Posts by JassMan 926 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Mar 2008
I was almost going to say that I was taught that almost everything will burn except noble gases and oxidisers. However, I have since come across this article in New Scientist which shows that if you try hard enough and have the right oxidiser, you can "burn" noble gases and even (shock, horror) oxygen itself.
Not very likely to happen as a result of poor regulations though.
Sorry about the iconic abuse but it is somehow suitable.
And its not helped by cladding companies repeating the lie that aluminium doesn't burn.
In fact, I believe that even the fire "experts" at the inquiry kept blaming the construction method of the panels allowing the insulation inside to be exposed to the fire, rather than acknowledging that not only does aluminum burn well, but adding water results in a hydrogen fire. There are some who say that only foil will burn but in reality it just depends on whether you can generate enough initial heat to remove the natural or anodised coating. Once ignited, aluminium will be as destructive as thermite. Indeed it is used in Alice rocket engines.
An automation failure would throw the pilot back to basic stick and rudder skills, potentially leading to an accident if he or she wasn't prepared for that. Aviation safety professionals identify such unexpected scenarios as "startle."
That's the trouble with automated systems, they are overconfident and won't tell you there is a problem until its too late. True AI when it finally arrives will be just as bad except it will put up a message saying "I told you, you went weren't as good as me. Look, you crashed, you dumb meatsack"
Plus of course, the number of people excluded due to being out of the UK for too long to still qualify as legitimate UK voters was lower than the winning margin
Which is perfectly true. However, Cameron promised that the 15 year law would be repealed before the referendum. Yet another manifesto promise broken.
Then, there is the inconvenience that you're forgetting about the little fact that the government made it impossible for those entitled to vote to actually return a vote in time. voting papers were sent out with second class stamps which of course were mostly returned as not having sufficient postage. The few that got though had enclosed prepaid envelopes (which stated that the vote would be invalid unless returned in the prepaid envelope.) However, the prepaid envelope was only valid for postage in the UK. Over 3 million votes were thus not counted. We will never know how those living on the continent would have voted. There was also a lot of confusion about where you should register to vote since the government didn't issue any helpful instructions.
Continental papers at the time were full of complaints from expats. I remember reading a few in the Grauniad at the time as well.
"Smaller circuits aren't just easier to execute. They're also able to tolerate a lot more noise just by virtue of being smaller."
So how come it works the other way round in a camera where your elements need to be as large as possible in order to reduce noise? Otherwise everyone would have binned their DSLRs by now and just rely on phones. I would never consider using a phone for low light shots except in extremis.
Or are they saying that the quantum effects of photons work inversely to those in qubits.
Yeah I forgot to say my cat also loves Doritos and any other crisps with spices on them - the hotter and spicier the better. Likewise as you say with the milk. I believe cats are OK with milk as long as they are used to it but once they start on it you need to keep supplying it in order to maintain the appropriate gut biome. If you stop for more than a few days you have to build them up to it again, very slowly.
Thankfully, he doesn't like alcohol at all and the only way to get him off the table at meal times is to stick a glass of wine (or something stronger) under his nose. Anything else is treated as an invitation to stay. I know people say you should never let your cat on the table but when they are armed with a series of half-inch razor blades, you don't argue.
I don't know about dogs liking cucumber, but my cat (or rather the cat that owns me) likes olives, sundried tomato, chinese meals with sechuan pepper, moroccan with harissa, etc. Actually it seems to be anything well spiced, even the accompanying vegetables. When he is in a good mood, he stands on his hind legs to beg for a piece of trout but if you don't offer it quickly enough, he will rip your arm off.
I was in the middle of a major coronary when I realized the phone was now clamped in the holder not 3 feet in front of my face.
Its called "getting old". I regularly check all 6 pockets on my jacket, as I am going out, to find my phone. Only to then find it in my back pocket where I NEVER put it because I know that is the guaranteed way to make a working smartphone into an unworking foldable phone.
If NASA built cars, we'd still be driving roadworthy Model-T Fords.
If NASA built cars, we would have no pollution problem here on earth as we would all prefer to walk. I can walk further in one day with gammy knees than Curiosity has gone in 10 years. In my misspent youth I walked around Wales doing 25miles a day and that was up hills and down dales (unless dales only exist in Yorkshire). I still try to walk at least a mile a every day simply because my GP says it is movement that keeps the knees from getting worse. I often do 4 miles (after dosing up on high strength paracetamol) so that's a week and a bit to do the same as Curiosity.
Disrupting radio altimeters potentially prohibits the use of automatic landing capabilities, as used during bad weather when pilots can't see the airport.
The simple answer which should have been done when 5G was first mooted :- Test to see if there is any interference only on days when there is good visibility. Any pilot trying to blame interference on his radio altimeter when he can see the ground rushing up shouldn't be flying.
Yes I know that certain sizes of raindrops scatter radio in differing amounts and differing directions (otherwise weather radio wouldn't work), but presumably it does not affect the 4.2-4.4GHz band used by airliners' radio altimeters, otherwise they wouldn't work when most needed. Presumably this is how the frequency was allocated as you don't want an altimeter which gives a different result during weather. I would further postulate that the frequencies wouldn't have been chosen for 5G if there was a weather problem, 'cos the telcos would be seriously cheesed off if everyone phones up to say their phones don't work in the rain.
a firm called nChain Ltd is "said to be working on a modification to the existing BSV client software, which would enable someone who owns but cannot access the BSV to regain control of them."
If they can do this then so can hackers. What is the point of blockchain, if anyone can overwrite keys for anyone who claims ownership.
Just like losing £5K down the back of the sofa, then sending it to the local incinerator cos it has become a bit grubby. If you demand that the Bank of England owes you £5000 even though you cannot prove you are the bearer, they should just laugh in your face.
If I owned any bit coin, I would have a copy on the keys on a USB key. If they were worth more than £1K, I would have it on 2 USB keys, If it were any more I would have it on an encrypted key stored at a solicitors office or a bank deposit box.
But how do they know that life would develop at all on those super earths without the benefit of a few cosmic rays kick starting the formation of amino acids and stuff in the primordial soup? Its not much use having the potential to live longer, if you don't get born at all.
Also without a bit of radiation, surely speciation is also likely to be a lot slower.
Or are the authors creationists and believe that God creates living beings directly without evolution.
Although, the available traffic seems a little light to me.
There are traffic lights in suburban parts of London where the traffic can be so light (for short periods each day) that there are no other vehicles, no pedestrians and yet they change to red just as you are approaching. They then take 3 minutes to change back to green. I believe it is all part of the government's levelling up agenda - making sure that there is equal pollution everywhere. Why don't they just go to flashing amber in both directions (and save 50% power) when traffic is light?
What on earth were you trying to install? Virtually all mainstream flavours of Linux have had decent installers for the last 20 years. Give Mint a try and I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Personally I prefer the XFCE version but all versions are easy to use and much quicker than Windows. My Laptop took over a minute to boot in Windows (the one and only time I tried it) but Mint XFCE 20.2 boots in 6 secs from OS selection to password prompt. It spends more time in UEFI than booting the OS. (Yes, the live USB version takes over a minute but once installed to an SSD it is like greased lightning)
The only reason to use a Linux which requires you to compile the kernel is if you have extremely esoteric hardware or you want to build a machine for hacking. Otherwise just stick with an Arch, Ubuntu or RedHat derivative.
Yep, my previous car was Argent Ancienne but was on the DVLA docs, it was registered as "met grey" (presumably for metallic grey).
My current one is Blanc Banquise, and I had trouble finding a scratch repair kit when I imported it only to find in UK it is called Bianca White, so in this case the DVLA has a point that it is still just "white" since it is the only white available as standard for that model and year.
The very thought of it makes me want to barf.
I used to love this as a child (several decades ago), so when I noticed it on the otherwise completely empty supermarket shelf*, I thought I would reminisce with a taste from my childhood. Either they have changed the recipe or my taste memories have altered from Covid. I cannot imagine why I liked it in the past.
*Yet another reason to thank the masters of Brexit.
They seem to have at least 16 shades of black to white so not really just 2 colours. Shame the patterns they display seem to make a not particularly attractive car even uglier.
I think the only people who will want to pay for what will probably be several £/$ K extra will be people in advertising and criminals (sometimes difficult to tell the difference). Still if you had a car like this it may be handy for getting off speeding tickets. Sorry that photo shows a black car but mine is off white. Which brings up another problem, that in the UK you have to specify the main colour of your car to register it and the police take a dim view of drivers whose car car doesn't match the registered description.
"The MPs also called for new levels to encourage the adoption of new computer systems in healthcare. It said the independent watchdog the Care Quality Commission should include an assessment of the integration of information technology between primary care, secondary care, and the social care sector in its assessment of NHS Integrated Care Boards — organisations with responsibility for NHS functions and budgets."
If they hadn't decided they were going sell off all the patient data thus creating a public backlash, they could have implemented this twice already. Mind you, both attempts were probably so badly designed that only big business would have been able to extract data in bulk rather than doctors being able to see data for their current patient.
Although the message is obscuring the view, unlike the other 12BOCs, this is not an OS crash. The StatusNotifierPlugin is just a python-java shim and will probably belong to the task button to the left of VLC. As such (assuming you can attach a keyboard) you have a much better chance of being able to fix the problem, because the OS itself will still be cooperative.
@IGotOut Between £3 and £5 all day in my town.
They should be more civilised like the French - most car parks give 2 hours for free 12h00 to 14h00, 'cos like you shouldn't have to pay extra to park while having lunch in a bistro.
I once pre-paid 0€50 at 17h00 for 2 hours, only to find I was entitled to stay until 09h00 the next morning.
Nobody has ever set it alight in advance.
That will probably be taken as a challenge by some Swede in a Santa suit. You should probably not been so boastful.
I have never liked fires in any form so I think the real challenge would be to pull them apart and take all the burnables to the nearest biomass energy producer.
Probably crossed with Macadamia nuts from Queensland, Australia. I have broken 3 hand operated crackers on the buggers. I once visited a factory where they shell them and they were in the process of changing from 4inch thick solid steel contra-rotating rollers to using lasers to cut them open.
From wikipedia "The nutshell ("coat") is particularly tough and requires around 2000 N to crack. The shell material is five times harder than hazelnut shells and has mechanical properties similar to aluminium. It has a Vickers hardness of 35."
Then again probably not, because macadamia have comparatively thin shells but they are truly the toughest I have ever tried to crack. Don't know if it was true but I was told they use the discarded shell as a road surface at pedestrian crossings because it lasts longer and has better friction for stopping than gravel.
Admittedly it has only happened to me a few times when I had a Netpad (1024x768 screen), but I have fallen into websites obviously designed by someone sitting in front of an Apple Retina screen and thinks every one should have one. They have massive amounts of whitespace at the top and left and NO SCROLL BARS which makes them generally useless, until you discover that at least tabbing from field to field helps get around the screen. I once came across one which had so much blurb that you couldn't read it as it immediately scrolled to the bottom of the page to the "Save" button. God knows what you couldn't fill in in the middle because they had somehow also disabled the normal tab action.
I am just waiting for the day a website defeats my 2560x1440 screen which I know is chicken feed to those Apple screens with their 6016x3384.
"This was breaking systems with more than 256 TiB of RAM – I wonder why nobody noticed? Either way, Linux now correctly supports standard ARM systems with up to 4 PiB of RAM."
I would be jealous because my current laptop only has 32GiB (+6GiB for video).
However, I think I have wasted my money - the memory gauge in systray only shows a couple of pixels at the bottom no matter how many of my common apps I have launched simultaneously. I only bought a "big" memory machine so I wouldn't need to have to have swap enabled. [I have already partially trashed 2 SSDs on previous laptops due to lack of memory and intensive use of swap*]. I think I could probably have got away 16GiB. Maybe I should have a go at video editing just to see if that will use some RAM.
Mind you the processor gauge also hardly ever gets off the bottom either - just a quick flash of about 25% every now then which is so quick it is easy to miss. However I am glad of this since I now no longer have to wait while stitching photos nor when using Freecad.
* got around this by marking the swap partition as invalid, squeezing /home, then creating a new swap. Still, I have decided not to have a swap area unless it is unavoidable.
Also in February, LastPass came in for criticism after a security researcher recommended against the password manager's Android app after noting seven embedded trackers in the software. LogMeIn said at the time that users can opt out if they want.
My personal choice is to use Passwordsafe (the pwsafe.org version) because:
a) it is open source so no security by obscurity
b) passwords are still encrypted even while in memory and only decoded individually for display/copy-paste
c) support for all OSes, not just Win & iOS
d) you can choose where to store your data - Mine is on a pair of USB sticks (one on my keyring, the other in a locked drawer for backup.)
e) no ongoing costs, or any costs for that matter.
Just seen on BBC News, that an Amazon spokesman said they advised all staff to get to the* shelter in place. *my emphasis.
In a building this size, IMHO, there should be a minimum of 9 shelters. In fact if they had really been concerned about safety, EVERY toilet facility in a single floor large area warehouse should be constructed as a shelter. It wouldn't even have cost that much more compared to the overall warehouse cost. Although from the pics, the building looks like it was just to keep the rain off the merchandise, not to withstand anything stronger than a stiff breeze.
Given that the building is 1.1M sq feet, if it was square that would require 5 minutes to walk each side. It sounds like the building should have had quite a number of safety shelters. I wonder if all staff were trained to go to the nearest shelter, and if there were marked routes to those shelters with maintained lighting.
I tend to agree with you. Maybe they should have had 2 versions. The existing one for the pilots, and one with folded wings for the tourists. The main problem with the scheme is that makes no distinction between getting 50 miles above the earth's surface for a few minutes, and actually getting to a stable orbit,
I don't think UKGov has had a plan since they came into power after the last Labour Government. They have said many times they have had plans but not one of them has seen the light of day till several months after announcement. Even when they appear they are only half thought through.
As for Boris with his several "oven ready" deals and plans for various stages of Brexit and not needing any transition times offered by the EU, we wouldn't have the Northern Ireland stand-off if he was capable of planning his way out of a paper bag. I won't say he lies about his "plans". I won't even allege that his plans are so secret that he won't present them to parliament, because we all know that Prime Ministers are totally honourable and beyond reproach.
I once bought a £11 falafel scoop and waited 5 weeks for it arrive, where I hadn't noticed it was "free delivery from Lebanon" to the UK.
In reality you prolly waited 5 weeks for the Lebanese refugee to get a boat across the channel and he carved your scoop while waiting in the refugee processing centre in Kent.
OK I admit it, I am pissed as a newt having had 2 large Aberlour 18YO while waiting the delicious smelling leek & chicken I just made to finish baking in the oven.
Some dominance? There's an understatement if ever I saw one...
Even though I suspect KSM-AZ is a merkin, understatement is not the preserve of the British. Nor should it be. Understatement helps us all keep our little grey cells working.
I think he was confused by the fact that the original Apple ][ was a 6502, but no one ever called this a 65K. Even the subsequent upgrades to the 6502 never got called 65K even though they had 5 digits, because someone decided they should all have a pesky C after the 65 to show how newfangled they were by being CMOS instead of TTL.
... looks an awful lot like Boston Dynamic's Spot, replete with those backward knees
I believe that in their effort to make Spot vaguely dog-like they forgot to give it knees at all. The thing about dogs (and cats and other 4 legged animals) is a lot of people think their knees are backwards, but in fact the prominent joint is the equivalent of an ankle in a human. AFAIK all land mammals have their knees in the same orientation as humans. Obviously seals and cetacea are built a bit differently, but I understand some of them also have vestigial leg bones in the same orientation but don't have hips so they are disconnected from the spine and thus useless as limbs.
When I was semi-permanently living in France (pre-Brexit), on the few occasions I ordered from Amazon, they never managed their next day delivery promise if ordered before xx o'oclock. The reason being that although their fulfilment centre is less than 250km by road, their logistics insist on sending everything via Paris, Lyon then St. Etienne. A round trip of well over 1500km along with several transfers along the way. Usually they took 3-4 days. The record was 8 days because there was some local flooding between Lyon and St.Etienne, which is a route they never should have used in the first place.
But OTOH my Ryzen 9 seems to have an automatic throttle for which you can choose different rules. Unfortunately my lappy's keyboard has so few keys, that not only does it lack Scroll Lock, it doesn't even have Page Up & Page Down or even Insert. Home, End and Pause are also missing.
I spent several hours messing with xmodmap to put the extra keys back (in place of the functions I never use) trying to make it survive more than 5 minutes. It was only once I started reading the code for the HID drivers that I noticed that all of sudden, my first attempt had working again. Touch wood [taps head] it is still working.
The only key I don't seem to be able to over-ride is Fn+RightCTL which insists on being ContextMenu instead of my usual placing for Compose. Luckily, the ROG button does seem to remember that I xmodkeyyed it to be Compose instead even though I find it "unnatural".
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