Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
"Mr President, while on the hot line you may hear a high pitched squeal. That will be the phone melting at the other end."
"Sweet Jesus Christ! Our bomber got through their defenses? They are about to be nuked?"
"No, sir. Our bomber finally got the recall order thirty five minutes ago and turned for home."
"Then ... you mean ..."
"Yes! The Russian Premier is using a state of the art smart phone with a dodgy Russian-made Lithium battery."
"Then there's only one hope for World Peace. Bring me ... my Galaxy Note 7."
If your lifestyle looks like a ridiculous video game, time to change something. Hint: not the video game.
If you don't like what documentary people are going to say about your lifestyle, time to do something about it. Hint: not try and suppress the documentary.
If you are famous, or want to be famous, expect to be held up to the light and judged harshly by the lumpen masses when they Do Not Approve. That's what fame is.
Next time you are in there, see if you can find the bearings for my drill press. I bought a new set about eight years ago, put them away in a safe place and now can't find the buggers behind the coils and coils of infinitely long wire, old junction boxes, boxes of screws and whatnot.
Solid research there Black Betty, but I believe you have failed to factor in the Sleeper Effect.
If this railway line were abandoned long ago, it could very well have the traditional creosote and urine-soaked wooden sleepers of yesteryear, which would likely burst into flame and/or char to ash long before the iron ablated. Softened by the terrific current passing through it, each rail would then be free to "sag" sideways toward the other, possibly shorting and invalidating the entire experiment.
Even concrete sleepers might cause a problem. Not only might the bolts securing the chairs to the sleeper melt through long before the rail, the concrete itself could explode violently due to the radiant heat.
Either way, safety glasses and ear defenders would seem to be a wise precaution.
Are you under the impression that calculations done on a sliderule are exact?
A sliderule isn't a pocket calculator, it is an aid to doing the paper and pen math without log tables in the first pass. A skilled user can come pretty darned close with an instrument about twelve inches long.
Then, if you are Grumman you run the calculations through a something called a computer. Yes, they had them then.
The thing in your picture isn't intended to give "greater accuracy" through size, it is intended to be used by a teacher in front of a class of kids learning to use their brand new slide rules. The size is so those at the back of the class can see and follow along on the one in their hands.
I disbelieve the room-sized moonshot sliderule on accoun of I knoww why such a thing would have more problems than it solved. Perhaps you are thinking of a Mural Quadrant, a device used in Elizabethan times to map the sky accurately?
The amusing part to all this furor is that six men walked on the moon and did it using machines built using slide rules and imperial units (and old fashioned amperes), whereas in the Brave New World of Robots Everywhere Except Low Earth Orbit we cannot abide the ampere as it stands.
I guess the new rule of thumb is: Engineers Make Do, Scientists Argue.
Nah, can't do that or you end up with a circular definition that results in a pair of what was known in the newly SI world of the early 70s as Zanzibar Units.
Brief explanation (sorry, can't find a linkable version online):
Man holidays in Zanzibar and hears people tell of two other men, one who owns a fabulous clock tower at one end of the island by which everyone sets their watches and clocks, and the other an old sea captain at the other end of the island who fires a cannon every day at noon.
Our man goes to visit the sea captain, has a nice cup of tea and asks about the cannon, specifically how he knows when it is noon.
"I look through my old telescope here, and set my watch by the clock in that tower at the other end of the island" says the captain.
Our man then visits the owner of the clock tower, has an evening cocktail and asks how the man sets his clock so accurately.
"There's this chap at the other end of the island who fires a cannon at noon ..."
This standard is probably needed the same way the seven layer OSI standard was - i.e. not at all, and will be just as representative of the way the real world deals with the ampere.
And nothing about this new way of defining the ampere makes laboratory calibration unnecessary, in fact it makes it - well, no different at all really because labs will continue to calibrate their existing equipment the same way they've been doing for decades.
Oh yeah, I just bet the metre rules in your local DIY superstore were inscribed by counting the wavelengths of a beam of very monochromatic light.
The problem is that these chaps don't "do" math and when a tech-savvy person blithers about keys, the non-techy is thinking mechanical key. Mechanical locks can be re-keyed easily in the event of a key loss, and skeleton keys are ubiquitous.
The problem, in part, is that the key metaphor has been pressed into service a lock too far.
Also, we are talking a country founded in a real sense on tech innovation. The idea that "it can't be done" is foreign to the American psyche which runs with the thought that if a problem concerns technology, it can be solved if enough money and effort is available.
Talk of mathematical impossibilities cuts no ice.
Another issue is that there simply isn't enough interest in a national discussion of the issue (or indeed, any issue) in an "adult" fashion. The only way you get people invested these days is to fire 'em up emotionally over some issue. Adult debate is a non-starter.
And before anyone laughs at the dumb Yanks, let us cough and flick our eyes on the "debate" that occurred before the Brexit Referendum, for there, in general terms, is the script for backdoored security discussions Blightside.
And people downvoted me when I wisely suggested charging the newly repaired-by-net-upgrade Microsoft tablets on a concrete slab within a sandbag emplacement to mitigate any mistakes made in the detection of over-charge department.
Harrumph.
It's all fun and games until your smartphone sets fire to your Playstation.
Let's hope the "fix" was a better job than that done by the original coders. Better charge the device on a large concrete slab, surrounded by sandbags, water tanks and other blast mitigation measures in the event there's a fencepost miscalculation in the overcharge protection routine.
All the potential vulnerabilities of embedded Linux IoT devices plus Windows 10's added-value brand of upfuck for the fail.
Why in Azathoth's secret last syllable would anyone put Windows 10 on any IoT device? Isn't it bad enough that the world plus its dog can't understand how to secure Linux properly. Now they have to add an O/S with a well-known and growing exploit dictionary in the wild so that even if you DO know how you'll be backdoored by some fucking driver exploit or yet another buffer overrun?
And I say that as someone who has used Windows happily up until about four weeks ago, when some stupid Windows 7 update fucked up ... the update mechanism.
Getting Windows 10 to run on a Pi was a great example of misplaced ingenuity: They said it couldn't be done - what they meant was it SHOULDN'T be done.
Here's the Stevie Plan to prevent STDs and unwanted pregnancy (and also reduce the demand for abortion), all drains on the State: Honest education about sex (cries and fainting on one side of the House) and access to free or low-cost contraception.
Because teenagers are genetically wired to want to bonk no matter what their parents say or teach.
And bonk-minded teens aren't thinking of the consequences when the urge hits hard.
I offer into evidence ... well, the world. Look around. Also, try and remember your own teen years.
No high-tech doll is going to be able to combat millennia of evolutionary selection (screaming, fainting, burning of crosses, stern letters to The Mail).
Adrian Mole said it best in his Secret Diary:"Wracked with sensuality."
Nonono Ac, This is a Microsoft product. It is supposed to run like a Swiss watch under any circumstances and read your mind as to what you actually want *without* all that tedious reading of fine manuals or looking at documentation.
From shrink-wrap to genetics lab, law office and doctor's billing department - all things to all people with nil effort and zero learning curve. Force(tm)-enabled to read your mind.
All this talk of learning how to use the product properly.What on earth do you think this is: Linux?
Actually it is, with a rather nifty GUI bolted on top. Excel uses the JET, doesn't it? If you say it isn't an enterprise-level database, well now you have my agreement.
Something many have missed here is that inside the workbook NOTHING HAS BEEN CORRUPTED.
That's because what you are looking at when you view an Excel (or OO or OL) spreadsheet is GUI PRESENTATION of underlying data. I'm reminded of the furor over what the control panel data/clock showed when Windows 95 debuted. Another day on which the IT community showed the world how to run around like a chicken with no head.
Hence, when the scientists' graduate student free help (the actual people who probably did the data entry) get a clue and read the manual, they can change the default "best guess what the average person needs" out-of-the-shrinkwrap behavior by flipping a few switches and everything looks right again - except for the "scientific" "peer-reviewed" papers which apparently made it into print without anyone actually reading the stuff in them.
Which proves one important thing: Geneticists find the write-up of their science as boring as everyone else does and so don't read it with their brains switched on.
Thus demonstrating the real problem with airships (as opposed to the ones "everyone knows"), the problem that killed so many in the Glory Days of the Dirigible: when you have a bouyancy mechanism providing the lift that relies on having lifting masses of gas very far apart, local changes in air density can kill you faster than you can yell "release ballast aft!" as a machine longer than however many sperm whales laid nose-to-tail flies into a pocket of air denser than that in which the tail of the craft is currently situated.
Shortly after this the poorly-named aerostat will nose-stand and the crew will individually release ballast aft.
Unless the ground gets in the way first.
I'd have thought the fact that the loudest foghorns calling in public for the exit (Gove and Boris) bolted for the door as soon as the ballot was tallied would be a stomach-liquidizer for anyone who listened to their lies and "mis-statements".
How fast *was* that "350 million quid" bus wrap pulled, anyway?
Once again, ball dropped.
They should have leveraged the "free" Windows 10 mandatory download whether you want it or not technology and taken a leaf from the Chechnyan hacker mafia and gone the "use BING three times today or your hard drive will be encrypted" route.
Is everyone asleep at the wheel at Redmond?
Most websites won't allow me to strengthen my password by lengthening it beyond an arbitrary eight or nine characters, and when they do they won't authenticate me next time because what gets accepted, what gets stored and what gets presented to the client for the login process are not standardized in the organization running the site.
The windows update troubleshooter is no longer available for windows 7. Links to it land on a dead page or did all last weekend.
This advice, while well taken, is almost word for word what Microsoft's forum spat out, and the responses to the issue were for a problem occurring over 18 months ago. Nothing about a problem that started last Tuesday. I assumed that it was something local that was banjaxed, a repository that had overflowed or some such. But I've not been able to detect such a problem on the machine itself.
And it isn't windows defender either. The issue tracks back decisively to windows update. Amazingly, this was easy to hunt down using only the Task Manager, which has features in it not in the Sysinternals Resource Monitor. Whodathunkit?
Still, appreciate the replies, everyone.
Oh what a loverly bore.
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