Re: Typo/fact checking
I think it's related to the iodine-13.
Posts by Rich 11
4580 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
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Germany's wild boars still too radioactive to eat largely due to Cold War nuke tests
Lesson 1: Keep your mind on the ... why aren't the servers making any noise?
BOFH: WELCOME TO COLOSSAL SERVER ROOM ADVENTURE!!
80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office
How to get a computer get stuck in a lift? Ask an 'illegal engineer'
Aspiration to deploy new UK nuclear reactor every year a 'wish', not a plan
Florida man accused of hoarding America's secrets faces fresh charges
Monday 31st July 2023 07:07 GMT
Re: This is not a joke. This is not a drill. This is the messiah for a whole bunch of idiots.
I'm the same age as Boris, and while I didn't go to the posh school he attended that still taught Classics, I did learn Latin at a grammar school that had reduced the traditional Classical education down to a first-year Classical Foundations followed by two, four or six optional years of Latin. It did provide a handy background and I still find that world fascinating.
But as with any skill or set of knowledge, unless you use it regularly you forget it. I can barely string a useful sentence together in French now, let alone Latin. I can remember enough words to get the gist of Roman monumental inscriptions (which is a subject in itself, really) or to throw about phrases that are used commonly or less so in English (like in the silly spoof above), and I can recall a few lines from Virgil and Ovid if I scrunch my face up and wish upon a star. When I hear Boris spout something scholarly, I always think of the trouble he goes to tousle his hair and crumple his tie before stepping out into the limelight: I bet he puts the same deliberation into reciting a few choice quotes in front of the mirror before he leaves the dressing room.
Sunday 30th July 2023 08:22 GMT
Re: This is not a joke. This is not a drill. This is the messiah for a whole bunch of idiots.
"Pfwah. I say! Hmm. BoJo's none too happy, inter alia, with that Truss gel ahead of me in the speaking circuit stakes. Pfmf. Caeteris paribus, why do the pointy-headed chappies want her to speak first? We're both blond, sure, and both economically illiterate, but my experience as an inveterate liar must count for something, what, when we get up on our hind legs and tell the millionaires what they want to hear. Deeply sus, as the kids say. Someone's kids."
Aliens crash landed on Earth – and Uncle Sam is covering it up, this guy tells Congress
Twitter name and blue bird logo to be 'blowtorched' off company branding
UK's proposed alt.GDPR will turn Britain into a 'test lab' for data harvesting
Saturday 8th July 2023 05:21 GMT
Re: @Doctor Syntax
Who killed the British fishing industry
Two takeaway points:
"The decline of the UK fishing industry has many factors behind it, with membership of the EEC and then the EU seemingly being used as a smokescreen when overfishing and flawed quota systems were much larger culprits, and the nosedive started much earlier than the UK's membership of the bloc."
"Another cause of grief among fishers in the UK has been quota allocation, but again, the way in which the quota allocated to the UK is split lays in the hands of the British government, not in Brussels, according to Greenwood, who highlights two reasons why the system does not produce a fair outcome."
The article cites its sources, so there's plenty of bedtime reading there for you. Have fun.
Friday 7th July 2023 05:25 GMT
Re: @Doctor Syntax
The collapse of the British fishing industry was primarily caused by losing the Cod Wars, which was nothing to do with the EEC. It was NATO which oversaw the negotiations between the UK and Iceland that finally settled fishing rights in 1976, and the UN which recognised the 200nm zone standard that the UK subsequently proposed. The later EU fishing quotas imposed across the community were essential for fisheries management, Atlantic cod et al having been reduced to an unsustainable level. That British trawler operators chose to sell their quotas to foreign operators rather than land less than what they'd previously been used to was their own choice, just as it had been their choice to overfish in the 1960s and 70s despite being warned of the inevitable consequences.
Metaverses are flopping – hard – says Gartner
If AI drives humans to extinction, it'll be our fault
Monday 26th June 2023 15:41 GMT
Well, you know what they say: one person's profit is another person's bankruptcy. Well, several people's bankruptcy usually. And then a collapse of the bubble, the loss of small investors' life savings, the issuing of arrest warrants, and finally the founder's flight from justice documented on TikTok. Pfft. What can you do?
Techie wasn't being paid, until he taught HR a lesson
Saturday 24th June 2023 11:59 GMT
Re: Unique keys
My father and grandfather both hated their first names, and consequently from childhood went by nicknames used by everyone except their own parents. My middle name is a modernised version of my grandfather's first name, which I'm pretty sure my dad chose for me purely as a dig at my grandfather for giving him a crap first name.
BOFH: Cough up half a grand and we'll protect you from AI
Open the pod bay doors, GPT, and see if you're smart enough for the real world
Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time
Microsoft's big bet on helium-3 fusion explained
Will LLMs take your job? Only if you let them
Wednesday 17th May 2023 08:21 GMT
Re: In The Long Run.......
In the UK there was no slavery
There was slavery in the UK in 1800, but in these islands it was mostly confined to the role of personal servants to the wealthy. The vast majority of British slavery was offshored to the Caribbean, just as exploitative near-slavery conditions were imposed across East Africa, West Africa, India and SE Asia: sugar, coffee, tea, cotton, hemp, indigo and rubber all flowed back to feed the factories in the UK.
Brexit Britain looks to French company to save crumbling borders and immigration tech
Thursday 11th May 2023 11:25 GMT
Turkey were on course to join the EU eventually.
It was recognised by the EU back in 2011 that Turkey was not on course. It had taken the Turks six years to achieve just one of the 35 chapters required before a vote on EU membership could be offered to the Turkish people (the chapter on education standards and research-sharing, IIRC). Turkey hadn't even begun work on 19 of the chapters, and progress on the remaining 15 was euphemistically described as 'mixed'. Nothing further was achieved in the subsequent six years either; they were not on track in the least.
BOFH: Ah. Company-branded merch. So much better than a bonus
Star Fomalhaut has dusty little secret – two more debris belts and a potential planetary party
Datacenter fire suppression system wasn't tested for years, then BOOM
What if someone mixed The Sims with ChatGPT bots? It would look like this
So you want to integrate OpenAI's bot. Here's how that worked for software security scanner Socket
Monday 3rd April 2023 06:11 GMT
That's a childish response. There always has to be some level of trust, which you apportion according to the level of risk and the reputation of the developer. For all their failings (including greed), at least you know that the big name companies have security teams and processes in place because they want to protect their reputation. You don't know what the situation will be for most individuals contributing to open-source projects and libraries, at least at first, so you should evaluate risk and act accordingly.
Errors logged as 'nut loose on the keyboard' were – ahem – not a hardware problem
Here's a fun idea: Try to unlock and drive away in someone else's Tesla
Reg fashion: Here's what the well-dressed astronaut will wear on the Moon in 2025
Conversational AI tells us what we want to hear – a fib that the Web is reliable and friendly
Space dust reveals Earth-killer asteroids tough to destroy
Thursday 26th January 2023 08:55 GMT
Re: some thoughts...
Aiming something at the sun is not as easy as it might first seem. You'd have to push the asteroid in such a way that it loses its orbital velocity, leaving it to fall directly towards the sun. If it's left with even a slight velocity component horizontal to the radial line, you risk it missing the sun and slingshotting around and back towards you. It needs to either hit or pass close enough to the sun that the tidal forces rip it apart, and if it is ripped apart then the fragments have to be small enough that you can't be harmed by them: it becomes just another regular meteor shower like the Leonids et al.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
