Re: Next up….
NASA announce their first spindizzy drive.
And then people near where Elon Musk is living feel the ground shaking.
3377 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Aug 2009
I personally think nuclear propulsion would be much more suitable for missions (especially manned ones) in the Solar System. Solar sails are only suitable for long duration missions which aren't time sensitive.
For most missions the target will still be there in 10 or 100 or a million years. Apart from Pluto crossing the line where its atmosphere condenses/sublimes and the obvious "oh shit, it's going to hit us, better move it" events I can't think of stuff that's seriously time sensitive. So long as some results come back within a researcher's lifetime so there's motivation, a few extra years don't really matter.
I strongly disagree with his take.
Ditto. I learnt to program 52 years ago. For most of those 52 years there's been someone, somewhere predicting the end of programming "because it will all be done by machines, you'll just tell them what you want done". I suspect this will still be happening long after I've been recycled.
We've been with Zen for 15 years or so, but not had anything from them about this change
I've just been forcibly upgraded from copper to CityFibre by Zen (Thursday last week). I thought I might be losing my /29 which I've had since 2002 but that transferred without a problem, as did my /48 IPv6.Technically the switch was utterly painless, and as they initiated the upgrade I'm supposed to only be paying the same as my old FTTC link (£19.50/month rather than the full cost which I think is £35/month).
However, they've totally bogged up the billing. As they started it I shouldn't have to be paying an extra penny, but they're trying to get me to pay £2200(*) for the upgrade! There is a support case open on this but they're being very slow to respond. (I wonder why?)
(*) They've managed to enter my annual fee as a monthly one and are treating the upgrade as if I requested it.
I seem to remember my old professor Warrick at Reading experimenting with this years ago. I'll have to have a Google and see what came of it. ISTR that he planted an interface in his brain so this might not be the first as claimed by Mr X.
He had an RFID chip (or similar) stuck in his arm IIRC. He'd have never got permission from the ethics committee to do a brain implant, not even in his own. He just bullshitted a lot.
won't be long before the police will just routinely run cctv through their stores of information from passports and licenses and just apprehend people
If you think that's bad, how about using DNA to predict a face and then using facial recognition on the predicted face. Utter insanity.
In 11th grade, a teacher told him, "You're never going to get to college"
There ought to be some sort of dishonourable discharge ceremony for teachers that say that to their pupils. Preferably involving a ritual snapping of their stick of chalk and a board rubber being thrown at their head.
because you just don't bother to post positive comment when they are literally doing their job
To quote Colin Percival (FreeBSD dev + tarsnap chap):
"The most impressive achievement of the modern corporation is to persuade the world that exceptional service consists of it working at all."
What it can achieve is, probably well, beyond what 99.9% of adult humans can do
Undoubtedly and very impressive. But equally, what Le Pétomane could do was beyond 99.9% of humans.
Joking aside, Deepmind is just using machinery to do something humans aren't very good at, in much the same way as someone with a JCB can beat what 18th century navvies did by brute force. Systems like Macsyma/Maxima have been better at integration than any human mathematician for decades, this is just the next step. It's a good thing for people like El Reg's readership as it makes mathematical skills more widely available, but it's sod all use for people who are wondering where their next meal is coming from or how to avoid their neighbours killing them.
Yes the sun is dumping its energy in our environment, and we have reached, more or less, an equilibrium. My argument is to maintain that equilibrium and not to push extra energy into our environment. True renewables just move energy around *within* the terrestial environment; they do no change the overall energy level.
You seem to be forgetting a little thing called entropy. It prevents anything being truly renewable in the long term.
In all my years of consulting work, I've never had to worry about being attacked by a leopard making my way from the parking lot into the office!
The Leopards Eating People's Faces Party will fix that for you. Vote for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party in the coming election!
[Damn, no big cat icon.]
I came here to say much the same. Totally made my day, given that I'm on my second pacemaker.
However, the story doesn't make that much sense to me. Although my GP can't get data out of my device, the local hospitals have loads of mutant laptops in heavy duty cases that can, plus cardiac techs and cardiac nurses who can operate them as well as the cardiologists. I've also got a remote unit at home that will send a read out over the mobile phone network in about two minutes, so the idea that only a company rep can get the data either isn't right, or whoever chose to use those devices should be fired.
Giving unelected people the power to overrule elected governments is a great idea...
True. I'm very much in favour of having an apolitical judiciary make an incompetent, corrupt and dogmatic government obey the law. The problem comes when a country's constitution doesn't separate the legal system from politics.
Still after a week or two would become pretty tedious as would fresh truffles and beluga caviar I could imagine (chance would be a fine thing. :)
There's a story from WW2: the sailors on the supply convoys to the USSR were treated as heroes and fed the best food the Russians could provide. This led to at least one of them writing a letter to his family complaining about the "crunchy fish jam" the Russians kept on giving them.
It's honestly bewildering how this can have occurred, as larger companies like Boeing are under much deeper scrutiny with the regulators practically living in there.
Hasn't the FAA switched to self-certification for the big manufacturers because of budget cutbacks and subsequent lack of staff?