear Sir,

Some of my best friends are baboons and they state with the utmost emphasis that they wouldn't even want to be found dead at the so-called MySpaceSite (overal, they'd prefer not to be dead). Maybe those lowlife macaques, but not them.

Sincerely,

Gerald Orilla

Home Office minister gets tough, then gets stuck

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

Crustaceous... crusty...

I like Andy H's suggestion for "Feisty on Foreigners"!

On the other hand, since all this proposed literacy demands only apply on Johnny Foreigner at the gates, and not on the (ex-Sun) press officers, we cannot expect much vocabulistic variation from the foreign office.

Monitor your data center with a coffee mug-sized server

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Down

@Solomon Grundy

100F=body temperature, so 104F= fever.

I think you legally get to close your office once it gets above 30C; conditions have improved since Dickens, you know. Even in the warmest office, I'm thinking it's not so hard to find a corner that doesn't reach this temp.

Lords kick anon leukaemia stats back to Scots ICO

Marvin the Martian
Alert

Barnardisation helps conspiracy theories!

Given that the most common reason for demanding that kind of localized leukemia data is to try to show that proximity to high voltage power lines are their cause, then this randomization seems to destroy the data set's usefulness?

Given the 1/r drop in potential, you'd want to know each person's distance pretty accurately.

The entire thing is pointless, as it was a jobless statistician in the first place who came up with the idea while driving around, and that's about it.

Jodrell Bank spared the chop

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

Visitor centres and paint jobs for Stonehenge?

Speaking of the most dismal of British tourism experiences, I'd indeed get rid of Stonehenge first.

You can spend a rainy uncomfortable night at an atrocious (Trave)lodge, then saunter 45 rainsodden minutes along a motorway to see some misaligned pillars and beams (that started an English engineering tradition, hence historically important) from behind a fence. All this joy on a roundabout among busy traffic. Then you can shelter for a while in the depressing tat shop, but most probably you'll be walking back the 45min to a busstop barely speaking to your (now) ex-lover.

Google out-visions Jobs on Mac roadmap

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Down

You know what the X stands for, right?

It amazes me that even TheRegister seems to have no clue that X=10.

So it's MacOSX.4.11 or whatever, not MacOSX 10.4.11 ... and OSX followed OS9.

Similar with John Dvorak trying to say Windows 7 would be like MacOSX so he kept writing of WinOS X --- obviously Windows VII would have expressed the same in one go.

Segway CTO scoots to Apple's design team

Marvin the Martian
Dead Vulture

Exhibit B--Z?

Who needs an exhibit B if exhibit A is so shockingly painful?

Apple drags its heels on iPhone security patches

Marvin the Martian
Stop

iPhone?

I thought the standard label was "JesusPhone"? Or has that become problematic since the second coming/ update?

Geldof backs Davis 'For Freedom' by-election

Marvin the Martian
Unhappy

I'm pretty new here: "favourite boomtown rat"?

So who are the less-favoured ex-boomtown rats? How much more do we like SirBob than the others, is there a close second, are they all distant or is there a really-disliked one?

If possible on a visual or metric scale. It seems friday is unitintroductionday (as the "chorus girl's wingspan" was introduced as unit of circumference apparently), so please help us understand.

EU Commission plots to end rip-off Britain online

Marvin the Martian
Flame

Bastardly bloody Eurocrats!

We're Brit'n, so stupid overregulating $&@$@ Eurow**kers go f**k *ff! We're GREAT Brittn so we can hold up our own pants! Go regulate the length of bananas for your own zone!

Wait, that's the kind of comment you normally want for any article concerning the EU? Why not today? Are we being selective, now?

Heavyweight physics prof weighs into climate/energy scrap

Marvin the Martian
Flame

Lies, damn lies, and all without statistics.

Hurray! Another person who has an unrelated expertise (an AI researcher) gives his 2cents worth (literally in this case). Oh, he's here to promote a book? That's allright then, ElReg, just pass the mike to him and praise him for "he's used numbers before, so he can do the math".

For example, covering 10% of the land with windmills will power 1 car for 50km a day? Yes, one car per adult for 50km per day I can possibly believe, 500km I'd think more probable, and that would really be what we need.

Clearly, insulation and more efficient water heating (for the mentioned daily showers) would help --- here in antediluvian Kings Cross, I have a central waterheater that pumps hot water to the flat, so inefficiently that we never heat, have single glazing yet summer and winter it's 24--28C here. So yes, start crunching numbers.

I don't care whether average temperatures are now measurably up (ElReg's ongoing series disputing NASA's "up", what's your ultimate goal?), there's simple chemistry involved: you have a system in a relatively stable state, you start 150--200years ago pumping massive amounts of carbon into the atmo --- what do you expect? (a) nothing happens, (b) severe turbulence/ chaos/ disruptions or (c) all that plus a higher temp final equilibrium. ElReg keeps arguing (a) for sheer bloody mindedness; seems frankly a bit stupid bet to me.

Flirty texting could land Scots in jail for 10 years

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Down

What are you arguing here?

If your "flirty" texts cannot be legally distinguished from those "clearly intended to humiliate", then frankly I'm glad not to know you.

Firefox 3 downloads hit 7m despite server FAIL

Marvin the Martian
Dead Vulture

Wow, so here's ElReg's loony bin!

OK, just waiting for Webster P. and Amanfrommars to check in...

Really not a single comment so far makes any sense and/or resembles coherence and/or has anything to do with the article, but they're the cream of the crop, having passed moderation? Worrying.

Navy sonar dolphin 'massacre' - the facts

Marvin the Martian
Dead Vulture

So much for reasonable arguments

So your argument boils down to "there have been cars driving through our streets since time immemorial (i.e., the 20s), no pedestrians or cyclists have been hit up to now so it's impossible that this bloody mess this week is caused by a car", while willfully ignoring the fact that the street got busier and busier and then last year the layout was disastrously changed with all kinds of blind corners? And then you go on to suspect rottweilers are more likely?

What if the dolphins been mostly lucky upto now? Consider the fact that both traffic is increasing, and dolphin numbers are increasing due to improving water quality and no hunting since a few generations (see also how seals are returning to a lot of estuaries). Also, the argument that because we couldn't correlate upto now location sonar usage with strandings mostly depends on greater transparency and responsibility of government --- you'd be actually drawn and quartered as a traitor in the thirties for demanding or publishing sensitive info like sonar exercises.

That said, I'd be interested to hear the causes, so I don't see the point of concluding now on no basis that it is or isn't sonar. But to me, the stranded whales with bleeding brains at the location of sonar exercises in recent years were pretty conclusive evidence of cause and effect, given that these are very unusual things (and stranded whale forensics have been routine since the seventies).

Climate supremo deploys knitwear in war on patio heaters

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Down

Always look on the nagging side of life.

Obviously patio heaters cannot be banned, as there is no fury as suburbanites spurned --- government would simply fall. The likes of you are already nagging on about the supposed nanny state (except for intermittent calls for more rules for things you object to).

So basically DEFRA spends little time on the topic (half as much as you), mentioning the obvious solution. What exactly more do you want?

Oh, an exposition on an unrelated topic, car safety. Nice one. Also very subtle of you not to point out that there's an obvious conservation benefit in every car crash and fender bender avoided, as even a single side panel costs a lot of energy between manufacture, transport and installation. Not to mention the human costs and lost working hour, whether the accident was slight, grieveous or a tragedy.

As an impatient person, I anyways go for the jumper solution (though not those scratch ones made by endemic grannies, but the fleecy kind presumably made from recycled PET bottles), I can't be bothered with waiting for the stuff to heat up and be make sure the wind doesn't blow the heat away and all fiddling around involved.

Broadband bumpkins overtake city surfers

Marvin the Martian
Stop

Underrepresentation in cities?

Here in N1 0 (Kings Cross), I'm officially not on broadband, if you ask the companies (or psychological torturers, if you don't consider e.g. Tiscali a company).

However, I'm paying a neighbour to share wifi (WPA). And I can see a cafe's open wifi. Etc.

So how did ofcom get these numbers, from the ISPs or from surveys? Both methods have their flaws I guess.

M

Teen battles City of London cops over anti-Scientology placard

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

Strategies against Interdimensional Architects

For the student: little worries, it will take time but this will be thrown out of court and a justice will speak sternly of the police while apologizing to the student. [FFS, it's the plods that should apologize, not the justice dept.]

For next time, maybe spread the message over several independent signs --- "Scientology" "is a fuckin" "g cult" comes to mind --- and thus escape. This not only helps evade, but also increases sign-size a lot.

You could even prepare several statements, but planning ahead and training (and having a few different extra signs in reserve). Extra cunningly, train in a few silly or ungrammatical nonstatements, to claim any message is "accidental, and probably caused by a god displeased with the cult of xenu".

For those with time on their hands, go look stressed at the scientologists' little desk, that appear about every saturday just north of the square mile [Islington Angel: 100yards from the tube, opposite side, just before the split of Upper Street and .. eh, is it Essex Street?]. They are always sitting there with their "are you stressed" free test, and dianetics books (but no interdimensional aliens, natch -- that might convince me).

Boeing raygunship fires first blasts in ground testing

Marvin the Martian
Flame

Fight fire with fire

That will teach those neds shining laserpointers in pilot's eyes!

Can't decide how to vote? Publicwhip.org will tell you

Marvin the Martian
Unhappy

An old and very useful tool --- in multiparty countries.

This type of voting advisory site is used since many years in Holland, for example. There's no current one online as there's no upcoming elections there I guess. There are party-choosers online (e.g. http://www.welkepartijpastbijmij.nl/ ).

In Belgium just as much --- but with the added twist "do you want this country to persist?" as a question (e.g. http://www.irule.be/bvh/be/politics/kieswijs/kieswijs.wt ).

The point is that in countries where coalition governments are the rule, it is worth voting as your personal politics are. In the UK and US, it's a simple strategic choice for the lesser of two evils, as in most UK borough or districts there's only two possible winners (and often only one highly likely). A tad undemocratic: the london mayoral elections brought out this zoo of unknown little parties, no point to vote for any of them, and similarly Ralph Nader made Bush II president.

Samsung to demo next-gen, 240Hz LCD TV tech

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

A compromise

Couldn't you update 1/4th of the pixels per frame? This should take the moving blur away AND leave you naturally-unsmoot.

Or randomly update 1/3th each time, but make sure it's no true random, so that no pixel is unmoved for more than 4 frames.

Google trials Street View face-blurring tech

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

Blur blur blur... blur some more... blur

Will they also blur the face of my kitty that's sitting in the window? Animals are people too!

More reasonably, you want your expensive/attractive stuff to be hidden from view, so blurring should also apply to flat screen tv's etc, but then presence of blurring shows interesting thing to be there.

I hear from that arrested pedophile that blurring can be undone? Oh no, that was the swirl-blurring, maybe not this type.

Panasonic Lumix DMC-FS20 compact camera

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

Food mode?

I put it to you that the food mode is developed for edible-looking food, not the scary gloop that's britain's finest.

In essence, it's a reality-filter; it takes your mental image of the plate away and shows you how it really looks.

Now try the same function with a good paella, or boeuf bourgignon, or tempura, or green thai curry: it will look delicious, because it IS.

Ruckus kicks off over directional Wi-Fi

Marvin the Martian
Black Helicopters

12 antennae??

How does that work? Point one in both orientations along the three principal axes --- good, that's 6. Now you have divided the world in 8 octants (+ or - along each of the 3 axes = 2^3=8), so optimal spreading is to put one in each (same as "NE" on a compass fits best between "N" and "E"). However, contrary to the compass now they are closer in some directions than in others...

OK, forget this post -- just start with an imaginary, regular dodecahedron and put an antenna in the middle of each of its 12 surfaces, and you have them ideally spread out. This means that the final-bestest-model will have 20 antennae (on a regular icosahedron), while the earlier (unsold?) models must have had 4 (tetrahedron), 6 (my initial above, on a cube) and 8 (on the octahedron) --- there's no more platonic solids. Let's ignore the fact that we will always be in an anisotropic space (with the router at ground level, we'll rarely be far below it) so regular spacing of antennae is weird. Or can we move them around? Then all above is even more pointless...

Or they should forge ahead, and make a 60-antenna model (on an imaginary Fullerene, i.e. football surface)! Hm hm yes, that ought to do it (in a nearly-regular way) .... [walks off muttering about fabrication of doomsday devices]...

Where's the prof. Farnsworth icon when you need it?

Intel wants to own the weather prediction business

Marvin the Martian
Paris Hilton

A country mile?

Where did that non-standard unit slip in? Is it shortish like a furlong, or is it the "oh you go 5 minutes there to the intersection, then right for another" type of league upon league?

PH because we have a right to know, or we may have a right to remain ignorant; we don't know and refuse to find out.

Canadian toddler dies after VOIP 911 call

Marvin the Martian
Stop

Billing without address no problem

If you do the billing online (VOIP = internetty, you've heard of it), then there's no problem and no paperwork needed as long as bills are paid on time. And from that payment no address is deduceable. I guess afterward they could find out that the address was wrong, from their routing, but that would not be something you continuously check.

Now, if they'd have an all-in-one broadband+phone (and possibly +tv) deal, so the company would as a consequence know where they live.

Maybe the company has even been sending every Xmas a "dear customer" card to their old address?

'Mad Scientist' developing powered suits for US military

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

Power cable?

I think they do the tethering on purpose, so that each armoured soldier's lead should be protected, by another soldier (who's also on a lead, which is protected, etc)...

Not ad infinitum, but up to a "safe" point (say the prez' bunker).

Alternatively, the cash really starts to flow if the first soldier's lead is protected by another soldier *on each side* of the lead, who are in turn each protected by two soldiers on leads ... etc ...

Franco robbed Sir Cliff of Eurovision win

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Down

Improbable...

It's a bit ridiculous to try to bride hopelessly uncommercial national tv stations (we're speaking sixties here, but same would apply throughout seventies and eighties) with a promise to buy series (from another department they're probably at war with anyways, "drama" dept despising "quiz/entertainment" dept etc etc).

Proof or it didn't happen --- bit improbable that there were no rumours for 40years, yes? However much further infighting went on in all those different countries' stations?

How to destroy 60 hard drives an hour

Marvin the Martian
Stop

Are we about done with the stupid solutions?

The article (and one commentor) mentions that Degaussing doesn't (always) work, but still it's suggested a few times. Plus a heap of repeated variations on the smash/blowup protocol, and how it will cost between say 0 and 150 quid.

OK, done with the amateurism? If you make your own process, not only will it fail every so often (see above) but it will ruin your company's ISO 9001 (or similar) status, or require them an audit of the method costing, costing a multiple of said 11 500quid.

This method is (or should be) a certified method to both reliably DESTROY a HD and KEEP a record of this destruction.

Or are you satisfied and not doubtful at all if say the tax people, FBI or LLNL weapons techies claim that they have most assuredly destroyed sensitive records, and not mislaid them at all? Idiots.

AMD now has 'more than allegations' against Intel

Marvin the Martian
Dead Vulture

Disappointed in Reg's title

I looked at the page's source, as I was convinced Mr. Modine would have hidden a joke in the [blank]-[blank] subtitle (see all the PDF-censoring cases, where an existing PDF document gets an added layer of blackness; this works fine in printing, but re-editing in Acrobat lets you uncensor).

That said, maybe was little hidden: when asking for their diagnosis of my motorbike's problem, a technician helpfully explained that "the f*cking f*cker is f*cking f*cked!". Note that with or without censoring, the same information is conveyed...

US Army hands out $3.5m for portable fuel-cell powerpack

Marvin the Martian
Flame

Meth -> Eth

It would make more sense to develop one working on ethanol, not? The willingness to carry a large amount of it will be greater, as well as the probability of finding replacement when stuck away from friendlies.

Especially if you develop an "alround" version that can work with anything above say 60*proof (30* by volume).

Astroboffins moot massive Moon-mirror heliograph

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Up

Re asteroid impact

Isn't much of the destruction upon asteroid impact due to the atmospheric shockwave pulling things apart (an raining fire)? Well, no probs on the moon then.

Obviously we can miss the bauxite and the electricity to fabricate a moon-sized tinfoil sail, effectively; how fabricating this device (and sending it spaceward) helps with global warming is immediately clear.

Dogs reduce allergies in kids

Marvin the Martian
Thumb Down

@Follows common sense.

Indeed, that is the problem: common sense is nonsense. Just because it says what you want it to say doesn't mean it's anywhere near right.

At face value, it's not any deeper than misquoted Nietzsche "if it doesn't kill me it makes me stronger", that complete crap. (Yeah, I'll wrestle you after letting you bleed nearly to death, we'll see if that makes you stronger).

I remember the same result being published a few years ago, and everybody happy about this "confirmation of the hygiene hypothesis", that piece of 90s thinking ("nanny state, let 'em run" etc). To then find out they forgot to take the heritable component of allergies into account (as Paul points out, parents without allergies have a better-than-average chance both of owning a dog and of having nonallergic children) --- after doing that it was a negative effect of having the allergens present.

@Paul: they may have learned and taken heredity into account, we don't know without reading the article; this is just blurb and no information.

In the childhood leukemia case, for example, the "hygiene" hypothesis seems to still stand, but why my body would have evolved to resist pig's diseases (flu, that has actually first jumped through birds) none of them can explain to me. Same with exposure to mammal body products in high concentrations (in near airtight houses --- another very very recent thing, too recent to adapt to; note that people allergic to dogs have no problem being in a park with them, it's a concentration thing).

Financial firm wags finger, warns youngsters to watch gadget spending

Marvin the Martian
Dead Vulture

I agree with the rest of Yoof!

Admit it, most will have the same order of importance, or you'd be at another site.

Yewelrey? Wazdat? I remember vaguely getting a watch at 18, misplaced it later and haven't worn one since (why, with pda's and mobiles and ipods functioning as clock AND alarm AND calendar?).

Living in London, obviously cars are a futile thought. And being yoof, they can't afford their own home so why improve the landlord/usurer's den? [Even if it's your own home, "home improvements" are a silly idea with houses so shoddily finished in Britain that they return to dust in about a decade, so why polish this turd?]

And anyways, my PowerBook and EEE are work things, not gadgets, so the premium-cost is as justifiable as my commuting iPod, and 3G phone. With cinemas at 9--14quid, the home theatre is actually saving money. OK, which gadget do I still have to justify? [Not that I actually own most of them.]

Harman hack horror has blog backing Boris

Marvin the Martian
Alien

Forces of Darkness?

I thought that Boris was the Prince of Blondness? Now I'm confused.

Alien icon as I'm obviously an ignorant dago/wop/alien.

Girl-only fish species survives by cloning

Marvin the Martian
Stop

So the only thing they did was make a bad model?

The Amazon Molly parthenogen species complex is know for many years as just that; the females need to be stimulated in some sense by the presence of male sperm but then go on with the standard split-my-own-cells-and-stick-them-back-together way of sexless reproduction. So that's not news.

Many models try to explain why this is bad, and really so bad that it's even worse than sex(*). It goes all the way back to famous brit RA Fisher, pointing out that if a mother makes 2 daughters per generation (as will those) then your population doubles every generation; if a mother has to make 1 son and 1 daughter per generation (to mate with another mother's offspring) at the same cost, then the population stays at the same level. (If both make 4 children, it's "doubles" versus "quadruples", etc.) This is the famous "2-fold cost of sex". So any heritable trait that lets you avoid this cost will be very advantageous.

So what they in the BBC article claim to have done, is make a model along these lines, run the numbers and find out the outcome didn't fit. Thus only pointing out some assumption somewhere is wrong? I don't get it, are peer review standards slipping?

The most typical arguments contra parthenogenesis are M"uller's Ratchet and similar, that the recombination in sex allows you to combine good, or less-damaged, genes with other good ones and maintain your population's health; without recombination you will eventually have bad mutations in each gene and no way to improve this. [One way to repair this is recombination-with-yourself, so that the daughter is not an identical copy of you, but in each locus has either both alleles that the mother had or two copies of one of the two --- drawback is that you lose a lot of variation until everybody has 2 copies of the same allele in each locus anyway; but after that it's a good way to repair your genome.]

But these not-working models or not-fitting numbers are old news; a working one would be good news. Hm.

---

*No it didn't surprise anyone that it was an (very very late-victorian) englishman that tried to convince the world what a pointless and costly distraction sex is.

Honda harness to take the strain out of strolling

Marvin the Martian
Pirate

RotM: suicide pack/pact?

So this snazzy suit will push me into traffic when I want to stop at a red light?

Has it got wifi (ostensibly to allow a remote to find it back, for the lazy/frail of mind), so it can be hacked and someone can make me kick a cop?

Bones and skulls as they will be broken, or underused.

The American way of bioterror - an A-Z of ricin crackpots

Marvin the Martian
IT Angle

Reminds me of the qat/kat situation

This mildy hallucinogenic sedative plant is chewed traditionally in Jemen, Somalia and parts of Erithrea and Ethiopia.

The problem is that the active compound (which makes it an illegal drug) is not stable and it persists only in near-undetectable quantities in harvested leaves. By the time it reaches the US or the UK. Even so, it seems much desired by the local immigrant community in NY, and very hard to find [there is a long story in the Village Voice a few months ago, culminating in failure to find it]. However, if I walk to my local internet cafe here in London, it is even advertised by a notice on the window.

To me this represents how the War on Drugs has been completely abandoned by the US: police officers report that even if they find truckfuls of the `drug', they do not prosecute as there will no be demonstrably active drugs and no conviction can ensue. (They also cannot prosecute for fraud, as you could someone selling a random chemical as cocaine.) In contrast, they can prosecute in the War on Terror for doing pointless things with castor oil and even claim it's a "significant step" in bioterror.

Mystery HDD maker orders kit to build monster-capacity drives

Marvin the Martian
Flame

It's time to put all your eggs in one basket!

More data on a single disk?

As the man said it,

It's time to put all your eggs in one basket,

Dare to be stupid!

Al Jankovic link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=nll8-kSlq6c

Tesla Motors in dirty-tricks suit against Valley electrocar rival

Marvin the Martian
Flame

I like Muskie's style

I quote, "We’ll see what people think of cars designed by me versus Fisker," Musk told the NYT. "It’s the amateur versus the professional”

... which implies he's the amateur and Fisker the professional. This must be correct, since it's considered unprofessional to hire an amateur so a professional Musk wouldn't hire an amateuristic Fisker. So the next Tesla is guaranteed to be an amateuristic enterprise? Where can I sign up for the delivery list?

Tesla's not-very-well-thought-out credo is or should be:

"Dilettantes of the world, Unite, or any acceptably ordered groupificationing, or whatever!” Revolutionary firebrands, the lot of em treehugging techies.

Dubai impounds cable slicing ships

Marvin the Martian
Paris Hilton

@spider: Continental shelf? In the gulf?

Smart cookie!

... the others can maybe work out why P.H.

SanDisk warns that unsecured flash drives are coming to get you

Marvin the Martian
Dead Vulture

"Nightmare at 20,000MB"??

Only yesterday we were making fun of an american soldier/waffler talking of "the speed of megabytes", now you use the trusty MB as either a location address or time unit? Is nothing sacred??

I hereby sacrifice the Vulture with the Golden Eggs, see icon.

US Army cyber colonel in call to network arms

Marvin the Martian
Dead Vulture

This raises serious questions

Deeper philosophical questions are raised by this thinkering:

--What is the sound of one bit shifting?

--If a megabyte moves with cyberspeed, but there's no spyware present, does it still move?

--Can a megabyte at cyberspeed ever overtake another at footspeed?

Biologists track down elusive lungless frog

Marvin the Martian
Boffin

"Breathing through skin" comes standard!

Don't be too surprised that it must be "breathing through its skin" if it doesn't have lungs --- that comes with being an amphibian (or a reptile, to some extend).

The smaller you are, the simpler your gas-exchange (air, carbondioxide) can be --- hence little insects all breathe through diffusion.

Even large adult bullfrogs breathe 20% of their O2 through the skin (and exhale 75% of their C02 through it). For frog larvae (who have gills) it's usually both around 60-70%. For salamanders like the Hellbender it's 90% and 97%, and for the lungless salamander Ensatina eschscholtzii it's 100% and 100%. [I'm quoting from Kardong (1995) now.]

To increase skin-breathing you can have a large amount of floppy skin like the Hairy frogs have --- even to the extent of living at great depths (with little oxygen) and never surfacing to breathe, like the Titicaca frog Telmatobius culeus does. This frog still has lungs, but ineffectual ones.

Even turtles, lizards and snakes get about 10% of their oxygen through the skin, and exhale around 25% of CO2 by skin (very species-dependent percentages). Also, there are very few species of snake with 2 (functioning) lungs, the left one being reduced to almost nothing.

Land Warrior 15lb soldier-smartphone kit lives on

Marvin the Martian
Boffin

@Handy for looking round corners?

Much the same idea here --- give them a ruggedized smartphone with a telescopic handle and they can stick it around a corner.

The drawback of a mirror is partly that it works both ways. My idea would be to separate the camera from the gps/smarthphone/viewer --- you know, no reason to stick to the idea of a swiveling lcd on a dSLR --- so you can easily watch the wireless viewer in a dark corner, for better contrast and safety. Pointing the camera accurately is also much easier if it's on a stick someone holds in both hands.

Mac OS X Tiger out, Leopard back in

Marvin the Martian
Linux

Ow ja, now I remember...

GIMP drawbacks were: a) you have to install X-windows, so find back those install DVD's and locate the package, and b) it's a pc/linux thing so keyboard commands are by default instead of apple+key now control+key.

This is annoying for 15minutes each time you switch between aqua and X-windows, though there's visual clues so you adapt eventually.