Posts by DavCrav

Re: "The detached sail will accelerate but the probe will decelerate"

"The idea is only to detach one part of the sail. The laser will still hit that part and accelerate it further. But the laser is being reflected from the detached part and hits the probes remaining sail from the front, which decelerates the probe. But this would be a highly complicated stunt given the differences and the communication latency of 12 years. You could just pre-program the procedure and fire the laser at the right time (six years earlier) in the hope that everything is where is should be. And this simple calculation doesn't even include relativity, which will already play a big role at 0.2c,"

I get the idea. I just think it's stupid. First, the laser hitting the detached sail will push it forwards and the probe backwards (assuming it works), so the sail will need some sort of power of its own to continually readjust the focus of the reflection. Second, we'll worry about how narrowly focused the laser beam needs to be to hit a single object (and not the probe's sail) from six light years away, sent six years ago based on where you think the probe will be. Then, as you say, the fact that you've already pushed the probe to 0.2c makes slowing it down harder as it's now heavier.

This is why I suggest chucking the whole sail and everything else you don't immediately need out the front, or equivalently just firing the whole recording equipment out the back of the probe when you get there would decelerate it more. If it's going at 0.2c, I reckon that will get it down to about 0.19999c, maybe a bit more. Which is still better than the sail detachment idea.

Also, suppose you can accelerate a 1kg probe to 0.2c in six months of laser shining. I reckon that the power requirement is 0.2^2c^2/2/180/24/3600 (0.2^2c^2/2 is the kinetic energy of the probe), which means the laser needs to be about 1GW in power, after heat loss from the atmosphere. And that ignores relativistic effects: both special and general. (The special effect is the mass of the craft getting heavier, so we need to add that into the calculation. The general effect is the loss of power due to gravity on the laser itself, as it will still have to leave the Earth's gravity well. You can build a space-based laser, but on order to harvest 1GW from the sun, well, it's going to have to be big. Something like 3-4sq km.) Chinny reckon.

Re: Fractured

"Statisticians know that mean averages can sometimes obscure the truth and so they have other averaging methods to choose from. The median average (middle of the distribution) will still be less than two but perhaps higher than the mean. Modal average (the most common occurrence) will be a solid two.

IANAS."

The mode is the most common number, so it is 2 in this case. The median is the amount of arms the person in the middle of the line has, when the people are ordered by number of arms (or the mean of the two in the middle if there are an even number of people). In this case it is therefore also 2.

Re: As we say up here in Yorkshire when things don't go our way

I camembert these puns any more.

Re: Wikileaks and Trump?

"And if Assange had some secret deal with Trump to make the DNC look bad, why is he still cowering in London, saying he's fearful some U.S. Men in Black will whisk him off to Gitmo or some such place the moment he puts his nose outside the consulate?"

Haven't you read the news? Trump's promises aren't worth shit. You can't trust the fat fuck as far as you can throw him. Which isn't far, what with him being a fat fuck.

Re: Hmm

"By the way punishment is used as a disincentive for behaviours."

Yes, but not all disincentives are punishments. Jesus wept.

Re: Not Technical!

"It's in the Bootnotes section, you must be new here."

He just hasn't twigged yet.

"(yes, increasing CO2 in a greenhouse makes plants grow faster. If you expand this notion to the entire world, increasing CO2 in the atmosphere will make plants grow faster, and thereby deplete it faster, via a "biological equilibrium" and I happen to LIKE trees and plants, so I'd like more of them, thanks)"

I don't know what the fuck this is, but I can tell you one thing it isn't: remotely true.

"If they have no offices in Europe how exactly are they going to enforce this? A company could just not pay it."

They do have offices in the EU. A quick EAW will see the head of Google Europe in the local nick to explain the situation.

If a company has no offices at all anywhere in the EU, it might have trouble selling large amounts of goods and services into the EU. Also, if the company is declared a criminal enterprise, most other companies won't engage with it.

Re: Google's definition of "abusive"

"Google's definition of "abusive""

My definition of 'abusive' would pretty much include this behaviour:

"Of course, it's more likely Chrome 71 will block nasty adverts served from outside Google's network"

Advertising company blocks other companies' adverts. How is that possibly not an abuse of monopoly position?

Re: Spurious conflicts within open source projects.

"Yeah, nah. No it won't. CoCs lay out what is and isn't acceptable behavior in a project team. The only folks, in my view, getting really upset with them are the types of people who'll regularly break the CoC by being an arse to others."

I take offence at you describing people with varieties of autism and therefore unable to easily read social cues as 'being an arse'. Pursuant to the CoC that El Reg clearly doesn't have, based on the conversations that happen here, you should be fired.

CoCs are the modern-day Cardinal Richelieu.

Re: I voted for him.

"If we (thankfully), have term limmits for those who wish to be President. Then there should also be limmits on those who serve in the Congress as well."

I guess I shouldn't pay attention to anyone who cannot spell the word 'limits', but there are no limits for those who wish to be President, only term limits for those who are.

Re: Noted scientists

"Both ebcuase she was very smart, and because women are sadly underrepresented on bank notes."

Hodgkin already has a series of grants from the Royal Society named after her. James Maxwell has some crap instant coffee.

Re: "Hitler was right"

""Hitler was right"

er, he was actually right about a thing or two, you know..."

Yes, but when people say "Hitler was right" they don't mean "Adi was right about how the background of this painting washes out the foreground colours, leaving it looking unstructured." Normally it's about the Jews.

Re: There will be £10m for a scheme to identify ways to keep physics and maths teachers in schools

"If the state schools were better, would you send your children to them then? Then the solution is there to see..."

What? Move to a better state? Or somehow become Education Secretary and Chancellor simultaneously so you can sort out the DoE and fund it properly?

Re: V.amusing but...

"There's a cost here in removing them for proper disposal, this cost has now passed to me through the taxes I pay."

Sort of. Shoving them in the back of a Council van is quick, and surely WEEE directives still apply, so the manufacturer is responsible. Or does that only apply to consumers?

"That I understand, the original finding was that Google had abused of their power over the Play store to force makers put Chrome on every mobile phone. And now, according to this lawyer, they are abusing of their power to charge money."

Yes, if you are a monopolist, and abuse it, you too can charge people just to be able to come to your shop.

Re: Not quite

"A little mental addition reveals that the sales of the entire notebook lineup of all of the biggest notebook manufacturers comes to about 122 million, versus iPad's 44 million. That's not more. That's less. A lot less."

I came here to say that, and also it's meaningless. The number of iPads is dwarfed by the number of TVs sold, but you wouldn't suggest swapping all your iPads for TVs.

They are different things.

"Yes, but IP traffic from the ISS is carried over proprietary links from the USA (at least, on the US side of the thing)"

Does that work when the ISS is not over the US? I have no idea how the ISS Internet service works, and you seem to know.

"last time I came through UK Customs it felt a little like Prison Visits."

Last time my partner (not British) or I (British) came through UK customs we just waved our passports at the electronic gate and walked through. I've not visited a prison in either capacity but I somehow hope it has more stringent security than that.

"Technically, for German, it's V2 and SOV."

So, you mean it's 'second idea', like I said?

Well, technically, German has a "+Scramble" feature on its universal syntax. My personal favourite feature is +Scramble. Which means your trees are built up in the correct way, and then the words can be moved around afterwards.

Re: Access is not the same as bulk export

"and should have been able to view what he needed in summary and record by record sitting at a terminal on the company's premises. He never needed the ability to insert a USB device and bulk export to it."

From the article:

"After external auditor KPMG asked for copies of various data including the entire company payroll, Skelton made a private copy of it from an encrypted USB stick."

And how would KPMG get it if not via some sort of export mechanism?