Posts by Dave 126

Re: Poor Countries?

If you're developing a country, it costs little to lay fibre down *before* you pave the the first roads. Even less if you do it at the same time.

I'm not coming down on the side of fibre vs satellite, though. Too many other complex factors. Sociopolitical, for example - how many tyrannical governments like shutting down internet access, how many twats like to set fire to cell phone towers or microwave relays? How much of our essential infrastructure such as food distribution and emergency coordination relies on the internet, and how resilient is ground based infrastructure to storms, fires, trawlers, civil unrest etc?

Re: I've not managed to find a balanced opinion on ...

I'm just amazed by the folk here, using the internet, effectively saying that other groups of people don't deserve the internet because they'll only use it for cat pics and pr0n - just because they live in the rural USA or a remote African village.

Re: Asteroid hunting doesn’t use the same type of ‘scope

So, to summarise the above points:

Ground based: lots and lots of telescopes, can be made very big. Atmospheric interference not a deal breaker.

Space based: Just too expensive to put lots of telescopes up there, size is limited.

Okay, so let's look at twenty years in the future. Will there be enough telescopes in space to warn us of meteorites?

I'm assuming that for less urgent, purely scientific astronomy (the cosmos ain't going away any time soon) space or lunar based observations will eventually surpass any earth based telescopes, be this in fifty or years or a hundred.

Also, spotting an extinction-level rock hurtling towards us isn't too useful unless we can divert or destroy it. That will require getting hardware into space. The development costs of getting stuff into space have to funded somehow, be it by commercial satellites, military or state posturing.

Anyway, there's a professor at Oxford who set up a department for existential threats to humanity, and he places giant meteorites quite low down on the list - though they are devastating they are rare, and there are plenty of other ways we have of screweing ourselves over.

Re: If only there were some kind of paint with 99.999% absorbtion

Kapoor has negotiated an exclusive licence to use a particular material produced in a certain way... other materials with similar properties are available, and who knows, there might be reasons that Vanta Black is not the ideal coating for space vehicles.

Maybe microgravity vacuum is a suitable environment for depositing nanotubes on a substrate - i.e, develop a system for coating the satellites in orbit.

Re: Facebook Tracking

To expand my point, it's akin to the recent change in UK law that makes organ donation Opt Out, so that the default is that your organs can be used to help save someone else unless you explicitly opt out. The aim is provide more organs for donation. This, along with many other real world examples, strongly suggest that changing the default option can be more powerful than merely presenting a choice. There's even a UK Government department nicknamed the Nudge Department based on this sort of thinking.

Re: Bad guy vs bad guy

> overpriced hardware slinger

I guess that the conclusion 'overpriced' can only be reached after considering the values you assign to money and to privacy.

Re: Facebook Tracking

It is convincing. Facebook is rightly more worried by the default behaviour of a popular OS as shipped than it is by an individual browser chosen by the user.

Re: Personalised ads actually make less money

If I want a TV, I research TVs, search for a good price and then buy a TV. Then I see lots of advertisements on websites for TVs - advertisements that are wasted inner because I already have a TV.

It would seem that personalised advertising would work better if it only shows me ads for things I have never searched for. "Ohh, an ad for a steel mcguffin, I had no idea they made those... it looks kind of neat, I might buy one!"

Re: OK i get it, its a demonstrator but...

A large part of military operations isn't combat, but logistics. The shipping pallet was originally US 'military tech' (WW2, Pacific Theatre), the shipping container was civilian invention but popularised by the US military (Vietnam War).

I haven't got an answer for your question, but such an answer might be found in the area of getting a few key personnel from a main base to a forward operating base, perhaps. The military is sure to have a use for moving a few people around quickly and cheaply over rough (but non combat) terrain.

Re: "let alone a plan for how they would be safely operated in large numbers"

Swarms of drones on ad hoc mesh networks coordinating their own 'air traffic control' autonomously has been shown successfully in principal some years ago.

Re: Apple should launch this for the public.

> Don't see how you can possibly do that without too high a false positive rate.

That is what I was hinting at by including the Acetone / Nail Bar example that the DARPA programme manager gave. False positives are expected. Their plan is is use roving sensors (they talked of cars, but chemical sensors masquerading as smartphones fit this model too) to build a huge real-time data set and then use algorithms to highlight unusual cases. Fertilizer on a farm or agricultural wholesaler = normal. Fertilizer by a government building = worthy of investigation.

I daresay that a similar approach is applied to purchases made online. Gallons of acetone supplied to a nail salon raises fewer flags than if it were supplied to a residential address in a certain area.

Re: Apple should launch this for the public.

For sure, but a little knowledge is a dangerous thing... wait til idiots accost some poor radiotherapy patient for being a terrorist.

DARPA have a programme looking into the problem of separating natural or mundane sources from those that suggest something more sinister is going on... roving sensors and big data, etc. Not just radionuclides, but precursors to conventional explosive too. High acetone reading, ah, but it's outside a nail salon, likely mundane source.

Re: Transparent TV

> I'm wondering how it tells a pixel is transparent... are these "normally black" pixels?

Other sources say the TV comes with some custom content, to give the impression of fish swimming about etc. It's likely that you can play PNGs with transparency defined by an alpha layer, too.

Otherwise, it just plays normal video in a normal fashion.

Hehe, my inclusion of the Monty Python link came to me as an afterthought, after the concept of surprising a feline came into my head

Re: Frying tonite

Search for 'graphene anodes' and you'll find a lot of articles and papers. You'll have to dig more deeply than I have to find out how close to production they might be.

Re: Transparent phone, please?

We're forever seeing see-thru phones in sci-fi, films like Looper, TV like the Expanse. I never saw the point. And back in our reality, there were some see thru dumbphones on the market a few years back, with boring old monochrome see-thru LCD panels.

Sci Fi Side note: the origami folding tablet things from Westworld appear to be useful.

Re: Frying tonite

I dunno, do considerations of efficiency change the sums at all? Is 120W the max the charger will draw from the socket but not what it supplies to the phone?

Re: King's Quest

I still have the tension of not knowing if the damned game will actually run after waiting an hour for the download... Then I have to play a thrilling game of trying to reinstall Microsoft Runtime Environment 2015 or whatever the hell it is, with no guarantee of success (Civilization VI). First game I decide to play for years, and shonkiness of the process took be right back to the nineties!

If I recall correctly, real time data from the engines back to Rolls Royce was an optional service that they offered, but not every airline took them up on it - famously the Malaysian Airlines jet that disappeared a few years ago.

CAMRA in their early days did very important work, but it's been 'Mission Successful' for several decades now - tied pubs were allowed guest ales, and real beer is widely available. (Though law of unintended consequences is that many pubs sold off by the big breweries were bought by pub companies, whose chief business model is squeezing their publicans by always increasing the rent).

Many CAMRA members are now 'tickers' - those who prize variety over quality (if a pub only offers a constantly revolving selection of beers, there is no dynamic that rewards a really good beer since a drinker won't know which pub to go to to find it. Most of these 'craft' breweries use cheap drum-malted barley as opposed to the traditional and labour-intensive floor malted barley). For them it is a hobby like stamp collecting, not a campaign.

Real ales are alive and well, it is our real pubs that are under threat - and CAMRA would do well to focus on that. Pub companies are one issue, as is the beer price escalator that successive governments have adhered to. If they sincerely thought alcohol consumption was a public health issue, they would put more tax on supermarket booze instead of pricing people out of pubs and community engagement.

Of course in the current situation, in many sectors, many people's jobs and passions are under threat. I would note though that regular pub users are able to talk civilly with others of varying lifestyles and political views - unlike many a Twitter user.

Re: I have to use Excel at work

Why complain? You can now Alt Ctrl Del with one hand!

Re: Where is the outrage?

You must have read a different comments thread. Most of the people here are either bashing MS, suggesting how Excel should behave, suggesting that scientists should a database, defending the use of excel in this context, talking about cats, or saying things about scientific research culture.

Reading between the lines, most of the comments here are based upon an unease that scientists should have to change their way of working to fit a tool. That most here aren't expressing their unease as outrage actually speaks well of them.

( As for removing loaded, potentially offensive terms, yeah, I might differ from the majority here, but in the appropriate threads I merely suggest to them that experiments and studies have been conducted and that it's worthwhile looking at them. It's not so much offense that is an issue, but continuously and subtly perpetuating views and assumptions that do not withstand objective scrutiny. )

Re: Time to be pedantic

You would lose a lot of talent, skills, various ways of seeing the world, and thus insights, if the only people who were allowed to be scientists were IT literate to a certain level. However, there some issues to be sorted out.

In a similar vein, a good number of working scientists aren't statisticians, and can as a result fall into traps. Some universities therefore employ some full time statisticians for researchers to consult.

So perhaps the answer is to educate scientists in IT enough so that they know what they don't know, and thus seek assistance - and then provide said assistance. Of course, the learning would go both ways, with the IT specialists learning about the sort of issues in IT the scientist in his or her field might come across in their workflow*.

*And that's another thing - if you're at the cutting edge of something, you don't always adhere to an established work flow. You might carefully record data in a logbook (or Excel file) out of habit, but only discover it to be significant down the line when something surprising has happened.

Re: They are creating a database ...

You beat me to the XKCD, very relevant!

At least Polaroids are an honest record of known optics and chemistry - there are no algorithms in the middle.

Whatever it does, it should let the user know it is doing it. Minimum. Ideally, it should ask the user if it should do it.

If this issue affects gene researchers, it might also affect others. Whilst the gene researchers have, as a group, decided on a workaround, it would be sensible for MS to allow users to configure Excel to not auto-format when importing files - this way benefitting other users who might otherwise run afoul. Alternatively, have Excel bring up a dialogue box telling the user how to convert the cell type - "Hey, it looks like you might be working with dates in this column. If you wish to convert it to a date format, select the column by double clicking the header and then right click, Format Cells".

Lots of people use Excel for some pretty exotic stuff, including control and automation. That horse has bolted. Some options, clear and well communicated, would seem to be the sensible way forward. Maybe just a choice at install: Are you an accountant or an engineer?