Posts by John Brown (no body)

Re: abominations

"Urgh. Hopefully this never happens. Drift is one thing. A complete reversal of meaning is quite another."

Is that the hot topic of the day? Cool!!

Re: GM free AI

and dolphin friendly too. Never forget the cute smiling dolphins. They are our ticket out of here when the world goes titsup.

Re: Consumer

I think the point is that they did use off the shelf stuff. And DJI is a Chinese company. NASA can't work with them or use their kit, even if they wanted to.

Re: Well what do you expect ?

"Why should it care about what happens to the data it has on you,"

It cares a great deal about that. That is the product it sells to it's customers. The last thing they want is for their valuable product to be devalued by being copied and sold for less than Meta charges, or <gasp> given away for free.

Re: so many favourite things

Funny, I was seeing the end of Invasion of the Body Snatchers in my mind :-)

Re: 1 vs 3

"The same is true of piezo Pitot speed sensors (Air France from Brazil icing)."

FTFY :-)

(Was it autocorrect? Go on, blame it on autocorrect...everyone else does :-)))

I can see the point though. You don't want just one system from one supplier. Taken to the extreme, the Russians got to space first so why didn't everyone else just give up and buy rides on their hardware?

Without NASA doing the first sky-crane landing, would ESA be trying to develop their own in-house skills and experience or would they still be going with smaller rovers and the bouncy balls solution?

"At least they ARE supporting Linux, and in NVidia's case, also FreeBSD"

True, and I also use primarily FreeBSD and have NVidia cards in my two main boxes. But both a fairly old now, as are the GFX cards in them. The general consensus on the FreeBSD forums is that AMD is the way to go. NVidias support for FreeBSD (and Linux) isn't bad per se, but can be slow to catch up and often doesn't support all function, especially on more recent cards. Their non-Windows drivers very much seem to be an afterthought. But then, like many hardware manufactures, they probably don't see *nix as much of a market and so give it about as much effort as they think is worth it.

Re: Corporate manslaughter?

As with any company hit by something like this during their normal working hours, no doubt someone was watching the weather forecasts and local reports, ready to close things down. What info they took into account and how close there were prepared to cut it to the bone is what matters. Bear in mind all the people who died in the Candle factory in Mayfield too.

Also bear in mind that predicting where these things touch down and where they go is more of an art than a science and that often the swathe of damage, while devastating for the areas it hits, can often be quite narrow, houses and building just a street or two away from the main track escaping almost totally unscathed.

I'd not be pointing fingers at Amazon management until after it's been investigated and witnesses have had their say and we find out the full circumstances. Was Amazon in the process of shutting down in the face of the storm coming or were they still sending delivery drivers out knowing it was coming and there was an active "danger to life" warning?

Re: Don't do it Priti

Hot off the (BBC) press...

She's going to be tried in the UK but by video link from the USA.

Which begs the question, does she have diplomatic immunity? If so, then why agree to a video trial? If not, why not send her to the UK to do it properly?

Re: Remarkable and Pocket Book Pro 912

It's not unusual for reviews to include comparisons. Depends on if it's a paid review or not.

I don't recall any real issues booting MS-DOS 7/7.1 in DOS mode back in the day. For gaming, I was using a config.sys/autoexec.bat menu system that customised the boot sequence for particular configs for games and memory usage, primarily to maximise "low RAM" availability. or to use the defaults to Windows.

IIRC there was a file I kept two custom copies of, one of which had to be copied to the correct filename to enable/disable loading of Windows98. I vaguely seem to recall that some DOS utilities were in different places in a default Windows install. I can't remember if I copied them to where DOS stuff expected to find them or just added to the path variable.

It's a long while ago now, but it worked with pretty much everything with pretty much the same caveats that came with DOS 6.22, i.e., some stuff, games in particular, didn't like some high memory managers and/or used their own, and so need those custom config/autoexec options in my menu system. Likewise, I don't recall any missing DOS tools or utilities. Either I found them elsewhere on the W'98 CD or never used them so never noticed they were missing :-)

Re: How is this novel?

And even if they are claiming sending pixels instead of text as novel, we've had various versions of that in remote desktop apps for many years too.

Re: Actually...

Actually, that first statement "downloading by a web crawler facial images of individuals and personal information associated therewith;" is downright dangerous to allow in the patent. It gives them rights of a process used everyday by many. It's a an incredibly generic process. For a start, isn't that what pretty much any image search index does? Once overly broad statements like that are passed through the patent process, it's not only concerning what the standard of the rest of the claims are, but possibly could invalidate the entire patent. Unfortunately, they will get away with it unless and until some company with money decides it's worth their while to contest it in court.

Clearly the USPO isn't even doing cursory examination of patent applications these days. I guess there's only one person left there now and all s/he has is a rubber stamp saying "Passed".

After all, the "method" described above has been shown in court to be illegal the way Clearview use it. Yet the USPO have passed it.

"more than three days of solid overcast, something that has not happened so far."

Yeah, well, Spain, not Scotland. And clearly you're not on the plain, where all the rain hangs out :-)

Re: Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer's industrial tribunal

Oh, was he flying an F35 off the Queen Elizabeth instead of the usual sleigh?

"and the computer is Amy."

Are you, perchance, of a certain age and owned an Amiga computer in your youth?

Amy The Squirrel"

Re: Equator

We already have a number to choose from. The Cayman Islands or Bermuda might be a good choice. Low tax rates there too, although launching over Cuba might not be good, so maybe not the Caymans!

Ascension would be another obvious choice. Near the equator, nice big RAF base with a long runway and a local NASA tracking station. Logistics a little awkward though.

Ascension & British Virgin Islands are probably best in terms of a nice clear down range.