* Posts by Flocke Kroes

4532 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007

Pizza and beer night out the window, hours trying to sort issue, then a fresh pair of eyes says 'See, the problem is...'

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: I can relate to that

A beginner did an excellent job of etching, drilling and soldering a one-off two sided PCB but did not understand why it did nothing until I mentioned that the holes do not conduct electricity by themselves.

I wasted half a day debugging a 2.5V circuit until I noticed the 5V version of a chip had been installed. Some helpful person had fixed an "out of stock" problem by calling the supplier. Apparently many customers did not mind which chip was supplied because the 2.5V chip was designed to work in 5V circuits.

I busted a few prototype PCB's before I noticed the big inductor for the switched mode power supply was very obviously not big at all. Someone had helpfully dealt with a late part by authorising a different one with the same inductance.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Prelalal dnceodig

If the fsrit and lsat lrtetes are cercrot the orehts can be in any oredr and you can siltl wrok out waht is mnaet qitue qilckuy.

United States Congress stormed by violent followers of defeated president, Biden win confirmation halted

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Four year late

Vlad expected Trump to lose four years ago and was ready to call for armed uprisings back then. He had to pivot quickly to re-direct his message to Democrats. With four years to prepare I thought Vlad would have done far more damage. Clearly like everyone else he is hampered by a clueless narcissist president who could only attract third rate sycophants for key government positions and delusional Qnatics for his armed militia.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: why Pence

I agree that any sane president picks a vice who is even more detestable to his opposition to reduce the chance of assassination but Trump did not pick Pence. Trump came out with his shortlist. The blatant traitors and criminals were trimmed away and everyone else said "no chance".

It was getting embarrassing so some bright spark in the Republican party seized the opportunity to deal with another problem. Pence was set to lose a safe seat as governor of Indiana to a Democrat. The Republicans needed Pence elsewhere so they could put up anyone else as a candidate. He was invited to interview for the position of vice presidential candidate. Instead Pence publicly accepted the non-existent offer to become vice president and flew over for the confirmation.

This suited everyone but Trump who spent the night texting campaign staff and demanding that the find anyone else. In the morning Trump announced Pence as his choice - in true Trumpian style. He turned up late and kept journalists waiting to the song "you can't always get what you want". A normal presidential nominee would spend at least 5 minutes extolling the virtues of his pick so Pence could do the same back but Trump missed that bit out, tersely announced Pence then walked out.

If Trump had enough brains to stage a successful coup in the US he would have replaced Pence years ago because there is no way that Pence would want to live in Trumpistan.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: backfire if Pence ...

Trump tweeted his disappointment in Pence for failing to keep him in power. In the "minds" of the revolutionaries Pence is a traitor and was a major target in the attempted coup. As Pence is not completely stupid he kept out of sight until after the revolutionaries were kicked out. The lame duck has already decided Pence is an enemy and has selected him as the scapegoat for losing the election. I am sure Pence feels slightly safer now that Trump's social media accounts are frozen.

Open-source contributors say they'll pull out of Qt as LTS release goes commercial-only

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Open source

That is why us pinko commie "don't understand business" license purists insist on free software (free as in freedom) instead of open source which is a much wider term including free software, technology lock-in trap licenses and "you can contribute but only we can distribute" licenses.

Lay down your souls to the gods of rock 'n' roll: Conspiracy theorists' 5G 'vaccine' chip schematic is actually for a guitar pedal

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

what 'footswitch' refers to

Isn't that obvious? It swaps the nerve connections with your feet so trying to move your left foot actually moves your right. This makes walking and running really hard until you get used to it but you can still bound like a kangaroo.

Brexit freezes 81,000 UK-registered .eu domains – and you've all got three months to get them back

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

This is normal idiocy

People with an eu domain are more likely to be people who voted remain so the targeting of this "punishment" is completely backwards. All it shows is that no one region has a monopoly on stupid.

File format conversion crisis delayed attempt to challenge US presidential election result

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Still begging for money

The explanation is simple: Trump is still begging for money because people are still paying. He has to put a small percentage of the income into hiring 3rd rate lawyers to file defective complaints. The more defective the filing the better. When the complaint is thrown out in under an hour he can bleat that a cabal of baby eating Satan worshippers prevented the evidence from being heard and the solution is for supporters to send more money to the self-financed candidate.

The lame duck may be useless at almost everything but he really understands how to loot the GOP.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: US senators can lie through their teeth with impunity

Article 6 section 11 of the constitution says senators and members of the house of representatives can tell as many malicious harmful lies as they want while in session or when in one of their committees.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Don't suck the joy out of everything

2020 has not been a barrel of laughs so imagining the lame duck getting dragged out of the White House kicking and screaming has been one of the cheerful thoughts I use to put a smile back on my face. I think it is unlikely to happen because he will quietly run away on the 19th but there is no need to burn that little day-dream just yet.

NHS awards £23m two-year deal to controversial Peter Thiel AI firm Palantir

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: sold before Boris finishes his term

I would love to believe this but from what I have seen of our politicians "given away for free already" is far more likely.

About $15m in advertising booked to appear on millions of smart TVs was never seen by anyone, says Oracle

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Re: So, from where does that money ultimately come?

Aerial or Bold? The adverts for each were so awful that they convinced people to buy the other one instead of "Store's Own Brand". All three washing powers were made by Unilever but Unilever made more profit from their branded products.

Perhaps supermarkets will inflict some terrible adverts for branded products on us so they can put up the price of Store's Own Brand. Judging by a couple of adverts I saw recently, this is already happening.

Search history can calculate better credit ratings than pay slips, says International Monetary Fund

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Re: Oh God, no

Isn't the solution obvious? Buy my super AI web search spoofer that pretends to be a rich twit reading fashionable sites on Safari. After a couple of weeks your credit rating will be AAAAAAA+++. Purchase today for a 10% discount. If you have already purchased you can upgrade to the enterprise version - with blockchain!

US Government Accountability Office dumps sack of coal on NASA's desk over Moon mission naughtiness

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: So Biden can kill off the US manned space program, again?

GWB43 announced the retirement of the space shuttle (probably because it was expensive and dangerous but perhaps you should check the official record of his emails to be certain). The shuttle was kept in service to build the ISS (and until Constellation was ready to replace it) so the the final flight was early Obama/Biden. I would call the attempt to replace the space shuttle was half done well by both sides. The Space shuttle is mostly dead but the replacement took a long time.

The Constellation program was created during the Bush era but there was a clear bi-partisan effort to make it expensive and continuously delayed (by requiring use of space shuttle hardware and suppliers). Obama/Biden tried to cancel Constellation but it had too much support. They achieved compromise: Constellation would get renamed SLS and would continue as a Boeing handout disguised as a jobs program and a new commercial crew program would be started so America would not be dependent on Russia to send astronauts to the ISS.

There was a bi-partisan effort to loot the commercial crew program to funnel extra funds to SLS/Boeing. Obama/Biden and Pence/Trump restricted this to manageable levels so commercial crew was delayed rather than destroyed.

I have no idea what Pence/Harris will actually with the US space program next year but cancelling SLS/Orion is beyond their reach. Congress will turn their backs on thousands of Americans dying from poverty if it allows them to continue shovelling money to Boeing. There was only one idiot great enough to believe that SLS would get Americans to the Moon by 2024. Changing the nominal landing date to something achievable will get support because it extends purpose of SLS - which has nothing to do with actual space flight.

SpaceX will be going to the ISS and probably to the Moon and Mars whatever the US government does. I am sure SpaceX will get enough support so politicians can take some credit for the achievements. I would love to say Blue Origin will show some progress towards catching up with SpaceX but so far the evidence is rather thin.

If you want someone to blame for the slow and expensive progress of the US space program I would point at US voters who do not know or care how their taxes are being spent. NASA used to have an educational outreach program that would have helped but that had its funding cut (to provide funding for a magnificent wall when the Mexicans didn't bother to pay for it?).

They were not the cloud you were looking for, insists Amazon Web Services in unsealed JEDI protest

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Re: The Lost Jedi

At least half the cost of mud slinging will be at tax pay expense. The rest will be divided between AWS investors and employees. That split may well land mostly on the investors because it is difficult to take anything more from the employees but I am sure the best minds at AWS are working on it.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Bezos' irony filter mislaid

IIRC AWS won then Trump threw an epic tantrum and had the decision reversed - because The Washington Post printed articles that contradicted the dear leader.

Tim Cook 'killed' TV project about the one website Apple hates more than The Register

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: why would they care

Means nothing to me but keeping it a secret meant a great deal the Thiel. Presumably the opinion of homophobes mattered to him. Homosexuality is one of the few things where IOKIYAR does not apply.

Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: the right people

It is more a matter of "the right time". If I am reading the news then I am not buying anything. If I am buying something I will use my list of URLs to get to a company the sells what I am after and type key words into the site's search box to get to the right product. All of this works without massive databases of every website that anyone has ever looked at or complicated algorithms find and excuse to deflate the fattest advertising budgets.

iPhone factory workers riot over unpaid wages in India

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Apples and Oranges

iPhones are inedible and provide lousy shelter.

When I worked in China the idiot tourist rate for a small but clean hotel room was under £1/day. Good food public transport also cost a pittance. That $200/month may well be enough for a local to live, eat and attend evening classes to get a qualification for a better job (the hours may well be so horrendous that you would have to save up and stop work to get some education).

Someone deserves some consequences for deliberately or accidently failing to accurately communicate the salary but for people who live thousands of miles away it is not clear whether the contract manufacturer rips off its employees more than Apple overcharges it customers.

SpaceX Starship blows up on landing, Elon Musk says it's the data that matters and that landed just fine

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: They claimed it would explode on landing?

Almost. Musk said only one in three chance of a successful landing so a big boom was the most likely result. I am amazed SN8 performed its lithobraking manoeuvre on the landing pad. I thought it would RUD earlier and make multiple splash-downs. This one was doing really well until the exhaust became engine-rich during the landing burn.

SN9 has been waiting for the test pad to clear. If fixing the pressure in the small methane tank can be done quickly we may say another starship RUD this year.

PSA: The 2020 monolith is a dead meme. You can stop putting them up now. Please

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Tame little steel monoliths

If you have a properly over sized ego you should make your status symbol wide as a house, 24 storeys tall, bolt on three giant flame throwers to it and put it on display in the sky, higher than Everest.

IT workers join elite sports stars, fat cat biz execs, celebs and posties for special treatment under England's COVID-19 travel isolation rules

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Republican health care

You have misunderstood how Republican health care is supposed to work. Rich people get proper treatment. Anyone else can go straight to heaven.

Let's check in now with the new California monolith... And it's gone, torn down by a bunch of MAGA muppets

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Second great commandment

That is because destroying inanimate objects is a requirement: Exodus 23:24.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Without aliens, the Messiah would have died before getting crucified

Here's the proof.

So bye-bye, Mr Ajit Pai. You drove our policy into the levee and we still wonder why

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Pardon before conviction

Thanks for the proper reference. Relying on the internet for legal advice really caught me out.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Since 2020 is all about conspiracy theories

Biden might not do anything but some of the district attorneys have plans for inauguration day.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Since 2020 is all about conspiracy theories

First listen to a competent lawyer and do not trust statements from random ignorant commentards like me. As I understand it, you do not need to step down to make a statement to the FBI. You may need whatever power you currently hold to get the assistance you will need from other officials. You can plead guilty as often as you like but that does not get you a conviction. In the US the president can only pardon you if you have a conviction. Getting convicted of every possible offence that can be inferred from your confession before the deadline would require an effort from people who may be busy covering their own arses before the holidays. Be certain they will make you a priority before you jump off a tall building. Your statement must be checked thoroughly for non-federal crimes. If you are convicted by a state the president cannot help you (although the state governor may have the power to pardon you).

If you somehow get your conviction in time you then need to actually get pardoned. Trump is not famous for doing things out of the goodness of his heart. You will need some quality dirt on him to ensure action. The delusional lame duck believes he is completely untouchable. Cast iron kompromat is no guaranty of actually getting a pardon.

If you really have a chance of getting a pardon there is a much less risky option available to you. Get your lawyer to arrange a deal for you: exchange the kompromat for immunity from prosecution. This is not entirely safe as someone less reprehensible may have already offered sufficient kompromat. Do not hold back on your confession. Immunity deals only cover what you have already admitted to and require you ongoing wholehearted cooperation - which will definitely uncover anything you 'forgot'. Forgetting about crimes cancels you immunity from prosecution and the feds get to keep the kompromat.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

The one source of news

The way to drive someone completely conspiracy-theorist kook QAnon Trump voter is to get him to listen to only one source of news. Once started the habit is self re-enforcing - the Trump voter will know any news that does not say the dear leader is an internationally renowned expert on everything is biased librul media fake news. The difficult bit is to drag new voters into the ring. The obvious solution is to ensure people have access to only one source of news. Decades ago someone recognised the danger and created laws to prevent things like the Sinclair/Tribune merger. Thanks to diligent enforcement of these laws the USA has a diverse range of independent news sources and there is no chance that Trump or anyone like him could ever get elected president.

Ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, Ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.

SpaceX blows away cobwebs at dormant California pad with satellite launch as a Falcon 9 makes touchdown number 7

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: 3D printing

Almost all of the Rutherford engine used in Rocket Lab's Electron is 3D printed.

£1.3bn National Cyber Security Strategy? Meh – we're looking at 2021, Cabinet Office shrugs

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

fundamental shift in ... approach the topic of cyber security

Was: I do not have time to bother with the topic cyber security.

Shift to: COVID gave me lots of time. I need a new excuse to do what I am best at (spending lots money to achieve nothing).

HP CEO talks up HP-ink-only print hardware and higher upfront costs for machines that use other cartridges

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Thanks for the warning

First test of an ISP: if the help line is a premium rate number then faults are considered a revenue stream. (If you have to deal with one of these call the sales number and get transferred.)

If HP+ "automatically detects and fixes connectivity issues" that makes me suspect HP- "automatically breaks connectivity to create issues" in an attempt to get me to switch to their locked-in tier.

Physicists wrap neutrino detector in cosy blanket to shed light on the Sun's secondary fusion cycle

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Astrophysicists love approximations

Astrophysicists' periodic table: Hydrogen, Helium, Metals...

(No joke icon. No sarcasm tag. This really is a popular approximation in astrophysics.)

Considering the colonisation of Mars? Werner Herzog would like a word

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: here's the money

NASA commercial cargo. NASA commercial crew. NRO secret missions. Space Force launches including GPS upgrades. Commercial satellites that are not OneWeb or Kuiper. Scientific and military payloads too big for Rocket Lab and not stuck with a national carrier (EU, China, India and Russia). If the funding survives the change in administration: bits of Artemis. Then we get to the big two: Starlink and private investment.

SpaceX runs at a profit despite some big bangs in Boca Chica (Starship SN8 could be making an impressive crater before the end of the year). Private investment has already provided enough to make SpaceX the biggest commercial satellite operator and their is still plenty of money left over for more launches. Starlink will be bringing in a good return on investment before Musk considers raising more money by splitting it out into a public company.

Musk has the potential income to get Mars started without having to look for something on Mars worth the cost of bringing it back. Remember Boca Chica is not making about making half an SLS every year. It is about making multiple Starships each month (SN9 is about ready, SN10 is in big pieces and bits of SN15 have been spotted).

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Humans like locusts

Musk's stated goal is to make humanity a two planet species. Plenty of people are working on making humanity a zero planet species. Who do you think will win? Would Mars only be considered a draw?

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: travel distance

EPA testing showed 391miles. Presumably the car was tested driving round a circuit so the final distance moved on one charge could easily have been half a lap. You are welcome to use your own definition but the EPA range is at least an independently verifiable standard.

Mysterious metal monolith found in 'very remote' part of Utah

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

As the location requires delivery by flying car

It is clearly a DeLorean temporal navigation beacon. If you decode the signal it says: "Stay away from 2020".

The GIMP turns 25 and promises to carry on being the FOSS not-Photoshop

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Single window interface

For those not familiar with the GIMP: Imagine clicking on the left menu item and then the first entry in it and a window appears. Do the same for each entry in the left menu so you have lots of separate windows that look like different applications. Then go for the second column in the menu and create more windows. Repeat for each column. You now have some idea of what the GIMP is like when it starts up. It is not that simple as some menu items open multiple windows and if you close some windows it can take ages to find the icon in another window you closed that brings the one you want back again. To make life more fun, when you try to do something impossible a new window pops up with an error message and all the other controls lock up until you get rid of that window. Several years ago GIMP developers made a great effort to not hide error message windows behind other windows.

This utter insanity accounts for much of the steep learning curve for using the GIMP. Years ago I made an effort to actually read the documentation and discovered there is an off switch. The GIMP can behave as if it has one window divided into non-overlapping sub-windows for different tasks. These sub-windows can be closed so that there is a reasonable amount of space to look at the image you are working on. Sometimes you can even find a way to bring them back again when needed.

I am sure some people love the multi-window interface and are sharpening the torches and lighting their pitch-forks ready to lynch me for my heresy. Please just accept that the vast majority of the population find the multi-window interface far more trouble than any possible benefit.

Here are the other major reasons why the GIMP appears not to work:

You are not working on a single picture. Instead you are working on several pictures of different sizes layered one above the other. Most of the GIMP's tool only work on the currently active layer. Find the layers window. Learn how to make a layer visible and active. Layers consist of bands, usually three: red green and blue. The lower layers will be hidden if an upper layer does not have a transparency band (look for the jargon 'alpha channel'). Find out how to add one and how to draw with invisible ink (try the eraser).

Most tools only work on the select area. A selection is another band covering the whole image that decides whether a tool affects each pixel completely, not at all, or only partially. Find the selection window and work out how to change the default behaviour (a new selection replaces the previous one) to one of the other possibilities: unite with the previous selection, select the intersection of two selections, subtract the new selection for the current one. "Select all" does what a programmer would expect when in subtract mode (subtract everything from the selection so nothing is selected and all the tools do not work).

Some tools create a new temporary layer that must be anchored to become functional. I assume this extra step was created to confuse beginners.

The GIMP is an amazing tool that can do all sorts of beautiful things. Budget a of day frustration reading the instructions and trying to get simple things to work and another day to do one tricky thing. Then expect anything new and complicated to take an hour to find a tutorial and another hour to get it to work. Once you get the hang of how the GIMP works, the insane troll logic to the user interface begins to make a kind of sense and the buttons start doing what you expect (or your expectations change to match insane troll logic).

We see what you did there: First-stage booster from Rocket Lab's Return to Sender mission floats back to Earth

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Parachute.

The parachute required for a Falcon 9 would have been impractically huge. That did not stop someone planning to reuse Saturn V with even bigger parachutes and an enormous helicopter. That helicopter is a bit tricky to control. To go sideways you need to twist the blades one way on the right and the other way on the left. It will take time for that change in twist to travel from the hub to to blade tip. You have to work out what the effect of previous twists will be to decide what twist to apply now so it can reach the correct radius when needed later.

The it might be possible to make the control system different (not sure if this will be easier) by not twisting the blade from the hub but instead putting separate control surfaces on different radii on the trailing edge of each blade. The controls could be powered by compressed air from the jet engines on the blade tips.

If you somehow work out a way to make an enormous helicopter someone will complain about all the fuel it uses while ignoring the much larger carbon emissions of building a new booster from scratch.

YouTube is going to splash adverts all over your videos, and won't pay creators unless there's a big enough audience

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Camel straws

There are plenty of other straws but I was curious about how big the "not paying anything to smallest accounts" straw is. According to this site 1000 views earns you about $2 (the amount will vary depending on who those 1000 are). The minimum requirements for a payout would be 1000 subscribers each watching a 5 minute video every week which gets you about $100/year.

Now look at the alternative. Your budget is $99 per year. With that money you have to buy a domain name, rent a server, set up a web site, sell $99 of adverts and make 52x 5-minute videos. As an individual it does not look like a path to a comfortable retirement.

Clearly you need economies of scale. What numbers are you going to put into cincinna-tube? 10,000 content makers with an average of $10/year revenue. You get a place to live, food and you can give 50% of your revenue to the content makers. I can really see them working hard for $5/year and you have all the work of distributing content and money and selling adverts (how picky are you going to be about selecting advertisers?). Clearly 10,000 small content makers does not make a viable a business. Increase it to 1,000,000. Now you have a budget to start dealing with checking a million videos per week for revenge porn, death threats, copyright infringement, QAnon and furious content providers angry about unfair DMCA take downs.

Google have the resources to do a better job. A start-up offering to be less evil would either need a huge pot of gold or to initially cut costs by deliberately doing every awful thing Google has grudging paid lip-service to fixing.

Behold, the Ultimately Large Telescope: A revived proposal for a 100-metre liquid-mirror star scanner on the Moon

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

There are planned Moon missions

Some of them have funding. The Artemis program includes robotic landings. Some time next year we will find out if politicians are still willing to spend tax pays' money on it.

GitHub restores DMCA-hit youtube-dl code repo after source patched to counter RIAA's takedown demand

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: What comes next is most interesting

Winning or losing is not important to the RIAA. What matters is that the lawyers get paid. The $1m defence fund represents an opportunity to take at least as much money from musicians.

Not on your Zoom, not on Teams, not Google Meet, not BlueJeans. WebEx, Skype and Houseparty make us itch. No, not FaceTime, not even Twitch

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

RE: The situation

My first thought was no but then situations where an image would help leapt to mind. What about those calls from 'Microsoft' technical support telling me my non-existent windows computer is running amok? How about that call from 'Amazon' telling me I am about to be charged £79.99 per month for the Prime account I do not have? Wouldn't it be great to actually see these people.

Just a minute ago I was reading an advert on this very publication for a service that only costs 16,000 roubles. For the equivalent of just $200 and a photo of the caller facial recognition AI will be deployed to discover where the caller shows up on CCTV cameras. Of course the scammers will respond with the other advert on the same page: AI deep faked video. Perhaps next time the 'IRS' are about to arrest me in the UK for tax evasion unless I hand over my bank details the call will come from Charlize Theron. I can hardly wait.

KDE maintainers speak on why it is worth looking beyond GNOME

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From another KDE 3.5 refugee

Thanks for the warning. The KDE team are still focused on doing a bunch of stuff I do not even have to disable in XFCE. I am sure people who prioritise appearance over getting stuff done will love it.

Shock news: NASA lunar ambitions might be a bit too... ambitious

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Limit on the possible

Although rocket science and technology has moved forward in the last 50 years NASA was required to buy antique parts from the preferred manufacturers for SLS (to meet deadlines and keep the price down). When the delays and cost overruns became ridiculous congress relaxed the restrictions so the major parts could be redesigned at great expense to justify the delays. The basic design (Hydrogen+solid boosters) had to remain the same so SLS could continue to use space shuttle main engines (and two new versions of those engines with upgrades for modern manufacturing techniques and disposability). The goal is not to produce a more powerful rocket than Saturn V (44,000kg to trans-lunar injection). The SLS crew (Artemis) spec is 37,000kg to TLI and the SLS Cargo (Europa Clipper) spec is 40,000 to TLI.

Despite what the OIG says, SLS is delivering as required: truck loads of money to the preferred contractors in every state. This gets politicians elected so they vote to increase the SLS budget. Artemis was never about new foot-prints on the Moon in 2024. That was just blatant fiction to get the vote of President COVID.

If you want congress to budget for something interesting in space you will have to get a majority of voters to take sufficient interest that they work out for themselves what SLS is and what could be achieved with a modern rocket like Falcon 9/heavy or a futuristic rocket like Starship+Superheavy.

BOFH: You might want to sit down for this. Oh, right, you can't. Listen carefully: THIS IS NOT AN IT PROBLEM!

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Do you have ...

Sample output from various office printers dating back from BC, any recently printed paper from Mr Jobsworth, the list of company equipment at Mr Jobsworth's home and a blue light?

Python swallows Java to become second-most popular programming language... according to this index

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: ?:

Using C's ?: would confuse some text editors that "know" a : in python always precedes an indented block.

(value_if_true, value_if_false)[if condition] always evaluates both if_true and if_false which may have unwanted side effects.

condition() and if_true() or if_false() goes badly wrong if bool(if_true()) is False

There was a long argument about if/how to include ?:. if_true if condition else if_false was mostly considered least awful.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Or ...

Point = complex

Or ...

class Point(complex):

Remember - before writing new code check to see how many of the existing implementations already do most or all of what you need.

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

All your nightmares

IronPython was maintain by Microsoftians for a while and is implemented C#.

Tax working from home, says Deutsche Bank, because the economy needs that lunch money you’re not spending

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: charged for entering a shop

No silly. You will be taxed for not entering a shop when you do buy something.