Posts by John Smith 19

Re: National infrastructure projects @AC

"Omitted the fact that because the UK government is keen not to pay anything upfront and have the construction financed by the Chinese, the price the UK pays for electricity from these plants has been further inflated as it will include interest repayments on the capital needed to build them and operate them until such time as they break even (after 30~40 years); at which point the profit extraction can commence."

Welcome to the PPP electricity grid.

Just like the PPP hospitals and PPP schools.

Something you're grand kids can tell you.

"Grandpappy, we finally paid the ba**ards off."

"US companies could" "be required by the US courts not to disclose"

Could ?

Could ?

Have.

Multiple times.

THE PATRIOT Act trumps pretty much anything.

"Anyone know why that's in the instruction set?"

Small side point I wonder if it uses the bit counting algorithm outlined in "Combinatorial Algorithms" by Reingold, Nievergelt and Deo whose complexity varies with the binary log of the word length, takes a fixed number of cycles and which they "Do not give explicitly" ?

As opposed to the other 3 bit counting methods they happily describe in details.

Re: Why not team up with Copenhagen Sub-Orbitals?

"UPDATE: having watched the video, 2 out of 7 members of the core team are: Photographer, Visual Artist. (Plus whatever 'Production' is - I suspect more likely to be video production than rocket production)."

So another high quality Scandinavian video product then?

I shall look forward to viewing it.

Not so much a jacket, more a rain coat.

"Does that mean I can buy some decent paint again?"

No, obviously.

Those are the bad VOC's, not the good VOC's

"waiting for someone to edit the XML configuration" to give us this guy

Say hello to "Gimpy," Clippy's more obedient relative.

Complete with moving zip animation for when you want it to stop talking of course.

" Even in the UK the House of Lords is a joke."

A "joke" that has helped stop the Snoopers Charter, Identity Cards and its cradle-to-grave National Identity Register (no doubt still in the bottom drawer of some data fetishists desk).

People can (and often should) sneer at the UK 2 house system but before you do note this.

The UK does not run it's national budget on "continuing resolutions," because (literally) on a person by person basis parties cannot reach an agreement. It does not lay off huge swaths of staff because of some arbitrary spending cap pulled out of some Con-gressmans back passage.

It it is not designed to generate deadlock until every special interest group and politician who wants their palm greased has been payed off or otherwise appeased.

In fact the closest thing the US system resembles is the way the UK runs it's local government, at town and county level.

That might be fine for a population of a few million people at most.

It's a rubbish choice for the largest (or 2nd largest) economy on the planet.

Those who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

"I am sure this no accident."

You are quite correct.

I think this is a fine piece of journalism from Orlowski. It lays out what these f**kers are up to and why people should be concerned.

And we should be.

These guys are exactly like the NHS selling off "annonymized" patient data for study (regardless of how easily it can be de annonymized). But that also means when I say "It's our data" that also the copyright holders, some of whom are also corportions and some of which do sometimes behave like douche bags.

It's still one of the few bits of the DCMA that seems a good idea to me.

ElReg welcomes BattleBotBob

I see you've just joined the site. You certainly have an interesting posting style. Let's look at it.

"And the designer of the strut could only design to the load cases supplied by Space X. Space X is responsible for doing a design review."

Nice implication that SX did not. Although I doubt you have any more knowledge of what they did than I do.

" I don't understand why so many fanboys believe all the PR and give Space X a pass on their responsibilities?"

Another nice implication that SX don't accept them. NASA got a completely new LV out of them for about $200m. $15Bn later the SLS has still managed to put nothing in orbit.

" Space flight is tough and when you cut corners and reviews this is what happens."

Much the same line from ULA or an SLS contractor. And again note the implication that SX don't do such reviews.

" Maybe this was a new lesson learned or maybe the bright new engineers missed some basics from past lessons learned."

Or maybe the low bidder on the parts contract really did have s**t QC?

When an inventory part tests out 5x lower than it's design load that's a mfg fault, not a design fault.

I'm not an SX fanboi, but I do respect their engineering skills.

And I don't like PR goons astroturfing.

Re: "he doesn’t believe that computers will never be truly conscious."

"Are you sure about that?"

As in "ever" or "never."

It makes quite a difference.

"Floppy RAID array, a whole 4 megabytes of awesome storage potential;"

http://macguild.org/raid.html

But consider the possibilities.

Data split across disks.

Garbage unless all combined in correct position in the stack.

Do that with bigger media and you could be onto something.

"funny document I swore to protect and defend. "

You mean that "Piece of paper that all those suckers signed" ?

"Which, incidentally, is a great excuse :-)."

Oh yes.

This is one of those notions that (if you squint a bit) looks semi-reasonable.

But is in fact complete b**locks.

OTOH a phone with no screen, that only works through a Bluetooth headset and used voice recognition IE only really good at sound stuff (making phone calls and playing music).....