Yeah, a bunch of us here on Slashdot moved much of the conversation to Twitter. Unfortunately, Trump seems to get a bunch of the bandwidth there too.

Hey folks! Just to clarify: I said that the UK would renegotiate its relationship to the EUCD (European Union Copyright Directive) and Iain (reasonably enough, given the noisy room) heard OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development). Just a minor clarification, but I'd appreciate an upvote so confused people see it.

Totally understood. The trick is: you can tune your own signal/noise. Its very handy and I get essentially all my news via Twitter these days.

Its all on Twitter man...

Be thankful they were just plain laserdiscs - the BBC Domesday Project is an oft-cited example of digital obsolescence, involving weird analogue/digital laserdiscs and custom computer hardware...

Farting around doing FFTs on radio telescope data at university, I saw big chunky peaks at multiple of 50Hz (it being the UK) - mixed in with peaks from the pulsar being observed. Mains hum gets everywhere!

No, Buzz Aldrin did leave exposed film on the moon, out of retaliation against Neil Armstrong.

He didn't.

Hello, Arthur.

Probably useless for most people reading this, but my favourite-ever electronics store must be the utterly one-off R. F. Potts in Derby, UK. The shop is absolutely tiny, but chock-full of stuff both new and old - with incredibly helpful and knowledgeable staff. Weird, obscure component is buggered, and you need a new one? Hand it over, and they'll find a replacement from the wall of drawers behind the counter - then charge you something like 20p for it. They also have a wide range of old computer parts and random reclaimed mechanisms from things - one of their front windows is always filled with inspiration for stuff to build.

It's probably Derby's engineering heritage that allows it to keep going - with Rolls Royce aero engines and Bombardier trains based nearby, there must be plenty of engineers mucking around with stuff in their spare time...

I only wish they'd open a branch in Seattle, where I live now! A trip to a Radio Shack a few years ago for components was most disappointing.

Wouldn't that make an awesome app, building *real* 3d scenes, and making the models available for export in a variety of formats and with direct-links for popular functions (editing apps, export to popular 3d printing services, etc)?

Look into photogrammetry software like the cloud-based 123D Catch and the defiantly offline Agisoft PhotoScan - they'll turn loads of conventional photos into arbitrary 3D models. The former is probably closest to your request!

I've been playing around with the latter software recently - the required photography is pretty difficult to master, but it's a rather useful tool. Here's a geometry-only render of a statue I scanned as an example - there's a full texture map for the model as well, but this is showing off the frankly implausible levels of geometrical detail you can get from a physical object. (Excuse the noisy crevices - I was shooting hand-held at ~9am in the middle of winter on a cloudy day...) It's terrible at shiny objects (reflections confuse the hell out of it) and system requirements are pretty steep - it'll eat however many CPU and GPU cores you throw at it, and the more memory the better - but the results are well worth it.

Adobe for reasons only known to itself absolutely refuses to support case-sensitive file systems for Mac OS X.

I've heard of various other software breaking when used with case-sensitive filesystems on OS X - not making an excuse for that software, but what is the benefit of running with such a filesystem anyway? I'm genuinely interested.

(I've been running with the default case-preserving, case-insensitive filesystems for a decade or more, and not hit any problems.)

... and in Britain, there are perfectly synchronised, nation-wide power surges when everyone puts the kettle on...

I think most people would agree PHP is a four-letter word.