Posts by Ru

Credit to the artist though, for finding a way to sell a lump of rock, presumably for a fair amount of cash

Metallic meteorites are easily sold for quite reasonable slabs of money, on account of the "Widmanstätten" patterns that form in molten metal cooled slowly in zero-g looking rather pretty.

Melting the original destroys these, leaving a fairly boring chunk of nickel iron behind. I'm sure there's an artistic statement in that somewhere, but I don't see any value in it.

Re: Dark?

Geothermal is a slight inconvenient technology to use... there are probably huge areas where it wouldn't be appropriate at all, and yet more areas where the expense of building such a thing would far outweigh the benefits. If you're in a sunny desert on the other hand, the amount of technical expertise and construction equipment required will be vastly lower.

I Am Not A Geologist, however. The Nevada site may be a perfect hotspot for all I know, but I rather suspect that a 20MW geothermal installation would have cost a few more pennies than the equivalent solar cells, taxbreaks or no.

Re: I don't see this as an advantage.

I'm a game developer. Am I now supposed to write serious games in HTML5/Javascript?

If there are potential customers on a new platform, and the potential revenues from that new platform comfortably exceed the cost to port old/develop new software on that platform, would you really ignore that platform just because you don't like the language?

do they expect us to write good apps in this limited and unsophisticated language?

There's lots not to like about javascript, but 'limited and unsophisticated' it ain't. You can refuse to write in it and demand a 'real programming language' (and I wouldn't blame you), but that basically makes you a primadonna. If you can't write good apps in it, then perhaps you should be examining your own design and engineering skills rather than blaming the language you have to work with.

Re: Alternative to Windows?

The is a reason that Windows (with OS X some way back in the distance) won the game. A clear vision, clear direction and dependable platforms

No-one can "win" this particular game; only maintain a temporary lead. I would posit that Microsoft's current actions with regards to Windows 8 fail to show "clear vision, clear direction and dependable platforms".

Meanwhile, the market for desktops is looking pretty moribund, and laptops aren't exactly looking healthy. On the other hand the market in tablets and phones remains very healthy, and a substantial chunk of it runs Linux.

Then we get into all the forking that's going on. X, Wayland, Mir...AND all the DEs! And GUI kits! So you have to re-write your application about 10 times...no, 20 (sorry, I forgot the deb/rpm thing) times in order to deploy.

If you want to write a desktop application for Win8 right now, what do you use? WindowsForms is basically obsolete, WPF has been all but abandoned (the internal devs have largely moved to other projects) and Windows Store is clearly inadequate for a vast number of jobs (great for a calculator widget on your phone, less so for Photoshop). Where's the dependable platform?

Re: Cool

Now we have an antimatter source, someone needs to invent dilithium.

This is a positron source, not quite as useful as an antiproton source. Given one of those, though, you wouldn't need any dilithium.

It is possible to make relatively lightweight and quite powerful antimatter-catalysed nuclear pulse engine with equipment we could conceivably build right now... have a look at this stuff, especially "Antiproton-catalyzed microfission/fusion propulsion systems". 30 day trip to Mars, a little over 50% of the ship's total mass needed for reaction mass, and all this with a mere 150 nanograms of antiprotons. I bet CERN could brew that much up in under a year, if they really tried hard.

All that's lacking is determination. The US could build such a spacecraft and has some domestic particle accellerators to provide the fuel, but I don't see any US government seriously diverting funds from the military to spaceflight any time soon.

Re: Agreed...

So I'd love to hear how they are going to "monetize" this fickle audience...

Blackmail?

Re: Title

As I keep trying to explain to the missus, I might not last very long but I'm very fast

Careful now. You don't want her to engage in a comparitive benchmarking session, do you?

Re: the press had to endure a long flight with no alcohol

No booze - on an Aeroflot flight?

Possibly that only means 'no spirits'. Beer is basically a soft drink in Russia after all.

AES-256 is the only "US Government officially approved" encryption method. It was certified by the NSA. As was SSL.

Connect the dots.

It isn't really in the interests of the NSA to have widely used encryption algorithms with exploits, because you are basically gambling on there being no-one in the whole of the rest of the world who will be clever enough to find out, and nor will the details of the backdoor be leaked within the expected lifetime of the cipher.

Ultimately, if US citizens and businesses are shafted as a result of inept cloak'n'dagger games by their own government security services, the enemies of the US will be the ones who benefit most, which rather defeats the point of the whole exercise.

Re: Due to caffeine intolerance,*

I get very panicy and think everything is going to go wrong. avoid caffeine and I am fine

As Pratchett has observed in the past (with reference to coffe, rather than tea), the phenomenon you have encountered is called being 'knurd'... experiencing life as it really is without all the comfortable fluffy delusions your brain erects to make things bearable.

And besides, everything has already gone wrong. It is just getting worse, now.

Why would a sentient ad-server want to destroy humanity? Who would buy or view adverts then?

Mind you, I'd fear for the safety of anyone who's ever contributed time or money to AdBlock...

Re: People and confidentiality

There are ways to protect the confidentiality of your data:

1) do not generate it

You seem to be under the impression that 'protection' is some sort of absolute; either you've got it or you ain't. Wrong.

If you hold confidential data on me, you'd better be exercising some due diligence with regards to keeping it confidential, rather than just leaving it on a public webpage and saying 'eh, it would have probably leaked one day anyway'. You might not agree with me, but there are quite a few legal jurisdictions in the world which agree with me, and they're also ones in which quite a lot of business is done.

You seem to have completely missed the rather important underlying point, which is that creation of confidential data and restricting the dissemination thereof is critical to the workings of business, governments, medics and even friends and families. No-one can simply give it up.

Given this constraint that somehow went over your head, what can be done to ameliorate leakage and provide some contingency plans?

Re: Now

Now how about using 3D printing to actually make something useful............

For prototyping parts that cannot be easily bashed out on a CNC mill, it is exceptionally useful and indeed what they are most often used for. Architectural models are also useful things, and are more usefully 3D printed than painstakingly hand-assembled. But maybe that isn't useful enough for you? How about a 3D printed metal replacement jawbone?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16907104

See icon

See title.

Re: UK better at building, but rubbish at owning.

Saw the news yesterday that the UK now makes more cars than France and nearly all the owners are not based in the UK

Oh noes! Exports are literally the worst possible thing that can happen to an economy!

Er, right?

Re: Are you sure you want to do this?

This could be soliciting for information

They already have the information that might be considered sensitive.

Re: "XBOX Vista" already dead?

Except that to many players, having to phone home every day is inconsequential as it will always be online through WiFi.

And for all those naysayers who lack a convenient internet connection, I'm sure a handy phone-based system can be cobbled together where you just have to phone up a call centre once a day and enter a handy 36-character authentication code into your console and everything will carry on working just fine.

Huh, I thought you had to go much further east to get crazy long consecutive consonant chains. Georgian and Armenian seem to contain rather less conveniently pronounceable words... "ɡvbrdɣvnis" (the super-useful "he's plucking us") and khghchmtank̕ ("conscience", apparently).

I think they have Dutch beaten on the number of phonemes they can wring out of a bunch of consonants, if nothing else.

Re: Of course the Warlords will just sit back and allow this

It may startle you to learn that not all of Africa is a poverty stricken desert filled with the starving and oppressed serfs of the local warmongering kleptocrat.

If nothing else, have a think about exactly how much value Google could extract from such a place... "precious little", to put it politely. Regardless of how altruistic Google might be, they're not total idiots and will have done at least the bare minimum of due diligence with regards to the state of the local economy and political stability, because they probably don't want their shiny new kit to be blown up or left unused.

Re: The title is too long

For several weeks of that time I have been held in solitary confinement

...which is interesting. I wonder what he's done to deserve that sort of treatment... he doesn't seem like quite the type to shiv another prisoner, after all. Still, could be worse... he didn't get the suicide watch treatment that Manning did.

Re: Ball mark?

It looks a bit like a schooner, I thought.