I suggest that the reason people denounce reverse-osmosis desalination as carbon intensive is because they don't understand it. They do understand distillation, which is carbon intensive even with lots of fancy heat exchangers to reclaim heat where possible, and so there is a (numbers-free) idea in some people's heads that reverse-osmosis desalination must be as carbon intensive as distillation.
Which it isn't.
I drank water produced by reverse-osmosis desalination when on holiday in Tobago. It tasted funny.
I have read (non-authoritative sources) that there are health implications to persistent ingestion of demineralised water as produced by reverse-osmosis desalination. And (same Wikipedia article) it rots the utility companies' plumbing because it's more acidic. But (same etc) the lack of solutes make it really good for washing cars and assorted industrial processes.
I was watching Countryfile on telly on Sunday night, and John Craven or some such was introducing a piece about wind turbines, and produced a factoid "a wind turbine like this can produce enough electricity to make 230 million cups of tea per year". I got my calculator out to calculate how much electricity that was, and the numbers were big.
Unfortunately the corresponding numbers for the first tiny PWR I could think of were 80 times bigger, and when I started examining the assumptions in my back-of-an-envelope calculations, the numbers for the wind turbine got smaller, and the ones for the PWR got bigger.
I love it when the greenies rate wind turbines in terms of kettles. Suppose I did not want to sit in a yurt drinking tea, but stand in an office looking out of a window at people operating my aluminium smelter?
.. cast/director for the Hollywood reimagining of this tale of woe ...
Well, you want a big-name director, and you're going to have to turn a script-doctor loose on the screenplay.
How 'bout James Cameron? So the groom becomes a disenchanted researcher into robotics, biology, and physics (especially temporal plication), so some humanoid-looking cyborg killing machine arrives at the wedding to commit mass murder, and the movie climaxes with an H-bomb detonation at the reception?
[You *would* *not* *believe* some of the stuff that got cut from the first draft screenplay of "Titanic"; Sarah Connor's grandmother on the boat, iceberg under the control of Skynet, nuclear bomb plus kill-droids hidden in the coal bunkers, etc etc etc.]
Consider the now-retired Space Shuttle. There are suggestions that when it was being specced, NASA knew that American women would fly in space and so made the Shuttle female-friendly.
Did it have ... a rear view mirror? Clutch? Reverse gear?
Best of all, when the fuel tank was empty, the crew weren't required to refuel in any way, they just threw the tank away. So, no panicky calls to Houston, "help, I'm at the space station and I've filled up with diesel."
... so I was working my way down page 1, thinking "Even Molesworth never spelled quite this badly", not realising that this was all setup for a gag on page 2, which duly arrived and left me unprepared for the even better gag that followed clutching its coattails.
When his body was found, he was found wearing women's underwear.
But what was most unusual was that the Tory candidate at the ensuing by-election was a man. Normally after a sex scandal, Tory selection committees choose a woman, it's almost a reflex. Presumably on that occasion they asked all the prospective candidates if they'd ever worn women's underwear, and disqualified all those who said they had.
I myself would love any forthcoming Freeview HD channel allocation to be decided by beauty contest rather than by auction, andI can think of two existing Freeview channels that show content which would benefit hugely from HD, Film4 and ITV4.
That's not to say I wouldn't want to watch first-run Fifth Gear in HD, because I would. [Is it me, or are VB-H's hemlines getting shorter?] On the other hand, I sometimes forget for months on end that E4 exists.
Go on people, check your video archives from 2001-4, THAT video, she takes a phone call, and Rick Salomon voices his disappointment. [I can't remember which handset; probably predates her ownership of a Sidekick.]
Good luck to The Steve's heirs and successors, then.
Apple already has a TV product, the Apple TV. The Steve always discussed it as something of a side project. The Steve himself appears to have never been interested much in broadcast TV. And he always felt DVD as an entertainment delivery format was already on its way out, and that Blu-Ray would be dead on arrival. Maybe that's why the present Apple TV doesn't have an optical drive but is very good at streaming downloaded content that people have paid for.
The Apple TV might be just the thing in the US market, but it's a damp squib in the UK. In the UK free-to-air broadcast TV is very good (BBC, etc) and because of bandwidth costs streaming and downloads of movies and other content hasn't taken off in the same way -- well, apart from the BBC iPlayer which is a runaway success provided the BBC's servers think you're in the UK when you try to use it. Hi-def digital broadcasting (DVB-T2, Freeview HD ...) is working well for me. DVD is working for me, and soon Blu-Ray will be for me too.
I don't own an Apple TV, because it doesn't do iPlayer. If it did, iPlayer on its own would be enough to make me buy one. All those people elsewhere in this thread complaining about how many buttons on the remote ... search the web and you'll find blind folk singing The Steve's praises because unlike most media players, the Apple TV's accessibility features are really good. [Those same blind folk then denounce The Steve because the Apple TV doesn't do iPlayer so their accessible device won't let them get at BBC content.]
Cable and satellite are available to me, both as content delivery mechanisms, and creators of content. I don't subscribe. Other people do. I might subscribe if the free-to-air content wasn't so good in this country. Ditto IPTV, apart from the specific IPTV service I've mentioned.
Things like the iPod and iPhone succeeded because they were gamechangers. They solved obvious problems, and also bigger problems you didn't know you had. Whatever The Steve was cooking up, it's more than the existing Apple TV with a screen on top, even with a hi-def display on top, and maybe a legacy optical drive and a DVB tuner.
But for the iPod and iPhone, the game was more or less the same in every country. All that stuff I wrote above about what I can get at, and why The Steve never saw the need in the past to support it because the content being delivered by the equivalent mechanisms in the US wasn't worth the effort. Whatever big thing the notional future Apple TV is going to do, I think it's going to have to be a different thing in every country.
My pal Baz once took a really good picture of me, which I saw for 15/100th of a second; that is, before he dropped the Android device with which he'd taken the picture, and the device hit the ground and the back came off and the swappable battery fell out and that was the end of anything not in permanent storage. I don't how much drinking time Baz wasted reassembling his phone and seeing what content he'd lost because I'd wandered off back to the bar by then.
re "5. Scarcely Marks You Out As One Of The Cognoscenti"
Fire extinguisher would have been my choice too. Because of "you'll get geekslapped by an early-adopter pal with a demonstrably better gadget: and to crown this infamy, his will probably have cost a lot less than yours".
To show how discerning I am, I'd follow said early-adopter pal around with said fire extinguisher, waiting for his 'demonstrably better' gadget to catch fire.
And in the meantime, should one be besieged by some "iPhones are rubbish, really they are" bore, perhaps even Lewis Page himself, a fire extinguisher makes a pretty handy improvised blunt instrument.
Most PNDs, like TomTom's, aren't entirely self-contained devices. They generally need to have their data updated periodically, and this is done by attaching the PND to a computer and managing the PND with some software supplied by the PND's vendor.
For older TomTom PNDs, there is an application with comprehensive functionality called TomTom HOME. But for current TomTom PND models, there isn't.
That might be down to the settlement reached with Microsoft over the FAT32 patent. Or not. But, whatever the reason, however much I'd like a new TomTom PND with enhanced lane guidance and a 5" capacitative multitouch screen, and bluetooth, etc etc etc, until TomTom release the corresponding device management software, I'm sticking with my existing PND.
John Naismith, I expect better resolution from GPS than "in the North Sea off Norfolk".
The accompanying map shows something occurring above the north Norfolk coast, which could be either the balloon's peak altitude, or loss of signal presumably because of splashdown or landing. Either way, there are no coordinates given, and the only time value given is for the balloon's launch, although the text of the article indicates the launch crew were having lunch when it passed 40km. I will admit that I didn't notice the 'Z' suffix in the time value shown on the map first time round.
If on the other hand we knew that the balloon hit the water early in the afternoon, we could be reasonably certain that it had nothing to do with the lifeboat callouts that occurred in north Norfolk that night because of reports of an object suspected to have been variously a sky lantern or a distress flare.
Onboard pressure sensor? What's the margin of error at 40.5km, given that atmospheric pressure isn't constant?
Moreover: launch from Cambridge at 2011-08-20-07-30Z? Came down in the sea off the north Norfolk coast? Exactly where and exactly when? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-14606919
"Despite not being a total success in the matter of moon mapping"?
There was nothing wrong with the maps derived from Lunar Orbiter 2's images ... Armstrong had to steer the LM away from a boulder field because the LM's flight computer had been given an incorrect initial value for the LM's velocity.
Where is Naomi Campbell's hardened-edge cellphone?
I'm told that Flavio Briatore used to collect martial arts paraphernalia, and once, while still stepping out with Naomi Campbell, he showed her his favourite antique shuriken.
Allegedly, she examined it closely before asking where one inserted the SIM card.
Build a proper submarine? For moving cargo? Even if the the cargo is easy to handle and stupidly valuable, that's not where the money is.
If I was some random South American and I had the skills and the money to develop a working submarine, I wouldn't mess about with small-time illegal stuff like hauling $100m worth of drugs.
I'd spread scare stories about Brazil's fitful SSN development, then start bilking assorted regional departments of defence for huge sums of money by selling them armaments. The military submarines I'd be offering might not actually work, and I might need to licence all sorts technology from US companies to make my products seem even plausible, but I'd still be making money. Lawfully.
... that's where you can find lots of people that said Apple, and/or The Steve, were finished.
Tsk. I own a pile of Apple consumer stuff. And a pile of Netgear consumer stuff too. Thing is, while both piles support IPv4, exactly one pile supports IPv6, and exactly one pile doesn't.
I've got Macs that supported IPv6 ready to turn into fishtanks. Apple's been ready for years; why not Netgear?
particularly French military interests ... French nukes and smartbombs
This would the same France of which it is alleged "they have enough nukes to blow up the whole world twice ... of course, being French, they might miss the first time"?
... if you want to see Apple product placement in print, try anything William Gibson has written in the past ten years. His latest novel, "Zero History", is worse than ever in that respect. [But hey, I owned a Power Mac G4 Cube once.]
Yes, the sscanfdinavians do have a non-British-English set of vowels, and there is mirth and/or confusion to be had there. Anybody see the TV movie version of the Wallander novel where Inspector Forehead's love interest is a computer programmer, and when she's not guessing his password ("fiske" -- bit easy that) she's lecturing him about a programming language called Eeeyava? And suggesting he read the documentation with something called Acrobott?
Yeah. One horrible accident caused by having an unduly complicated rocket stack, and another caused by being in a debris stream next to the rocket stack instead of being in clear air on top of it. And lots and lots of safety scares, mostly to do with fuel system plumbing and the like because of having liquid-fuelled rocket main motors mounted on the orbiter.
... None of which would be a factor for the spaceplane under consideration.
Serverside Java? J2EE? WebObjects? The iTunes stores?
Apple has a number of web applications that aren't going to go away soon, such as the iTunes stores, written in WebObjects. The current version of WebObjects is pure Java.
But then, the previous version of WebObjects used ObjC, and Apple never supported that after MacOSX 10.1.5 or December 2003. It is widely believed that Apple maintains a large estate of PPC Xserves running custom builds of MacOSX explicitly to support existing WebObjects 4.x applications, and it's entirely possible that Apple will do the same to support its WebObjects 5.x investment. Apple might be saying that Java will be dead and gone, but that will mean that it's dead and gone for customers, while inside Apple it remains an essential technology whose continued existence as far as possible remains carefully hidden from the outside world.
Use a third-party JVM? If interested in developing server applications, I can get by without Eclipse using Xcode, and I'll not need X11, or AppKit integration, or SWT, or AWT, or Swing, or any of that.
I did notice after upgrading from JDK 1.4 on MacOSX Tiger Intel to JDK 1.5 on MacOSX Tiger Intel just how much faster my bytecode was running because of the availability of a JIT native compiler. I'm not sure how well third-party JVM maintainers would fare at providing one of those.
I know what a 'slash' genre is ... either, it refers to use of '/' as a lexical operator to conflate two or more otherwise unrelated subjects, or it refers to somewhat febrile horror fiction. Or maybe both.
I fail to see what the article's subject has to do with Slashdot, which I understand to be a website for generally argumentative individuals of the beard/sandals/tinfoil-hat persuasion.
... I think it was from a bootnote at the end of an El Reg group test, well over a decade ago, that I learned of the existence of DABS, and pretty soon that was the only place I went for electronic or electric techie toys.
But do DABS stock these? Do they b*ggery. Going to hell in a handbasket since David Atherton sold up.
Perhaps I'm being unreasonable ... would I really want to pay mail-order delivery charges on something that weighs over a ton? Mmm, probably over the threshold for free delivery ... wonder how they'd get it off the van?
Firstly, the iphone is not 'open source'. 'Open source' can be defined and described in many ways, and one succinct description is 'not like the iPhone'. The phrase 'open source' has a special meaning -- best find out what it is before you next use that phrase.
The iPhone developer tools may be a free download, but that doesn't make iPhone development accessible to all ... really not at all like the "thereby empowering citizens with more useful, accurate information" to which you refer. You need to spend about a thousand quid on a modern Mac, and a couple of hundred quid on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, and sign up for the development program -- that starts at £59 in the UK, and then usually costs some more as UK candidates often find they ned to get their solicitor to fax an authenticated copy of their passport to somewhere in California. And then you need the skills to exploit all this and begin writing solid working code! The whole process is less like being an empowered citizen, and more like becoming an .... accredited lobbyist. [I should point out that becoming an iPhone developer isn't that much harder, and is in some cases easier, than becoming any other sort of developer. Mostly this suggests that your iPhone analogy was a poor one even before I started stretching it.]
"throw open democracy too by introducing a technology enabled Public Reading Stage to each Bill so the wisdom of crowds can improve laws and spot potential problems"? Nice idea. However, there is a school of thought that "the wisdom of crowds" is a paraphrase of "20000 lemmings can't be wrong". On the other hand, leading light of the Open Source (found out what that means yet?) movement Eric S Raymond coined a phrase "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". Let's think about that.
Consider the Videolan project -- that's genuinely open source, as opposed to just bandying words about -- which has a MacOSX downloads page. On it there are remarks about how there is no 64 bit version, how they would like more development volunteers, and what the skills they think those volunteers will need are. I've not volunteered or downloaded the source code, in part because I know I am missing some skills which I think would be vital. By comparison, I have never read the draft of a bill, but I did once visit my local public library and pull down a volume from a shelf and read, or rather try to read, the text of some enacted legislation. I, like most people who are not lawyers who draft legislation, found it to be impenetrable.
What next? Oh yes, Twitter. That's currently not a Government-run service, it's a private venture casting about for a revenue model. If you were to offload a pile of Government activity onto them, that might substantially increase their bandwidth bills (in reduced English for MPs, that is to say, operating costs). They might come after the Government asking for money. Would the Government prefer to come to an arrangement, or to accidentally drive Twitter into bankruptcy?
And there's very little authentication on Twitter. It's relatively easy to masquerade as someone you're not. Dumping Government activity onto Twitter would invent new classes of opportunity for fraud and identity theft.
Despite the present Government's best efforts, there are still lots of people who don't have ready access to the internet, and the have-nots tend to be the less privileged in society whom governments usually try to prioritise trying to reach; and this is before thinking about the present Digital Economy Bill, which I do hope does not survive the wash-up so that in the next parliamentary term that matter can be dealt with again, properly and rationally.
Advertising job vacancies by Twitter? I remember, in 1991 I think it was, that some executive at Kent County Council got his letter printed in The Guardian, about how he did not believe in graduate unemployment because of how few CVs he was seeing. Naturally I sent him my CV by return of post, and it seems every other unemployed graduate (quite a lot of those in 1990-1, if I remember) did too, and it was some months before I got a reply, which mostly said "sorry for the late reply, we got lots more CVs than we expected". I never heard from Kent County Council again, so I expect I wasn't the man they were looking for. I doubt many of the other people who posted CVs were the right person either. The difference is of course, what with Twitter being something to do with the World Wide Web, that the deluge of replies won't just come from the part of the world where the print edition of a national newspaper is distributed -- they'll come from the whole world. Mr Shapps, would you care to propose some "wisdom of crowds" initiative for performing the equivalent of a CV sift?
Dealing with NEOs by means other than nuclear demolition may well be possible. If we wanted to deliver large technical payloads in a timely manner, we might need a spacecraft with an engine delivering very high specific impulse, and to me that looks like the Orion engine -- pulsed nuclear fission with a very big shockabsorber between the drive plate and the rest of the spacecraft.
Of course we could just make a very big pointy DU ballistic impactor, and use an Orion engine to make it move fast enough...
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Page:
Or, as, "Numerical Recipes in C" has it...
"The practical scientist is trying to solve tomorrow's problem on yesterday's computer. Computer scientists often have it the other way around. "
Innumeracy?
I suggest that the reason people denounce reverse-osmosis desalination as carbon intensive is because they don't understand it. They do understand distillation, which is carbon intensive even with lots of fancy heat exchangers to reclaim heat where possible, and so there is a (numbers-free) idea in some people's heads that reverse-osmosis desalination must be as carbon intensive as distillation.
Which it isn't.
I drank water produced by reverse-osmosis desalination when on holiday in Tobago. It tasted funny.
I have read (non-authoritative sources) that there are health implications to persistent ingestion of demineralised water as produced by reverse-osmosis desalination. And (same Wikipedia article) it rots the utility companies' plumbing because it's more acidic. But (same etc) the lack of solutes make it really good for washing cars and assorted industrial processes.
230 million cups of tea per year!
I was watching Countryfile on telly on Sunday night, and John Craven or some such was introducing a piece about wind turbines, and produced a factoid "a wind turbine like this can produce enough electricity to make 230 million cups of tea per year". I got my calculator out to calculate how much electricity that was, and the numbers were big.
Unfortunately the corresponding numbers for the first tiny PWR I could think of were 80 times bigger, and when I started examining the assumptions in my back-of-an-envelope calculations, the numbers for the wind turbine got smaller, and the ones for the PWR got bigger.
I love it when the greenies rate wind turbines in terms of kettles. Suppose I did not want to sit in a yurt drinking tea, but stand in an office looking out of a window at people operating my aluminium smelter?
.. cast/director for the Hollywood reimagining of this tale of woe ...
Well, you want a big-name director, and you're going to have to turn a script-doctor loose on the screenplay.
How 'bout James Cameron? So the groom becomes a disenchanted researcher into robotics, biology, and physics (especially temporal plication), so some humanoid-looking cyborg killing machine arrives at the wedding to commit mass murder, and the movie climaxes with an H-bomb detonation at the reception?
[You *would* *not* *believe* some of the stuff that got cut from the first draft screenplay of "Titanic"; Sarah Connor's grandmother on the boat, iceberg under the control of Skynet, nuclear bomb plus kill-droids hidden in the coal bunkers, etc etc etc.]
Female spacecraft pilots
Consider the now-retired Space Shuttle. There are suggestions that when it was being specced, NASA knew that American women would fly in space and so made the Shuttle female-friendly.
Did it have ... a rear view mirror? Clutch? Reverse gear?
Best of all, when the fuel tank was empty, the crew weren't required to refuel in any way, they just threw the tank away. So, no panicky calls to Houston, "help, I'm at the space station and I've filled up with diesel."
Deary deary me...
... so I was working my way down page 1, thinking "Even Molesworth never spelled quite this badly", not realising that this was all setup for a gag on page 2, which duly arrived and left me unprepared for the even better gag that followed clutching its coattails.
What, no Basil Fotherington-Thomas?
I remember that Tory MP
I remember that Tory MP.
When his body was found, he was found wearing women's underwear.
But what was most unusual was that the Tory candidate at the ensuing by-election was a man. Normally after a sex scandal, Tory selection committees choose a woman, it's almost a reflex. Presumably on that occasion they asked all the prospective candidates if they'd ever worn women's underwear, and disqualified all those who said they had.
Gripping hands?
I dread to think what the equivalent Mark Hurd doll would be like
Yes
I myself would love any forthcoming Freeview HD channel allocation to be decided by beauty contest rather than by auction, andI can think of two existing Freeview channels that show content which would benefit hugely from HD, Film4 and ITV4.
That's not to say I wouldn't want to watch first-run Fifth Gear in HD, because I would. [Is it me, or are VB-H's hemlines getting shorter?] On the other hand, I sometimes forget for months on end that E4 exists.
This is a Paris Hilton story, isn't it?
Go on people, check your video archives from 2001-4, THAT video, she takes a phone call, and Rick Salomon voices his disappointment. [I can't remember which handset; probably predates her ownership of a Sidekick.]
I'm dazed, and also confused
*nobody* has seen fit to mention "The Song Remains The Same"?
The Steve never bothered with TV
Good luck to The Steve's heirs and successors, then.
Apple already has a TV product, the Apple TV. The Steve always discussed it as something of a side project. The Steve himself appears to have never been interested much in broadcast TV. And he always felt DVD as an entertainment delivery format was already on its way out, and that Blu-Ray would be dead on arrival. Maybe that's why the present Apple TV doesn't have an optical drive but is very good at streaming downloaded content that people have paid for.
The Apple TV might be just the thing in the US market, but it's a damp squib in the UK. In the UK free-to-air broadcast TV is very good (BBC, etc) and because of bandwidth costs streaming and downloads of movies and other content hasn't taken off in the same way -- well, apart from the BBC iPlayer which is a runaway success provided the BBC's servers think you're in the UK when you try to use it. Hi-def digital broadcasting (DVB-T2, Freeview HD ...) is working well for me. DVD is working for me, and soon Blu-Ray will be for me too.
I don't own an Apple TV, because it doesn't do iPlayer. If it did, iPlayer on its own would be enough to make me buy one. All those people elsewhere in this thread complaining about how many buttons on the remote ... search the web and you'll find blind folk singing The Steve's praises because unlike most media players, the Apple TV's accessibility features are really good. [Those same blind folk then denounce The Steve because the Apple TV doesn't do iPlayer so their accessible device won't let them get at BBC content.]
Cable and satellite are available to me, both as content delivery mechanisms, and creators of content. I don't subscribe. Other people do. I might subscribe if the free-to-air content wasn't so good in this country. Ditto IPTV, apart from the specific IPTV service I've mentioned.
Things like the iPod and iPhone succeeded because they were gamechangers. They solved obvious problems, and also bigger problems you didn't know you had. Whatever The Steve was cooking up, it's more than the existing Apple TV with a screen on top, even with a hi-def display on top, and maybe a legacy optical drive and a DVB tuner.
But for the iPod and iPhone, the game was more or less the same in every country. All that stuff I wrote above about what I can get at, and why The Steve never saw the need in the past to support it because the content being delivered by the equivalent mechanisms in the US wasn't worth the effort. Whatever big thing the notional future Apple TV is going to do, I think it's going to have to be a different thing in every country.
Swappable battery? Seriously?
My pal Baz once took a really good picture of me, which I saw for 15/100th of a second; that is, before he dropped the Android device with which he'd taken the picture, and the device hit the ground and the back came off and the swappable battery fell out and that was the end of anything not in permanent storage. I don't how much drinking time Baz wasted reassembling his phone and seeing what content he'd lost because I'd wandered off back to the bar by then.
re "5. Scarcely Marks You Out As One Of The Cognoscenti"
Fire extinguisher would have been my choice too. Because of "you'll get geekslapped by an early-adopter pal with a demonstrably better gadget: and to crown this infamy, his will probably have cost a lot less than yours".
To show how discerning I am, I'd follow said early-adopter pal around with said fire extinguisher, waiting for his 'demonstrably better' gadget to catch fire.
And in the meantime, should one be besieged by some "iPhones are rubbish, really they are" bore, perhaps even Lewis Page himself, a fire extinguisher makes a pretty handy improvised blunt instrument.
How TomTom could sell more PNDs
Most PNDs, like TomTom's, aren't entirely self-contained devices. They generally need to have their data updated periodically, and this is done by attaching the PND to a computer and managing the PND with some software supplied by the PND's vendor.
For older TomTom PNDs, there is an application with comprehensive functionality called TomTom HOME. But for current TomTom PND models, there isn't.
That might be down to the settlement reached with Microsoft over the FAT32 patent. Or not. But, whatever the reason, however much I'd like a new TomTom PND with enhanced lane guidance and a 5" capacitative multitouch screen, and bluetooth, etc etc etc, until TomTom release the corresponding device management software, I'm sticking with my existing PND.
It's Microsoft I tell you
for installing a very early build of the next release of Windows
Has LG sought a patent for this?
If they have, I suggest the Anoto C-Pen ought to count as prior art.
No, did YOU bother reading the article at all
John Naismith, I expect better resolution from GPS than "in the North Sea off Norfolk".
The accompanying map shows something occurring above the north Norfolk coast, which could be either the balloon's peak altitude, or loss of signal presumably because of splashdown or landing. Either way, there are no coordinates given, and the only time value given is for the balloon's launch, although the text of the article indicates the launch crew were having lunch when it passed 40km. I will admit that I didn't notice the 'Z' suffix in the time value shown on the map first time round.
If on the other hand we knew that the balloon hit the water early in the afternoon, we could be reasonably certain that it had nothing to do with the lifeboat callouts that occurred in north Norfolk that night because of reports of an object suspected to have been variously a sky lantern or a distress flare.
Altitude determined how?
Onboard pressure sensor? What's the margin of error at 40.5km, given that atmospheric pressure isn't constant?
Moreover: launch from Cambridge at 2011-08-20-07-30Z? Came down in the sea off the north Norfolk coast? Exactly where and exactly when? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-14606919
"Despite not being a total success in the matter of moon mapping"?
There was nothing wrong with the maps derived from Lunar Orbiter 2's images ... Armstrong had to steer the LM away from a boulder field because the LM's flight computer had been given an incorrect initial value for the LM's velocity.
Why has El Reg ...
Why has El Reg not signed up Dave Weiner to do digital camera reviews?
Lots of people cry at weddings ...
... but everyone will be crying at this one. Marmaduke LaHussy, you omitted to refer to the Met's pre-ceremony excessively zealous use of tear gas.
they may have to reboot the franchise
ie, do please ask, "have you tried turning it off and on again?"
"Chernobyl ... most of the area is still unfit for human consumption."
That doesn't add up.
If I was in the habit of eating soil, I'm not sure how bothered I'd be about how radioactive it was.
yes, but even so ...
... does this mean that the team that wrote Stuxnet is going to get fired because their product failed to deliver?
Where is Naomi Campbell's hardened-edge cellphone?
I'm told that Flavio Briatore used to collect martial arts paraphernalia, and once, while still stepping out with Naomi Campbell, he showed her his favourite antique shuriken.
Allegedly, she examined it closely before asking where one inserted the SIM card.
'Or "unhealthy", as we prefer to put it'?
Hmmm. Unhealth food anybody? "Can I have some more cold grease on that please?"
yes, DAVE.
Well that's the intention, isn't it?
If a show is 60mins long and has to fit in a 60min slot, including any advertising, it will be:
About 60mins long on the BBC
About 46mins long on Dave
About 42mins long on US TV
It does help if you create the show with lots of nice "edit points", where you can snip bits out apparently seamlessly.
Which could be where "let's tease the Mexicans" came in ... a minute or so's content ready to be discarded in the sanitized-for-export edit.
Webbox? sounds like a dog's dinner to me
See also http://www.google.com/search?q=webbox+pet+treat
Inefficient investment
Build a proper submarine? For moving cargo? Even if the the cargo is easy to handle and stupidly valuable, that's not where the money is.
If I was some random South American and I had the skills and the money to develop a working submarine, I wouldn't mess about with small-time illegal stuff like hauling $100m worth of drugs.
I'd spread scare stories about Brazil's fitful SSN development, then start bilking assorted regional departments of defence for huge sums of money by selling them armaments. The military submarines I'd be offering might not actually work, and I might need to licence all sorts technology from US companies to make my products seem even plausible, but I'd still be making money. Lawfully.
Read the history books, Patrick Lo...
... that's where you can find lots of people that said Apple, and/or The Steve, were finished.
Tsk. I own a pile of Apple consumer stuff. And a pile of Netgear consumer stuff too. Thing is, while both piles support IPv4, exactly one pile supports IPv6, and exactly one pile doesn't.
I've got Macs that supported IPv6 ready to turn into fishtanks. Apple's been ready for years; why not Netgear?
A German submarine for patrolling intestines?
Tsk. I wonder what Dönitz would have thought?
particularly French military interests ... French nukes and smartbombs
This would the same France of which it is alleged "they have enough nukes to blow up the whole world twice ... of course, being French, they might miss the first time"?
Apple product placement?
... if you want to see Apple product placement in print, try anything William Gibson has written in the past ten years. His latest novel, "Zero History", is worse than ever in that respect. [But hey, I owned a Power Mac G4 Cube once.]
Orfffrica?
Yes, the sscanfdinavians do have a non-British-English set of vowels, and there is mirth and/or confusion to be had there. Anybody see the TV movie version of the Wallander novel where Inspector Forehead's love interest is a computer programmer, and when she's not guessing his password ("fiske" -- bit easy that) she's lecturing him about a programming language called Eeeyava? And suggesting he read the documentation with something called Acrobott?
"The Shuttle's spotty safety record"
Yeah. One horrible accident caused by having an unduly complicated rocket stack, and another caused by being in a debris stream next to the rocket stack instead of being in clear air on top of it. And lots and lots of safety scares, mostly to do with fuel system plumbing and the like because of having liquid-fuelled rocket main motors mounted on the orbiter.
... None of which would be a factor for the spaceplane under consideration.
"The yanks launched their scuttle"?
"scuttle"?
Is this perhaps a reference to the stillborn East German reusable spacecraft program, which was to have used lignite fuel?
Go to blue alert!
Go to Blue Alert? Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb!
And, I take it, no hope of taupe-with-a-hint-of-vermilion alert, either.
Sigh.
... Southend?
"The fact that he made it out of Southend alive on a Saturday night, a small matter like a mugging with violence must have been a walk in the park!"
[1] he was attacked on his own doorstep in North London
[2] had he been attacked in Southend, he would likely not have survived; impersonating a musician is very poorly tolerated in these parts
Serverside Java? J2EE? WebObjects? The iTunes stores?
Apple has a number of web applications that aren't going to go away soon, such as the iTunes stores, written in WebObjects. The current version of WebObjects is pure Java.
But then, the previous version of WebObjects used ObjC, and Apple never supported that after MacOSX 10.1.5 or December 2003. It is widely believed that Apple maintains a large estate of PPC Xserves running custom builds of MacOSX explicitly to support existing WebObjects 4.x applications, and it's entirely possible that Apple will do the same to support its WebObjects 5.x investment. Apple might be saying that Java will be dead and gone, but that will mean that it's dead and gone for customers, while inside Apple it remains an essential technology whose continued existence as far as possible remains carefully hidden from the outside world.
Use a third-party JVM? If interested in developing server applications, I can get by without Eclipse using Xcode, and I'll not need X11, or AppKit integration, or SWT, or AWT, or Swing, or any of that.
I did notice after upgrading from JDK 1.4 on MacOSX Tiger Intel to JDK 1.5 on MacOSX Tiger Intel just how much faster my bytecode was running because of the availability of a JIT native compiler. I'm not sure how well third-party JVM maintainers would fare at providing one of those.
"novel type of rotary engine"
I bet the "novel type of rotary engine" is a Deltic. Novel my *rse.
"but also for the entire slashdot genre"?
Eh?
I know what a 'slash' genre is ... either, it refers to use of '/' as a lexical operator to conflate two or more otherwise unrelated subjects, or it refers to somewhat febrile horror fiction. Or maybe both.
I fail to see what the article's subject has to do with Slashdot, which I understand to be a website for generally argumentative individuals of the beard/sandals/tinfoil-hat persuasion.
"We want two or no votes for you"
yeah, that's catchy -- almost as catchy as "we want eight and we won't wait".
Not shurikens...
... rather, prototype iPhones specially localised for the Japanese market.
After all, was it not Naomi Campbell who, when handed a shuriken a while ago, examined it closely before asking "where do I insert the SIM card?"
(allegedly)
"jazz CD ... not all John Hancocked"?
jazz...
Hancock...
gosh, does that mean that somewhere there's an ancient seditious document signed floridly by Herbie Hancock?
Gosh this is interesting ...
... I must click the "post to Facebook" button immediately!
Tsk. Where to buy?
... I think it was from a bootnote at the end of an El Reg group test, well over a decade ago, that I learned of the existence of DABS, and pretty soon that was the only place I went for electronic or electric techie toys.
But do DABS stock these? Do they b*ggery. Going to hell in a handbasket since David Atherton sold up.
Perhaps I'm being unreasonable ... would I really want to pay mail-order delivery charges on something that weighs over a ton? Mmm, probably over the threshold for free delivery ... wonder how they'd get it off the van?
Well I suppose I'll take my shot ...
Dear Grant Shapps MP:
Firstly, the iphone is not 'open source'. 'Open source' can be defined and described in many ways, and one succinct description is 'not like the iPhone'. The phrase 'open source' has a special meaning -- best find out what it is before you next use that phrase.
The iPhone developer tools may be a free download, but that doesn't make iPhone development accessible to all ... really not at all like the "thereby empowering citizens with more useful, accurate information" to which you refer. You need to spend about a thousand quid on a modern Mac, and a couple of hundred quid on an iPhone or an iPod Touch, and sign up for the development program -- that starts at £59 in the UK, and then usually costs some more as UK candidates often find they ned to get their solicitor to fax an authenticated copy of their passport to somewhere in California. And then you need the skills to exploit all this and begin writing solid working code! The whole process is less like being an empowered citizen, and more like becoming an .... accredited lobbyist. [I should point out that becoming an iPhone developer isn't that much harder, and is in some cases easier, than becoming any other sort of developer. Mostly this suggests that your iPhone analogy was a poor one even before I started stretching it.]
"throw open democracy too by introducing a technology enabled Public Reading Stage to each Bill so the wisdom of crowds can improve laws and spot potential problems"? Nice idea. However, there is a school of thought that "the wisdom of crowds" is a paraphrase of "20000 lemmings can't be wrong". On the other hand, leading light of the Open Source (found out what that means yet?) movement Eric S Raymond coined a phrase "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". Let's think about that.
Consider the Videolan project -- that's genuinely open source, as opposed to just bandying words about -- which has a MacOSX downloads page. On it there are remarks about how there is no 64 bit version, how they would like more development volunteers, and what the skills they think those volunteers will need are. I've not volunteered or downloaded the source code, in part because I know I am missing some skills which I think would be vital. By comparison, I have never read the draft of a bill, but I did once visit my local public library and pull down a volume from a shelf and read, or rather try to read, the text of some enacted legislation. I, like most people who are not lawyers who draft legislation, found it to be impenetrable.
What next? Oh yes, Twitter. That's currently not a Government-run service, it's a private venture casting about for a revenue model. If you were to offload a pile of Government activity onto them, that might substantially increase their bandwidth bills (in reduced English for MPs, that is to say, operating costs). They might come after the Government asking for money. Would the Government prefer to come to an arrangement, or to accidentally drive Twitter into bankruptcy?
And there's very little authentication on Twitter. It's relatively easy to masquerade as someone you're not. Dumping Government activity onto Twitter would invent new classes of opportunity for fraud and identity theft.
Despite the present Government's best efforts, there are still lots of people who don't have ready access to the internet, and the have-nots tend to be the less privileged in society whom governments usually try to prioritise trying to reach; and this is before thinking about the present Digital Economy Bill, which I do hope does not survive the wash-up so that in the next parliamentary term that matter can be dealt with again, properly and rationally.
Advertising job vacancies by Twitter? I remember, in 1991 I think it was, that some executive at Kent County Council got his letter printed in The Guardian, about how he did not believe in graduate unemployment because of how few CVs he was seeing. Naturally I sent him my CV by return of post, and it seems every other unemployed graduate (quite a lot of those in 1990-1, if I remember) did too, and it was some months before I got a reply, which mostly said "sorry for the late reply, we got lots more CVs than we expected". I never heard from Kent County Council again, so I expect I wasn't the man they were looking for. I doubt many of the other people who posted CVs were the right person either. The difference is of course, what with Twitter being something to do with the World Wide Web, that the deluge of replies won't just come from the part of the world where the print edition of a national newspaper is distributed -- they'll come from the whole world. Mr Shapps, would you care to propose some "wisdom of crowds" initiative for performing the equivalent of a CV sift?
-- lho
Orion.
Dealing with NEOs by means other than nuclear demolition may well be possible. If we wanted to deliver large technical payloads in a timely manner, we might need a spacecraft with an engine delivering very high specific impulse, and to me that looks like the Orion engine -- pulsed nuclear fission with a very big shockabsorber between the drive plate and the rest of the spacecraft.
Of course we could just make a very big pointy DU ballistic impactor, and use an Orion engine to make it move fast enough...
Oh, *that* Sun
... the tawdry newspaper, rather than the Borged-by-Oracle the-network-is-the-computer vendor. So no SPARC, Java or Solaris angle.
Should we expect Playmobil re-enactments of the proud parents dutifully obeying instructions from an iPhone?
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