Posts by Dave 126 10672 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010
> When someone changes their name, it is customary for references to that person's historical actions to be retrospectively attributed to their current form of identification
Indeed. This convention extends to honorific titles too. Eg "Sir David Attenborough, who presented the series Life On Earth...", even though at the time he made the series he was just Mr Attenborough, not Sir David.
The argument given is that she had diplomatic immunity, and that waiving it in one circumstance would set a precedent, which would not be good given the sort of countries in which the US and GB have embassies. Not my argument, just what has been discussed.
Yet Assange was an accredited journalist, not an American, wasn't in the US, published material, not protected under any free speech principal. Prosecuting him sets a bad precedent too.
It's odd how many folk who once espoused his values are now indifferent to his fate... whilst it is very possible that he is jerk, it's also plausible that this is an effective long-term smear campaign. It's also possible that Trump offered him amnesty if he testified that Russia didn't know Trump.
Assange is a friend of Philip Adams, and I'm inclined to listen to Mr Adams - in fact I do, four days a week on ABC.net.au Late Night Live. He produced the film Barry McKenzie and has been sacked by Murdoch twice. Listen to him chatting to a huge number of prominent statesmen, economists, historians, comedians and others over the last twenty five years.
> However mimicking the market leader is not always good
Indeed. I would often use Picasa for some things I would have previously used Photoshop for - Picasa would let you straighten and crop photos very quickly.
Of course Picasa and Photoshop are two different things (an organiser and an editor, respectively), but where there was a little overlap, Picasa's UI was often better in some ways.
At least one can guess the function of Inkscape from its name, which is a good start for ease of use. This obvious kind of user friendliness isn't a given in the GNU world.
Similarly, one can guess the sort of thing Photoshop does from its name, but one can't from the short name of GIMP.
I remember that Illustrator took me a while to get on with, but that was likely due to my inexperience with vector graphics ( unless you count the sketch tools in CAD suites, which share some concepts), so it might be possible that you'll find Inkscape similar: a concept might suddenly 'click' with you and you'll find things straightforward. Or, it might just be it has a poor UI.
Illustrator UI is not perfect. Chief example on my mind is that the scroll wheel cannot be set to zoom in / out without a modifier key. This behaviour is at odds with Photoshop and most CAD software, and is frustrating. It becomes something I have to constantly remind myself of when I wish to be concentrating on the work.
Illustrator can also throw up little hurdles that can interrupt your workflow until you've Googled a solution - eg, objects stubbornly remaining grey after you've assigned I've assigned a colour to them. Oh, right, I need to convert the object manually to RGB, even though it's in an RGB document and I've assigned it an RGB colour - surely my intent is obvious? Theres a little zoo of such behaviours that can slow you down until you've learnt their ways.
Formaldehyde-free mattresses - or 'mattresses' as we call them in countries with more robust consumer protection regulation. Still, even some foam mattresses sold in the UK advise buyers to unroll a mattress and leave it to air in a spare room for a few days before sleeping on it.
Xiaomi's reference boast of being formaldehyde-free is likely just an effort to differentiate themselves from more unscrupulous mattress vendors in their home territory.
I really don't believe there isn't a website somewhere tests - or least collects users' experiences of - laptops for Linux as their raisin d'etre... so I'm always confused when poor penguins pitch their questions here and not there.
For sure, occasionally the Reg will take a stab at installing Linux, but it isn't their MO to go super in-depth on any machine on any OS.
People's preference for 16:9 over 16:10 or 3:2 is up to them. Huawei offer 3:2 screens on their Matebook series.
A second charge-capable USB C socket would be nice, since it adds reduncy should one fail (though I get the impression USBC sockets are more reliable than some laptops' barrel connectors).
Being AMD, I don't suppose it supports Thunderbolt, though for many people that's no big deal. Being able to use an external GPU is a nice concept, but it still appears to be niche.
Read it again. "Won't be shy about it" refers speculatively about using this craft to send crew to China's planned space station. A good PR move, peace in space etc
The mission it has just completed (or possibly not, I'll grant you) might, as the article suggests, be for purposes akin to that of the USA's military space plane - the purpose of which has been secret.
You're right that it's plausible that China's space plane may not have performed as well as expected, but there are also other plausible reasons for keeping details secret - as the USA effort illustrates.
> There is no such thing as zero point energy.
We know. We also know that even so-called 'hard' science fiction is allowed one mumbo-jumbo concept every so often for artistic licence. Such mumbo jumbo concepts can serve as place holders for things that are not only stranger than we do imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.
By 'hard' sci Fi, I mean a lot of Clarke, but not Stargate :)
I'm just thinking of the stationary bicycles with dynamos connected to a 60W bulb that used to be at festivals... as a young teen I struggled to get the bulb very bright.
With the usual caveats about dynamo efficiency etc, my intuition is that a cyclist would struggle to power an older Xbox (they ran hot), but might have a chance with a handheld console (with battery just used to even out the dynamo's output)
This concept made me think of other ways of powering a Gameboy using the player's muscles. I remembered those naff dynamo flashlights which resembled naff grip-strength exercisers... and in turn Powerballs - gyroscopic balls that are used to treat RSI and build forearm strength in musicians and rock climbers.
Of course some clever bugger has already fitted a dynamo to one:
https://hackaday.com/2010/11/22/ridiculous-exerciser-become-useful-as-a-charger/
Note: Powerballs are not ridiculous. Since the gyroscopic effect keeps your wrist straight it keeps your tendons happy. Recommended to those with RSI. Consult your doctor etc
There was a Gameboy Advance game which used a photometric sensor in that cartridge, to encourage the player to spend time outside. By playing outside, the player could 'charge' up their 'solar powered' weapons in their role as a vampire hunter.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Hand
> FWIW I've had a little input into developing LFDs for other uses, and they can be a challenge for everyone to read
Is there any inherent reason why a smartphone camera and flash can't be used for determine the colour of the test strip?
The test strip can be printed with colour calibration swatches, which an app can interpret.
> What is annoying is that the electronics are single use.
Especially when the vast majority of users already own an optical reader - in the shape of a smartphone. Printing some coloured calbribration swatches along the edge of each paper test strip would give the interpreting app enough data to accurately determine the colour of the strip.
If the user doesn't have a waterproof phone so feels wary of cleaning it water, then the test pack can include some sachets of isopropyl alcohol for sanitising the handset afterwards.
Without coming down on the rights and wrongs of having more children, let's look at the actual levers:
Top-down control of birth rates doesn't work very effectively (see India), it can have unintended consequences such as more boys being born than girls (see China), and in any case it would politically unworkable in many countries
So, what does decrease birth rates?
Better sanitation (which minimises disease and thus infant mortality), better health care (ditto), higher female education, female access to contraception and a culture in which women feel able to use it.
Of course these points are themselves complex interrelated to resource consumption, but there's smart ways of doing things.
For starters, let's not use an expensive, single-use lump of plastic and microcircuitry instead of a strip of paper. If all medical tests were performed so inefficiently, there would be no hope of bringing the healthcare of developing nations up to par.
Shouldn't too tricky to fix. My Kindle has a few small dead areas where it has evidently met hard objects in a bag, but I always figured it was because it has a soft plastic screen, a material likely chosen for reasons of low weight, low cost, and low light reflectivity.
A textured glass or thicker, stiffer plastic screen should be feasible.
For the board game setup discussed above, a toughned glass would likely be required due to the size of it - and people being sure to place beer bottles on it. This thicker glass might cause parallax issues, but probably tolerably so for the use case.
A digital 'board' for playing chess outside would be nice. Whilst it would never have tactility of a real chess board, the advantages it could offer are:
- a huge range of other games would be available, Go, Civilisation, - anything 'turn based'
- human Vs computer play, human Vs human over internet
- you can't lose the physical pieces
- when playing Scrabble against other humans, the board can be instantly rotated 90 degrees
Note: some games such as Scrabble would require each player to use their phone view their letters without revealing them to other players... unless this this digital game board had a lenticular section on each edge that was only visible to a player sat there.
I was just wondering what the current state of the art of bipedal robots is... I have't heard much for a while, and don't know what the current technological hurdles are. Navigation? Control? Battery power density?
The following from, this year, is being sold to.connercial customers, but as a dev kit for future applications. It's certainly advanced than Honda's discontinued Asimo. I don't know what Japanese companies have in the pipeline.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/6/21050322/bipedal-robot-digit-agility-robotics-on-sale-delivery-inspection-ces-2020#comments
It looks alright, but I don't think it would be too hard to fit some retractable wheels to its feet for when it is on flat, level ground - it sounds like someone has left half a horse walking around the office.
You're thinking of Teleoperation and Telepresence, where a human is in control of a remote - like an existing bomb disposal waldo or military drone. Japan is thinking of standards that would allow autonomous robots to work alongside humans safely in various situations, such as in hospitals, factories, etc
I didn't downvote you, but hey, it seems there's a film critic here.
The reasoning behind just providing an API and not a full app was that a method of entering confirmed cases is required - just letting people say "I've got Covid!" opens the door for all sorts of idiotic mischief. Artificial false positives just for the lols, for starters. So, the idea is that health authorities build an app atop the APIs and they are the arbiters of whether an individual has Covid, hopefully based on good testing. And that goes for the authorities accrediting private sector testing companies, if required.
Google and Apple assumed that competent health authorities exist.
What's wrong with your phone that you don't receive Play Services updates anymore? Play Services get updated like an app, not like an OS update from your phone vendor.
Still, if your phone is five years old or whatever, you might not have Bluetooth 4 LE anyways - your hardware will preclude you.
UK government initally refused to use Google Apple APIs, citing lack of distance estimation - and then wasted loads of money on a non functional (yet "World-beating") system from Dominic Cummings's Cambridge Analytica Vote Leave mates.
Then they discovered that Google and Apple know a little bit more about mobile phone systems than they do.
The other issue is that local public health authorities had been deprived of money for a decade - local professionals on the ground who would know which areas wpuld be more at risk of a pandemic. Contact tracing has been done fairly successfully in other countries by knocking in doors and asking questions.
Page 94 - the Private Eye podcast - has some useful background.
Well, there's a place in the market for the 'let's build it just because we can' approach - there's 8 billion people on the planet, so someone might buy it.
There's also a place in the market for extensive studying of what people need to do, devising a good way of doing it and then imposing these ways on users.
And neither approach is perfect, and the companies involved won't ignore the market for ever.
The result? Samsung phones are now less likely to incorporate features nobody asked for, and, coming from the other direction, Apple eventually made bigger phones and allowed 3rd party keyboards.
Your perception of it being small was a triumph of the design language rolled out in the 3210 - it made them look smaller than they were. Maybe the lack of an aerial bulge or knob helped. Both models were smaller than many of their contempories and forebears, but there had been far smaller and slimmer phones on the market for a couple of years, both from Nokia themselves and from Ericsson.
The 3310 was bulky compared to some of its (more expensive) peers.
Ericsson's T28 from 1999 was 15mm thick and weighed 83 grams, whilst the 3310 was 22mm thick and weighed 133 grams. The T28 was pricey, costing more than twice as much as bigger but otherwise similar Ericsson models.
How small a phone was became a status symbol for a while - hence the visual joke in the film Zoolander (2001) when the fashionista protagonist struggles to operate his matchbox-sized phone.
In a case of life imitating art, Nokia would go on to make a lipstick sized phone with no keypad - during Nokia's run-by-mangers (instead of engineers and designers), terminal decline era.
Yeah, the retrospective attention the 3310 gets over the 3210 is at odds with my memory of events. What is it that I'm missing - did the 3310 sell massively better than its predecessor? Was I in a bubble at the time because I was a student?
The 3310, with no visible aerial, was quite striking when it first appeared. It was common, too, and replacement Xpress-on cases (both shoddy 3rd party and pricey Nokia versions) were everywhere.
I recall the 3310 didn't look quite as good, though it was a touch more compact, and used a white LED for its backlight over the 3310's green.
> I meant that it is quite possible using current technology to block cosmic rays and therefore keep astronauts safer.
That's fair, perhaps we were on cross wires. The issue of how much mass to surround travellers to Mars with is economic, not technological. We can use current technology, but lots of it!
> You can talk about "human bias", but people value what they value and those trillions are only hypothetical a long way down the road
I can talk about human bias because it has been demonstrated experimentally. Repeatidly. We just haven't evolved to look at these issues intuitively.
But hey, special relativity isn't intuitive, but we grapple with it anyway to make our GPS systems work. Quantum mechanics is not intuitive, but we grapple with it to make transistors work as intended.
So, if you want to design the best machine you have to look beyond your intuition and use data and theory derived from evidence, experiment and proof. The same goes for designing humanitarian solutions, if you are serious about helping people and not just seeking a feel good factor. There's nothing wrong with using the desire to feel good as a motivating factor - it just has no place dictating strategy.
As Terry Pratchett noted, it's hard to talk about the workings of the universe using s language designed to tell other sites where the ripe fruit is.
Most people form sentences in their minds faster than they can speak, type or write them down. There are of course hangovers when. I can't find the... thingies. I'm... er... looking. for.
And conversely, there are times when inspiration strikes and words fly out. It's often better to just record them when the metaphorical iron is hot, and review and edit later.
> cognitively impaired and at great risk of cancer.This is not true at all...
It is true. Cosmic rays cause cognitive impairment, according to the best evidence we currently have. Note the link, it's Nature, not a Mickey Mouse journal:
'Cosmic radiation exposure and persistent cognitive dysfunction'
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep34774
Alister is correct; your claim about the Russians is bollocks. Everybody knows that the first reusable rocket to land vertically was created by Professor Calculus on behalf of the Syldavian government in 1953. The event was witnessed by the journalist Tintin.
[Fun fact: professor Calculus and Captain Jean-Luc Piccard were both based on the same Swiss investment for and explorer, Auguste Piccard, known for high altitude helium balloon flights and making the bathysphere. ]
> Right up until you get distracted. e.g. something you saw on TV last night, what might be for tonight's dinners, that pretty woman (or man) who just walked past
It is lovely to do things that preclude distraction... I am more easily distracted when I am writing up a report than I am if I am hurtling through the woods on my mountain bike. Heck, I've found myself blissfully free of any concious thought when working with my hands to repack the wheel bearings of my bike, my brain and fingers together finding the correct but tightness - my mind nowhere to be found.
So, is it a UI problem? Tony Stark's fictional workshop blurs the lines between CAD data and real objects... does it aid the engineer to be working with their whole body and not just their eyes and hands?
> I know people who worship at the altar of Musk thing he can do anything, but his companies have never made any fundamental advances in the state in the art. They've taken the next obvious step.
That's the kind of the point - fundamental scientific advances in and of themselves dont benefit anyone until they become deployed technology. What is often the barrier to deployment? Cost. How does one reduce cost? Scale. Scaling spreads the development and tooling costs across many more customers, so each customer pays less.
So, Musk himself doesn't discover or invent things, but he has a clear idea of what technology he thinks would be beneficial and then organises companies to reduce the cost barrier to deployment.
Example problem: batteries are expensive, they would be cheaper if more people bought them, but they won't buy them until they are less expensive. Solution: invest in a sodding massive battery factory, invest in the scale to reduce costs and then reap the increase in demand. That's an organisational solution to an organisational problem.
So yeah, Musk only takes what engineers see as the next obvious step. However, markets and money don't see things the same way as engineers, which is a barrier to the next obvious step actually being taken. The skill set to get the financiers, the public, the government customers, the engineers et al to all see the next step as obvious, and then organise and finance the engineers to deliver it is not an engineering skill set as such - but it is invaluable none the less.
So, he uses the technique of talking about crazy far off things such as backing up your memories or going to Mars. Since those are so far off they cannot be destinations and can only be used as directions at this stage. And that is not a problem. I would follow the *direction* of North if I wanted to travel from Mexico to Canada, even though I had no great desire to go to the *destination* that is the North Pole. On my journey I might discover things that cause me to go West instead, or maybe settle down. It would be hubristic of me to assume I know everything about the journey before I take it. Never the less, if I ever do reach Canada I could learn more about the North Pole than I ever could in Mexico.
All navigators, and the Marquis de Sade, know that directions are often expressed in terms of far-off and unreachable destinations.
> manages to land on a Goldilocks-zone planet it will still take getting used to. And then we would start the process of destroying the new planet all over again . . .
Hehe, for sure. However, that's assuming we need planets. If you want as many acres as possible to suport life and only a finite amount of matter in the solar system, planets are a very inefficient way of arranging things. If we weren't at the mercy of our biology (which requires the protection from radiation that our Earth's magnetosohere provides, or else a shit ton of matter around us) our options would be much wider. If we weren't tied to our bodies and thus only really cared about energy, our outlook would be more different still - though would likely tend towards capturing as much energy as we can. None of the above is barred by the laws of physics, its just a question of desire and technology - just as finding a way of seeding life (via seed ships, generation ships, cryostasis) in other star systems is. If we want to ensure our species' survival against a catastrophic event on Earth, then it follows we might also consider seeding life many light years away in case of a supernova local to the solar system.
Or maybe it's easier to develop a form of philosophy along the lines of "If we and all our descendants ceased to exist tomorrow, we at least know that exist today, and have existed, and that's more than we ever had any right to expect from the universe, and we're good with that"
"We could program you not to mind" said the mice to Arthur Dent, in response to his protestations at the prospect of his brain being removed and replaced with a computer. Very unreasonable of him - after all, nobody would be able to tell the difference.
> terraforming Mars is crazy.
On that I agree - or at least I've never read of how Mars, that doesn't have a magnetosphere, would retain a thicker, breathable atmosphere even if such an atmosphere could be created. So yeah, Musk mooting the detonation of thousands of hydrogen bombs over the Martian poles would be crazy if he was actually in a position to do it. Merely coming up with crazy ideas isn't itself crazy if one always performs *due process* (ie assessing them, putting them out for criticism etc) before putting them in action.
There is also a school of thought that sending all of mankind's stockpile of nuclear weapons to a dead rock is preferable to having them on Earth, however useless they would be for changing Mars' atmosphere. There isn't a mandated *due process* for launching nuclear weapons on Earth - it's at the whim of the head of state in several countries.
On the subject of leaving the Earth's magnetosphere, I don't believe the problem of protecting human to travellers from cosmic radiation has yet been solved. Options are: more fuel to make the journey faster, more fuel to allow the spacecraft more rad shielding. Potential options: an artificial magnetosphere for the spacecraft (untested, let alone scaled up, likely unworkable for the foreseeable future), advances in biotechnology that would render the passengers less susceptible to radiation damage.
Any astronaut sent to Mars with today's technology would arrive sickly, weak-boned, cognitively impaired and at great risk of cancer.
Back in 2013 Musk stated he wanted to make the James Bond Lotus Esprit submarine work as is it is depicted in the film - i.e, a car with wheels that converts to a submarine upon entering the water. The actual Esprit prop he bought does work as a submarine, but it requires the operator to wear scuba gear and it doesn't work as a car - timing involving several working Esprits and Esprit body shells to depict a car turning into a submarine and back again.
It's 2020 and we're still waiting!
Still, it's clear that he hadn't completely forgotten about his Lotus - he said the Esprit was a strong influence upon the shape the Tesla Cybertruck, as if that wasn't obvious. Now, I've seen how other Lotus Cars in James Bond films behave - they explode if someone tries to break into one by smashing a window. Such an effective (if terminal) theft-deterrence device was conspicuously absent during Musk's Cybertruck demonstration, but I guess this oversight can be fixed by the time Cybertrucks are released for sale.
> I wish Musk would put all of his energy and efforts toward Martian colonization into fixing Earth.
Besides his efforts to decarbonise road transport, reduce urban road congestion with tunnels, develop solar power infrastructure and grid storage, push for high speed rail systems as an alternative to internal air travel, set up a research to group to keep an eye on potential threats from future AIs, and inspiring young people to become engineers by making cool rockets?
What have the Romans ever done for us?
And of course there is much more to be done to make our existence on earth more sustainable, responsible and enjoyable.
Seriously though, if you want to help the most humans on earth right now for the least amount of money, give your money to people distributing malaria nets. In terms of lives saved per dollar, the best performing humanitarian charities are 1000x better than the least performing, and 100x better than the median. That's right now. I don't know if the analysis considered instead giving money to malaria research so that future generations might not fear malaria - current lives vs future lives. Of course mosquitos spread other diseases too such as Dengue or Zika, and potentially viruses that have not yet mutated to infect humans.
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