Re: Might take a while
It was traditionally the architect. I think that would translate to senior management.
Posts by Graham Dawson
2678 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007
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Sane people, I BEG you: Stop the software defined moronocalypse
Apple goes to crapple in stock plunge kerfaffle: $113bn wiped off in days
Windows 10: Buy cheap, buy twice, right? Buy FREE ... buy FOREVER
Petrol cars are dead in the water, says Tesla CTO waving numbers on the back of an envelope
Friday 31st July 2015 22:08 GMT 
Of course all of this ignores the fact that essentially all of the pollution a car will produce over its lifetime is produced during the manufacture of that car, and at the moment an electric car produces far more pollution in total (that means counting everything, not just CO2 emissions) during its manufacture than an equivalent IC car. Elon's big battery manufacturing plants might mitigate that somewhat, but I can't imagine they'd make a significant dent in the total, especially when you consider the environmental issues surrounding the mining and refinement of rare earths.
Ballmer's billion-dollar blunders: When he gambled Microsoft's money and lost
YOU! DEGRASSE! It's time to make Pluto a proper planet again, says NASA boffin
Saturday 25th July 2015 13:47 GMT
Re: American
No, it didn't. You're thinking of the failed Indiana Pi Bill, a legislative attempt to square the circle - something politicians and legislatures around the world have been attempting to do in one form or another ever since they were invented. It was just rather more literal in this case.
NSPCC: Two nonces nailed by cops every day
Account at HSBC? BAD LUCK, no iPhone bonk-banking for you
Tuesday 14th July 2015 14:49 GMT
"all those wasted moments finding the right card"
I have two. Credit. Debit. They're in my wallet, which is in my pocket. Unless iPhone users walk around with their phones literally glued to their hands and have the bonkpay app open all the time I don't think I'm going to be suffering any comparative delay finding my money.
Pan Am Games: Link to our website without permission and we'll sue
Saturday 11th July 2015 20:38 GMT
Technically correct, but the lack of a distinct second-person plural in modern English has resulted in the evolution of a number of attempts to replicate it, especially in American English - yourselves, y'all, yinz and so on. If we were still using tou/thee it wouldn't be an issue, but of course language evolves to drop and reacquire forms all the time, so it's only inevitable. Perhaps in a few hundred years we'll have adopted something else equally silly.
We tried using Windows 10 for real work and ... oh, the horror
Why OH WHY did Blighty privatise EVERYTHING?
Sunday 28th June 2015 21:31 GMT
Re: Why did the EU insist on separating track and train operators?
EU Directive 91/440 required all member states to separate the management of infrastructure from the provision of transport services. It was modelled on the "successful" Swedish practice, though between the directive being drafted and coming into force Sweden's railways went down the same shitter as ours would do a few years later.
Thing is, Sweden's railways are still state-operated and have suffered exactly the same issues as our own railways. The UK problem wasn't privatisation, but the lack of cooperation between the infrastructure management and the transport operators.
Why is it that women are consistently paid less than men?
Tuesday 23rd June 2015 20:20 GMT
@Tom 13 Re: @Graham Dawson
"here's not a great deal of skill in bricklaying. You trowel the mortar on the brick, press it down/slide it over the correct amount, and move to the next brick."
I've worked on enough projects and knocked down enough shonky walls after the fact to know the difference people people who think that way and brickies who are actually worth paying. Generally speaking, the people who do think that way are called apprentices and they're kept away from anything remotely structural or visible.
Any fool can slap mortar on bricks and call it a wall. It takes a long, long time before they're actually good at it.
Sunday 21st June 2015 10:19 GMT
Re: Something missing
The whole point of comparing like for like is to eliminate confounding variables - things that can't be controlled, like relative supply and demand, required skill, cost of operation and so forth.
Simple example: Bricklayers require a lot of training and need several years of experience to be any use, and are always in relatively short supply as a result (though not nearly as short as plumbers or gas fitters). Secretaries need to know how to turn on a computer, type reasonably well and answer phones, and can be had for pennies because there's a glut of people with these skills
A man working as a secretary will be earning the same as a woman working as a secretary (I know this, because I have done so), and a woman working as a brickie (and yes they do exist) will earn as much as a man working as a brickie.
FLICK my FLINT and SNIFF my TREE on the streets of Naples
Saturday 20th June 2015 10:51 GMT
Re: Welcome Back
The big brick and mortar retailers generally do send you vouchers for things that you want - or more accurately things that you are more likely to buy based on your shopping habits. They can be disturbingly accurate in their predictions - so accurate that they have to toss in unrelated vouchers to mix things up a bit.
Online retailers are amateurs in comparison.
Using leather in 'leccy cars is 'unTesla', rages vegan shareholder
Wednesday 10th June 2015 20:00 GMT
@sabroni Re: providing the world's population with the protein it needs to survive.
Others have pointed it out, but it's worth repeating: most meat animals are kept on marginal lands that wouldn't be suitable for crop farming. Cows and sheep are the most efficient way of turning otherwise inedible grasses into food and they turn it into a form that is most easily processed by our bodies, as it's pretty much in the form we need it to be in already - proteins, fats, vitamins. Got to get that lovely offal down your throat too. You barely need to do anything to digest it.
Now you could argue the point on factory-farmed piggies, which don't live particularly nice lives at the best of times, but free-range piggies raised on the crap we throw out are particularly delicious, and given they consume a great deal of waste food that would otherwise be dumped (and the occasional farmer) they're good for the environment as well.
For the record I was raised out in rural derbyshire and lived close enough to farms to know what a mess an animal makes when you cut it open. That sort of visceral knowledge either turns you veggie or completely inures you to the whole thing. Fortunately for my tastebuds I soon came to the conclusion that piggies are at their best when they're sliced and smoked.
Yum.
Online identity woes can only be solved through the medium of GIF
Your CAR is the 'ultimate mobile device', reckons Apple COO
Queen's Speech: Snoopers' Charter RETURNS amid 'modernisation' push
BlackBerry: We ARE cutting jobs AGAIN
Sunday 24th May 2015 20:08 GMT
Re: Sadly...@cb
Pfft, they "tried". If they'd actually stuck with one platform instead of fundamentally changing it with every iteration and if they'd actually marketed it properly, and maybe if they'd not let the Symbian team murder it in the cradle... they tried with the N900 and N9 the same way Microsoft tried with Xenix.
SpaceX signs off on another successful mission with Pacific splashdown
Friday 22nd May 2015 01:09 GMT
The leading conclusions I expect to be drawn from the worm experiment are
a) that there are previously unaccounted effects of microgravity leading to a loss of muscle mass and tone
b) that the body's reaction to microgravity leads to unpredictable changes in metabolism that result in poor uptake of essential minerals
c) further that a certain amount of reduction in physical size may occur
d) that regular exercise along a general line of squeezing, bending and stretching may assist in staving of the effects, and
e) that the most viable long-term solution to the physiological effects of human habitation in space is to fill the entire cabin with high grade loam and require astronauts to burrow through it, thus mitigating the concerns of (a) and (b), negating the effects of (c) and fulfilling the requirements of (d).
Yow! It's the HOT NEW 'Collections' from Google! Oh wait ... it's a Google+ thing
Right Dabbsy my old son, you can cram this job right up your BLEEEARRGH
BARMY bio-boffins are growing DINOSAUR SNOUTS on CHICKENS
Mondeo Man turns into mutant electrical beauty: Ford Mondeo Hybrid
Sunday 10th May 2015 00:29 GMT
Bad example. Zirconia is a much prettier rock than diamond and isn't tainted by the dubious moral decisions of a monopoly supplier forcing an artificially high price through artificial supply restriction. So it's not a "cheap knockoff", it's an arguably superior product at a much more reasonable price.
Facebook echo chamber: Or, the British media and the election
Shields up! Shields up! ASTRONAUTS flying to MARS will arrive BRAIN DAMAGED, boffins claim
Sunday 3rd May 2015 10:39 GMT
Re: Not really equivalent
"Someone hasn't read their Larry Niven..."
I plead guilty m'lud, and throw myself on the mercy of the court.
"The logical conclusion, therefore, being that the first colonists on Mars would have to be Clangers - right…?"
No. Mars has no blue string. They'd never survive.
Saturday 2nd May 2015 11:21 GMT
Re: Not really equivalent
The Apollo 14 astronauts were apparently exposed to 1400mrem over 4 days, which seems to be even less than skylab. There's a lot to account for there though. They were on the moon for a good portion of the mission and likely shielded from a fair amount of radiation by its sheer bulk.
All of which leads me to the only sane conclusion: in order to get to mars safely, we need to use the moon as a spaceship.
Saturday 2nd May 2015 10:59 GMT
Re: Not really equivalent
Well... the issue is that they gave them the dose all at once, and a quick check around the numbers makes me think it's a lot higher than anyone would expect to be exposed to in space.
Skylab 4 was an 84 day mission. The astronauts were exposed to about 17 rems cumulative over that time, or 0.17 Grays. That's for 84 days, or a rate of 0.0000082 Gy/minute (Assuming I can indeed count and am not ballsing up the conversion between rems and Grays, and I'd appreciate if someone checked the maths). This test exposed the mice to between 0.5 and 1 Gy per minute for a short but sustained period. If the skylab astronauts had suffered that sort of radiation absorption for the entire mission then they would have take on board 120,000 Grays of radiation. They'd be dead. In fact they'd probably have cooked right through.
This experiment suffers the same issue that a lot of mouse experiments suffer - they expose the mice to an unrealistically high dose of whatever is being tested and assume a linear relationship between dose and effect, and assume that a single large dose is equivalent to a chronic low dose. They don't examine whether there's an effect from low-level cumulative radiation exposure. They just blast them in the brain with what would be a fatal dose of radiation if it was sustained for more than a minute, and then act surprised when they turn out brain damaged.
Thing is, even assuming there is a cumulative effect from radiation, you have to account for the body's ability to absorb and adapt to radiation over a sustained period. If you expose someone to a cumulatively high dose of radiation over a period of a few years they will likely not suffer any effects from it, beyond an increased risk of particular cancers. Expose them to the same high dose of radiation over a second and their organs will melt and dribble out of their behind.
tl;dr the experiment assumes a linear relationship between dose and effect. The experiment posited an unrealistic environment and did not test what would happen in reality.
Sources:
http://srag-nt.jsc.nasa.gov/spaceradiation/faq/faq.cfm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_%28unit%29
(and an assumption that the 1:1 rad/rem relationship holds in the particular situation described)
Wordpress munching contagion turns Linux servers into spam bots
Citroën C4 Cactus BlueHDi: A funky urban crossover
The huge flaw in Moore’s Law? It's NOT a law after all
Saturday 25th April 2015 10:01 GMT
Re: Spelling Police
Catenation is also a term in linguistics. It's less frequently used than concatenation, but nevertheless you can catenate words.
Sadly the wikipedia article about the word doesn't include that definition, which is presumably why this isn't so widely known today.
And, for the record, I'm still waiting for you to back up that accusation of plagiarism you made against me. But then I've noticed something of a pattern in your posting recently. Accuse someone of something, declare yourself superior in some way and then bugger off when you're called on it.
Public exploit crashes Minecraft servers
WW2 German Enigma machine auctioned for record-breaking price
Easy ... easy ... Aw CRAP! SpaceX rocket ALMOST lands on ocean hoverbase
Wednesday 15th April 2015 23:25 GMT
Re: Meh
Here's the thing: they very nearly did it. The craft suffered a sticky throttle valve, which caused the guidance computer to overcompensate. On only their second attempt they got it down to the barge and very nearly landed it, but that throttle problem scuppered it at the last moment.
Frankly your initial post was correct. You know fuck.
Wednesday 15th April 2015 14:57 GMT
Re: Meh
The divert video is even better for demonstrating it. They can take the falcon through some pretty extreme manoeuvres already and they've advanced their capabilities quite a bit from that test. The technology is there and it works in ideal conditions, so they just need to figure out how to deal with the less-than-ideal. They've already demonstrated that they can get it to the barge and set it down in one piece. Of course it fell over, exploded and sank in the swa- er, sea, but the next one will surely stand firm.
Landing on a barge is harder than landing on land anyway. For one thing, the ground doesn't generally wobble up and down (unless you're having a really bad day).
To BALDLY GO where few have gone before: NASA 'naut twin to spend YEAR IN SPAACE
Sunday 29th March 2015 21:57 GMT
Re: Baldly go?
The entire concept of the split infinitive is derived from languages in which tenses are conjugated with suffixes and prefixes and the infinitive form is a single word. By contrast, the English infinitive includes the particle "to", a separate word.
The concept of a split infinitive is nonsense in most languages - you can't split a single word. The application of the split infinitive prohibition to English originally rested on the belief that because Latin - seen as the ideal language at the time the rule was invented - did not split infinitives, therefore no language should do so.
The problem arises, however: English is not Latin. Its grammatical rules are very different. The split infinitive does not apply and has not applied for perhaps a thousand years. To boldly go is grammatically as valid as to go boldly. Avoidance of the so-called split infinitive leads to clunky and occasionally confusing language structures, similarly to the prohibition of ending a sentence with preposition - it is unnatural to our language and needlessly pedantic. To so loftily and haughtily proscribe a linguistic form, merely because a latinist a couple of centuries ago decided such a form was inferior to the pure language of his study, is something we should no longer be required to put up with.
Belgium to the rescue as UK consumers freeze after BST blunder
Monday 30th March 2015 12:10 GMT
Re: Don't away with BST, don't blame farmers
Daylight savings time wasn't invented for farmers, but as a way to save energy (by shifting work hours to times of day when less artificial light would be required) and to give office and factory workers more access to daylight in the evening. It was first proposed by a new zealander and first implemented in germany and austria-hungary during world war 1.
It is entirely a myth that it was created for the farmers. That's an excuse politicians use to justify its continued existence.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
