Posts by Primus Secundus Tertius

Re: Can you solve this Captcha?

It looks like a press release edited by an arts graduate who can manipulate words but not grasp their meaning.

Re: How is this waste?

Well said, sir!

U-235 has a half life of 700 million years, and U-238 of 4500 my. They are not the problem; it is fission products that are.

I believe, though I would like to see someone else do it first, that one can safely walk past a freshly manufactured fuel rod. But a rod just withdrawn from a reactor is spitting wild rates of radiation from isotopes with a half life of just a few minutes, and would probably kill you. So those rods are left in a deep pool of water for a year, until there are two main fission products left: caesium-137 and strontium-90. These have half lives of about 30 years.

A half life of 30 years makes them emit, weight for weight, over 50 times more radiation than the classical radium (half life ca 1700 years). They could, however, be useful for peaceful applications of radiation. This may be why the story mentions hospital uses. Or, as commented above, they can be turned into glass and buried.

I have read that much of the earth's internal heat comes from the decay of potassium-40 in the earth's crust, with a half life of many billions of years. So I calculated the internal temperature of a football-sized sphere of sodium strontium silicate (glass). It would be red hot at the centre. So burying glass needs some thought and design.

But the story is unconvincing, a cloud of ackamarackus to hide some real objective, which may even be as mundane as money.

Re: Cheques

I am the Treasurer of my local town twinning committee. We use cheques for two main reasons: we do not have the business status to collect direct debits for subscriptions; and we require two signatures for payments. That latter is a protection for us committee officers as well as for the money.

Our German counterparts, however, use giro transfers to receive payments for the events they organise. I have not yet asked them about payments: do they need multiple authorisation, and if so, how is that arranged?

One problem we have: for every event we organise, some cheques arrive payable to the organiser personally rather than to the twinning association. Fortunately our bank is sympathetic to these things.

Re: Exhibitionists vs. Mormons

@TheOtherhobbes

"makes Twitter look like a Mensa pub quiz".

Well written, sir! Have an upvote.

Re: Bah

N'Draghi??

No, this is not US non-recognition of foreigners. It seems to be hinting at the Naples version of the mafia, the Ndrangheta.

Re: ...just like the police

No, they were not respected by the plebs (e.g. my grandparents, on one side at least). It is a middle class delusion to say the police were respected - and they lost that respect after everyone bcame a motorist.

Re: I'd have assumed that their test code suite would catch something like that...

In the 1980s I was taught how to develop microcode for a processor built by Norsk Data. It was hard. There were different objects within the CPU addressed by different fields within a very long instruction word. These objects had to be kept working together consistently, and with regard to their timing needs.

It makes me wonder if things have evolved since then; whether perhaps one can do a software emulation of microcode; and whether such an emulation could be more rigorously tested.

Re: Simplified list

People say they want secure, bug-free systems; but will they pay for them? Hell, no!

Re: "Your anger is our energy"

It is a pity Microsoft do not have the same positive attitude to us users who demand a Windows 7+, not that 8/10 spyware rubbish.

They could even call it Windows 24/7, since it will probably take them until v24 to get things the way we want them as opposed to what MSFT marketing want.

Re: Redundancy?

Virgin Internet struggle to hit two-nines reliability, let alone five-nines.

Re: QR code?

I did get as far as the QR code. Then on my PC I used a QR reader program I found via Google, which does seem to read other QR codes. But it would not recognise the GCHQ one.

I was given an Android tablet as a Xmas prezzie, but have not worked out how to read QR codes with it, using just the standard apps it came with. I can photograph them, but not decipher them.

Re: There's a good and a bad side to this

"They" aboolished sterling bank notes of more then £5 during World War 2, to stifle the black market.

Re: What's the point of living?

@Scrubber

Also:

Driving your own car is dangerous

Being driven by Google is dangerous

Re: What happened to austerity?

@John Brown

"Anyone not there for there debate is likely not competent to vote."

I strongly disgree. Most issues in politics are decided along party lines; most MPs are elected with the support of their party; in return they are expected to follow the party whip. Exceptions can be made where an MP has especially strong feelings or knowledge of a particular matter.

Few MPs are really interested in the whole range of issues that parliament deals with. So they generally support their party on "other issues", and expect their colleagues to repay that support when the issue is important to them. Those party mechanisms generally reflect the mood of the voters.

MPs are expected to answer constituents' letters (assisted by office staff) and where necessary to find the information for those answers, by asking ministers or researching other sources. There is more to being an MP than being gasbag lobby fodder. They are also expected to have a life outside parliament so they are better qualified to vote on matters before them.

So they bring outside knowledge to their vote, not just the proceedings of the debate. It would be entirely wrong to limit the vote to those in the debating chamber.

In return, the voters pass their own judgement every four or five years.

Re: Does my Amiga 1200 count?

I, too, have an FX-451 which I use almost daily. E.g. to check out the 49.7 days mentioned above.

Re: Pilots?

"The Dog and Pilot" would be a fine pub name.

@Roo

Come to think of it, a floating point number is a pretty abstract object compared with mere binary digits.

They used to be defined in software, you know.

Re: Shurley some mishtake

There can be advantages in copying a non-ISO file to a CD or DVD. E.g. denying that it contains anything if you are caught.

Beos and Nextstep used non-ISO cds for at least part of their product.

use a pretty printer

Indenting is only useful if it shows what the computer thinks, rather than what the programmer thinks.

Example: a bug in a Coral66 program, where the preceding 'comment' lacked a terminating semicolon. So the program statement got absorbed into the comment and was therefore absent from the binary.

Re: "fake news has taken on a much more unpleasant tone...

@Dave126

When Rome was a republic it was governed by two consuls. Sometimes one would handle Monday, Wednesday, Friday... Sunday could be left to the priests.

Newspapers whould be run in this way, the Guardiagraph one day refuting what the Teledian published the day before. Sunday could become a big day for El Reg.

Re: What if?

Perhaps WhatsApp should have just handed over the encrypted data, saying that is all they had. At least then they would be showing some degree of compliance with the law.

Next step perhaps is arrest warrants for all senior WhatsApp personnel. That will show them!

Re: NSPCC

The Romans had the right idea. Paterfamilias would not tolerate indiscipline in the ranks.

also defence data

@Monsieur DePlume

I worked on at least two defence projects where we were the first to actually examine data that had accumulated for years, but there had never been money allocated to studying it. We were looking at ancient magnetic tapes in ancient formats, religiously collected because orders are orders. Sometimes the tapes had been transcribed to CDs.

The military people we dealt with were all strongly oriented to the here and now, and not interested in going over old data.

@AC

Not so easy when Lenovo have done something to the disk hardware so that the MSFT install DVD for Windows 7 does not recognise the disk.

Re: Office 365.25

@Crazy...

He Caesar maiden through the glass

And contemplates her shapely anatomy.

Re: Why would they - they are PRIVATE companies.....

But they are not supposed to be negligent, whatever they are.

Re: Variable record format

Yes, VMS files came in the proverbial 57 varieties. This was all well documented, but few people ever consulted the manuals, Many programmers got confused and made mistakes.

It was as confusing as the old George 3 file varieties: graphic mode (for all-capitals text), normal mode (quite rare, upper and lower case), and allchars (normal plus control characters).