* Posts by Robert Heffernan

392 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jul 2007

Page:

Boeing plans super-secure Android smartphone for top echelons

Robert Heffernan
Thumb Up

The upside

There is an upside here, Boeing will be able to pay the best in field security experts to harden android beyond all belief. Now while a lot of their work won't be of use to the mass market, such as military grade encryption, it's the hardening of the kernel and dalvik VM that will benefit everyone due to the open source nature of the OS. If Boeing's work is backported into the mainline repo, Android will suddenly become one of the most secure platforms out there.

Commodore founder Jack Tramiel dies at 83

Robert Heffernan
Pint

Farewell Jack

Farewell Jack,

Thanks for all the enjoyment your machines brought me during my childhood years, sparking my current enthusiasm and love for all things IT.

You were largely responsible for the meteoric rise of the home computer market by providing computers at a realistic price point and in doing so, stepped on the toes of your contemporaries who in return ensured that your place in history has largely been forgotten.

Thank you, and so long.

PLASMA GERM BLASTER GUN invented for cleaning skin

Robert Heffernan
Facepalm

*Sigh*

The problem is we should be using LESS anti-bacterial not making more ways to kill them.

The human immune system is based on exposure to this kind of thing, ever since anti-bacterial cleaners, ever more effective dust removal and the progressive move away from outdoor activities (playing in the dirt) kids have started to develop more and more allergies and have started developing other similar ailments all because their immune system didn't get the jump-start it needed when they were babies.

Canon reaches for stars with DSLR refresh

Robert Heffernan
Boffin

About time!

Ooh, it's about time the astro model dslr got an update. Might have to get me one :D

Scientists refine smart self-assembling building blocks

Robert Heffernan
Mushroom

I for one..

I for one welcome our new replicator overlords!

*The Aasgard almost got wiped out by them, what chance do we have!

IPv6 networking: Bad news for small biz

Robert Heffernan
Trollface

Re: It's only two more fricking Bytes

Honestly, I don't know if you are trolling or not but IPv6 does NOT add another 2 bytes, it adds another 12 bytes!

Using your terminology (not the correct one for IPv6 by the way) the address would be...

255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255.255

Storage upstart boasts of not losing a single customer...

Robert Heffernan
Trollface

Re: Making up names for things that don't exist

Did you READ the article at all??

"He revealed that Pure uses data centre MLC, which is less expensive than enterprise MLC. It is Samsung consumer-grade flash with jointly developed Samsung and Pure firmware to make it more reliable and deliver a consistently low latency from it. This flash comes with a 5-year warranty."

It said it right there in the same paragraph, after the sentence talking about the DC-MLC, it is just regular consumer MLC with custom firmware tuning the access to flash in a way better aligned with the usage case in a data center environment.

High school student expelled for dropping F-bomb in tweet

Robert Heffernan
Holmes

Easy solution!

Twitter would log the source IP address of all tweets, why not ask twitter to supply the IP that the offending tweet originated from. If it was a school IP then the school is fine, if the IP isn't a school ip then the school has some serious back-pedaling to do

CD: The indestructible music format that REFUSES TO DIE

Robert Heffernan
Thumb Up

Easy!

Stick it on a cheap USB thumb drive

'Intelligent systems' poised to outsell PCs, smartphones

Robert Heffernan
Boffin

Re: Not exactly

"I think there's a wider trend here. It used to cost a fortune to tool up for things like FPGA and embedded software development, but there is now so much competition from the silicon vendors that the entry level prices for these tools are tending towards zero."

The entire price for dev tools, especially in the FPGA market should be zero. Completely free, full featured tools are one of the best ways for the FPGA/Microcontroller manufacturers to get their parts into designs.

I know if I am picking components for a design and I need a certain functionality then I pick parts that I don't need to pay huge money for tools to get the functionality I need.

iPad subsidies axed for Microsoft S&M fanbois

Robert Heffernan
Facepalm

Doesn't Look Good!

Can you imagine how it would look to a customer if a Sales droid was standing in your office, asking How many Windows 8 Tablets can they sign you up for, punching the order into an iPad.

Doesn't exactly instill a lot of confidence in the product.

Musk muses on middle-class Mars colony

Robert Heffernan

Hmm

Half a million for a Mars trip definitely makes the $20m for an ISS trip seem like an awful ripoff.

I know for a fact that Elon/Space X will make this a reality and as great the work is laying the foundations of space exploration that the current incumbents in the space race (nasa, esa, roscosmos) have done, it's SpaceX that will really leave a footprint in the history of human space exploration and colonisation.

Time to start saving my money I think!

Mobile phones cause ADHD in rodents

Robert Heffernan

The article actually stated that the exposure duration was the entire 17 day gestation period of which the phone was on an active call the whole time

Mammoths, sabre-tooths MURDERED by second giant space boulder

Robert Heffernan

Where's the crater?

So if there was an impact event that recently, there should in theory still be a pretty big and reasonably fresh hole in the ground some place. Sure, the thing would be somewhat eroded and filled with plant life by now but it should be pretty obvious none the less, assuming it hit land. If it hit the ocean then there should be a nice smash mark on the ocean floor and a record of a mega tsunami in the ground around the coastlines about 12,900 years ago.

Workers can't escape Windows 8 Metro - Microsoft COO

Robert Heffernan
WTF?

Re: I don't want to work harder.

"Personally I've very glad I rarely end up doing desktop support these days, since I'm mainly server orientated, but I feel really sorry for the poor buggers who'll have to support this!"

Better start feeling sorry for yourself. Download the Windows Server 8 beta, I hear it has Metro too.

Giant stick insect saved from extinction

Robert Heffernan
Coat

Eratication Program

Lord Howe Island needs to undertake an eratication program (see what I did there!) to wipe out the rat popuation and restore the natural balance, then reintroduce the tree lobster to it's old environment

Citrix drops Rush Limbaugh over 'slutgate' slurs

Robert Heffernan
Trollface

Don't Feed The Trolls

Shock Jocks are the Trolls of the radio waves and w ha t this DJ has done is earn every cent of his $400m paycheck. In media there is no such thing as bad publicity and while he may have pissed off a lot of people with his remarks, those same pissed off people are now listeners to see what he will say next. Sure, some advertisers will pull out but there will be others who take their place and will pay more for it because of the now expanded audience. This whole thing was deliberate, to either raise revenue or to increase a declining a audience pool.

Everyone just played into their hands. Don't feed the Trolls!

'Kill yourself now' - Torvalds throws openSUSE security tantrum

Robert Heffernan

Re: Re: Hmm

"You're not "logging in as root" in order to add a printer. You're being asked to give YaST a password to prove you have the correct administrative rights to carry out the function."

That may be all good and well, but by no means should it be the root password to do it. There should be a separate administrative level password for authorizing such things, that doesn't give the user full and complete unrestricted access to every level of the system.

AMD snaps up server upstart SeaMicro

Robert Heffernan
WTF?

Wow!

I totally did NOT see that one coming. In hindsight though, I am surprised no one had snapped up SeaMicro earlier, the "Freedom" interconnect is a awesome piece of gear. I would have figured Intel of all people would have been the one to buy them, but AMD! crazy times!

Microsoft demos 3D desktop with transparent OLED

Robert Heffernan
Go

Re: Re: Look ma!

SolidWorks and AutoCad users will be all over this as soon as it hits the shelves. Being able to manipulate and assemble virtual components by hand in 3D space will be such a huge boost to productivity.

The problem with Telstra’s NBN plans

Robert Heffernan
WTF?

Wtf? Downvote?

Now what possible reason would there to be to downvote this post? None that I can see! Unless the downvoter was a Telstra fanboy who thinks the Blue 'T' can do no wrong.

Robert Heffernan
WTF?

"$80 for a 25 Mbps plan including home phone and a 5 GB monthly allowance"

A 25Mbps link will burn through 5Gb in a little under 27 minutes. What's the point of such a high speed link if you can only use it for less than half an hour a month!

Tiniest ever 128Gbit NAND flash chip flaunted

Robert Heffernan

Jeez

If scaling the process down slows down speeds, and generally has a negative effect on flash performance, then why not just forget scaling the process down then? Need more bits? add another chip in the 3D stack of silicon that seems to be all the rage now.

Microsoft holds peace talks after Hyper-V booted from OpenStack

Robert Heffernan
WTF?

Hyper-V Junk?

I wouldn't call Hyper-V junk. It's actually based on a rather clever micro-kernel with enough of the Windows Driver Model built into it to allow regular Windows drivers to work. The Windows Server instance you see when you login to a Hyper-V system locally is actually an instance of Windows Server running as a guest in the Hyper-V environment. It has nothing to do with the old piece of crap VirtualPC effort. Infact, I would call Hyper-V more of a Bare Metal hypervisor than Xen or KVM since you can't actually directly interact with Hyper-V like you can with Xen or KVM.

And for the record, I use Citrix XenServer on my own virtualised systems but only because Microsoft won't maintain the Hyper-V drivers for Linux guests.

Australians like the NBN: poll

Robert Heffernan
Facepalm

2000 Character Limit??!?

Ok, so I sat back, wrote out a rather insightful post on how the NBN is a good thing, how it is the way of the future and all that good stuff. It was long, but not so much so that it took a long time to read. I tried to post it. Sorry, 2000 character limit. I shortened it. Sorry, 2000 character limit.

Is a 2k hard limit really needed? Does El Reg have a shortage of hard disk space where 2k is just too big to fit? Is El Reg running SQL Server with a 4Gb database size limit and don't want long posts eating into the limit?

Are the El Reg web guys worried the long messages will take up too much screen real estate? If so, why not limit the message shown to a portion of the response with a "Read More" link below it to reveal the rest if requested.

C'mon!

FCC hangs up on 4G broadband biz LightSquared

Robert Heffernan

Re: Buy back?

It wouldn't actually be spending Taxpayers money, since LightSquared would have paid the FCC (in effect the taxpayer) for the spectrum, and the FCC buying it back would in effect amount to a Refund of the purchase price. Thus the taxpayer doesn't loose any money.

Robert Heffernan

Just Plain Stupid

As far as I am concerned, the investors who backed LightSquared got everything that they deserved. There is no way in hell I would consider investing in a company that would buy the spectrum next door to GPS and try to change the rules attached to that spectrum. Going up against GPS in a fight, GPS will win every time.

The GPS industry really IS too big to fail, GPS has become such essential equipment that it cannot accept interference under any circumstance, the last thing anyone wants is planes to loose position lock or old ladies turning into oncoming traffic all because someone wanted to make a phone call.

The FCC should buy back the spectrum either side of the GPS bands and keep them as an indefinite white space.

Microsoft explains bland new Windows logo

Robert Heffernan
FAIL

Metro

Looks like Metro Tiles to me. BLEH!

Man surfs slopes at night in LED suit

Robert Heffernan

300 Hours?

"The sole source of lighting was the LED suit, created in roughly 300 hours by designer John Spatcher."

300 Hours for wrapping a suit in a chain of LEDs sounds a bit steep, but then again it was done by a designer.

Give the suit to a pile of "Makers" and in 6 hours you could have had a suit not only wrapped in LEDs, but it would have had a GPS tracking movement speed, an accelerometer measuring turning force and the suit could have changed colour based on speed with "hot" flashes of colour when turning.

Damn it, where’s our NBN scandal?

Robert Heffernan
Facepalm

Typical Politicians

So, what your saying is that the Coalition are looking for any little thing they can use to bitch and moan about the NBN, even though there is really nothing they can run to the media whinging and crying about.

Sounds about right.

Telstra gets mail with Microsoft

Robert Heffernan
WTF?

Must be stopped!

The Government must step in and block this. The emails stored on microsofts servers in the United States will be subject to their laws, so the private communications of Australian citizens will be open for inspection by the US authorities.

Even if Microsoft host the BigPond emails in an Australian datacenter, since Microsoft is still an American company, the US authorities can still access the data anyway.

Basically, Telstra just gave the USA unfettered access to the emails of Australian citizens with no court orders needed.

Thanks Telstra, Sellouts.

BOFH: The Cloud Committee Calamity

Robert Heffernan
Thumb Up

Welcome Back Simon!

Great start to the new year. Hope they keep coming nice and regular!

Russians drill into buried 20 million-year-old Antarctic lake

Robert Heffernan
Coat

I'm stuck on a glacier with MacGyver

Everyone should know they just found the Antarctic Stargate!

You would figure a device capable of using superconductors to generate a wormhole through space (and time if you get too close to a solar flare) would create a pretty big magnetic anomaly.

*Coat: I got my BDU, now just need my P90

CA wins copyright wrangle against ISI

Robert Heffernan
FAIL

Protected?

This judge needs to be thrown out. The fact that CA won this case is a load of crap!

"CA claimed the ISI's software has replicated parts of confidential source and object codes"

Last time I checked, this was called reverse engineering for interoperability, and so long as ISI didn't get hold of any of CA's source and use it in their migration tool then it should be perfectly legal.

SpaceX successfully tests SuperDraco rescue rockets

Robert Heffernan

Delayed

It was supposed to be this month but got pushed back for some reason.

Robert Heffernan
Coat

YAY!

Not bad for a mere 9 months development. Taken an existing internally design engine, revamped and beefed it up, fabricated and tested it. Not only does it make a perfect emergency escape engine but it's dual purposed to land on other bodies in the solar system.

There is NO WAY that NASA could ever achieve this level of productivity, and I doubt a publicly owned company could do it for the same price.

So long as SpaceX stays a privately owned company, it's on a winner, it will be the first to land boots on Mars and I get the feeling it'll be Elon's wife wearing them.

*Coat: Nah! Space Suit!

NASA: Solar system may have alien origin

Robert Heffernan
Headmaster

Yep!

That is my point exactly.

The fact that the heliosphere acts as a bubble around the solar system should allow a localized, and as you pointed out quite possibly in a gradient fashion decreasing with distance, concentration of oxygen to accumulate as it's being emitted from the sun.

With the particle counts the experiment reported, I don't think it's an unreasonable hypothesis.

Infact, I would also postulate that if the sun wasn't emitting trace amounts of oxygen into the heliosphere, then within the bubble, I would expect less amounts of free oxygen than in the interstellar medium due to the oxidation of other molecules within the heliosphere.

To actually study this, I would propose a spacecraft similar to IBEX, but nuclear powered and launched the same as New Horizons, on a trajectory headed straight for interstellar space. It also could be loaded with other instruments specifically designed to measure the termination shock and heliopause in greater detail than the Voyagers have been able to.

I find it extremely easy to believe that the solar system has moved far away from it's original birthplace, but I seriously doubt that the oxygen concentration within the heliosphere hasn't changed significantly in that time.

Robert Heffernan
Alien

Fusion Reactor?

Perhaps somewhere inside our solar system is a huge fusion reactor taking raw elements and fusing them into heavier atoms such as oxygen and spewing them out into the space inside our heliosphere. It would have to be pretty big and have a self-sustaining fusion reaction to affect the oxygen concentration like that. I wonder where the aliens would have put it?

Woolworths cuts off Dick

Robert Heffernan
Boffin

Sparkfun FTW

These days I tend to do all my component shopping at Sparkfun, the old Dick Smith, and now even jaycar are behind the mark for the really fun components. These days 99% of all ICs are surface mount with such tiny pins (if they have pins) that soldering them is really hard. Along comes sparkfun with little PCBs with all the connections broken out for the parts putting modern tech back in the hobbiest hands.

‘Quantum Trojans’ undermine security theory

Robert Heffernan
FAIL

Corporate Suicide

From a business standpoint, any company found building this type of back door into their Quantum Computing kit is committing corporate suicide.

The company would have spent MILLIONS perhaps even BILLIONS of dollars designing and building a Quantum computer, then when they start selling, and a customer finds the back door, they will destroy any Goodwill they have earned, they will find themselves on the receiving end of lawsuits from their customers, and an investigation from every major government that has one.

In the end, sure it's a possible attack vector, but to be honest I think the biggest threat to Quantum Computing gear would be some kind of side-channel attack on the support electronics that interface with the Quantum package and NOT through a vendor embedded back door.

Tilera preps many-cored Gx chips for March launch

Robert Heffernan

Serious Contender?

If Tilera have really thought out their architecture and it performs well, this could be a serious contender in the server stakes. It takes a very game company these days to release a new architecture, especially considering they are responsible for the linux kernel support, but they are also ruling out Windows as a server OS as well. I wonder if it supports virtualization through the linux kernel. I can see this doing well as a host for small budget virtual servers, say two cores and a gig of ram, on the 100 core model with 64gig ram will give you 50 virtual machines and ram to spare.

Most EU states sign away internet rights, ratify ACTA treaty

Robert Heffernan

Replies to above points

I understand the current hollywood model tries to squeeze as much money out of the consumer as possible, by having to re-buy the content when it comes out in a better format. It's this very act that is known far-and-wide and is part of the problem when it comes to piracy of content. It's the first thing that needs to change. The fact that directors, actors, etc make such huge sums from a movie actually gets offset by the fact that they can go years without income, not getting cast or called to make a movie, it's why you see so many actors and directors branching out into producer roles and such.

As for the store using a streaming model, that's a definite no-no, it's still a hold-over of the current 'we-must-have-total-control' mentality of hollywood. While there are internet markets that have caps on downloads and data is priced by the gigabyte, streaming will not work, doubly so to people on very low bandwidth limits. The service must be download based. You buy it, it starts downloading a copy to your local machine. Once there, there is no issue with burning the file onto DVD or Blu-Ray for those that like to have a physical copy. If you ever damage your disk you can just re-burn it. If you want to take it to a friends house, you can take the file, and watch it (with your license) if your friend likes it, they can copy the file to their system, buy it from the store, and not have to re-download it.

The whole system will cause a big change in hollywood, especially concerning money but it's a change that is needed, the current system doesn't work anymore. They will make less per copy of the content, but they will get more sales of the content and the cost to distribute content will become essentially free, so the money lost in the supply chain will dry up (which sucks if you work in the supply chain). Besides, using Avatar for an example, the film cost $250,000,000 to make which is quite a large sum for a single movie. They only needed to make that sum back plus a modest amount extra to make it worthwhile. They made $2,782,275,172 which is such an obscene amount of profit (in fact it's a little more than the GDP of Guam), and where did it all go? In to some fat-cat's bank account.

Robert Heffernan
Facepalm

Steam Model

The major root of the whole problem of internet piracy of copyrighted content really is the fact that the MPAA/RIAA and associated global arms are stuck in an old and unworkable business model. The heads of this business are old fat-cats who are too happy with their fingers in their ears yelling 'LA LA LA LA LA' to block out the chorus of the internet crying out for change.

The old model guaranteed high profits, and loads of industry control because the means of distributing content were often limited to moving physical property from place to place. The duplication of film stock and audio recordings was limited to certain companies authorized to do such work.

The advent of the home VCR and even the cassette tape were the first stage in the loss of control of content distribution, you could connect two VCRs or tape players together and make as many duplicates of the content as you wanted. It was a time consuming process and the MPAA/RIAA didn't like it but not much could really be done, and the rates of piracy were still relatively low mainly due to the time required and loss of quality in the duplicates, so this didn't force the industries into a rethink of their business model.

Fast-forward a couple of decades and the rise of the Personal Computer and the Internet was such a fast and wide reaching thing that the MPAA/RIAA didn't have time to really look at and arrive with a new business model. They just stuck their heads in the sand and hoped it would go away. It didn't. The PC and Internet made it possible to almost perfectly duplicate the original copyrighted work in an extremely short time, with very little quality loss, and made distribution of these duplicate works extremely easy and fast. The MPAA/RIAA tried to sue as many people as they could but it turned into a PR disaster, such large and powerful organisations picking on little Johnny in his mothers basement, and in some cases, little Johnny's mother.

It is high time that the Film and Music industries finally conceeded defeat and came up with a new modern business model that will make everyone happy. My idea is this...

Steam, from Valve Software.

It's the perfect idea for this kind of content access and distribution. Sure it will require some small tweaks to make it apply to Video and Audio files, but the idea is just the same. Sure there is stuff like iTunes but they are hold-overs from the tightly controlled (DRM) distribution model of old, and they need to be scrapped.

A studio needs to make their works available within the 'Steam' style framework where a user's content library is stored in the system. Newly released content is made available from a central server but as it gets downloaded, the system starts using a P2P model where once there is a critical mass, the central server basically becomes a backup for the P2P version of the file. As for the purchasing of music or films, you access the store, you pay a small amount of money, say a couple of dollars for an album, or maybe $5 for a feature film. You get a perpetual license to the content, if you loose it you can just download another copy from the P2P pool, you can freely copy the file to other systems and access it whenever and whereever.

Then the store can have deals on content. Like all the bond films? Instead of paying $300 for DVDs of the whole thing, you can pay like $50 and get all of them. Is it the holiday season? 30% discount on all the crappy holiday season films. Want to keep the Cinemas in business? All latest released stuff still gets screened at the Cinema but keep your ticket which has a redemption code for a free or heavily discounted digital copy of the movie from the Store.

The whole issue is pricing the content at a point where everyone thinks 'Meh, it's only a few bucks, i'll buy it" the same thought process can be seen with movies that didn't do so well at the box office in the bargain basement bin at the local shopping complex. "Some Crappy Movie for $8, it was an ok movie, i'll grab it for $8, no big deal" The bonus of doing the content distribution digitally instead of over physical media is with the Store/P2P approach is that the Industry doesn't have to pay or pays almost nothing for distribution, it's pure profit. Where as the $8 DVD in the bargain basement bin still has to pay shipping, manufacturing, wages, etc up the line and will make almost no money in the end.

Then comes the added benefits from the Store based approach. Have a single unified store. Sure it will be a monopoly but if it represented the whole of the global content industries, the cost of running the thing can be shared easily, thus making the running cost of it for any particular company rather small, and leaving them with even more profit. It also avoids market segmentation with people having content on multiple services. Also with the monopoly store approach, there is a guarantee that the store will always exist, thus keeping everyone's purchases 100% safe forever. The game stores (Like Steam) have a problem of if the parent company shutters the service what happens to the user's legally purchased content. This is a non-issue for a global, industry-wide service.

Next comes the metrics that could be data-mined from each user in an anonymous fashion. They could work out what films/music people like the most and produce more of that type of content, thus fueling more sales.

This is something I thought of for about the whole of 20mins, why is it so hard for the content industries to come up with something like it!

Peeking up the skirt of Microsoft's hardy ReFS

Robert Heffernan
Mushroom

Hmm

Before I make my comment, I would like to point out that by no means am I a Microsoft fanboy (I have a server running Citrix (Linux) splitting it up into virtual servers running a mix of Windows or Linux depending on the workload being served) or trying to defend Microsoft in any way but...

If Microsoft said "Ok, so this new FS we are after needs to basically cover all the functions currently offered by the Linux LVM system, so for the sake of ease of implementation and compatibility lets just implement LVM" then the Open Source zealots would haul Microsoft up in front of the first court that would take their case demanding that the Windows code base be opened up to everyone.

I understand the need for open and available specs and drivers for filesystems, but for Microsoft to even think about risking implementing an Open Source filesystem in Windows then they would be extremely negligent to their shareholders and just bad business sense. The only logical and legal choice they have is to implement a new custom closed source filesystem.

While it doesn't do a lot of things NTFS can do and does a lot of things NTFS can't, it still sounds like a pretty decent filesystem, While the whole FAT/FAT32 thing was a bit of a debacle, being an old legacy filesystem, NTFS was actually pretty good, so I am looking forward to giving ReFS a try to see how it performs. I also think the EXT filesystem is pretty good and I would love a spare box to give ZFS a try!

*Nuke: Closest thing referencing the bunker i'll need to deal with all the inevitable flaming I am about to get!

Australia, US agree to space junk talks

Robert Heffernan
Joke

Eureka!

What is needed is some kind of reusable orbital space plane with the ability to capture and retrieve used satellites for return to earth and repair and service defective or old satellites in-situ.

Brilliant!

First ever private rocket to space station in launch delay

Robert Heffernan
Flame

IPOh No!

Taking SpaceX into the realm of publicly traded companies is most definitely a very bad idea, especially with Mars set firmly in Elon Musk's sights.

Publicly traded companies are run by board members who try to pad their wallets as much as possible, and shareholders scream for returns and dividends. Staying private means you can invest all your profits back into R&D, which in a business built around spaceflight is an EXTREMELY important thing. The more money you pump back to shareholders is less money spent developing the next engine or flight control system, or whatever.

And if SpaceX want's to be the first to set boots on Mars (which at this point in time, SpaceX has my bet that they WILL be the first), then once again, being private means you can build the thing, paid for by what isn't being used for R&D or what might be handed over to shareholders.

My hat is off to Elon for building the company to where it is, but it needs to stay the way it is or risk becoming a target for a hostile takeover and being absorbed by one of the existing overweight overly bureaucratic space industry incumbents.

*Flame: Nice looking engine test there!

Boffins quarrel over ridding world of leap seconds

Robert Heffernan
Mushroom

Leap Minute?

Why not just split the difference, in 32719381274 years when a leap hour is required the adjustment of one hour will be pretty significant, but today, leap seconds every few years is a bit much. Why not just do leap minutes every few centuries or however long it works out to be, not as big a hit as a leap hour, but less of a nuisance than leap seconds (so what if the bus is a minute late, it's already bloody late an extra minute won't matter)

*Nuke: Oh, so that's why the button on the atomic clock was labelled 'Do Not Push This Button' !!

NASA's ageing black hole-stalking probe switched off

Robert Heffernan
Facepalm

It would be obvious that the commands to cause the satellite to adjust it's orbit wouldn't be given over to the public, and the people who would most likely take up the job of command and control of the satellite would be vetted by the relevant govt authorities to make sure they aren't just in it for the lulz, so to speak.

X Prize: Build a Star Trek 'tricorder' and win $10m

Robert Heffernan

I believe the rules state that the testing must be done by non-contact, non-invasive means. Just point it at the patient and get a diagnosis. The same as the Star Trek version.

Oz skeptic offers prize if Rossi’s E-cat works

Robert Heffernan

Forget Investment...

If this was real, forget trying to find investors, you would have the Nobel committee throwing millions of dollars in prize money at you!

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