Posts by John Smith 19

"And it's not really AI at all. "

It never is, once you can explain how it works.

Billions Above Estimate never disappoint, do they?

Yes sea trials are to find problems.

But, y'know, with £3.5 Bn on this tub you'd think they'd managed to get the basics right.

Especially anything whose repair instructions start "First put ship in dry dock"

Because the ship is f**king huge.

"Velocity of the projectile is not the same as capacity,"

True.

I think people think this is like a message pod in a vacuum tube in a building, but for humans. That's simply rubbish. This will need lots of pods together. Since they occupy most of the volume in the pipe pumping down the sections in the stations should be fairly quick.

Likewise people seem to think the pods will need gaps, like the gaps between pods. I'd suggest they run as a package and the pods are the train,with each pod tracking the one in front.

More problematical is the cost. Is this a "mass" transit system, given the massive improvement in travel time? That is more doubtful.

Dear Lord Toffy McToffyface, Prove it.

Signed

Fatboy Kim.

"NZ has 10% of the UK's population with 10 times the rugged terrain."

But NZ is not in the EU.

Y'know? "Competition rules blah blah. Rural investment blah blah.."

However NZ is the 53 largest economy,.

The 52 largest is Romania, which is in the EU.

And I'll bet there broadband is still better than the UK's.

"Making America grate again."

And for the next election

"Keeping America Grate"

Yeay.

".... isn't there a bit of a heavy metal risk here?"..

Actually not. IIRC 30% of all Mercury in the environment comes from vaporized amalgam from the incineration of people. So what's left is relatively (no pun intended) safe.

I'd be more worried about the rise of Mercury due to poor disposal of CF lamps in land fill.

Just a f**king minute

They are a retailer. IE most of their business is 1 off stuff.

Not through customer accounts.

And they want 120 days to pay their suppliers.

In the country with the 2nd worse business payments record in the EU (only Italy has a more relaxed attitude of companies paying other companies).

BTW is that £12m+ number a profit or a loss IOW have they reduces losses or profits from last yr?

"If you have the plaintext already, you're not looking for a backdoor, "

Not necessarily.

The classic example of a "crib" was the Enigma work where they looked for radio station operators who ended their messages "Heil Hitler."

Then you back convert it to get the settings for the whole message traffic from that site (or "node" in today's packet using world) for the period that code is valid for.

Does anyone doubt such cribs exist today, either due to rules of an organization, or inserted automatically by the transmission software?

"It's possible to leave the..names in a compiled program, for the benefit of debugging tools;"

True.

I wouldn't underestimate the space gained by stripping the executables though.

When you've got a big executable, like the 100 DLLs of an office suite that can make quite a difference in load time, and the ability to respond to user functions.

If they are stripped the de-compile will likely fall back on some default variable naming system. IOW it will be "Pseudo C" (or whatever they modeled their HLL on) with "Fn1" creating "Var1" "Var2," "Var3" etc.

An ability to over ride those defaults can really help when you're gradually working out what the code does a lot easier. It does not change the code logically, but boy does it improve readability.

That's not in the "Statistical noise" that's "Too close to call,"

Ooops.

To be clear. I meant that referendum was not too close to call. It was 2:1 in favor of joining when 64% of the electorate turned out.

That seems pretty definite to me.

Sodium-ion technology

Quite an intriguing website.

Especially the graph of element abundance in the Earths upper crust normalized to Silicon (which is pretty abundant)

Sodium is (literally) as cheap as table salt.

Lithium got its jump on other choices because (at some point) a chemist did an energy density calculation. Li is lightest Anode element QED highest density.

But IRL you can't use pure Lithium/Sodium/Calcium and once you start needing high molecular weight polymers in there achievable density starts dropping (but Lithium prices stay the same or rise).

So Lithium is the Gold standard in battery energy density even in "Lithium"

batteries.

Which suggests Sodium might be quite worthwhile.

"a colony sited at the bottom of a canyon would be sheltered from 90% "

Not unless it was a) in the walls or b) under 3m of regolith.

It turns out that what really works great as a radiation shield is the 46Km column of air sitting above every square metre of Earth.

but when one finally gets kicked out they consistently find a replacement who is even worse.

Wot, doesn't everyone love Jacob Rees Mogg.

"(it's stereoscopic imagery)."

That I suspect makes a very big difference between what is and is not possible.

Likewise 87% may not be bad if it lets humans focus on the doubtful images, one way or the other, eliminating the drudge work.

It's not clear if this thing does that.

"What goes through someone's head when they do that?"

He's a lawyer.

Probably what he's going to make from his treachery and what he's going to spend it on.

"ANPR's been in operation since 2006.... still no legislation covering it 11 years later."

Funny how that works, is it not?

That'll be an "Operational decision" of the individual police forces no doubt.

Does anyone else smell a delaying tactic while some particular system is being rolled out in secret, so the cabal of data fetishists that seems to infest the HO can say "Sorry but the money's been spent and the system's already rolled out"

"Democracy just slipped a little closer to oblivion."

People often don't realize just how much of the US system was modeled on Ancient Rome.

Specifically how much power (and responsibility) is placed in the hands of individuals.

This requires a very high standard of individual to hold those posts otherwise the system is basically owned by whoever puts their man into the post.

And in this case it's Big Cable/Telco.

"All excellent, except I think advertisers, not readers, pay the wages."

And you'd be right.

"I was expecting mechanical transfer of data with a couple of tin cans"

That's the "Next Generation Broadband" project.