This is, basically, Android for Windows. It's using .NET instead of Java, and the WinCE kernel instead of Linux, but it's very much the same thing.
Is this a good idea? I have no idea. Microsoft have a long history of sucking at consumer electronics (*cough*Zune*cough*), but if they finally get their act together they may end up with something worth using --- Silverlight should at least mean that the UI ought to be pretty. And it cannot possibly be worse than WinMo, unless they suddenly announce it's based on Symbian.
I doubt very much they'll beat Android, though. All the next generation of Chinese cheap phones will run Android, simply because it's free and works pretty well. Android may be fragmented to buggery but it'll still have huge momentum...
No mention of a Speccy game is complete without the requisite link to http://www.zxspectrum.net. And yes, they have Dalek Attack --- scroll down to 1992, and it's right there under 'Doctor Who'.
Looking at that photo, I wonder if the focus was wrong. The knob the lens is contained within is knurled --- might it need to be krotated?
Also, there might have been a tiny circle of antiscratch film on the lens --- they're not always very obvious, and need to be removed before it'll work properly.
I received several --- does anyone know how to forward them on to the HMRC? The concept of siccing the Tax Men on these bastards is one that fills me with a holy joy.
When I travelled to the Land of the Fee in late 2008 I had to fill out the online form. It may not have been technically compulsory, but BA wouldn't let me check in without it. And yes, I had to fill out the stupid paper form as well ("Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of any pinko socialist commie organisation such as any British political party?"). I complained that I'd already filled it in online, and was told quite apologetically that the systems weren't talking to each other yet.
After LoTR came out, I read one rant by someone who kept complaining about the 'obviously fake CGI mountains composited into the backgrounds of every scene'.
I really like the idea of having a heater that is up to about 500% efficient. (You put in 1kW of electrical energy, and get out about 5kW of heat!) Interestingly, today's technology appear to include air source heat pumps so you don't need the (expensive) ground exchange loop.
There are grants available under the LCBP programme of, apparently, 900 UKP minimum for an air source heat pump and 1200 minimum for a ground loop (for homeowners). OTOH a random search on t'interweb indicates that a new ground source heat pump costs about 10k UKP, so it's still bloody expensive. An air source heat pump appears to be about 6k.
If you're building your own ray-shielding headwear or wallet, whatever you do, don't use aluminium foil. You've got to use real tin foil. Reputable studies have shown that aluminium foil helmets actually *enhance* the orbital mind control rays: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
And I bet you thought it was just coincidence that you can't get tinfoil in the shops any more.
My washing machine is immediately under the combi boiler; total pipe length is under a metre. And it's currently winter, which means the combi boiler is nearly always hot anyway, and can produce hot water instantly. Even in the summer I have the washing machine set to run early in the morning, at about the time I want hot water for the shower anyway. And a combi boiler produces hot water at mains pressure (makes for great showers), which undermines the third argument on the page you linked to.
Another advantage of filling from the hot tap is that boilers can heat water much faster than the crappy electric heater in the washing machine, which makes for far faster washes.
Why is it so hard to find a washing machine with a hot water inlet?
If you go into a washing machine specialist and ask for a hot fill washing machine, they look at you like you're trying to launder a stoat. If you insist, they'll eventually start producing strange excuses like 'but it's cheaper to heat the water from electricity because then you're not wasting all the hot water in the pipes' or even 'heating the water from cold washes better'.
The bulk of the energy use in a washing machine is the water heater. Not only is this electric, which is the most expensive kind of energy around, it's usually peak time electric. Even gas is cheaper. Being able to fill with hot water --- or even the kind of luke warm water we get from British solar panels --- would vastly reduce the energy budget. But they appear to be impossible to get.
To me, this looks like an attempt to kill off DNS hijacking --- the practice of returning bogus results for unrecognised domains. I can think of three main reasons why Google would want this:
- the bogus results usually assume the user was doing an HTTP request, and attempt to serve up a webpage pointing at some kind of search site that's not Google. By preventing this, Google starve their competitors and at the same time increase the probability that the user will go look up the site on Google;
- DNS hijacking *really is* a horrible security hole; consider someone on Gmail following a spam link to fnord.googlemail.com. The domain's not recognised, so scummy ISP redirects them to a server that masquerades as fnord.googlemail.com --- and the user's web browser happily hands the server the user's login cookie, because fnord.googlemail.com is in the same hierarchy as googlemail.com. Who gets blamed for this? googlemail.com, of course;
- Google want *everyone* to be able to access their services, and so have a vested interest in maintaining web standards; DNS is the engine that makes the web go, and doing stuff as horrible as DNS hijacking is destabilising the entire internet (as this illustrious publication has said, many times).
So I see this as a really good thing. I'm sure they *could* attempt to use their new-found DNS skills to spy on my precious bodily fluids, but really, who cares? I'm more interested in how much the 8.8.8.8 IP address cost them. Lots, I'd imagine.
It's actually a Kirkwood processor, not a Sheeva --- SheevaPlug is the name of the dev kit.
I run my entire home server off one. That's all my email, including spam filtering, my firewall to the outside world, my website, an IMAP server, my DNS server, my backup server, and my remote ssh box for doing batch operations. It even runs Java. It's all based off a home-made SSD made out of a RAID array of USB keys and runs Debian Linux. Yes, geek heaven.
But it's also totally silent, and the whole setup cost about 170 quid --- 70 quid for the SheevaPlug dev kit, and 100 for the USB storage. Yes, unlike most pieces of development hardware, the SheevaPlug is actually *cheap*!
If you're interested in low-performance computing I can highly recommend one. Marvell also make a more expensive version with more ports --- including VGA and eSATA --- which is more suitable for actual use, but the SheevaPlug is astonishingly functional as is.
Are you sure it's open source? I don't see any reference to that on the (laughable) website --- did you tyop for 'open platform'? (Open platforms typically mean that anyone can write apps for them, provided you're willing to pay/NDA/sign up for the SDK. Closed platforms mean that the SDK isn't available.)
Actually, I tried that a little while ago. At least for the Ṻᶇⓘḉȱᵭḝ ɼₑᵹᶖǭⁿꜱ I tried (and every character in those two words comes from a different one), all the .com extensions appear to map to .com in ASCII. So at least *something* is converting isomorphs to ASCII.
Whether this is a feature of my Linux system or something in DNS I don't know; I was unable to try it on Windows because Windows has terrible Unicode support, particularly for anything above U+FFFF.
Is there a version of the video where you can actually hear what the keyboard is playing, rather than overdubbed piano music?
I do find it somewhat bewildering that they'd create a public art installation whose primary purpose is to make sound, video it, and then edit away the sound.
I don't know whether it was a deliberate design choice or not, but one thing I really like about UK plus (and others of the same shape) is that the wire sticks out the side of the plug rather than the back. Coupled with the triangular pin layout this means that pulling the wire tends to impart a rotational moment on the plug, which locks it in place. It's extremely hard to pull a UK plug out of its socket by pulling on the wire.
Right now I'm in Korea, which uses grotty two-pin europlug type things. I tend to have to hold the plugs in place by pushing a heavy object up against them. 240V 60Hz, too...
You know, instead of cloning the dog, they could clone the terrorists instead. That way they could give them a televised show trial and then execute them.
...the image stabilisation system worked a treat in keeping things sharp...
Methinks you accidentally switched the 'image stabilisation on' and 'image stabilisation off' labels. (Unless the bottom of your garden is naturally blurry.)
Well, the only way proximity power can work at all safely is by negotiation with the device. That is, you put your device on the mat, the mat notices it's there via RFID or something, it energises the coils in the mat under the device, etc.
Otherwise a paperclip dropped on the mat would melt.
So when not in use it probably uses a pretty average level of standby power.
I can't imagine the actual charging efficiency's very good, though, as there's a fair bit of distance between the transmitter and receiver coils...
...because the SS-19 is a converted ICBM and launches out of underground missile silos. And you *really* want the lid on top of the silo to open before you launch your rocket. Trust me on this one.
...speaking of HiRise, which as you say is utterly awesome, they managed to get a picture of Deimos with it, which is today's Astronomy Picture of the Day:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
That must have been a fairly impressive bit of manouvering to get the MRO's camera pointed in the right direction at the right time; from orbit, Deimos' motion across the sky must be pretty rapid...
@ Van Becelaere: you are aware, aren't you, that Dejah Thoris is actually some kind of egg-laying marsupial and not a human at all?
Yes, you could put Debian on it --- that's just a matter of wiping the userland and replacing it --- but you may not want to; in order to be a functional phone you'll need to load the radio stack software onto the other processor, have a UI for making calls, etc, and AFAIK that's all done by the userland. If you just want an ARM in a box that'll run code, I'd suggest the BeagleBoard instead, which is a lot cheaper (and, interestingly enough, will run Android).
No way. Judging by the way everything moves, I think you mean seven *feet*. If that was seven metres up, then the net mesh would have strands about 3cm thick and the whole video would have had to be sped up.
A bit over ten years ago I did some work with a i-Glasses VR headset. It was a hell of a lot chunkier, but had much the same spec as this device.
The i-Glasses had a very shoddy magnetic head tracker (once you got the data down a 9600 baud serial cable and then rerendered the image, you ended up with about 1/3 a second lag, ideal for inducing motion sickness). But being a VR headset, it also had stereo vision. You could drive each display separately.
Do these devices support stereo? Stereo video is incredibly cool: you have to see it to believe it. It's particularly good for gaming, although playing Half-Life 2 at 320x240 is probably not going to be easy. Given that they already have two screens it would seem rather easy to implement...
Anyone who's read _Ghost_, or wants to read _Ghost_, or is even *thinking* about reading _Ghost_, or wants to know why there's all this fuss about reading _Ghost_, should probably read this review first:
BTW, the author himself agrees entirely --- he says that he wrote the book solely to make the idea in his head go away, so that he could then go and write something that wasn't depraved. Then his publisher bullied him into publishing it...
I'm with IF, and it's compulsory with them, too. I've tried complaining but I always seem to get a munchkin on the other end who doesn't know what I'm talking about.
What's more, resetting the password is trivially easy and doesn't even require email confirmation, so I'm not sure what it's actually for...
They get customers because they offer huge, huge discounts. The rocket needs to carry mass anyway as ballast --- the rocket won't work properly without the correct mass distribution --- so they might as well carry a useful payload at the same time. Apart from anything else that also lets them test the payload deployment mechanism.
Personally, I want to know why the RocketCam footage cut out before we saw anything interesting happen. That happened on the other flights, too.
Samsung UN55B8000 55" LED TV (Widescreen, 1920x1080, HDTV)
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Samsung UN55B8500 55" LED TV (Widescreen, 1920x1080, HDTV)
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35 posts • joined Monday 4th August 2008 22:45 GMT
David Given
Microsoft Android → #
Posted Tuesday 16th March 2010 13:07 GMT
In Windows Phone 7 - what's in and what's out
This is, basically, Android for Windows. It's using .NET instead of Java, and the WinCE kernel instead of Linux, but it's very much the same thing.
Is this a good idea? I have no idea. Microsoft have a long history of sucking at consumer electronics (*cough*Zune*cough*), but if they finally get their act together they may end up with something worth using --- Silverlight should at least mean that the UI ought to be pretty. And it cannot possibly be worse than WinMo, unless they suddenly announce it's based on Symbian.
I doubt very much they'll beat Android, though. All the next generation of Chinese cheap phones will run Android, simply because it's free and works pretty well. Android may be fragmented to buggery but it'll still have huge momentum...
David Given
Play it → #
Posted Sunday 14th March 2010 01:56 GMT
In Doctor Who to materialise on Wii this Autumn
No mention of a Speccy game is complete without the requisite link to http://www.zxspectrum.net. And yes, they have Dalek Attack --- scroll down to 1992, and it's right there under 'Doctor Who'.
David Given
Suspicious photo → #
Posted Thursday 18th February 2010 20:35 GMT
In SWaP Signature watchphone
Looking at that photo, I wonder if the focus was wrong. The knob the lens is contained within is knurled --- might it need to be krotated?
Also, there might have been a tiny circle of antiscratch film on the lens --- they're not always very obvious, and need to be removed before it'll work properly.
David Given
"Debribillation"? → #
Posted Thursday 18th February 2010 16:45 GMT
In Swiss prostitutes armed with defibrillators
Defibrillation, surely?
David Given
Spam → #
Posted Wednesday 3rd February 2010 12:36 GMT
In Record year for online tax filing - and phishing mails
I received several --- does anyone know how to forward them on to the HMRC? The concept of siccing the Tax Men on these bastards is one that fills me with a holy joy.
David Given
It's been like that for years. → #
Posted Monday 18th January 2010 16:57 GMT
In US makes travellers go online, before getting onboard
When I travelled to the Land of the Fee in late 2008 I had to fill out the online form. It may not have been technically compulsory, but BA wouldn't let me check in without it. And yes, I had to fill out the stupid paper form as well ("Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of any pinko socialist commie organisation such as any British political party?"). I complained that I'd already filled it in online, and was told quite apologetically that the systems weren't talking to each other yet.
David Given
Re Neq Zealand → # ↑
Posted Tuesday 12th January 2010 13:26 GMT
In Avatar renders this earthly life meaningless
After LoTR came out, I read one rant by someone who kept complaining about the 'obviously fake CGI mountains composited into the backgrounds of every scene'.
Sigh.
David Given
Heat pumps are awesome → #
Posted Monday 14th December 2009 06:45 GMT
In GSHP: The green tech even carbon sceptics will like
I really like the idea of having a heater that is up to about 500% efficient. (You put in 1kW of electrical energy, and get out about 5kW of heat!) Interestingly, today's technology appear to include air source heat pumps so you don't need the (expensive) ground exchange loop.
There are grants available under the LCBP programme of, apparently, 900 UKP minimum for an air source heat pump and 1200 minimum for a ground loop (for homeowners). OTOH a random search on t'interweb indicates that a new ground source heat pump costs about 10k UKP, so it's still bloody expensive. An air source heat pump appears to be about 6k.
David Given
Don't use aluminium foil! → #
Posted Friday 11th December 2009 12:02 GMT
In Steel-woven wallet pledges to keep RFID credit cards safe
If you're building your own ray-shielding headwear or wallet, whatever you do, don't use aluminium foil. You've got to use real tin foil. Reputable studies have shown that aluminium foil helmets actually *enhance* the orbital mind control rays: http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/
And I bet you thought it was just coincidence that you can't get tinfoil in the shops any more.
David Given
More hot fillage → # ↑
Posted Wednesday 9th December 2009 15:39 GMT
In 'We must all stop washing to save the planet'
Yes, but ---
My washing machine is immediately under the combi boiler; total pipe length is under a metre. And it's currently winter, which means the combi boiler is nearly always hot anyway, and can produce hot water instantly. Even in the summer I have the washing machine set to run early in the morning, at about the time I want hot water for the shower anyway. And a combi boiler produces hot water at mains pressure (makes for great showers), which undermines the third argument on the page you linked to.
Another advantage of filling from the hot tap is that boilers can heat water much faster than the crappy electric heater in the washing machine, which makes for far faster washes.
David Given
Hot fill washing machines? → #
Posted Tuesday 8th December 2009 15:53 GMT
In 'We must all stop washing to save the planet'
Why is it so hard to find a washing machine with a hot water inlet?
If you go into a washing machine specialist and ask for a hot fill washing machine, they look at you like you're trying to launder a stoat. If you insist, they'll eventually start producing strange excuses like 'but it's cheaper to heat the water from electricity because then you're not wasting all the hot water in the pipes' or even 'heating the water from cold washes better'.
The bulk of the energy use in a washing machine is the water heater. Not only is this electric, which is the most expensive kind of energy around, it's usually peak time electric. Even gas is cheaper. Being able to fill with hot water --- or even the kind of luke warm water we get from British solar panels --- would vastly reduce the energy budget. But they appear to be impossible to get.
Paris, because *everything* puzzles her.
David Given
Take that, DNS hijackers → #
Posted Friday 4th December 2009 00:27 GMT
In Google expands plan to run own internet
To me, this looks like an attempt to kill off DNS hijacking --- the practice of returning bogus results for unrecognised domains. I can think of three main reasons why Google would want this:
- the bogus results usually assume the user was doing an HTTP request, and attempt to serve up a webpage pointing at some kind of search site that's not Google. By preventing this, Google starve their competitors and at the same time increase the probability that the user will go look up the site on Google;
- DNS hijacking *really is* a horrible security hole; consider someone on Gmail following a spam link to fnord.googlemail.com. The domain's not recognised, so scummy ISP redirects them to a server that masquerades as fnord.googlemail.com --- and the user's web browser happily hands the server the user's login cookie, because fnord.googlemail.com is in the same hierarchy as googlemail.com. Who gets blamed for this? googlemail.com, of course;
- Google want *everyone* to be able to access their services, and so have a vested interest in maintaining web standards; DNS is the engine that makes the web go, and doing stuff as horrible as DNS hijacking is destabilising the entire internet (as this illustrious publication has said, many times).
So I see this as a really good thing. I'm sure they *could* attempt to use their new-found DNS skills to spy on my precious bodily fluids, but really, who cares? I'm more interested in how much the 8.8.8.8 IP address cost them. Lots, I'd imagine.
David Given
I've got one of these → #
Posted Wednesday 2nd December 2009 12:52 GMT
In Cell phone supercomputing II: in the flesh
It's actually a Kirkwood processor, not a Sheeva --- SheevaPlug is the name of the dev kit.
I run my entire home server off one. That's all my email, including spam filtering, my firewall to the outside world, my website, an IMAP server, my DNS server, my backup server, and my remote ssh box for doing batch operations. It even runs Java. It's all based off a home-made SSD made out of a RAID array of USB keys and runs Debian Linux. Yes, geek heaven.
But it's also totally silent, and the whole setup cost about 170 quid --- 70 quid for the SheevaPlug dev kit, and 100 for the USB storage. Yes, unlike most pieces of development hardware, the SheevaPlug is actually *cheap*!
If you're interested in low-performance computing I can highly recommend one. Marvell also make a more expensive version with more ports --- including VGA and eSATA --- which is more suitable for actual use, but the SheevaPlug is astonishingly functional as is.
David Given
Open Source? → #
Posted Thursday 12th November 2009 13:25 GMT
In Samsung's first Bada smartphone pictured
Are you sure it's open source? I don't see any reference to that on the (laughable) website --- did you tyop for 'open platform'? (Open platforms typically mean that anyone can write apps for them, provided you're willing to pay/NDA/sign up for the SDK. Closed platforms mean that the SDK isn't available.)
David Given
@ lIsRT → #
Posted Friday 30th October 2009 22:14 GMT
In Non-Latin web addresses approved
Actually, I tried that a little while ago. At least for the Ṻᶇⓘḉȱᵭḝ ɼₑᵹᶖǭⁿꜱ I tried (and every character in those two words comes from a different one), all the .com extensions appear to map to .com in ASCII. So at least *something* is converting isomorphs to ASCII.
Whether this is a feature of my Linux system or something in DNS I don't know; I was unable to try it on Windows because Windows has terrible Unicode support, particularly for anything above U+FFFF.
This post has been deleted by a moderator
David Given
Without the soundtrack? → #
Posted Monday 12th October 2009 09:20 GMT
In Volkswagen boffins turn staircase into giant working piano keyboard
Is there a version of the video where you can actually hear what the keyboard is playing, rather than overdubbed piano music?
I do find it somewhat bewildering that they'd create a public art installation whose primary purpose is to make sound, video it, and then edit away the sound.
David Given
Date collision → #
Posted Monday 21st September 2009 12:41 GMT
In FOSSers host global Saturday celebration
I'm sure it's just coincidence that Saturday is also International Talk Like A Pirate Day...
David Given
Sideways wire → #
Posted Wednesday 24th June 2009 14:22 GMT
In Designer pitches flat-pack power plug
I don't know whether it was a deliberate design choice or not, but one thing I really like about UK plus (and others of the same shape) is that the wire sticks out the side of the plug rather than the back. Coupled with the triangular pin layout this means that pulling the wire tends to impart a rotational moment on the plug, which locks it in place. It's extremely hard to pull a UK plug out of its socket by pulling on the wire.
Right now I'm in Korea, which uses grotty two-pin europlug type things. I tend to have to hold the plugs in place by pushing a heavy object up against them. 240V 60Hz, too...
David Given
A better idea → #
Posted Thursday 18th June 2009 13:14 GMT
In 9/11 hero mutt cloned
You know, instead of cloning the dog, they could clone the terrorists instead. That way they could give them a televised show trial and then execute them.
David Given
My eyes, my eyes → #
Posted Friday 24th April 2009 21:40 GMT
In Canon PowerShot SX200 IS compact camera
...the image stabilisation system worked a treat in keeping things sharp...
Methinks you accidentally switched the 'image stabilisation on' and 'image stabilisation off' labels. (Unless the bottom of your garden is naturally blurry.)
David Given
@Martin → #
Posted Thursday 2nd April 2009 23:07 GMT
In Fulton imbues protection with power
Well, the only way proximity power can work at all safely is by negotiation with the device. That is, you put your device on the mat, the mat notices it's there via RFID or something, it energises the coils in the mat under the device, etc.
Otherwise a paperclip dropped on the mat would melt.
So when not in use it probably uses a pretty average level of standby power.
I can't imagine the actual charging efficiency's very good, though, as there's a fair bit of distance between the transmitter and receiver coils...
David Given
@ Iglethal → #
Posted Monday 16th March 2009 19:41 GMT
In Upper-atmos ion drive dart sat launch delayed
...because the SS-19 is a converted ICBM and launches out of underground missile silos. And you *really* want the lid on top of the silo to open before you launch your rocket. Trust me on this one.
David Given
@ Tom Paine → #
Posted Monday 16th March 2009 16:02 GMT
In NASA pimps Google Mars
...speaking of HiRise, which as you say is utterly awesome, they managed to get a picture of Deimos with it, which is today's Astronomy Picture of the Day:
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
That must have been a fairly impressive bit of manouvering to get the MRO's camera pointed in the right direction at the right time; from orbit, Deimos' motion across the sky must be pretty rapid...
@ Van Becelaere: you are aware, aren't you, that Dejah Thoris is actually some kind of egg-laying marsupial and not a human at all?
David Given
Font size → #
Posted Monday 2nd February 2009 16:43 GMT
In Subatomic nanoholograms smash 1-bit-per-atom barrier
0.3nm is approxiately 0.0000009 point. Annoyingly, OpenOffice only goes down to 2 point.
David Given
@ Anonymous → #
Posted Tuesday 9th December 2008 14:12 GMT
In Google starts selling unlocked G1
Yes, you could put Debian on it --- that's just a matter of wiping the userland and replacing it --- but you may not want to; in order to be a functional phone you'll need to load the radio stack software onto the other processor, have a UI for making calls, etc, and AFAIK that's all done by the userland. If you just want an ARM in a box that'll run code, I'd suggest the BeagleBoard instead, which is a lot cheaper (and, interestingly enough, will run Android).
David Given
7 metres? → #
Posted Friday 5th December 2008 20:07 GMT
In Missile Defence multikill space interceptor in hover test
No way. Judging by the way everything moves, I think you mean seven *feet*. If that was seven metres up, then the net mesh would have strands about 3cm thick and the whole video would have had to be sped up.
...now, if this were DARPA, I could believe that.
David Given
Graphs → #
Posted Thursday 27th November 2008 15:04 GMT
In Srizbi spam botnet in failed resurrection
@druck: here's a graph, courtesy of SpamCop.
http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spammonth
Note the big drop around week 45...
David Given
Stereo? → #
Posted Monday 24th November 2008 13:21 GMT
In Vuzix iWear AV230 XL video glasses
A bit over ten years ago I did some work with a i-Glasses VR headset. It was a hell of a lot chunkier, but had much the same spec as this device.
The i-Glasses had a very shoddy magnetic head tracker (once you got the data down a 9600 baud serial cable and then rerendered the image, you ended up with about 1/3 a second lag, ideal for inducing motion sickness). But being a VR headset, it also had stereo vision. You could drive each display separately.
Do these devices support stereo? Stereo video is incredibly cool: you have to see it to believe it. It's particularly good for gaming, although playing Half-Life 2 at 320x240 is probably not going to be easy. Given that they already have two screens it would seem rather easy to implement...
David Given
@ Iam Me → #
Posted Saturday 22nd November 2008 02:43 GMT
In DARPA wargamer calls for US X-Men superplane fleet
We aim to please!
And don't talk to me about things so bad they're good --- I own a copy of _Dragon Lensman_. And I've *read* it.
David Given
OH JOHN RINGO NO → #
Posted Friday 21st November 2008 16:00 GMT
In DARPA wargamer calls for US X-Men superplane fleet
Anyone who's read _Ghost_, or wants to read _Ghost_, or is even *thinking* about reading _Ghost_, or wants to know why there's all this fuss about reading _Ghost_, should probably read this review first:
http://hradzka.livejournal.com/194753.html?format=light
BTW, the author himself agrees entirely --- he says that he wrote the book solely to make the idea in his head go away, so that he could then go and write something that wasn't depraved. Then his publisher bullied him into publishing it...
Black helicopters because... er... because.
This post has been deleted by a moderator
David Given
Obvious names → #
Posted Tuesday 9th September 2008 13:59 GMT
In Ubuntu zoo preps for new arrival
The release following Zealous Zebra, will, of course, be [alculating [obra; shortly followed by \/iolent \/ulture.
David Given
Intelligent Finance → #
Posted Thursday 7th August 2008 11:52 GMT
In Net shoppers bullied into being Verified by Visa
I'm with IF, and it's compulsory with them, too. I've tried complaining but I always seem to get a munchkin on the other end who doesn't know what I'm talking about.
What's more, resetting the password is trivially easy and doesn't even require email confirmation, so I'm not sure what it's actually for...
David Given
@ Dale → #
Posted Monday 4th August 2008 23:15 GMT
In Third time unlucky for Elon Musk's Falcon rocket
They get customers because they offer huge, huge discounts. The rocket needs to carry mass anyway as ballast --- the rocket won't work properly without the correct mass distribution --- so they might as well carry a useful payload at the same time. Apart from anything else that also lets them test the payload deployment mechanism.
Personally, I want to know why the RocketCam footage cut out before we saw anything interesting happen. That happened on the other flights, too.