Re: Bah!
Worrabout Stonehenge? Bigger, tougher and based on advanced Flash* technology so no moving parts.
A triumph of silicon chunk technology!
(With apologies to Sir pTerry)
4259 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2010
“We are binaries people, and for devices and machines this is the only language they speak, they speak binary,” he continued.
Erm, OK...
“Who is the consumer?” he asked. “The consumer will not be a human being, it will not be you or me. It will be devices or machines and this is what is called continuous update, this is where the world goes to.”
WTF does that even mean?
“We are focusing on providing a very powerful pipe for binaries. We want to make software liquid.”
Ah, what you need is a blender. It transforms nearly anything into a liquid eventually.
I can't believe I'm about to type these words, but:
"to be fair to 123-reg"
the domain renewal price rises are a consequence of Nominet's (and ultimately ICANN's) policies, and all registrars have had to increase their pricing by quite a large hike.
What is slightly disingenuous is that a lot of registrars seem to be keeping the price down for initial purchase, but stinging you for renewals.
Bootnote: For those unfamiliar with DNS, the domain name system is the infrastructure that converts "www.theregister.co.uk" into the relevant IP address, so you don't need to memorise the 12-digit numbers to get to a website.
Yeah, thanks for that.
At least you didn't mention "Telephone Directory", as nobody knows what one of those is nowadays...
Steljes, which specialised in flat panel projectors and interactive whiteboards
Ah, I'm glad you said that.
When I first read "audio and visual specialist" I thought they might be one of those ridiculous Hi-Fi places that try to sell you a hand-crafted, gold-plated, unicorn-piss embalmed CAT-6 cable for £500 to improve the sound of your digital audio device.
@d3vy
Well I don't know where you live, but round here, odd-job men certainly don't take card payments, and nor do market stalls, car-boot sales, the local chip shop, the thing at the petrol station that I use to pump my tyres up, and a number of the local shops will only accept card payments for goods over £10.00.
Define "a lot"? You can get them online for around £35 or so
Note I said "proper".
A professional Pulse-Oximeter as used by the medical profession is likely to be £150 - £200 or more.
Anything cheaper is likely to be inaccurate, or unable to compensate for patient movement or circulatory variations.
The "oxygen bit" at it's most basic measures the "redness" of the blood in the capillaries - which can be correlated to the oxygen saturation. In practice, it's a bit more involved than that though...
I have a serious beef with forms that automatically reset especially when the Captcha isn't satisfied. Government payment sites I'm looking at you, but many corporate sites also suffer from this...
Unfortunately this is one of those things mandated as best practice for security, so you are likely to see it become more and more common, as more sites fall under the limitations of PCI-DSS and other security restrictions.
To the best of my knowledge, the things that define who we are, and maintain our memories, are all a result of electrical charges in the brain.
I'm pretty sure there are no persistent physical changes in the brain which would still be present after death. Think of it as RAM - the information is only held whilst electrical power is maintained.
Therefore, whilst the autonomous functions of regulating breathing and heartbeat, and functioning of the gut, etc, would all still be there (they are built in - like a BIOS), I don't think a re-animated brain would contain any vestige of the person who it used to be.
and they should re-release the song:
..
I'd like to teach the world to ping
In perfect harmony
I'd like to let them browse the net
and use this company
..
I'd like to see the world for once
All searching through one site
And use their browsing history
to place ads in their sight.
Had this (in 2012) been a direct hit America and most of Europe would now be living in Bronze Age levels of technology
Really? Does a solar flare remove all knowledge of electricity from people's brains then? And stop unaffected countries from helping?
I think you are overstating the case wildly, a Carrington-class event might lead to a few months of severe disruption, but we would soon start to recover.
@TechnicalBen
I think the question is, why were they near misses? If totally avoiding the problem is Sci-Fi, what can we do that is realistic to keep them down to near misses.
Sadly, the nearest anyone can get to a reason why they were near misses is that they broke up before hitting the ground.
Partially a function of their mass, size and shape, but also of their composition, initial entry speed and angle. The Chelyabinsk meteor had an estimated size of about 20 metres diameter, that of Tunguska was of the order of 60 to 190 metres long and 10 metres across. In both cases they entered the atmosphere at very high speed and a low angle of attack.
I can see no way that humans can engineer these circumstances with any reliability within a sensible timescale.
Besides. If we can track them, we can know where they will hit. What is the most reliable way to avoid danger then? Fire lasers and hope for the best, or evacuate the town/city in the path?
I think you don't really have a grasp of the enormity of the effects should an event similar to Tunguska occur in a populated area. In the original event the trees, to a large extent, contained the blast, and minimized the dust cloud that was formed.
Even then, there were widespread climate and weather disruptions for months afterwards. If a similar event happened over a city, the planet would probably go dark for weeks due to the dust and rubble thrown into the atmosphere, and that's still talking about an airburst event.
Should a Tunguska sized meteor actually touchdown, then whichever country it hit would be mostly wiped out - note I said country, not town, or city.
The Tunguska blast was estimated to be about 15 megatons or equivalent to roughly 1,000 Hiroshimas.
There is no way that we could effectively evacuate the whole target area of an impact event like that.