* Posts by MonkeyBob

81 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jul 2014

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'That's here. That's home. That's us': It's 30 years since Voyager 1 looked back and squinted at a 'Pale Blue Dot'

MonkeyBob
Pint

One of these for the imaging team --->

15 years on, Euroboffins finally work out what it took to send the Huygens Titan probe into such a spin

MonkeyBob
Joke

Re: New Reg unit?

"Is that a hamburger in a vacuum?"

More importantly was it a European or African hamburger?

World's richest bloke battles Oz catastro-fire with incredible AU$1m donation (aka load of cheap greenwashing)

MonkeyBob

Re: Not exactly a reasonable comparison

"As an example, my mum bought a house in the 1990 worth £15k. Now it's 10x that. She gets no extra cash out of it, and had no say- or interest- in how house prices change."

If this was you mum's second house she would have to pay capital gains tax if she sold it on the £135,000 profit. Same rules don't apply to first homes tho cos we all need a roof over our heads so can't realise the gains unless you make yourself homeless.

BBC tells Conservative Party to remove edited Facebook ad featuring its reporters

MonkeyBob

Do you think David Attenborough and Jeremy Clarkson both have the same views on climate change?

It does appear that hell might be starting to freeze over:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-50516797

Planets may lurk in harshest environments. Not that Novell NetWare server you can't unplug – black holes

MonkeyBob

Re: Okay, planets. Why not ?

Life as we know it can't exist on these planets. We depend on our star for a source of energy, which radiates outwards from it. Black holes suck in everything, including any energy that might be around.

So how well did you block fake news, Google? Facebook? Web goliaths turn in self-assessment homework to Europe

MonkeyBob

Re: Clickbait!

Yes, you might be avoiding the clickbait, but what about the majority of the population that do use FaceBook who are still being fed mis-information?

UK Ministry of Justice brags about new digital forensics unit to thwart tech-savvy jailbirds

MonkeyBob

Re: Why not reduce prisoner numbers?

It would definitely be better to remove short sentences and have these dealt with in the community. Unfortunately Grayling was let loose on the Justice department and decimated the probation service for the bargain price of £500 million. One (and possibly only) good thing BoJo has done is keep him out of the cabinet.

MonkeyBob
Go

Re: smartphones?

There are phones that are designed/not designed honest gov to be easy to get in and out of "prison luggage", sometimes 2 or 3 at a time. Maybe more if you have enough space.

https://cdn.images.dailystar.co.uk/dynamic/1/photos/336000/HMP-phone-791336.jpg

MonkeyBob

New prosions

"An additional £2.5bn is being spent on increasing prison capacity by an extra 10,000 places and to "create modern, efficient jails that rehabilitate offenders, reduce reoffending..."

I wonder how much of the £250,000 per cell goes on building the prisons with all the enhanced security requirements and how much is spent on training and courses to help with rehabilitation. I doubt there will be much change left over once the new tenants start moving in.

No one would be so scummy as to scam a charity, right? UK orgs find out the hard way

MonkeyBob

Re: Charities are a fraud

Any evidence for any of this?

Hinkley Point nuclear power station will be late and £2bn over budget

MonkeyBob

Re: Interesting...

There are also some good live charts here:

http://grid.iamkate.com/

https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

Gearheads get their spudgers into an iPhone 11 Pro Max: Bi-lateral charging, anyone?

MonkeyBob

"The only way I’ve managed to kill one is full immersion in water and even then it limped on for a month before dying."

I left s Sagem MYX2 in a pocket and put it through the washing machine. Left it to dry for about a day and it carried on working fine. I think it was still powered on after the wash had finished.

World's largest heap of untreated nuclear waste needs more bots to cart around irradiated crap

MonkeyBob

Re: Wow

They could be between the ages of 12 and 20. I couldn't possibly comment on what sort of rodent there friend and mentor is.

MonkeyBob
Mushroom

Re: Wow

Or mutant turtles

HP printer small print says kit phones home data on whatever you print – and then some

MonkeyBob

Trustworthy?

Wouldn't it be good if companies could be given a rating related to their data slurpage in the same way that iFixit rates devices on repairability?

First water world exoplanet spotted – and thankfully no sign of Kevin Costner, rejoice!

MonkeyBob

Re: Thank you!

The BBC does say it's 11 light years, that quotes a distance in miles for those who don't know what a light year is.

Lights, camera, camera, camera, action: iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip biz in new iPhone, iPad, Watch, chip shocker

MonkeyBob

Re: Why does 'See' sound ...

And to add another one:

Birdbox on Netflix

Although maybe a little more tenuous.

Fraught 'naut who sought consort's report says: I was up to naught, I will thwart fault tort

MonkeyBob

Re: Jurisdiction?

The BBC did have the main story on there, the last section describes how the law currently works in space.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-49457912

My MacBook Woe: I got up close and personal with city's snatch'n'dash crooks (aka some bastard stole my laptop)

MonkeyBob
Facepalm

Hardware can be replaced but data can still be lost and can easily be more valuable. When's the last time you validated your personal backups?

If at first you don't succeed, Fold? Nope. Samsung redesigns bendy screen for fresh launch in September

MonkeyBob

Re: Incremental improvements.

Unless you need to add another engine just to lift them then your not putting enough struts on.

Finally in the UK: Apollo 11 lands... in a cinema near you

MonkeyBob
Joke

Re: Amazing...

It was all definatley faked, I've tried doing it with Kerbals loads of time and it's impossible.

NASA smacks an Orion into the water with a successful Ascent Abort-2 Test

MonkeyBob
Mushroom

That's nothing

I can safely* abort a whole stack in the Ocean, including Kerbals

*for some measure of safe ----->

Brexit: Digital border possible for Irish backstop woes, UK MPs told

MonkeyBob
Devil

Re: This is the same 'think tank'

about as likely as Boris Johnson lasting as PM until 20:25

FTFY

To members of Pizza Hut's loyalty scheme: You really knead to stop reusing your passwords

MonkeyBob
Black Helicopters

Re: Yes, but...

I couldn't even remember my password and had to reset it so not one I had used elsewhere, I tried all those. And not possible this was cred stuffing as I have a unique email for their site, advantages of having a domain.

Also my 1 pizza slice I didn't know I had is still there, for what it's worth.

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

MonkeyBob

"responsability"

You are "H" and I claim my £5.

Definatly

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

MonkeyBob

Re: 3 football fields?

And if the edges are rounded does it have to pay Apple?

So you've 'seen' the black hole. Now for the interesting bit – how all that raw data was stored

MonkeyBob

Bigger, better

Is the next step in this to use space based telescopes to create an even larger 'dish'? Or does the data collection make this unfeaseable?

Probe-on-asteroid violence as Japan's Hayabusa2 chucks screaming chunk of base metal at Ryugu

MonkeyBob
Mushroom

Re: Bullet trajectory?

Thats what I was thinking, so I googled it. What it did was release a "Free-flying gun with one bulet". Then it moved to a safe distance before the gun fired.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa2#Surface_samples

Google Pay tells Euro users it has ditched UK for Ireland ahead of Brexit

MonkeyBob
Facepalm

Re: @iron

There might be more people in work, but we're not getting any more productivity for it

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47826195

Unionised BT workers reject plans to revamp pay, grading structures

MonkeyBob
FAIL

Re: BT is changing - the redundancies and reorganisation are necessary

And I voted against it for a number of reasons.

I have gotten more information about the new pay structure from the union than from BT. All they seem to have been able to say is that there will be 5 pay bands from frontline grunts to the CEO making them absolutely huge. I also have no idea which pay band I will fit into so voting for it is blindly voting for whats an unknown, kind of like voting for Brexit with no plan. I also disagree that managers should be deciding how payrises should be shared out amongst their team, this is ripe for unconscious bias and reducing trust between workers and managers.

MonkeyBob
Devil

Re: Progress

I'm not quite sure how this relates to a massive change in pay structure or huge job cuts

2 weeks till Brexit and Defra, at the very least, looks set to be caught with its IT pants down

MonkeyBob

Re: Effects of food import tax

"Alternatively UK government could spend the extra tax receipts on helping the less well off"

Hahahahahahaha, do pull the other one. This will never happen with a Tory Government in power*

Where power is buying DUP votes with taxpayer money.

Meizu ditched hole-free phone because it was 'just the marketing team messing about', not because no one really gave a toss

MonkeyBob

Get a QI charging phone holder for your car, such things are available.

Official science: Massive asteroids are so difficult to destroy, Bruce Willis wouldn't stand a chance

MonkeyBob

Re: Of course not, you need the whole team

Wouldn't it be easier to send 1 Chuck Norris up, he'll smash it in one punch and all the little bits will be so scared they'll runn away.

A once-in-a-lifetime Opportunity: NASA bids emotional farewell to its cocky, hardworking RC science car on Mars

MonkeyBob
Thumb Down

Re: RIP Opportunity

"FinanceMyF***ingWallYouB***ards! if Fartus gets his say."

Shhh, if he knows NASA are spending money on this he might divert it to his wall.

What a smashing time, cheer astroboffins: Epic exoplanet space prang evidence eyeballed

MonkeyBob
Mushroom

Simulated crash

Why is that planet(s) made from tiny balls? Did the CGI budget not stretch to Universa Sandbox?

http://universesandbox.com/

Fraudster convicted of online banking thefts using… whatever the hell this thing is

MonkeyBob
Thumb Down

Re: Baby Shark?

NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!1one!!!

Why did you have to put that back in my head

Roll a diplomacy check to win the election: Vote tie resolved by a D20

MonkeyBob
Joke

Natural 20

What are the odds on that? It's got to be more than a million to one.

Happy Christmas! Bloodhound SSC refuelled by Yorkshire business chap

MonkeyBob
Pint

One of these for the new investor -------------->

US bitcoin bomb threat ransom scam looks like a hoax say FBI, cops

MonkeyBob
Black Helicopters

Re: Just wondering here ?

You can't just take the money out of a bitcoin wallet, transactions have to be signed by the wallets private key, and as it wasn't made by a TLA it doesn't have any backdoors in to bypass this.

Icon cos can't be 100% sure on the TLA bit.

Official: Voyager 2 is now an interstellar spacecraft

MonkeyBob

Re: Solexit 2

Judging by this chart Pioneer 10 has just snuck ahead to beat Voyager 2 with Pioneer 11 close behind. New horizons is a distant 5th but catching up fast.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+the+most+distant+space+craft+from+the+sun%3F

FYI NASA just lobbed its Parker probe around the Sun in closest flyby yet: A nerve-racking 15M miles from the surface

MonkeyBob
Devil

Re: So what I'm wondering now...

The answer to this question is relative

Dollar for dollar, crafting cryptocurrency sucks up 'more energy' than mining gold, copper, etc

MonkeyBob

Re: Ending in 2140?

Miners are rewarded for each block they validate with a reward in bitcoins plus the transaction fees for the transactions recorded in the block.

The number of bitcoins awarded per mined blocked is on a decreasing scale, halving every 210,000 blocks. This will next happen in 2020. Eventually it will reach zero in about 2040 as part of the original design of the currentcy, at this point miners will only receive transaction fees for validating the blocks.

£220k fines for dodgy dialling duo who didn't do due dil on data

MonkeyBob
Thumb Down

Deterrant?

"These fines should set alarm bells ringing and deter marketing companies across all sectors that are contacting people without their consent,"

So that's why we keep seeing them then? Hopefully GDPR will actually have some effect on these scum.

It's Two Spacecraft, One Mission as BepiColombo gets ready to launch

MonkeyBob

Re: Remember the mystery goo container

I've been trying to do docking in orbit, and damn that is hard. So many spacecraft fragments floating around :-(

MonkeyBob

I think the point he was making is that weight depends on gravity which varies with the size of the planet you are on, or is zero in space. Mass is however constant wherever you happen to be.

With sorry Soyuz stuffed, who's going to run NASA's space station taxi service now?

MonkeyBob
Black Helicopters

They've already used all the technology they found at area 51, it's time to move on to area 52.

Convenient switch hides an inconvenient truth

MonkeyBob

1900 was not a leap year as it is divisible by 100 but not 400

In the Gregorian calendar three criteria must be taken into account to identify leap years:

The year can be evenly divided by 4;

If the year can be evenly divided by 100, it is NOT a leap year, unless;

The year is also evenly divisible by 400. Then it is a leap year.

It liiives! Sorta. Gentle azure glow of Windows XP clocked in Tesco's self-checkouts, no less

MonkeyBob
Joke

Re: Local Optician

That said, they're not Internet connected, so perfectly safe.

Yes but did they lock down the USB ports?

icon -------------->

BBC websites down tools and head outside into the sun for a while

MonkeyBob
FAIL

Re: CBeebies on Sky too

We had this too, pressed a few buttons and had Peppa pig on for a bit, plus a shed load of adverts.

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