Re: How do they get the vacuum in there?
...not only that, but where does the vacuum go if you let in the air? You can use a one-way valve so nothing can come out while the air goes in, and in the end the vacuum is still gone! How?!? Spooky...!
Posts by DropBear
4735 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013
Page:
China wants to bring home moon rocks in moon vacuum
Voyager 1 now 20 BEEEELLION KMs from the Sun
A third of Brits would cough up £300 to ransomware peddlers
Stray electronic-magnetic leaks used to harvest PC crypto keys
Project Loon ready for Sri Lanka test
Wednesday 17th February 2016 08:32 GMT
"Weeks after being released in South America..."
...sooo did the Loons drift with pinpoint accuracy over half the globe from South America to Sri Lanka, did they teleport there directly, or were there simply some trials earlier in South America leading to the freedom of said getting revoked there then reinstated in Sri Lanka...?
Virgin Atlantic co-pilot dazzled by laser
Shopping for PCs? This is what you'll be offered in 2016
Monday 15th February 2016 14:16 GMT
Re: I miss VGA
"VGA will work over a 30, 40, 50m cable even and produce a picture good enough"
Dunno about that. Last time I looked around in-line standalone TV tuners, none of them was capable of relaying the PC's screen through the two pieces of 1.5m VGA cable without clearly visible smear / shadowing / etc - and it was a fairly modest resolution, around 1366x768....
How to build a plane that never needs to land
Monday 15th February 2016 13:00 GMT
Re: why wings rather than balloons for lift
- If you just want to go up, balloons are great; if you actually want to hold a certain altitude, decidedly less so. It's not really possible to just stay neutrally buoyant passively, and fiddling with the buoyancy invariably gets messy. Major altitude changes are even worse - if you let out gas, you're not getting it back...
- Balloons tend to have the equivalent aerodynamic drag of a flying olympic swimming pool, so even with some propulsion moving them is unwieldy, moving them fast is out of the question, and basically pretty much any wind gets to sweep them away when they just want to stay put.
- Solar wings might be a large-ish target but they're nothing compared to the target surface of any balloon; not good if the point is to avoid detection and/or a rocket on its way up.
- Whether you use hydrogen (ay carramba del los santos kaboom...!) or helium, those tiny atoms tend to just slip through any material and go bye-bye sooner rather than later - now you're either carrying heavy tanks with reserves or you're definitely not staying up "never land" style..
- Plus a million other reasons I can't think of right now but I'm sure exist... ;)
Reluctant Wikipedia lifts lid on $2.5m internet search engine project
Monday 15th February 2016 10:10 GMT
"Has anyone ever typed wikipedia.com into the address bar first, then searched for their desired article?"
Oh, I don't need to - I just type whatever into the address bar and the wikipedia result page comes right up, since Firefox is sufficiently retarded to insist always using the search source selected in its search box for address bar searches too (and I keep that on wikipedia). It's a bit hard to fathom what the f### is the use of a dedicated search box if it will only search the exact same source as the address bar would at any given moment (instead of having the address bar stay dedicated to, say, Google and the search bar selectable)...
Google wins High Court fight with StreetMap over search results self-pluggery
Send tortuous stand-up ‘nine-thirty’ meetings back to the dark ages
Putin's internet guru says 'nyet' to Windows, 'da' to desktop Linux
Friday 12th February 2016 11:03 GMT
Re: ReactOS
The only problem is, at the current pace, the year of Linux on the desktop will come and go before ReactOS reaches production-level usability and stability. Yes, they have something that runs and looks like a windows desktop from far enough. No, it's nowhere near a complete, functional OS.
Why does the VR industry think 2016 is its year? It's the hardware, stupid
GSMA outlines thoroughly sensible IoT security rules
Australian astroboffins reveal hundreds of hidden galaxies
Wednesday 10th February 2016 14:08 GMT
Nonsense
"We are insignificant."
I strongly object - in fact, I'm on par with a wizard: I can see colours that don't exist! Like pink and magenta! Well, technically so can you (unless you are colour-blind in which case I'm sorry to tell you that you, Sir, are no wizard!), but that only makes my point stronger...
FTDI boss hits out at 'Chinese criminal gang' pumping knock-off chips
Wednesday 10th February 2016 13:58 GMT 
Fakes damaging FTDI's reputation
BWAHAHAHAHAA.... no, dude, they could never possibly touch the monumental amount of damage you did to your own reputation with being a colossal dick - TWICE. I know I'll never, ever design an FTDI chip into anything ever again - there is no such thing as a guaranteed supply chain unless one buys from YOU directly, and that's not something everyone is able to (or want to - see delivery times) do. Oh, and by the way - the clones were actually MORE faithfully following your spec than your own damn chips did - which is why you could erase VID/PID in a clone with the exact same code a "genuine" chip failed to execute due to a bug...
Microsoft researchers smash homomorphic encryption speed barrier
Tuesday 9th February 2016 13:52 GMT
Re: What on earth is this article on about?
"Having read this article, I honestly have no idea what has been achieved, and if it's impressive or not."
In other words, they can now recognize / match handwriting without ever having seen either the written sample itself or the result of the match operation. There, not so hard after all...
Tuesday 9th February 2016 13:45 GMT
Re: So let me get this right..
"Do Microsoft R&D and production actually ever talk to each other?"
Don't be silly, of course we do! Now here, take this totally free screen saver and please don't be so rude as to ask why it constantly pegs one of the cores or why it connects to the internet occasionally...
Silent Nork satellite tumbling in orbit
AdBlock Plus, websites draft peace deal so ads can bypass blockade
Tuesday 9th February 2016 12:46 GMT
Re: Firefox 44.0 upgrade kills adblocker and Google
"I think you may have bigger issues than Firefox, mate."
Don't worry (or rather, DO) they're about to become your issues as well - see "Enforced Add-Ons Policy Deferred" and by the way, they say it's already in since 43, only it can still be disabled. For now. In 44. Until 46 lands (which by Firefox version update rate should be in... *whips out pocket watch* ...hold on... just a sec...).
Tuesday 9th February 2016 12:34 GMT
Re: hosts
Of course it is. Considering the logical conclusion that the only way to avoid blocking of ads at _some_ level is to own and wall-off the entire computing chain from browser to computer to monitor, cue HDMI DRM focus shift from "not allowed to steal content" to "not allowed to not watch all these commercials" in 3... 2... 1...
Tuesday 9th February 2016 12:18 GMT
Re: Here's an idea:
Not gonna work. Just the other day I went to the effort of explicitly removing a specific DIV frame from a certain website's layout (which wasn't even blocked by Ad-block) simply because I don't go to read tech news (or whatever I do at that site, already forgot which one it was) just to be repeatedly presented with perfectly legit, non-animated and silent images of bare feet in excruciating waves of hot, colourful pain that could oh-so-easily be averted simply by using XYZ medicinal compound (oh hi there Lily the Pink).
Tuesday 9th February 2016 12:07 GMT
Exactly. And there seem to be some native, built-in feedback mechanisms that converge towards the large players managing to tacitly arrive at much the same customer-screwing conditions even without overt collusion: take it or leave it, except there's no-one else to go to - they all do the same shitty stuff. Also, anyone trying to counter that with "that's an opportunity for someone else to do it better and steal the establishment's business" needs to wake the f### up and realize that the first thing players in any mature industry do is close the door behind them, lock it and weld it shut - to make sure barriers to entry prevent anyone from doing just that.
Tuesday 9th February 2016 11:46 GMT
Re: Is someone under the impression...
"For the rest, (irritating text-based adverts, lightboxes and popups), disable javascript."
You know, funnily enough, every now and then something randomly breaks execution of javascript in Firefox, so no scripts run after that until I restart or at least reload the tab. And guess what - you know how I know when that happens...? I know because starting with the very next click the website in question becomes inoperable and unnavigable - nothing happens, because many, many websites just don't use any actual HTML links much anymore. Any action and all links are performed / substituted on-the-fly by scripts - it's like those integrated single-blob-single-url Flash websites, only with less Flash and more javascript (hey - web twopointoh, hell yeah! Wooo wooooo!). So yeah, good luck to you disabling them on anything more elaborate than Wikipedia...
Tuesday 9th February 2016 11:25 GMT
I dumped Chrome for good the millisecond it decided it was in charge of arbitrating what add-ons I may or may not run with it, without any override (yes, that's a thing that already happened). Currently using Chromium instead whenever I feel like watching videos without flash (thanks a lot for nothing Firefox).
Trane thermostat is a hot spot for viruses on home networks
Tuesday 9th February 2016 11:15 GMT
Re: The real problem
"There's probably a gap in the market for actual qualified engineers to get in and do things properly"
You mean like some of those recent smartphone security oriented startups that were allegedly built on the premise of doing it right, only to be proven just as pwnable as the rest...? Yup, that'll do it...
It's 2016 and a font file can own your computer
Tuesday 9th February 2016 10:26 GMT
Re: How did this ever become a problem in the first place?
I'm just winging this from memory so i could be easily wrong, but a mere five minutes into being involved with font design (no matter on how amateur a level) one rapidly comes to appreciate the significant difficulty of rendering all font glyphs _just_ the way they were meant in every possible corner case. If I recall correctly, one of the ways they tried fixing that back in the day was incorporating "instructions" into TTF fonts that were supposed to aid proper rendering of that particular font - as in a sort of full-blown virtual machine provided by the font renderer. Fast forward to a decidedly less innocent world today and I suppose you can see the writing on the wall...
LOHAN entertains the crowd at Oz Linux shindig
Fleet of 4.77MHz LCD laptops with 8088 CPUs still alive after 30 years
Tuesday 9th February 2016 08:44 GMT
Apparently the unchanged fact that most solid-state electronics are most of the time happily chugging along for decades without any issues (and why should they have any...) is nowadays planning its retirement in favour of the planned-obsolescent modern perception of things being necessarily junk after a mere few years. Let me offer a tentative rule of thumb: does it have a filament or moving parts? No? Then is should bloody well still be working regardless of how old it is...
That's cute, Germany – China shows the world how fusion is done
Reports: First death from meteorite impact recorded in India
Thirty Meter Telescope needs to revisit earthly fine print
Monday 8th February 2016 06:53 GMT
"That's a fair amount of employment"
Is there though...? Not that I have any actual clue, but in the long term, somehow I don't imagine a finished, functioning telescope site crawling with contractors or hot-dog stands or whatever. I mean, they probably don't even need a night guard... maybe a "day guard"...?
How a power blip briefly broke GitHub's boxes and tripped it offline
Friday 5th February 2016 12:39 GMT
"Users were served the unicorn-of-fail page"
OMG! Sparklelord! GitHub reads Doctor McNinja?!?
IoT lacking that je ne sais quoi? Try the IoTSP
Leak – UN says Assange detention 'unlawful'
Lights out for Space Vehicle Number 23: UK smacked when US sat threw GPS out of whack
Autodesk vapourises ten per cent of jobs to go completely cloudy
Thursday 4th February 2016 09:03 GMT
So when do we expect Home Depot and Harbor Freight to start "renting" hammers via monthly subscription instead of selling them? They could even come with a few dozen nails thrown in for free each month! What a steal!
...let me spell this out for you: NO! For me to recurrently pay you each month, you have to actually DO something for me each month, not just allow me to keep doing the same thing I did last month. It might make some sense if we'd be talking about something you do very infrequently - renting a crane or a forklift to lift your brand new lathe into your shop makes more sense than buying one, yes. But software tools just aren't like that - if you needed Photoshop or AutoCAD this month, you'll be needing it next month too - and the next, and the next. And damn if I'm about to start renting my hammer.
New AI chip from MIT gives Skynet a tenfold speed boost
It killed Safe Harbor. Will Europe's highest court now kill off hyperlinks?
Firing a water rocket to 1km? Piece of cake
Europe wants end to anonymous Bitcoin transactions
Wednesday 3rd February 2016 13:29 GMT
Re: What about good old Cash
"Do you have any proof of that?"
It's a very insidious scheme. The chips automatically detect any attempts to test their existence and remain silent; also, any of the billions of commercial cash test units in use automatically switch places with a non-NFC capable counterpart from a parallel universe as soon as they detect tampering attempts. Finally, clerks willing to disclose their use of the technology (as well as any parties receiving the disclosure) get a visit from the MiB and have to choose between staying silent or disappearing without a trace. </sarcasm>
'Dodgy Type-C USB cable fried my laptop!'
Uber rebrands to the sound of whalesong confusion
Why the Sun is setting on the Boeing 747
Tuesday 2nd February 2016 12:54 GMT
Jumbo Jet
As a surprisingly minimalistic but quite funky salute to the 747, I'll just leave this here...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
