Posts by TitterYeNot

Re: expanding from?

"If so, where is the center of the universe?"

My favourite answer to that question was supplied by Prof. Brian Cox of rockstar physicist fame - "It's at the end of your nose."

Why? Because all the subatomic particles that make up the end of your nose and the space-time they occupy were present in the Big Bang singularity (in other words all points of space-time in the universe can be thought of as the centre.)

Made me look at the end of my conk with a new found respect...

Re: admitted stealing

"For crying out load, they didn't admit stealing. They didn't steal anything"

Correct, I suspect El Reg are using a little artistic licence when using the word 'stealing' in the subheading, though some senior Met. plod did use the word 'steal' in a press release. The pair in court pleaded guilty to:-

- "Obtaining files that would enable the hacking of websites and supplying files to enable the hacking of websites to others."

- "Supplying an article for use in fraud."

- "Supplying an article intended for in the commission of an offence under the Computer Misuse Act."

Re: web 3.0 direct, from our brain to yours at 100wpm

I'm more worried about this...

[Walks along pleasant leafy street]

...great weather, wonder if it'll rain later...love the sound of the wind in the trees...ah there's Mr. Perkins walking his Spaniel, on time as usual, you could set your watch by him...oh yes, must remember to get some milk on the way home, we're almost out...<<BING BONG!...Yes, you need some ZuckerMilk (TM), great taste, great value for all the family, special promotion now on, free Zucker badge with every purchase!...BING BONG!>>...Aaaah!!! Get the fuck out of my head!!!! Now where was I?...oh yes, the trees...

Re: The same everywhere...?

"Umm, that's called responsive web design and is being used all over the place so that websites are usable on mobiles and tablets."

Yes, responsive web design has become extremely popular in recent years due to the fact that advertisers will pay more per impression when a 'main' website (i.e. not the mobile version of said website) is viewed on a mobile device.

I think the point that Simone was trying to make is that, while responsive design does indeed make a site more usable on a mobile device, and is quite effective in managing the differences in screen estate between a smartphone and a tablet, it's usually a right pain in the arse when viewed on a desktop with a decent sized monitor.

Whether this is due to immature web publishing tools, or simply lack of experience of good responsive design principles amongst web devs/designers, I have no idea.

Re: "Goodbye"?

"Although as Saturn's a gas giant, there's not going to be much in the way of ground!"

Though as you'd most likely be making a very high speed acquaintance with a layer of metallic Hydrogen covered by liquid Helium/Hydrogen, under which is a nice hot core of liquid rock, I'd still hesitate to call it friendly towards visiting sperm whales. Or Petunias for that matter, whatever their thoughts on the matter...

"Can someone enlighten me, because I thought 'hashing' in this context was just checksum generation?"

Yes, if you used something like an MD5 or SHA1 hash, changing just a few bits in an image file would result in a different hash. Image hashing uses different algorithms though, which will result in the same hash even if a digital image is resized, rotated or has altered gamma values i.e. if it looks pretty much the same to the human eye, you'll get the same hash.

"'I assume you mean more than 99.9% hydrogen and helium'

The paper doesn't mention helium."

The paper talks about the extremely low metallicity of the brown dwarf, which in astronomical terms means it contains very little mass that isn't either Hydrogen or Helium (astronomical metals are any non-primordial elements produced during nuclear fusion within stars i.e. Carbon, Oxygen, Iron etc.)

Most of the Helium nuclei in the universe are thought to have been created during the early phase of the Big Bang, so the star will likely contain around 24% Helium. Its mass is too low to support the usual fusion lifecycle of bigger stars, so the amount of Helium produced by fusion is very small, and thus the percentage will be lower than the 27% or so in our own sun for example. The unsteady nuclear fusion at its core also accounts for the relative lack of metallic fusion products.

Re: How can you not notice?

"YOUR COMPANY will refund me for 18 months of non-provided (and non-providable) service."

If billing was by Direct Debit then it is covered by the Direct Debit Guarantee, so you don't need to claim it back from Orange, you claim it back from your bank. If you've got evidence that the Direct Debit payments were incorrect, the Bank is legally obliged to refund you the full amount overpaid, and then it is up to them to go after the third party (the originator) to recover their costs, in this case Orange.

If your bank refutes this, have a word with the banking ombudsman, who will gladly have a word in their shell-like ears to point out the error of their ways, rather firmly.

To quote the Financial Ombudsman Service website - "if the originator or the bank/building society makes an error, the customer is guaranteed a full and immediate refund of the amount paid."

Re: re: Many, many phenomena in physics were predicted long before they could be detected

"Indeed, that is how science works. Nevertheless, before the proof is concrete it's sensible to take the theory with a pinch of salt."

Not quite. As I understand it, the only place concrete proof exists is in pure mathematics (i.e. proving a mathematical statement.) Scientific theories i.e. Einstein's theory of gravity, are impossible to absolutely prove, they just become more accepted as valid as more evidence is found to support them. A theory can be fully or partially disproved in an instant, however, if a prediction that is made as part of said theory is shown to be incorrect. All the science we 'know', is 'just a theory', but some of it has been around so long without being disproved that it is accepted as fact.

You're absolutely right that theories without evidence are taken with a pinch of salt. Peter Higgs (and his team) proposed the Higgs mechanism back in 1964, but didn't receive acceptance of his theory (and the Nobel prize that went with it) until 2013, after the Higgs boson had finally been detected in a two Large Hadron Collider experiments.

And other commentards seem to missing the point when talking about 'scientists getting their maths wrong so making things up.' Science and its theories evolve as our knowledge expands. Newtonian theory works absolutely fine here down on Earth when you're looking at falling apples, moving carriages and spheres dropped from towers. At the scale of the solar system, however, it starts to break down, its predictions in some cases not matching what we observe i.e. Mercury's orbit. Then along comes Einstein, and his description of gravity in the theory of general relativity offers a major refinement of Newtonian mechanics, and matches the motion we see in the solar system exactly.

Then as our view moves ever outwards to study the motion of distant spiral galaxies, we see that again, the currently accepted theory doesn't quite seem to fit what we observe. Either Einstein's theory of gravity is not quite correct, or there is more mass present than we can observe using our current technological capabilities, or possibly both. Given time, I imagine and hope a unified theory of gravity will emerge, and we'll understand gravity to be either a subsequence of the bending of space-time around mass, or the result of the interactions of the gravitons predicted by some quantum mechanics theories, and then we'll have a better understanding of whether the existence of dark matter is needed to explain galactic rotation.

Re: Loyalty

"The bean counters took charge and started to look at staff as just being economic units"

Yes, when that bright spark in HR picked the phrase 'human capital' to refer to a company's employees, I'm not sure that it wasn't a typo and they meant to use the word 'cattle' instead...

Re: Ahh colloquial meanings of words.

"she was dancing so close to him she could probably get the guys fingerprints from her fanny...!

Only when I learnt Americans have a different meaning for that word than us Brits the penny dropped."

Yes, as a Brit, the first time I heard a young American woman complaining that the strap on her fanny pack was too tight, I though I'd uncovered a drugs mule...

Oh go on then, it's Friday afternoon...

There was a young priest from Galacia

Whose float was considerably racier

The Church said "Not funny

To be humped by a bunny!"

He replied "Well at least twas no fellatia!"

"and The Register chooses to illustrate it with an American style pizza?"

Hey, Pizza Hut made 'em an offer they couldn't refuse. Capiche?

Re: "Built on a foundation of trust and transformation"

"I guess that slogan won, only slightly ahead of the second favourite, "Built on a foundation of loose sand and broken promises""

Yes, the PR department wouldn't let them use the original version:-

"Built on a foundation of trebles all round for the senior management team and a resounding 'Fuck You' to the workforce"...

Re: To err is human...

"To guarantee a mess put a human in charge of said computer. Enough said."

And to guarantee a shitstorm of Diluvian proportions, put said barely-technical human in front of some automation they don't really understand - but hey it looked great in the management meeting.

It'll save us loads of money, they said.

It'll guarantee five nines availability, they said.

It's foolproof, they said...

Re: A Symantec product is total shit

"While the post is missing the "/s" mark, it IS sarcastic."

Yes, here in the UK our sarcasm detectors are fine tuned from birth, so tags are implicitly not required (unless translation is needed for a leftpondian audience.)

Especially when the subject of said sarcasm is the cauldron of ineptitude that is Symantec...

Re: This is just a way to get rid of people

"I am curious as to how that will work. So you refuse to leave by the deadline, and refuse to quit as well. What can they do? Not sure about the US (where apparently you can be fired for any reason what so ever) but it would be harder to do that in the UK."

As far as I'm aware (and I did look into this a while ago when my employer moved offices), as long as there's nothing specific in your employment contract saying you agree to go wherever they send you, in the UK they would have to make you redundant. There's no specific distance specified in employment law covering this situation (the often quoted 30 miles is untrue), but the word 'reasonable' is used a lot to apply to both the employer and employee.

In other words if you are required to travel an extra 10 miles to work and have access to a car and public transport, but refuse to do so, an employment tribuneral would probably say you were not being reasonable and so you would not be eligible for redundancy payments - you would be deemed to have left your job voluntarily. If your employer expected you to travel an extra 150 miles to work however, the tribuneral would probably judge your employer as acting unreasonably, and you would be eligible for a payout.

It also depends on circumstances - if an employee is a disabled single parent who cannot drive for example, and their employer expects them to travel an extra 10 miles to work to an office where there is no public transport, the employer would probably be deemed to be the unreasonable party and would have to pay redundancy (as long as the employee has the minimum employment duration, which I believe is 2 years.)

Re: "Edge of space technology"?

"Either way, 60000 feet is barely 18 km up, so not even a quarter of the way there."

Strictly speaking you're correct, but 60,000 feet is well into the 'space equivalent zone', so for low speed objects the atmosphere is so thin that you may as well be at 300,000 feet for all the difference it makes, therefore it's a good enough test for 'edge of space' tech.

Re: What colour is Uranus?

"A Mars Ice Swirl, or a Handleoclast Shite Swirl."

How about we compromise and call it a Chocolate Kulfi?

Re: Miss-characterisation of the fault

I'm guessing that the point the author was trying to get across was that SpaceX were attemting to load O² at a lower temperature than most previous missions in order to increase the amount oxidiser carried, to give a greater safety margin in terms of re-entry burn time after launching satellites to a higher geostationary orbit. And you're absolutely right, it was this colder temperature that caused the launch test unscheduled disassembly failure.

My understanding is that 'return to flight' status for the Falcon 9 vehicle was achieved not by a redesign, but simply by reverting to the previous successful operating procedure i.e. loading less O² at a higher temperature. Presumably future versions of the vehicle will be modified to allow higher O² loads.

Re: Clarification

"Why isn't there an option to make spray go round in little circles?"

I'm assuming that the two options are there to differentiate between those of us who have one bottom, and those of us who have both front and back bottoms.

A circular motion option would only be required for a) unfortunate owners of a side bottom or b) people who have recently partaken of a dodgy chinese takeaway at a folk festival who are experiencing, erm, explosive consequences...

Re: Click baity headline is click bait

"I think that irony is misunderstood and the word misused a lot lately. The headline is parody and satire and it's corny but I'd say it's not ironic."

Agreed. A much better example of irony would be that most, if not all, of the examples of irony in the song 'Isn't It Ironic' by Alanis Morissette aren't, in fact, ironic...

Re: Looking forwards to another Radio 4 interview

"They are really insightful and always tell the people like it is."

Yes, absolutely beautiful the way that James Naughtie just manages to avoid a massive corpsing fit while on air.

And as to Jeremy Hunt, well, he's almost an example of nominative determinism at its finest, as I'm sure Mr Naughtie will agree...

"One of the things that's puzzled me about mtDNA is that it's so consistent within the cell....Why should a typical cell line not come to contain examples of a number of those mutant strains?"

To start with, in sexually reproducing multi-cellular organisms, the vast majority of all those mitochondrial mutations do not get passed on to the next generation of organism. You have your great, great, great, great...............................great, great, great, great grandmother's cell line - the only difference between your mitochondria and hers is a few DNA mutations that have ocurred only in your female ancestors' egg cells (this is why analysis of mitchondrial DNA is such a usefull tool when tracing the historical movement of human populations around the planet.)

Secondly, mitochondria are thought to be bacteria or a similar prokaryote that formed a symbiotic relationship with eukaryotic cells billions of years ago. Free living bacteria benefit from mutation in that it allows them to evolve by natural selection to suit their environment. Mitochondrial mutation is unlikely to benefit the host cell, and probably won't be passed on to the next generation of host organism anyway (see above), so the benefit of mutation is lost (mutation in bacteria is not constant - the rate increases in a stressed i.e. hostile environment, which allows the evolution of better adapted progeny.)