"Satellite launch rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles are very similar technology, differing only in details,"
"Penguins and transit vans are very similar things, differing only in details"
Me fail English? Unpossible.
Also;
"..isn't generally assessed as being able to mount a nuke on a missile yet. A successful Taepodong-2 test, however, would be a further step toward such a capability"
Umm.. How does testing a new ICBM (MRBM, more like) get them any closer to solving the major engineering issues around turning a 3-ton engineering device into a 450Kg nosecone-shaped weapon? One doesn't lead to the other. The issue isn't a lack of suitable missiles, it's managing to turn a reliable nuclear weapon into a much, much more compact and resilient package.
"After all, the much better funded and successful Iranian Safir-2 launcher is little more than a rebadged (oh god I hate typing this word) Taepodong-2."
Little more? I think you need to review the recent Omid launch... Quite a bit more than a rebadged Scud stack, I think.
At least Nokia finally got the E-series and N-series teams talking to each other, and Motorola finally understood that hardware and software should be designed in co-operation with each other.
SE handset range is insane though, even taking into account the need to have low-, mid- and high-end handsets across both prepay and contract and the fact that they run Cyber-shot, Walkman and now XPeria sub-brands 73 is a bit much.
"As usual, The Register missed to boat on Cuil. Maybe by next week The Register will actually notice them and announce it."
Yes, because the register should always announce when a new search engine fueled entirely by hot air, plugs and shameless self-promotion (I can't turn around without seeing them mentioned today, a side-effect of the management ancestry I guess) launches. You do know that a REVOLUTIONARY NEW SEARCH ENGINE launches daily, no?
FFS, for most of the day they were serving "No results found for blah blah" because they hadn't worked out that when their search servers fell over under load, "Umm, we're really busy" would be a better message than "we're shit at search". On the day they were running around PRing themselves to Hell.
Muppets.
PS white search box (that doesn't have a cursor in by default) on a black background? Oooooooooooooooooooooooooh. I prefer the at-least-we're-honest godawful green and cyan colour scheme at tripleme.com.
Also worth pointing out that most (if not all) MANPADs are pretty poor at shooting down a multi-engine passenger jet. You'd tend to end up with a shredded engine and ~300 stained pairs of pants, but as we saw with the DHL jet at Baghdad in around 2005, it's pretty hard to take out an entire jet with an SA-7 or similar.
Except you forgot to mention that XBox Live offers a range of HD films, on a rental basis. Has done for months, actually.
I don't use it much (well, once actually - when I first got my HDTV it was the only HD source I had, and I was disappointed to find out that The Matrix only had a Pro-Logic soundtrack but at the same price as Blockbuster there's no reason to leave your house providing you have fast-ish broadbeans.
And then of course there's a world of free HD downloads out there if you're prepared to hook a PC* up to your TV and get torrenting. Allegedly.
*Windows Media Centre still sucks balls though - roll on XBMC on x86...
"I wouldn't chance being in posession of a copy... would you?"
Too fucking right I would. This isn't a fascist police state and I'm innocent until proven guilty. I refuse to self-censor, and I refuse to be required to keep track of what's "good" reading material and what's "ungood".
We went for an 0870 number a while ago to feign largeness ("clicks 'n' mortar", too), but I decided (since we're in the Telecomms retail field and deal with lots of people on their mobiles) to move back to 01xxx about a year ago - definitely the best option, as it a) shows you have a geographic presence in the UK, b) either counts as minutes from your allowance or isn't barred from your workphone and c) shows that we value customer service above making a few extra K a month.
Having had 2 cards cloned at my local Shell petrol station (along with 3 or 4 friends), can I fit spikes to my card that impale the hand of the skimmer when they do their under-the-counter maneuver?
"Air New Zealand will equip eighteen of its airliners with in-flight entertainment rigs allowing iPod users to play their video on seatback screens, listen to audio through the aircraft system, and control their plane via the device's interface."
"1. People who have never tried it and just like bandwaggoning.
2. People who tried it for an hour maybe, and decided that they didn't like it based on things like UAC that can be turned off in 10 seconds or so.
3. People who buy sub-standard hardware and expect it to run."
I've been running it for 6 months on a Core2Duo with 4Gb of RAM and a XT2600 HD video card, with UAC turned off - as a media centre, under my HDTV - and it sucks balls.
Media Centre is an unresponsive piece of crap (what, you want to see a list of files in "My Videos", instead of thumbnails? Tough!), my Xbox 360 won't read the music from Vista unless I hack the registry (convergence, we've heard of it), the fonts are all over the place at 1920x1080, the hard drive is constantly thrashing even when I'm watching a film over LAN (yes, indexing service and every other service is turned off - Resource Monitor or whatever helpfully reports that "System32.dll" [iirc] is using all the HDD bandwidth)
Etc
Etc
Etc
Really, you can't look at Vista and say "yup, a lot of thought went into this". I'm pretty far from a usability expert but even I come up with 15 ways to make common tasks more obvious every time I use it.
Looking at how much I spent on my hardware, and how much better it is than my last PC purchase (PIII 1Ghz with 512Mb!!!) I can't see where my money went, and am considering sticking Mythbuntu or OSX or even XP on it, just so I can enjoy my expenditure.
"This comes back to one of my pet peeves: that putting "systems" in place stops people using judgement. Instead of asking "is this person a pervert who'll interfere with the children?", or "I think we want to keep half an eye on X, don't you?" we have progressed to "All the system checks are OK, so we're covered"."
My favourite is credit scoring, whereby the bank that holds my loan can refuse to extend the loan because I don't meet their criteria - despite the fact the monthly payments (never missed) would remain the same and I earn twice what I did when I took the loan out (and for a FTSE 100 company rather than for a sole trader).
I, for one, look forward to welcoming our Skynet system overlords. At least I can run around with laser cannons shooting them then.
"I think it is very well known that when ever an article about this pseudo religion goes up on any site, their amry of Lord Xeenu fanboys will flock to the available comments section in order to prove to everyone that their legally approved factets show that we are all dumb and they are all correct."
Did you know you can actually get a widget that tells you when anything judged either pro-palestinian or anti-zionist is posted, so sufficient numbers of rightwing wackjobs can go and crowd out the comments with "ur an antisemite!!1" posts?
Did you know the Vatican has the world's oldest intelligence agency?
I've always held a mixed opinion of LRH; on the one hand him (and his brethren) are scum who bilk the gullible and sick, but on the other hand he found a business plan that worked.
I'm in TCR this weekend, might stop by and see if the girl with the gasmask and the cracking ahem T-shirt from enturbulation.org is outside.
Smiley face because I'm an OT-3 and Tom lends me Katie every now and again, and also because Scarlett failed his audition.
Cryptome.org posted the industry-only brief in this a couple of weeks ago - keep up at the back.
I've had 2 bank (ie debit) cards ripped off in the last 3 months, have to say that Smile were very nice about it (instantly reversed all the transactions over the phone) whereas Barclays made me fill out forms, and review my own statements, and said that more charges may appear in the future.
Needless to say I'm still waiting for PayPal to refund me.
Anyhoo, as a result I have now switched to using a credit card exclusively online (they shoulder the risk and refunds are instant) and a Tuxedo prepaid card (or more likely cash) offline. My debit cards have been cancelled and replaced by cashpoint-only cards.
Chip And Pin (aka "Fuck you, liability isn't with us any more!!!11") led me to do this - thanks, APACs!
"Sidenote: Funny watching the pots and kettles... When China shot a satellite it was a BadThing according to the US because it would make space junk etc etc. Shoe is on the other foot now."
Apples and bowling balls - China's shot put debris into orbits where it'll remain for centuries, and they did it unannounced. This is much, much lower and even those against it concede that all the modelling shows debris persisting for less than 30 days.
Y'all should read this:
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1795/the-shot
Also thermal transfer is a strange thing (ever had baked alaska? What's the melting point of ice cream?) so it's entirely plausible the tank would make it down semi intact, but again the chances of this thing hitting populated dry ground are miniscule.
Picture of it. I for one welcome our new chilli-shaped UFO overlords.
On a serious note, pictures have consistently failed to show solar panels which indicates several possibilities; it has them and they failed to deploy, they're shielded to be invisible from Earth, it has a Plutonium-powered RTG power source or it uses a shitload of D-cells.
The fact is that shooting this thing down poses a risk to the ISS of the order of 1000-1 (from NASA), much greater than the chances of fatalities on the ground, so someone's working from a risk/reward calculation we're not party to.
Anyhoo, this is an excellent test of the SM-3 (Standard Missile 3! Love them complicated acronyms) coupled with the X-Band oil rig they have somewhere between dry dock in Hawaii and on station off Alaska, given that the closing velocities will be around 9.8Km/sec and the SM-3 has only ever intercepted at 6km or so.
I'm not a fan of orbitally-delivered hydrazine slush puppies, or aliens from out space ZOMG!!1, but still this seems very excessive given the moral high ground they've been claiming over the ChiComms since their own little (unnanounced, higher and more dangerous) fireworks party.
Skull 'n' Crossbones for the 0.007 people this hydrazine will kill on average.
Register
30 posts • joined Monday 18th February 2008 17:30 GMT
More Fonts = More slowness
Does it still have the same 16 bit font setup (including the font viewer)?
missile testsat launchAgain...
"Satellite launch rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles are very similar technology, differing only in details,"
"Penguins and transit vans are very similar things, differing only in details"
Me fail English? Unpossible.
Also;
"..isn't generally assessed as being able to mount a nuke on a missile yet. A successful Taepodong-2 test, however, would be a further step toward such a capability"
Umm.. How does testing a new ICBM (MRBM, more like) get them any closer to solving the major engineering issues around turning a 3-ton engineering device into a 450Kg nosecone-shaped weapon? One doesn't lead to the other. The issue isn't a lack of suitable missiles, it's managing to turn a reliable nuclear weapon into a much, much more compact and resilient package.
"After all, the much better funded and successful Iranian Safir-2 launcher is little more than a rebadged (oh god I hate typing this word) Taepodong-2."
Little more? I think you need to review the recent Omid launch... Quite a bit more than a rebadged Scud stack, I think.
It's a funny old game
At least Nokia finally got the E-series and N-series teams talking to each other, and Motorola finally understood that hardware and software should be designed in co-operation with each other.
SE handset range is insane though, even taking into account the need to have low-, mid- and high-end handsets across both prepay and contract and the fact that they run Cyber-shot, Walkman and now XPeria sub-brands 73 is a bit much.
FFS Cuil
"As usual, The Register missed to boat on Cuil. Maybe by next week The Register will actually notice them and announce it."
Yes, because the register should always announce when a new search engine fueled entirely by hot air, plugs and shameless self-promotion (I can't turn around without seeing them mentioned today, a side-effect of the management ancestry I guess) launches. You do know that a REVOLUTIONARY NEW SEARCH ENGINE launches daily, no?
FFS, for most of the day they were serving "No results found for blah blah" because they hadn't worked out that when their search servers fell over under load, "Umm, we're really busy" would be a better message than "we're shit at search". On the day they were running around PRing themselves to Hell.
Muppets.
PS white search box (that doesn't have a cursor in by default) on a black background? Oooooooooooooooooooooooooh. I prefer the at-least-we're-honest godawful green and cyan colour scheme at tripleme.com.
As I was going to St Ives...
I met a man with an HP EULA.
How many boxes were going to St Ives?
Now with pics!
http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/design/survivability/dhl.jpg
That's just crying out for a caption contest.
Oh...
Also worth pointing out that most (if not all) MANPADs are pretty poor at shooting down a multi-engine passenger jet. You'd tend to end up with a shredded engine and ~300 stained pairs of pants, but as we saw with the DHL jet at Baghdad in around 2005, it's pretty hard to take out an entire jet with an SA-7 or similar.
First US flight?
What about El Al? They've been packing bobby-dazzlers* since at least 2002.
*Oh, if I ran an arms emporium..
Very comprehensive
Except you forgot to mention that XBox Live offers a range of HD films, on a rental basis. Has done for months, actually.
I don't use it much (well, once actually - when I first got my HDTV it was the only HD source I had, and I was disappointed to find out that The Matrix only had a Pro-Logic soundtrack but at the same price as Blockbuster there's no reason to leave your house providing you have fast-ish broadbeans.
And then of course there's a world of free HD downloads out there if you're prepared to hook a PC* up to your TV and get torrenting. Allegedly.
*Windows Media Centre still sucks balls though - roll on XBMC on x86...
@Rotten oranges
Try www.esato.com - pretty much all SonyEricssons can be "debranded" for free, or at most €6 at home through a software solution.
You need to change the CDA to /1, and then use SE Update Service from memory.
Hmmm
One can't help but notice that he looks somewhat.... Swarthy?
Not that anybody's profiling, oh no!
@ Delaney
"I wouldn't chance being in posession of a copy... would you?"
Too fucking right I would. This isn't a fascist police state and I'm innocent until proven guilty. I refuse to self-censor, and I refuse to be required to keep track of what's "good" reading material and what's "ungood".
We stopped using them
We went for an 0870 number a while ago to feign largeness ("clicks 'n' mortar", too), but I decided (since we're in the Telecomms retail field and deal with lots of people on their mobiles) to move back to 01xxx about a year ago - definitely the best option, as it a) shows you have a geographic presence in the UK, b) either counts as minutes from your allowance or isn't barred from your workphone and c) shows that we value customer service above making a few extra K a month.
Shell, home of the cloner
Having had 2 cards cloned at my local Shell petrol station (along with 3 or 4 friends), can I fit spikes to my card that impale the hand of the skimmer when they do their under-the-counter maneuver?
What was wrong with...
Glyndwr?
George Bush's nephew is called "Pierce", by the way.
Dammit
I'm supposed to be working from home today but now I'm going to find it impossible not to fire up the [REDACTED] and play some Free Play online..
Gnngh.
Dieter?!
Quick, Call Stefan Eriksson! We've found his driver!
Fixed
"Air New Zealand will equip eighteen of its airliners with in-flight entertainment rigs allowing iPod users to play their video on seatback screens, listen to audio through the aircraft system, and control their plane via the device's interface."
@Ashley
I have around 25 biros on/in my desk, but I haven't seen a cap for any of them in months... Fancy a trade?
Gambling sites
If I buy a used car and it turns out to have been stolen, I lose the car.
So when are the gambling sites going to be refunding Rock's creditors?
Re: TIME FOR CHANGE
Why is it that people assume that change is always a good thing?
A fresh turd is still not preferable to a wilted rose.
Media Center?
Does 2K8 have a media center?
No, really, how is anyone defending this thing?
"1. People who have never tried it and just like bandwaggoning.
2. People who tried it for an hour maybe, and decided that they didn't like it based on things like UAC that can be turned off in 10 seconds or so.
3. People who buy sub-standard hardware and expect it to run."
I've been running it for 6 months on a Core2Duo with 4Gb of RAM and a XT2600 HD video card, with UAC turned off - as a media centre, under my HDTV - and it sucks balls.
Media Centre is an unresponsive piece of crap (what, you want to see a list of files in "My Videos", instead of thumbnails? Tough!), my Xbox 360 won't read the music from Vista unless I hack the registry (convergence, we've heard of it), the fonts are all over the place at 1920x1080, the hard drive is constantly thrashing even when I'm watching a film over LAN (yes, indexing service and every other service is turned off - Resource Monitor or whatever helpfully reports that "System32.dll" [iirc] is using all the HDD bandwidth)
Etc
Etc
Etc
Really, you can't look at Vista and say "yup, a lot of thought went into this". I'm pretty far from a usability expert but even I come up with 15 ways to make common tasks more obvious every time I use it.
Looking at how much I spent on my hardware, and how much better it is than my last PC purchase (PIII 1Ghz with 512Mb!!!) I can't see where my money went, and am considering sticking Mythbuntu or OSX or even XP on it, just so I can enjoy my expenditure.
Computer says no
"This comes back to one of my pet peeves: that putting "systems" in place stops people using judgement. Instead of asking "is this person a pervert who'll interfere with the children?", or "I think we want to keep half an eye on X, don't you?" we have progressed to "All the system checks are OK, so we're covered"."
My favourite is credit scoring, whereby the bank that holds my loan can refuse to extend the loan because I don't meet their criteria - despite the fact the monthly payments (never missed) would remain the same and I earn twice what I did when I took the loan out (and for a FTSE 100 company rather than for a sole trader).
I, for one, look forward to welcoming our Skynet system overlords. At least I can run around with laser cannons shooting them then.
Mine's the DJ.
Another cult with similar methods
"I think it is very well known that when ever an article about this pseudo religion goes up on any site, their amry of Lord Xeenu fanboys will flock to the available comments section in order to prove to everyone that their legally approved factets show that we are all dumb and they are all correct."
Did you know you can actually get a widget that tells you when anything judged either pro-palestinian or anti-zionist is posted, so sufficient numbers of rightwing wackjobs can go and crowd out the comments with "ur an antisemite!!1" posts?
Did you know the Vatican has the world's oldest intelligence agency?
I've always held a mixed opinion of LRH; on the one hand him (and his brethren) are scum who bilk the gullible and sick, but on the other hand he found a business plan that worked.
I'm in TCR this weekend, might stop by and see if the girl with the gasmask and the cracking ahem T-shirt from enturbulation.org is outside.
Smiley face because I'm an OT-3 and Tom lends me Katie every now and again, and also because Scarlett failed his audition.
Tuxedo
Cryptome.org posted the industry-only brief in this a couple of weeks ago - keep up at the back.
I've had 2 bank (ie debit) cards ripped off in the last 3 months, have to say that Smile were very nice about it (instantly reversed all the transactions over the phone) whereas Barclays made me fill out forms, and review my own statements, and said that more charges may appear in the future.
Needless to say I'm still waiting for PayPal to refund me.
Anyhoo, as a result I have now switched to using a credit card exclusively online (they shoulder the risk and refunds are instant) and a Tuxedo prepaid card (or more likely cash) offline. My debit cards have been cancelled and replaced by cashpoint-only cards.
Chip And Pin (aka "Fuck you, liability isn't with us any more!!!11") led me to do this - thanks, APACs!
Valentines to reflect CNP intro date
Paramount
Isn't there a Star Trek film underway? Can anyone say "cross promotion"?
Mine's the Buzz Rickson MA-1...
@Charles Manning
"Sidenote: Funny watching the pots and kettles... When China shot a satellite it was a BadThing according to the US because it would make space junk etc etc. Shoe is on the other foot now."
Apples and bowling balls - China's shot put debris into orbits where it'll remain for centuries, and they did it unannounced. This is much, much lower and even those against it concede that all the modelling shows debris persisting for less than 30 days.
Y'all should read this:
http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1795/the-shot
Also thermal transfer is a strange thing (ever had baked alaska? What's the melting point of ice cream?) so it's entirely plausible the tank would make it down semi intact, but again the chances of this thing hitting populated dry ground are miniscule.
Photo
http://robin.scagell.googlepages.com/SP-10481c_gal.jpg
Picture of it. I for one welcome our new chilli-shaped UFO overlords.
On a serious note, pictures have consistently failed to show solar panels which indicates several possibilities; it has them and they failed to deploy, they're shielded to be invisible from Earth, it has a Plutonium-powered RTG power source or it uses a shitload of D-cells.
The fact is that shooting this thing down poses a risk to the ISS of the order of 1000-1 (from NASA), much greater than the chances of fatalities on the ground, so someone's working from a risk/reward calculation we're not party to.
This is not a drill!
It's a satellite!
Anyhoo, this is an excellent test of the SM-3 (Standard Missile 3! Love them complicated acronyms) coupled with the X-Band oil rig they have somewhere between dry dock in Hawaii and on station off Alaska, given that the closing velocities will be around 9.8Km/sec and the SM-3 has only ever intercepted at 6km or so.
I'm not a fan of orbitally-delivered hydrazine slush puppies, or aliens from out space ZOMG!!1, but still this seems very excessive given the moral high ground they've been claiming over the ChiComms since their own little (unnanounced, higher and more dangerous) fireworks party.
Skull 'n' Crossbones for the 0.007 people this hydrazine will kill on average.