Posts by John Smith 19

According to Dave's (current) favorite "net nanny" Cathy Perry

There are just under 500 ISP's in the UK.

Granted many of them will be quite regional but so what? The point is there are alternatives. Ideally people would go to the biggest of them. Hopefully allowing them to plough back their increased revenue (partly) into increased speed or expanded operating area.

Of course that statistic was from the women who wanted to age rated every web site on the internet.

And so the analogue men rise again.

Perhaps. George Philbrick would be pleased.

In the 80s and 90s Carver Mead's team at Caltech adapted standard CMOS fabrication to mimic the huge dynamic range of natural audio and visual signals as artificial biological systems.

Now the work comes full circle with DNA being adapted to make biological artificial systems, also with large dynamic ranges.

I'll note that memory functions have always been a bit problematic for analogue systems but it's early days.

Thumbs up

Sounds like at least on eof the situations Hubble found itself in.

I'm guessing they have the procedures used then to compensate for uncommanded motion. However I'm not sure if the level of precision that will get them will allow them to continue planet hunting.

IIRC Kepler had bumped up the list of definite extra solar planets into the 100s and the possibles into the 1000s, some even relatively close to Earth, Earth sized(ish) and in the goldilocks zone (Although IIRC someone pointed out that Earth is not in the zone, except for the global warming produced by trace CO2).

I think the time is coming when they will have to retire it. It's delivered solid results, told NASA a lot about what their next planet finder should look like. It might have been a single function spacecraft but what a function.

I salute you.

I think it will make a nice rug in my living room.

Other than that.....

Good question about Amazon. People have called it an internet company but really all the tech is just to enable its core biz of shifting lots of stuff very quickly. You could equally call it the worlds largest (virtual) department store.

Jester.

Not joking.

I'll get my Drizza. It's looking like rain.

"Historical inevitablility" yadda yadda.

B***cks.

A cursory look below the surface of of any major change quickly shows there are always places where "The Revolution" could have gone in a different way, or just pettered out.

Marx's inevitable "dictatorship of the proletariat" turned out not inevitable after all. And really how much better does most software adapt to its users? It's got lots of options but how much of it "self tunes" based on users identity (and can you override it if it gets it wrong)? Maybe that's because no one trusts its, maybe that's because doing it right is damm hard work.

Let me suggest all successful large scale changes require a)Funding (could be peanuts, could be billions) b)Organisation (right people with a good plan and peanuts can beat wrong people with a fortune) c)Security, which may be simply that no one believes they can do it in the first place.

AFAIK the only things certain are that 90% of the human race will definitely pay taxes and 100% of us will die barring some really major medical advances.

So let me suggest that Dr Hausers is one possible future. Wheather or not it's one you want to be a part of and want to help make real is another question.

So even when they don't start *out* as defacto monopolies infrastructure systems *become* 1

Simply because it's the best way to maximize profit and minimize costs and improve (or possibly enable) interoperability.

Mr Holmes because IMHO it really is a case of "No s**t Sherlock."

Murdoch "unrecognisable as part of the Daily Mail".

He's seems to be saying it like that was a bad thing.

Personally I think it appeals very well to the desires of may core Daily jailbait Mail readers.

How long before HO press release "UK falling behind Saudia Arabia in being able to spy

on people."

Unfortunately submarine FO cables do use laser amplifiers

So while the process avoids the need for photo/electric/photo conversion it's not clear if you can retrofit this to the shore stations only.

I'd say the juries still out. It sounds like a good idea.

If you want space to be a place, not a programme

You need to feel that real people could go there.

And he did.

This is a great opportunity and I hope the Canadian Space Agency follow up on it.

I'll raise a glass to a safe journey home. He's still got a fair way to go.

But hang on

IIRC that private VC funded trip to Mars was meant to be set for 2018 to hit a solar minimum

That would put us 1/2 way through a cycle.

For some its all about access time / MB

for others its all about $/GB (or perhaps $/TB.

BTW

I looked up HP's share capitalization today.

It's c$41.5Bn.

That $8Bn write down made c19% of the company disappear.

Now being stupid is not a crime but it's hard to believe that no crimes were committed in the process of deciding $11Bn was a fair price to pay for Autonomy.

What those crimes were and who committed them should be questions for a court to decide.

Beer deliverd by drone.

Finally! The future has actually started to arrive (sort of).

What else as an icon.

Interesting. P**s away $850Bn in banks and your *not* liable but 10g of Hf and you are.

Now had that been the other way round things might be different...

ITAR, Making every foreigner feel as welcome as the leader of North Korea.

The cycle on doubling capacity for battery technology has been 35 years.

So on an 8-10 year development cycle you should get some meaningful improvement.

If you don't run out of money in the meantime.

"As long as every SME (they'll be the "beneficiaries")hooking up to superfastaccleratedinterwebnettubes signs a 'de minimis' confirming that they haven't received more than €200,000 over three years (that's a shed load of connectivity) then you can shovel State Aid as much as you like. Secondly, there's a State Aid test: "Could the measure affect trade between one or more Member States within the European Union?". Actually, it can't cos those fat pipes don't stretch outside of the UK. Do what you like inside your borders, as long as it doesn't get out. Lastly, you can push State Aid on individuals as much as you like: State Aid is only considered naughty if it goes to enterprises.

But supporting these arguments is beyond most of the Guvmint."

Really? I found your explanation fairly easy to understand.

Clearly I lack the skills for a career in politics.

More like a seen from the film "Goodfellas"

Remember the restaurant owner who take the Mafia crew as a silent partner.

Overpriced services. Funnel ingredients out the back door for re-sale and don't pay the supplier.

Then when it all gets too much have a fire

Is anyone seeing an analogy here?

WTF is this "line rental" b**locks?

Seriously.

What line?

I'm wondering if there is in bulk buying cell phone "lines" adding a small charge with the specific goal of not supplying any further information. IOW all billing details to all lines end up at the offices of (for example) "JS Enterprises." As to whose really using them, no need to ask, no need to know.

So for big companies who do big things yes it is.

For everyone else, not so much.

The problem is how many electrons in an Ampere.

It's a lot.

The current devices (no pun intended) would take 1 x 10^13 secs to count that many electrons, the new hotness could knock that down by a factor of 10 000, which would still mean it takes about a year to run (roughly pi giga seconds in a year).

Thumbs up for upping the frequency of these little critters by a factor of 10 000.

Which in most other industries would be considered quite impressive.

Ah the possibilities for improving life in (say) rural Arkansas.....

"You gonna be on youtube. Now squeal like a pig."

"a short list of modest, yet achievable goals."

Which IMHO sounds a hell of a lot better than grandiose takover-the-world plans.

Now if they could keep doing an update a month (a mix of new stuff and gradual refinement of the placeholders) this might start to get some momentum.

So thumbs up for this and hope they keep it up.

Oh Noooooooes Only 4 *billion* years left.

I don't think I'll give up on the human race just yet.

Erudition should not be surprising.

The NSA deals with communications intelligence and data retrieval.

Early selection tests were an aptitude for cross word puzzles.

Perhaps they still are?

Good point about checking the .pdf in case they've left an Easter egg or two in there.