Posts by Plankmeister

@AC @10/2 17:08

The most fantastic comment so far. Everything is relative. And the LHC is apparently relatively cheap.

£4bn over 20 years? Bargain!

The author of the article should be squelched as a troll, methinks.

Here in Denmark...

...the banks issue a printed-grid keycard with 100-odd cells, each with a unique number, and every online transaction requires one of these values to be entered into the browser. When a cell's value is used, it expires, and this continues until all 100-odd cells have been used, at which point a new keycard is issued. As well as the key-card, it's also necessary to use one's customer login number and password.

Therefore, unless you have this particular printed keycard in your posession, it's not possible to use the VbV system (unless you get incredibly lucky entering random numbers!). And I keep my keycard in a very safe place, well away from my credit card.

It's a system that is supremely secure, I think, especially seeing as if you lose the card or enter a number wrong 3 times (at which point the keycard is cancelled) you have to order a new one.

I'm very happy with it, anyway, and always feel completely secure shopping online using VbV.

@Michael

"Mother Teresa spent 50 years in the Calcutta slums in the belief that God existed and that he had told her to work there. This enriched her life and the lives of those that she helped."

Ok... so by this statement you are saying that Mother Teresa enriched the lives of the people she came into contact with, and thereby enriched her own life.

I feel my life has been greatly enriched by reading Dawkins' "The God Delusion". Therefore Dawkins has at least enriched my life, and undoubtedly the lives of others all over the planet, not just in the Calcutta slums. In doing so, I'm pretty sure that Dawkins' derives a certain satisfaction from the fact that he's helping people become cured of religion.

So - in that context - he's not that different from Mother Teresa after all. If you'd read any of his works you'd understand that - at least where the existence or non-existence of god is concerned - he has no fear of that. If you believe there's no god, how is it possible to fear it?

You're just spouting righteousness, which just makes your comments seem crass and closed-minded in the context of open and serious debate about the subject; the ultimate "ner ner!"

Perhaps you should read a few books on atheism, or at least realise that the possibility that there actually is a personal god "out there" that listens to your prayers is actually highly, *highly* unlikely.

I've had an OBE.... does that count?

That is.... an Out of Body Experience. Was a most peculiar experience. All I can say is, if that's what it's like when you die, then I have no fear of death: Peace, calm, serenity, wellbeing, supreme self-confidence, and yes, there was a bright pinpoint of light in the very far distance...

Reminds me...

...of a song a friend of mine wrote at school. I can't remember the whole thing, but it started - quite unforgettably - like this:

Muntas, muntas, everywhere,

Big fat tits and greasy hair.

Still makes me lol when I see a fat greasy-haired munta. Which is a rare occurrence here in Copenhagen :D

@Stuart Van Onselen

Well said! Hopefully the next 10 years will see an explosion (pun not intended) in the commercial space access market, progressing hopefully towards commercial heavy-lift boosters within the 20-25 year range.

Dutch Lobster

Ha ha! He searched for Dutch Lobster! Must be a n00b if he doesn't know what it is.

Space Elevators...

...are LONG. The geosynch altitude for earth is approx 35,000km up... And you need either an asteroid at the other end that's equal to the weight of the elevator shaft/cable, or a double-length shaft/cable to act as a counterweight, which also has the added benefit of slingshotting interplanetary craft off the end at a very tasty d/v. So if the elevator had a catastrophic failure, and snapped in half, or the asteroid twanged off the end, it would wrap almost once around the earth.

And depending on how much resonance there was in the cable, a fairly wide band all round the equator would be in danger.

Billions, maybe even trillions of tons of (probably) bonded and spliced carbon nanotubes crashing into the earth would cause an unhealthy amount of global devastation.

And if the cable went for the double-length approach (and it snapped), there'd be a new artificial satellite in orbit around the sun right in the Earth's ecliptic, and there would undoubtedly be a time in the future when the two would collide... Which would be even more devastating than a falling cable.

Best we steer clear of space elevators, methinks.

@Edward Rose

Yeah, I guess the plane is built by a load of ex-NASA Space Shuttle designers and engineers.

Paris because I'd inspect her payload bay good and proper.

XHTML/XML get the job done.

XHTML is far more robust than HTML. It really is designed from the ground up as being a markup language. That is to say, its strengths are in the separation of the presentational content from the informational content.

IMHO, I'd choose well formed Strict-XHTML and CSS over plain old HTML and CSS.

It's not XHTML that's the problem... It's the different way user agents render CSS. If you ask me, the WaSP project is a step in the right direction. The best all-round solution would be if there was an open-source project to build a rendering-engine that ALL user agents would use. Then it's just the feature-set built around the rendering engine that would separate the different browsers.

Imagine that... KNOWING with 100% certainty that your page will look pixel-for-pixel identical on every browser. Ah, bliss!

It might take 10 years, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

Evil Bill because he allowed IE6 to be so.... SHITE.

This is NASA we're talking about...

...NASA don't do things efficiently. It took them 30 years to realise the Shuttle was the "wrong way around*". Well... that's not true. They *KNEW* it was the wrong way around, but it was a good excuse to pour time, effort and money into some really cool engineering.

*By "wrong way around" I mean that it *should* be the first stage that's re-usable, with an expendable payload delivery system (a lá ESA's ATV). Much more efficient, especially in terms of cost of repair/maintenance. It's just nowhere near as cool.

OMFGWTFBBQ!?!?

I mean... seriously. She must have *approved* the final cut before it was uploaded. WTF was she thinking as she was watching it? "Yeah, that's good. People will really sympathise!"

And she's admitting in hard evidence that the marriage was never consumated, therefore, the marriage is not legally binding, and can be anulled by either party at any time.

Effectively, that makes her a squatter.

IT? because.... well... other than the gossamer thin reference to youtube, it's not really IT news, is it? Not that I actually care; I read The Reg for its pure entertainment value! :D

I had my doubts...

...about being correct. I also arrived at the same 0.003, but in my slightly pickled state interpreted this as one rock per 3mm^2. Which would be ridiculous. So I magically re-worked my calculation until I had something that was more reasonable.

Oh well... Mine's the one with "Maths n00b" written on the back.

They should...

...just open-source Windows for the desktop. Then they can still sell Windows Server products and all the office apps and other assorted piles 'o' poo they peddle...

By open-sourcing Windows, they'd - within a couple of years - have a *very* strong product free of all bloat, that pretty much everyone would use.

Surely M$ make enough money already... Think of all the money they'd save if they didn't have to employ all those useless Windoze coders who use dubious programming techniques (Such as this one plucked from the leaked Win2k source:

private\ntos\w32\ntuser\client\nt6\user.h:

* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt.)

Open-sourcers do it for FREE!

I find it absolutely bizarre...

...that NASA still continues to implement the biggest possible project it can under the guise "we need to design a whole bunch of new technology to get this working!", especially in today's technological environment.

Bob Zubrin is right... NASA is an oversized, mal-managed money pit filled with aerospace engineers and managers who aren't interested in progress of space flight; they simply want to get their hands on all that ca$h so they can develop exotic solutions.

Using Zubrin's Mars Direct program, the goal of landing humans on Mars is much easier and MUCH cheaper than any of NASA's hair-brained schemes. If only NASA's administrators, top management guys and technical advisors would stop trying to bring back the Apollo glory days...

In theory, with a government that was willing to fund space exploration instead of country invasion, NASA could have put humans on Mars more than a decade ago.