Posts by Number6

Re: Use case

Motorways will be the first bits to be automated. Imagine a set-up where you engage the autodrive as you get close to a motorway, with a destination programmed into the machine.

The in-between for this is that as you arrive at the motorway junction, you drive your normal car onto a low-loader and tell it which is your destination junction. Then the low loader hauls up onto the motorway, joins a convenient car train which either then releases you at the destination or is actually compised of cars all of which want to leave at that junction. You can then drive off the low loader and continue on your way under manual control.

Re: Spelling and Grammer

That would be 'grammar', too.

The Queen's English allows use of 'ize', it's just not common.

Re: But....

I was thinking the same thing.

Re: Prior art??

"Another one might be fertilization of human eggs by (well, you get the picture...)."

Not against a white background I hopefully.

Depends on the colour of your sheets...

Re: Fake

I bought my wife a drill for her birthday once. And a bench grinder one year, too. Some women do like power tools and know how to use them.

In some places they laid a third rail so that standard gauge trains could use the same track. It wouldn't be too hard to spend time doing that over the whole network and then swapping the rolling stock from broad to standard gauge.

You can still see an example of this sort of track at Didcot railway museum. I think you can even ride on a broad gauge train at times, too.

Re: RFC 4941

It's also irritating - I ssh from my desktop machine to other machines on the network, often leaving a terminal open for monitoring. The desktop machine uses a privacy address to do this, which is fair enough. What is annoying is that at some point, the system decides it's had enough of that address and deletes it, causing connections which are still using it to be dumped. Either I've missed an obscure setting that will stop this happening or there's something they need to sort out. I can see why there's a need to ultimately dump the resources associated with the address because over time there could be one of these per address used and the system would run out of memory, but every few days I find things disconnect for no good reason. I could force IPv4 connections but where's the fun in that?

Re: Fuck year!

That might create additional shortages however, especially in IT Management, I'll hazard.

The BOFH seems to manage that without needing any change in gun laws. In fact, if they could shoot back, his job might get more difficult.

Re: Come on, it's not hard

Even back to the days of DASS2 it was possible to present any number in your valid DDI range to the exchange on call set-up. If you had a 2-digit DDI in the range 00-49 then you could claim to be from any of those numbers, but if you tried to give it a number in the range 50-99 it would ignore you and default to the presentation number you'd chosen for your range. Of course, it helped that back then BT already knew what you were allowed to use and range-checked it. Interestingly, if you received a call from such a DDI number on a digital line you'd find the incoming CLI had an X in it immediately before the DDI digits, which was BT's way of informing the called party that they couldn't vouch for the digits after the X. This didn't happen with analogue CLI, although I wasn't in a position to check whether it was being sent but the CLI box (official BT one) was quietly eating the X.

Re: Too Late

Ah, someone from the USPTO checking in with a downvote :-)

Only if the place decides to consider changing its name.

Perhaps the Austrian town of Fucking would also consider changing its name to stop amused Brits from stealing their town signs.

Re: software should be updated to use the new version, 1.0.1g.

Why couldn't they have bumped it to 1.0.2 to make it clearly a new version?

Re: Why permit the secrecy

The patents are public but the licence deals are commercial secrets. If you know what your competition is paying as a licence fee then you're going to fight to be no worse off when negotiating to licence the same patent. I assume there's a gagging clause in the agreements so we never find out which patents are being asserted, it will take someone with a bit of money to go on a fishing exercise to do enough to encourage MS to talk patents, then reveal which ones rather than sign a gagging clause.

More to the point, how many of those patents really are novel and innovative and how many are the bleeding obvious written in obscure language?

Re: Wrong search term

Why is the EU thing taking so long to get going? Bureaucracy. The satellite doesn't launch until the paperwork weighs more than the launch vehicle.

It's all part of the launch method. Put the satellite on one end of a big see-saw and drop the paperwork on the other end. Obviously it's important to have enough paperwork to provide sufficient launch energy to the satellite.

Such as? The whole point of the US objection is that everyone else is planning to use cables that don't pass through the US, so unless they're actually going to blatantly cause mysterious failures in the world's undersea cables, there's not much else they can do. Even ICANN is limited, if they tried to screw the root DNS, the rest of the world has the resources to set up a parallel network. US registrars stop serving DNS lookups, non-US root servers can delegate to non-US servers. It would just encourage people even more to not deal with US internet companies.

Re: Do I have to talk to someone

I would actually prefer a text chat to a phone too, although I'd prefer some real intelligence on the far side, not the artificial stuff. It has advantages if you need to contact a place while at work too, chat can be a background task whereas a phone call is very much a foreground task. It's also better if the background is a bit noisy, too.

Re: Synchronous Power Grids

I remember doing that exercise in the power lab at university (the correct way, bringing the system into sync and then throwing the switch, not the other way). The lecturer told us that in some parts of the world they would just throw the switch and let the grid fight it out even with a big generator, but hopefully in the intervening years there has been more enlightenment.

Re: This is all well and good

Horses have a big "agenda".

Not heard it called that before...

Re: I agree 100%

I have thought it through. Whether I agree with the decision to censor the search results or not, it's supposedly a privately-owned system and there's plenty of alternatives that give different results. I choose to use one that I believe doesn't censor its results and tries to highlight when it's been forced to.

To me it sounds more like a group trying to make a quick buck - it wouldn't surprise me to find that Baidu has no US presence that could be hit up for $16 million anyway, so it's certainly not under the jurisdiction of a US judge.