Posts by Flocke Kroes 4558 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007
The Falcon Heavy centre core fell over before SpaceX employees could secure it to the deck. The robot that does this task for Falcon 9 does not fit Falcon Heavy but apparently this will be fixed for STP-2. As there is a centre core in the garage this should not cause delays.
The Bible has plenty of references to Israelites being berated and punished for idolatry and polytheism. Christianity and Judaism have made a thorough effort to forget their polytheistic ancestry. Their god used to have a wife - Asherah, the Queen of Heaven. It was a bad break up and she got edited out of the bible but the archeological evidence remains.
amanfromMars 1 is a more entertaining parody generator. Try mixing in a bit of Ezekiel. There's a man who know his mushrooms.
Gods get created over and over. The primordial Greek gods got demonised when they were replaced by the titans and the titans got demonised when they were replaced by the Olympians. The Greek Olympians were a bit too Greek for the Romans so they got recreated with a stronger Roman flavour. The god of Judaism was a bit Jewish for the Christians so they created an updated version closer to their own values.
Every culture creates their own gods - sometimes by recycling older ones. Hundreds of different gods and I have never seen any of them. Not even the invisible pink unicorn.
Pretend to be a lighthouse?
I never found Tippex on a monitor but I did get a complaint from a customer that his new hard disk was not working. After a couple of minutes of talking at cross purposes I discovered the customer expected plugging in the hard disk would cause the floppy disk to work faster. The entire concept of copying files to the hard disk and using them from there had never been mentioned to my refreshingly calm and polite customer.
I wish I could find the link to what happened when modern children were let loose with computers from that era. They had difficulty understanding what a floppy disk was, where to put it and the computer would not do anything without one. Instead here is one for the few surviving Tuttle/CentOS transcripts.
Lets try the alternate plan taking more time. Presumably you are going to do something in that time which will cost money. If you do not have the money you have to store your spaceship in the cupboard until more money appears. Unfortunately you cannot store your employees in a cupboard. Without money they are likely to wander off hunting for food. If more money does eventually appear you will not get all your employees back. You will have to find new ones who will then cost time and money to understand the project.
Part of the reason Beagle 2 performed an unplanned lithobraking manoeuvre involved time and money. Testing facilities have to be booked months in advance. At the time money was not there. Money did appear later but testing facilities were then booked up past the launch date of the ride share.
Both projects decided to go with what they had rather than risk not going at all.
The embrace stage is well and truly here.
Anyone noticed new features unique to the Microsoft implementation of the API? If some turn up it will only matter if people use them and Linus cannot implement them because Microsoft has patents on the mathematics. Penguins are quite likely to check the license and not simply click & ignore so there is a fair chance that extensions will be actively ignored.
I am old enough to remember what happens after extinguish... The dead proprietary software gets a license change to something copyleft and comes back like a zombie phoenix to take away chunk of Microsoft's world domination. Too late, already happened.
"Embrace extend extinguish" is not the right strategy here. I could believe "Developers Developers Developers" but personally, Microsoft can take my Linux when the snap it from my frozen dead flippers. It may be time to think about giving Microsoft a little trust. I will consider it when I get back from my snowboarding holiday in Hell.
[On another note, Debian has the same "problem" that if you say "install everything" on a Friday you are going to have a bad day on Monday when it has finished downloading.]
For orbit you want a bit of up and about thirty times as much fast. For a normal rocket you start with some up to get out of the worst of the atmosphere then tip over sideways to get some fast when air resistance will not melt your rocket.
Next imagine a rocket hovering. It is burning through kilo£s of propellant every second without going up or fast. The opposite extreme is taking off from the Moon by burning all the propellant at once. Massive savings in propellant because you do not have to lift any of it up or make it go fast but your rocket has to be a solid lump of steel to survive the explosion. This is why traditional rockets are a compromise between hovering and exploding.
Aeroplanes are really good at level flight. For the aeroplane not to fall, something else has to. You can either send a small amount down very fast by pointing the engines downward or you can send a large amount down slowly by using a wing. Either way, you want the same mass times velocity going down to get lift, but the energy cost is ½ x mass x (velocity)^2.
A small amount going down really fast costs too much energy for an aeroplane, but a rocket is much closer to the explosion side than hovering so it works out cheaper to point the engine downwards, and as a bonus you do not have to fiddle around making a wing that works over a huge range of pressures and velocities.
Shops are populated by zombies that shuffle along without any awareness of what is going on around them until they find a place I want to be - then they stop. They walk past the automated tills, fail to take note of the three available ones near the exit then wait at the entrance next to the tills disabled because of lack of staff. All they have to do is walk past the dead tills and they would be able to see there is no need to wait. When the number of available tills exceeds the number of people ahead of me in the queue I walk past them. I would happily point out the available tills but they are too busy texting to notice.
The scanner and the bagging area scales are connected via a satellite internet connection so I scan, put the item in the bagging area then the scales wait for me to put the item in the bagging area. At some point the scanner section will time out and let me scan other item which I can get to the bagging area before the timeout messages has gone to GEO and back. The scale happily records the weight of the second item as the first and I can zip through the rest of my purchases without further delay because the two sides remain one item out of step... until some helpful assistant turned up one day to show me what I was doing wrong and prevented me from putting each item in the bagging area until the scales were ready for them.
No increase in budget agreed. No cancellation of LOPG (destination for Orion), Orion (payload for SLS) or SLS (Shelby's boondoggle).
Undelaying the Exploration Upper Stage was proposed (EUS required to make SLS theoretically useful). This is a step back from Bridenstein's last speech so Shelby is successfully defending SLS.
America's first clear step back to the Moon is either and increased budget for NASA or NASA keeping their budget but without the requirement of funding SLS development.
BTW: LOPG is not planned to be inhabited continuously (astronauts cannot stay there for a year because of the radiation and SLS is too expensive to launch multiple times per year). Earth->Moon requires less fuel than Earth->LOPG->Moon. There has been talk of using LOPG as a propellant depot for refuelling a lunar lander. A simpler solution is to transfer propellant from the tanker to the lander (in LEO or an elliptical Earth orbit) without bothering with an addition transfer to a space station.
I found a couple of hints on the net: There are two medium-sized hard upper spacesuit torsos on the ISS, but only one is currently configured for EVA and the other cannot be configured in time. Also, an astronaut can prefer one size on the ground and find the prefer a different size in space.
Please try to understand the difference between "free" and "bundled". Years ago Microsoft worked hard to have Windows bundled with every computer. It was never free. Every computer included about the same amount of Microsoft tax. It took years of court hearings to get the right to recover Microsoft tax from the suppliers plus time and effort to actually get the money back for each individual computer.
This new deal does an end run around that ruling and funnels tax payers' money directly to Microsoft.
Cameron resigned and I had no chance to vote for who would replaced him. Thatcher was kicked out and I had no chance vote for who would replace her. The parties pick their leaders, not you or me. That is equally true for the UK and the EU. Your claim that we cannot pick our leader because of the EU is rubbish. We cannot pick our leaders directly in either case and after Brexit we will have even fewer votes.
Yes all politicians. I want to minimise the power of every single one of them until they start to demonstrate a detectable level of competence.
I did care. I did look. You have convinced me you have never provided evidence to support your opinions.
"Most of that depends on the actions of the gov." The UK government has tirelessly demonstrated incompetence for years before the referendum and you handed them a mandate to renegotiate the biggest trade deal ever anyway. It sounds like you are expecting Brexit to be a complete fuck up and you are preparing to blame the government for the consequences of your voting decision.
Lets try for some of the "destructive" things from the EU. The first three to come to mind were: guaranty on electronics increased to two years. Standardising mobile phone power connectors so power bricks do not become obsolete when you get a new phone and food standards. There is bad as well as good - the European Patent Office for a start but even that is better that the UK Intellectual Property Office.
"we get a vote to choose our leadership, not something the EU allows"
If the EU do not allow it, how do "we" get a vote for our leadership? I am not convinced "we" get to vote for our leadership. I did not choose May, Cameron, Brown, Blair, Major, ...
Yes I massively want to neuter all politicians. I do not vote for them to do things I want. I vote for a hung parliament in the hope it will stop them doing a few of the things I do not want.
Yes you do have a long post history. I read the first page of 60. Lots of opinions. No evidence to support them. You are still welcome to link to a specific post that provides evidence to support your opinion that brexit will lead to any of: a stronger economy, more representative democracy, the economy again, lower prices when Brits buy and higher profits when Brits sell or that concentrating power in UK MPs will lead to anything constructive. No-one will ever bother to search through all 60 pages hunting for something they believe is not there.
economic: see trade
democratic: Bremain we have MEPs to represent our interests. Brexit we don't. I have written to MPs and MEPs. Either way it takes time. They divert to the member of their party responsible for what you are complaining about who gives you the standard fobbing off. You reply with evidence debunking the fobbing off and get an equally useless reply. Next you send a copy of the correspondence to your representative. My MP ignores me but my MEP votes against the most damaging directives I understand well enough to explain. I get more democracy from the EU.
economy: see economic
trade: Bremain we have the negotiation power of the whole EU. Brexit we have the twits who could not negotiate an exit agreement with the EU that anybody is happy with.
sovereignty: This is a real problem for me. I want to keep power away from UK MPs and their partisan politics. The EU is more diverse so has to understand compromise. This avoids the extremes of any particular party.
By all means link to any of your previous posts that explain why Brexit provides an advantage with evidence that the UK government can deliver that advantage without incurring some greater cost.
(I reserve down votes for trolls and the irredeemably stupid or rude. Not for people trying to have a rational discussion even if we disagree on almost everything.)
One bunch of voters chose Brexit so that "we" would be in control instead of the EU. I am not convinced everyone involved is using the same definition of "we" but putting that to on side this fiasco is evidence that whoever "we" are, "we" should not be in control of anything.
I would happily kick all the Brexits out of the EU - if only we could find anywhere that would take them.
WTflyingF!
We were promised that immigrants would have to fill in a 54 page form. The plan was that there would be no funding for anyone to actually read the filled out forms - presumably because they would all have to be destroyed because of GDPR. The precise reason one bunch of people voted Brexit was to keep the bloody foreigners out by imposing infuriating levels of brain-dead bureaucracy.
Where is the Brexit we were promised?
(Edit: found it - it got a new paint-job)
Easy to understand. First forget any computing knowledge you may have and replace it with: "Getting infected with computer malware is completely random and there is nothing anyone can do about it". All of a sudden, the do nothing policy makes sense.
Back to the real world: If you can somehow get across the message that over 99% of malware infections are caused by the user clicking on something clearly identifiable as malware (like: "Install our free pornvid viewer") then there is some hope of progress.
The problem is I have no confidence in the manufacturer's firmware when it is new and far less two years later when theey have not released a security update in over 18 months. If you want a secure router you start by looking at openwrt's supported device pages, pick one and when arrives install openwrt. Some of the manufacturers have worked out that is what techies do and advertise openwrt support before the product is even released.
It is worse than that. The driver was required keep a log of what was going on on a touch screen device. I could tolerate making a verbal record with a hands free microphone but not something that required both hands and eyes.
The emergency stop detector only looked ahead and did not get any input from the route planning part of the software that knows where the road curves and when to turn. Left to itself, the car would stop before any obstruction on the outside edge of a curved road. Uber's solution was to prevent the emergency stop system from making emergency stops.
Uber should have kept these vehicles off the road until the emergency stop system could ignore stationary objects beside the planned route while still considering objects moving towards the planned route. Uber should not have instructed their drivers to operate a touch screen device while they are supposed to be watching the road. The driver should have refused to drive and keep a log at the same time.
Not a legal requirement, but I strongly recommend cyclists fit reflectors between the spokes. I suspect Elaine Hertzberg was a pedestrian pushing a bicycle because it was dark and she was not wearing high visibility clothing. The video of the accident gives some idea of how invisible pedestrians and cyclists are in the dark without plenty of reflectors and lights.
"Prime Minister Theresa May said she would allow Parliament to vote on a possible delay"
Parliament can vote to define pi as 3 but that will have just the same effect as "delaying" Brexit. A delay requires a unanimous agreement from the other EU member states. Perhaps the UK could buy a delay at enormous expense but they have demonstrated the inability to negotiate anything tolerable in two years. They certainly cannot buy a delay in under a month for any sane fee. What parliament could do without any EU agreement is cancel Brexit. A speck of honesty from May would be appreciated (and shocking).
Efraim Southwark-Portendorfer is over 18. He gets his username/password verified and Theresa promises to forget who he is. Someone accidently publishes the username and password on the internet. The ID gets used by thousands of people, some of them children. Theresa sends the cops round to Efraim and he says he left the user name and password on a post-it note stuck to the bottom of his keyboard and the note disappeared during a party. He would have reported the theft but he could not remember his username or password and there was no point phoning Theresa as she had promised to delete any record of his name.
The tech has potential for age verification on porn sites. Imagine 100,000 porn accounts all controlled by people who look like Theresa May or better yet: Teresa May.
Of course there are nine planets, but men have only found 8 so far. Clyde Tombaugh discovered one of the 7 dwarf planets (Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Eris and two more to be discovered). That just leaves three for the elves and the one discovered by Bilbo Baggins (Smeagol claims precedence but has no surviving witnesses).
That is not a requirement at all. The vital part is that when you tell lies about your publicly traded companies you must make damn sure you are not on camera, being recorded or surrounded by too many impartial witnesses. You should also diversify well before the shit hits the fan and promote some twit to take the fall because you are too busy with one of your newer scams investor opportunities.
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