* Posts by MT Field

208 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Dec 2015

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Long phone is loooong: Sony swipes at flagship fatigue with 21:9 tall boy

MT Field

Re: Fingerprint sensor location? Waterproofing?

Only two things needed to make it my next phone, a headphone jack and the fingerprint sensor on the side. Is it so?

New Horizons snaps finish buffering: Ultima Thule actually two dust bunnies that got snuggly 4.5 billion years ago

MT Field
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That is tremendous

Brit airport pulls flight info system offline after attack by 'online crims'

MT Field

Bristol - possibly the world's most amateur international airport.

Neutron star crash in a galaxy far, far... far away spews 'faster than light' radio signal jets at Earth

MT Field

My first reading of the El Reg article seemed to be saying that there was a radio emission caused by the collapse of the combined neutron star into a black hole dragging in material from the debris into an accretion disk and thus generating "super fast radio signals". I accept that the article does not in fact say this (at least it doesn't on a second more careful reading).

But again I find all of this highly questionable. These jets just happen to be pointing towards us? I wonder what the angular resolution of the radio observation is. But I doubt I'll find that out on here.

MT Field
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And that's why I don't bother with these comments sections any more.

So I have concerns about the research or about how it was reported. For this I get two thumbs down (so far) but no counter argument, no explanation. All we get is childish comments and ignorant rubbish about relativity.

MT Field

Doesn't really make sense to me.

That collision, I thought, resulted in a bigger neutron star and not a black hole, according to the observation I seem to recall.

And even if it did somehow turn into a black hole after some time, how can that effect the gravity field of the new object at a distance?

I believe at best these are separate events that just happened in the same area of the sky at similar times from our point of observation.

Up in arms! Arm kills off its anti-RISC-V smear site after own staff revolt

MT Field

Nothing to stop ARM from adopting Risc-V is there? Apart from the usual commercial considerations.

MT Field

Re: It bears repeating: Building a CPU that runs C fast considered harmful.

> Any C compatible CPU needs to have Byte addressing.

That is true but a byte is not what you think it is. The C language defines a "byte" as the smallest addressable unit of storage but that does not equate to it being 8-bits. To prove this is true you can have a fully compliant C compiler that works on some strange architectures, for example a DSP where the C-language defined "byte" is a 32-bit unit. Oh my.

Geoboffins baffled as Ceres is crawling with carbon organics

MT Field

You know what would be really amazing - if Ceres turned out to be much older than we previously thought, older than the sun, older than the solar system.

Astroboffins spy the most greedy black hole yet gobbling a Sun a day

MT Field

My theory

as I know you are all eager to hear it is that these big black holes precede the big bang somehow. Hey it's only a theory.

Put November 26 in your diary: That’s when Mars InSight lands. Hopefully

MT Field

It's tricky to land on Mars, land on Mars, land on Mars

It's tricky to land on Mars, it's tricky tricky tricky.

Musk: I want to retrieve rockets with big Falcon party balloons

MT Field
Windows

Gissajob

I like the way that Musk now talks about houses when in fact he means castles. Pretty soon he will be talking about houses when he means hollowed-out volcanoes.

German sauna drags punters to court over naked truth

MT Field

Sounds like they were taken to court for non-payment of the club's penalty charge. A civil case. Should've read the T&C's.

NASA stalls $8bn James Webb Space Telescope again – this time to 2020

MT Field

It will be killed for idelogical reasons

It will be powerful enough to make potentially blasphemous observations and that means the god-lobby want it killed off. Welcome to the new dark ages.

Space, the final blunt-tier: Binary system ejected huge 'spliff' asteroid, boffins reckon

MT Field
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My favourite theory ties in nicely with the recent gravitational observation of a neutron star merger. The ejecta from such a collision rapidly decondenses (no longer enough gravity to keep it degenerate) into plasma featuring lots of heavy atomic nuclei. Further reactions and de-ionization yields dense lumps of heavy metallic and rocky stuff.

Geoboffins believe gigantic volcanoes kickstarted Mars' oceans

MT Field

Nice theory. Next!

Brexit in spaaaace! At T-1 year and counting: UK politicos ponder impact

MT Field

Goodnight and good luck.

Amateur astronomer strikes it lucky with first glimpse of a Supernova

MT Field

Re: Bah!

That would be from the astronomical wing of the hollywood pirates - arggh.

Sony Xperia XZ2: High-res audio but no headphone jack

MT Field

They've put the god-damn fingerprint sensor on the back FFS.

FCC inspector general sticks corruption probe into chairman Ajit Pai amid $4bn media merger

MT Field

Lovely America.

National Audit Office report blasts UK.gov's 'muddled' STEM strategy

MT Field

FTFY

The government faces a complex challenge in encouraging four departments to work together and get anything done.

UK taxman told to go easy on transformation with Brexit in headlights

MT Field

Yes we are governed by cretins and the state is administered by highly educated cretins. We must like it as it is otherwise we wouldn't put up with it, would we?

Brazil says it has bagged Royal Navy flagship HMS Ocean for £84m

MT Field

Given the Royal Navy's modern role of combat-capable humanitarian relief, should we not be funding, building, and manning replacements for HMS Ocean in perpetuity?

Also find space on board for a Contact section, complete with special circumstances unit.

Bigmouth ex-coppers who fed media MP pr0nz story face privacy probe

MT Field

Seems to me the cops would be in breach of data protection if they were still employed by the Met. As they are retired they are fairly immune to any sort of sanction. And they certainly would have taken advice on the matter of this being a criminal act.

So it was just a case of them sticking the boot into Dirty Damian's career. Perhaps they didn't like him.

Exploding alien bodies' space death-rays gave Earth its radiation cloak

MT Field
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“you can observe a lot just by looking”

For me this is going down as quote of the year.

What network neutrality madness has happened today? Take a big breath

MT Field

All this fuss?

Seems like your typical day in the new America. Why bother, just let them get on with it.

No, BMW, petrol-engined cars don't 'give back to the environment'

MT Field

Erm yeh about that BMW

Wouldn't buy another one myself.

No venture capital please, we're British: Why a pair of storage startups went it alone

MT Field
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Good to know you can build a sustainable tech business in the UK from scratch with just some good ideas and lots of hard work.

$10,000-a-dram whisky 'wasn't even a malt'

MT Field

Re: Carbon dating ?

That's approx what I remember. But given the half-life is 5k years it would be pretty inaccurate for measuring in the ~100 year scale. Very useful for dating early humans and their artifacts.

By the way, I don't believe whisky of any sort improves once it's been bottled, whether that was by a scots artisan or a fraudster. It's cask time that makes it special.

MoD: Sci-tech strategy? Er, here's a bunch of words and diagrams

MT Field
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Still its good to see that things are far, far worse elsewhere.

Boffins trapped antiprotons for days, still can't say why they survived the Big Bang

MT Field

Re: But we do already know that it annihilates when it comes into contact with matter.

"... if you have a gamma ray of the correct energy it can spontaeously turn itself into a positron and electron ..."

I thought it was always two photons created at the annihilation and also it needs two to interact for the reverse to happen? Because of conservation of momentum.

MT Field

Re: anti-particles "moving backwards in time" ?

But still there are teams currently attempting to measure the weight of anti-matter - that is determine if the interaction with gravity is exactly the same as normal matter, or otherwise ..

MH 370 search to resume as Malaysia makes deal with US oceanographic company

MT Field
Alien

About that plane

Er yeah, I'm afraid we had to borrow it.

Twitter: Why we silenced Rose McGowan after she slammed alleged sex pest Harvey Weinstein

MT Field

You're not missing out. With the exception of some very funny professional comedians I used to follow, Twatter is an incomprehensible stream of rubbish from the exact sort of person I avoid having to listen to in real life. Happy to leave them to it.

MT Field

Re: How widespread?

How does that explain the Angelina Jolie angle? She was born into Hollywood royalty and yet she claims she had to get with the big guy. Which makes her a either a coward or a liar.

NASA readies its asteroid warning system for harmless flyby

MT Field
Alien

No need to panic

It's just picking up and dropping off.

Kotlin's killin' Java among Android devs

MT Field
WTF?

Can anyone enlighten me

People talk about Java being a programming language, but I thought it was defined as a virtual machine or set of runtime libraries (or some modern combination of those)?

How many times can Microsoft kill Mobile?

MT Field

I still think that the US Govt should have used anti-trust legislation to break MS up into separate companies for the desktop OS business and the applications business.

Blade Runner 2049 review: Scott's vision versus Villeneuve's skill

MT Field

I think you'll find the 306 was generally considered a decent motor.

Apparently Scott was an absolute bastard to work for, but to his eternal credit he did manage to make Blade Runner with considerable creative vision, despite the studio's repeated attempts to stop him because of budget (and probably other) issues. It's that creative vision we still value in the original film despite its many glaring flaws.

Foiled again! Brit military minds splash cash on killing satellites with... food wrapping?

MT Field

Why do they (us) still insist on naming everything after some figure from classical mythology?

Presumably now we are out of Europe we no longer have to work with those solidly stubborn Germans or smelly French. So we can go and do our own stuff in our own way, like in the good ol' days. There were good ol' days, right?

Hollywood has savaged enough sci-fi classics – let's hope Dick would dig Blade Runner 2049

MT Field

Arrival was good - the best sci-fi film I've seen for a long time.

Let's hope this one isn't a stinker. But already judging by the lazy special-effects spoilers in the official trailer it's going to pretty formulaic.

Trump's tax tease will be a massive payday for Valley tech giants and their shareholders

MT Field

Re: Isn’t this a good idea for the US?

No, no that is not good enough. Profits have to be taxed.

Karl Marx said that Capitalism will always tend to break because it is fundamentally unstable. Because money gives power that gives more ability to accrue money. Ultimately the system fails because it does not successfully balance out the work/reward equation.

One of the purposes of government is to regulate economies to try to prevent that from happening, and the USA is failing in this basic duty through inept and corrupt leadership.

MT Field
Unhappy

So this was his real purpose. All the other nonsense was just noise and distraction. Now we are all so inured to the orange wotsit's buffoonery this horrendous and gigantic act of theft will go almost unnoticed.

SAD!

Did the Earth move for you, too? Grav waves sensed from black holes' bang 1.8bn LYs away

MT Field
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Re: A three-sun tidal wave!

I am inclined to think you are right. Energy in the gravitational wave being absorbed by any solid or liquid mass. Fascinating.

Limp Weiner to get 21 months in the hole

MT Field

The shame

Hm mm yeh. The decline of reasoned debate.

1) The guy has a problem and it has ruined his career and very possibly his life.

2) You can't be in politics without getting at least a little dirty - it is mostly a business where you wrestle with pigs after all.

3) There is no conspiricy - it's all just stupidity, arrogance, cheating and greed.

The most significant thing for me in the article was how the girl sold her story to an English Newspaper. The shame ....

Google rushes to curb Oreo's massive appetite for your 4G mobile data

MT Field

"contains an unfortunate bug that causes phones to burn through their monthly mobile data allowances"

Yes its called Google Play Services and it also eats your battery.

Violent moon mishap will tear Uranus a new ring or two

MT Field
Alert

Smashing

Rocks and rings.

Climate-change skeptic lined up to run NASA in this Trump timeline

MT Field

Re: Man-made climate change argument lolz

Yay 5 hippies with downward-pointing thumbs.

Hurricane Irma imperils first ever SpaceX shuttle launch: US military's secret squirrel X-37B

MT Field

Four thumbs down? You heartless bastards.

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