* Posts by Francis Boyle

2735 publicly visible posts • joined 29 Jul 2007

Future airliners will run on hydrogen, vows Airbus as it teases world-plus-dog with concept designs

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Dihydrogen Monoxide

to give it its (in)correct name.

Das Keyboard 4C TKL: Plucky mechanical contender strikes happy medium between typing feel and clackety-clack joy

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Re: No back light on a black keyboard?

You want me to play Alien: Isolation with the lights on. What sort of wuss do you think I am?

One down, two to go: Astra's first attempt to reach orbit scuppered by iffy guidance

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No problem

as long as they remember to skip rocket ME.

Zero. Zilch. Nada. That's how many signs of intelligent life astroboffins found in probe of TEN MILLION stars

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The depressing possibility is that there may just be no aliens.

The really depressing possibility is that there are, but they're all hiding from something.

Amazon spies on staff, fires them by text for not hitting secretive targets, workers 'feel forced to work through pain, injuries' – report

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Explicit targets == controls

Hidden targets == extortion.

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You've given me an idea

Instead of trying "to redesign the entire socioeconomic system" we could just blame the Corona virus.

Worried about the Andromeda galaxy crashing into our Milky Way in four billion years? Too bad, it's quite possibly already happening

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It's a merger

It'll probably end up being called something like the AnWay Corporation.

Google and Facebook abandon Hong Kong landing of new submarine cable

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Built

but not plugged in.

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I think the Marginot Line

is the megastructure comparison you're looking for.

Um, almost the entire Scots Wikipedia was written by someone with no idea of the language – 10,000s of articles

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Chinese characters are NOT ideographs

Your first sentence is spot on. Unfortunately everything that follows is an old myth. Chinese characters are a single written form only in much the same way that the Latin alphabet is a single written form. They certainly don't guarantee mutual intelligibility in the languages that use them. A single character will have a certain pronunciation in any given Chinese language (and a different one in a different language – put (typically) two together and you have a composite symbol that represents a spoken word* not a concept or idea. As with any other language the written form is primarily a way of recording the spoken form – It's just Chinese just a lot more ad hoc in the way it does that recording.

*Or something like it. For example, 'kung fu' is accidentally two words in English because Chinese characters are written without any sort of word grouping, but it could just as easily have been transliterated as 'kungfu' and no one would be saying it wasn't a word. On second thought, t's probably better not to talk about words and just refer to the things that have dictionary entries whatever they are.

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Re: Local 'languages'

The grammar of English isn't particularly complex – the orthography on the other hand. But that's just what you'd expect given the several hundred years of coexistence with French. The grammar gets worn down to something that's manageable by both sets of speakers but the pronunciation and the way that it's rendered goes off in all sorts of wild and woolly ways.

Xiaomi turns 10 and celebrates by sitting down to relax in front of its new transparent television

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It's a gimmick

But an undeniably cool one. I can see it making a rather nice simulated aquarium.

You had one job... Just two lines of code, and now the customer's Inventory Master File has bitten the biscuit

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AOL

it metastasized.

What evil lurks within the data centre, and why is it DDoS-ing the ever-loving pants off us?

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Re: SMTP ddos

Because the person making the statement general follows it up with a shitload of other obviously racist statements. #evidence – how does it work

Incredible artifact – or vital component after civilization ends? Rare Nazi Enigma M4 box sells for £350,000

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Re: A fine piece of German engineering

On the other the habit of enthusiastic Nazis signing off with "Heil Hitler" proved to be quite useful.

China successfully launches Mars probe that packs an orbiter, lander, rover

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Hmm

Better not mention what the US space program started out copying.

(Dammit, where's the Basil Fawlty icon when you need it!)

Black hole destroys corona

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Re: @Richard 12 - Question for those who might have the knowledge

"how do you heat something at 10000K and beyond without burning the entire planet ?"

Fusion reactors regularly reach millions of kelvins without burning the planet so I suppose the answer is "bloody huge magnets".

TomTom bill bomb: Why am I being charged for infotainment? I sold my car last year, rages Reg reader

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And you beat me to being beaten

That said it's a sweet irony. (pun intended.)

Heir-to-Concorde demo model to debut in October

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Re: US Cities

Or the Chinese/Japanese solution – Maglev.

CEO of motherboard maker MSI dies after plunging from headquarters' seventh-floor

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From the woke dictionary

Bigot: anyone who dares to disagree with the current orthodoxy.

The reluctant log trawler: The buck stops with the back-end

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Not

if they're replaced by people coming the other way.

Boolean bafflement at British Airways' Executive Club: Sneaky little Avioses - Wicked, Tricksy, False!

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Are all avios

the one true avio. Screw that. I went (was forced to go to) a Catholic school and I'm still trying to get my head around the Trinity.

Well bork me sideways: A railway ticket machine lies down for a little Windoze

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I knew you were joking

the thought of Brunel using anything other than steam-powered Babbage machines is of course absurd.

The Moon certainly ain't made of cheese but it may be made of more metal than previously thought, sensor shows

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An hypothesis

that may now have to be reconsidered.

NASA mulls going all steam-punk with a fleet of jumping robots to explore Saturn and Jupiter's mysterious moons

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Bend it like Beckham

It's a ball. The thrusters can point any damn way they want.

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The actual quote is redundant

given it's stored at memory location 0x5EC3A9653B8AEB4462F0C6D2FC70CDF62F0C6D2FC70CDE18BC31B4BF1C3379 in most geek brains.

China praises Pakistan SatNav collaboration

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The real question is

why isn't Pakistan the friend of their enemies (the Uyghurs). So much for Muslim solidarity when there are deals to be done.

Windows fails to reach the Finnish line as Helsinki signage pleads for help

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Alternatively, you could try

actioning it going forward but you'd probably just end up with a nasty bruise on your forehead.

CERN puts two new atom-smashers on its shopping list. One to make Higgs Bosons, then a next-gen model six times more energetic than the LHC

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Eventually

that would mean going into space but as the LHC uses a vacuum better than you'd find in interstellar space the engineering is going to be interesting.

Check out the night sky in all its X-ray glory: Everything from hot gases to supernovas and massive black holes

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It should be in 3D

There's very few things I'd get the goggles out for but this would be one of them.

Looking for a home off-world? Take your pick: Astroboffins estimate there are nearly 6bn Earth-likes in the Milky Way

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I believe

there's a planet where drinking water is permitted only on the 11th day of the week. The rest of the time you have to stay sober by restricting your liquid intake to alcohol.

Only true boffins will be able to grasp Blighty's new legal definitions of the humble metre and kilogram

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As Einstein never actually said

E = mc2 or more accurately "energy is mass". So if you have a definition of energy (which you have if you have a definition of Planck's constant and the second) you have a definition of mass. It may seem circular but it is, in fact, consistent (with itself and reality).

India opens its space industry to private companies

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If I had the choice of shovelling shit

or working in space tech I know which I'd chose.

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Re: Are they the same person?

To be fair it could be one Chinese and one Pakastani. Or two Chinese since get paid ¥0.50 a go.

Watch an oblivious Tesla Model 3 smash into an overturned truck on a highway 'while under Autopilot'

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The first rule

of operating small vessels is and will always be "Stay the fuck away from big ships".

No, it's just a Mirage: Lenovo's nerd-goggles-for-suits boasts 4K display but no need to be attached to powerful PC

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Gimp

Re: "nerd-goggles-for-suits"

Your wearing the wrong suits. See icon.

All-electric plane makes first flight – while lugging 2 tons of batteries aloft

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Re: Compulsory El Reg commentary moan

Battery swap looks like a shoe-in for commercial aviation use. No one wants to load up a plane with more fuel than is needed for the planned flight and convenience factor is hardly relevant given the sort of effort needed to get a plane airborne. And it open up the possibility to use non-rechargeable chemistries such as aluminium-air.

Hoverbikes, Hyperloops and sub-orbital hijinks: Yes, the '3rd, 4th and 5th Dimensions of Travel' are coming soon

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Nothing so simple

Hyperloop has so many potential modes of failure that the word adequately describes what would happen to your various body parts in any serious accident.

7*7 = a simple equation for taking total control of multiple VMware-powered clouds

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I don't know

Has any tried executing one of amanfromMars' posts.

So you really didn't touch the settings at all, huh? Well, this print-out from my secret backup says otherwise

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It didn't take long

to determine that (assuming you are referring to the UK)) the truth is a little different. And the claim comes from that august source of truth, the Sun ( which presumably doesn't actually care how many admirals the RN has as long as they all have big boobs).

Beardy Branson’s 747-assisted sat-launcher can’t get it up

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Don't you mean Moonraker

Because Bond always attempts re-entry.

International space station testing Wi-Fi links with incoming craft, with an eye on autonomous docking

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Is the robot called Roller?

I've heard of a bending robot and even an ironing robot but a rolling robot? Are there a lot of things on the ISS that need to be rolled?

Oh wait, it's the vehicle itself that rolls (on wheels). That makes much more sense.

A real loch mess: Navy larks sunk by a truculent torpedo

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Re: Kids Toys

I learnt mine from porn.

I'll never be lost in Germany as long as I'm in the middle of an orgy.

Dickens' forgotten spaceship classic: A Tale of Three Missions

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What the Dickens

are you on about man?

If you don't LARP, you'll cry: Armed fun police swoop to disarm knight-errant spotted patrolling Welsh parkland

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I don't know about future plagues

but the orange one carrying a bottle of Clorox is a shoe-in for future Halloweens.

Now we know what the P really stands for in PwC: X-rated ads plastered over derelict corner of accountants' website

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Re: PwC

Probably will Cock-up!

Bye, Russia: NASA wheels out astronauts, describes plan for first all-American manned launch into orbit since 2011

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Probably because

when you search on AliExpress for 'launch package' the closest thing you'll find is "Rocket Pattern Wall Stickers".

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Re: how long for SpaceX to catch up with Boeing's pork barrel govt pricing

Mass produced satellites are likely to remain a rarity for the foreseeable but mass produced satellite buses are a thing (for small values of 'mass'). As the cost of entry to space falls due to cheaper launchers they're likely to become much more popular and thus cheaper which in turn. . .

International space station connects 100Mbps symmetric space laser ethernet using Sony optical disc tech

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Re: Nice technology

I'm not sure where you're getting the 1m figure from. According to the graphic the 1m telescope is on the ground and the unit on the ISS has an aperture of roughly 50mm. I assume the system is reversible (I can't see why it wouldn't be) so the larger unit will always be on Earth.