Posts by Joe Werner 300 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2008
... earlier in Germany? I seem to recall that there was this Cargolifter company, and they planned an airship with the capacity for 160000 kg (or some outrageous number). Money was burnt - mostly small investors, if I recall correctly. The hangar now houses a "tropical" wellness / swim thing. It is also a nice navigational landmark ;)
I liked the idea, though.
> Yes: I know that aviators traditionally measure altitude in feet...
"Interesting" factoid: While general (and commercial) aviation (well, the engine* carrying ones) in Germany measures height in feet, distance in nautical miles and speed in knots, glider pilots use meters, kilometers and kilometers per hour. They also use meters / second as climb rates in contrast to the feet / minute used elsewhere... you get to be quite quick in converting between the two systems.
(icon 'cause it is sort of unnecessary and confusing and...)
* we call them FNCs, fuel to noise converters
Well, Norway did not join because of its fishing rights... but yes, they have to implement almost all of the rules and have no say in them. Many still think it was a good decision not to join the EU. It does come with monetary costs and some inconvenience though.
Basically the "leave and we will make our own regulations" is not true - at least not if one wants free market access / integration, I guess many businesses driving the British economy would want that.
I'm still feeling... empty... checked the calendar twice to see if it's the 1st of April... I'll now try to at least change the "empty" (icon)
Bumblebees are actually really relaxed. They are not aggressive at all.
Bees are also relatively cool. I would still be a bit careful. If one stings you, it hurts a bit, but the poor thing dies as it cannot remove the stinger from your skin.
The ones stinging and flying away are wasps. These are hunter-seekers and aggressive, sometimes overly so. Especially in late summer, when they no longer focus on protein rich food, but on sugars. My father-in-law had a nest above his bathroom window, but there were no problems at all. The wasps did not mind him looking out, cleaning the window etc. He was accepted as a moving part of the landscape, I guess...
Hornets are really huge and make noise like a chopper. They actually eat wasps (and other insects smaller than them). They are not very aggressive, but a very impressive sight.
I think all of these are really cool!
... that is, they are meant for swimming. Yes, I wear them, and yes, I swim quite well, thank you. If you want to wear them to hang out on the beach that is another question. If you want to impress the person of the appropriate sex you sure should be well shaped (I'm past that...). On the other hand, no amount of clothing is going to help in some cases...
I also have no problems with skinny dipping - used to do this all the time. And yes, I am slowly reapproaching (started as a fat kid, trained, now put on weight again) a shape where that it is less appropriate... but I couldn't care less - about my shape or that of the next human being. If you get exposed (hah!) to nudity early enough you get used to it. That said: one should not force one's view of that on others, and that goes both ways. Don't force people to cover up, don't force people to strip down. Plus don't try to forcibly offend others (both extremes).
Fun 'fact' (if I remember correctly): one of the few places in Oslo where topless sunbathing is not allowed is the park of the royal castle.
... all those who work under more difficult conditions than me...
I have no long term job prospect, actually must leave my current workplace after 4 years max due to labour laws, live in a different country than my wife and kid, but at least nobody is blowing up my computers or tools or shooting at me.
Force is mass times acceleration. While the force is smaller for a lighter object (correctly remembered), the inertia that has to be overcome is also smaller by the same amount. The mass of the accelerated small (compared to earth) object cancels out on both sides of the equation. This means the acceleration is the same for a heavy and a light object. The equivalence of heavy mass (causing the pull) and inert (correct word?) mass to be accelerated is the question we need to test here.
That's what I gather from this after a few pints...
Mine's the one with the slide rule
"hey, what if I tried this ?"
"I'll bet that is how a lot of expliots are discovered - people trying things that the original designer never dreamed of."
My father in law was leading the software QA lab of a large company. He had testers that looked at the design documents and immediately found holes, like accepting 8 [:space:] as an allowed password. This made the whole lab very happy - and the programmers less so.
I wish we had something like this in both countries I live in. On the other hand, in one place I get my eggs (mostly) from a local farmer. The chickens are free roaming, even into the forest, and when passing on my bike I have to take care to avoid them. Pretty hard to measure density in that case...
Icon because we have no happy chicken ;)
You know, once we were mocking "duh, you know, there is an app for that" - and now there are some that are actually helpful.
... stuff is taxed on import. You as the buyer can be held liable for tax evasion (or whatever) if you make the seller declare it as a present.
This is (to me) perfectly ok. The discussion whether a sales tax is sensible or not is not my point (but people will get upset about that anyway). What I am unhappy about is what the national mail service charges for the customs clearance! Bunch of lovemaking lovechilds....
Icon because that part of the tax system is what I like least...
oh, wait, that browser is also really slow and resource addicted and probably outdated.
I am not a COF (yet), but I do miss the old systems (no, not "when the 'print' key acted like a 'hang / discard all changes' key" - as the BOFH observed)... it seems that I too pick features to use that "nobody wants or ever uses".
I am using R (under Linux), but this looks extremely interesting. It hopefully will replace the ugly and stupid RStudio for Windows user... Plus the hopefully easier use of multithreaded and parallel libraries in projects sounds interesting even for me.
OTOH I also had good experience with R in eclipse.
It is written the internet was for porn - and that's true (read the BOFH...)
Joke aside, all of the places where I lived do raise VAT also on internet purchases. If you order from abroad you pay import tax. I find this fair enough. I do not like paying taxes, but understand they are necessary... sort of.
But this was not what this guy was talking about. And who will hinder Australia from raising an internet tax? I mean, you just take a fixed amount of money from everybody (or every household). If you do not want to pay you have to prove you have no means of accessing the 'net... Easy to do, but likely not popular :-p
"I'm actually quite impressed; if a minor bit of boof-tinkle-tinkle, of the sort that happens every day between meatbag drivers, like this is newsworthy, the driverless cars must be doing something right"
Right. Because there are as many autonomous cars out there as meatbag driven ones.
What I wonder about is why they do not automate trains. At least these are already more outer less remote controlled by the signals and all.
... more interesting is 6*9 in base 13
(personally I like base 12 especially when thinking about thirds and quarters) - need a beer now, a full-sized one, way past pub-o-clock. On the other hand, I am doing some stats, real stats, with pen and paper (not calculations, analytics!). And we all know: don't drink and derive!
It is really not that complicated, and usually works flawlessly. One caveat: It is a Bad Idea to skip version numbers when upgrading. I did that, it was a bad idea, and I had to reinstall - but then the system had been upgraded continously from about Debian 3.0 (or so) to 5.0, and the main (OS) harddisk had been moved into a new box at least once... it was time for a reinstall, and thankfully I did not break too much. The machine was our group's mail and web server (well, still is, though most of the stuff has been absorbed into the university's system by now)...
Yes, I know, don't do such things on a production system, but with only a handful of users it is not problematic... and maybe I should also tackle the upgrade to the current stable soon-ish.
A Chromebook? A tablet? I do some work on it and like to have the data with me when I travel, which is too often. Not on an external harddisk, that is another thing to pack that would be left in an airport lounge or whatever. The tablets / combo things also usually have very crappy linux support, which is bad if that is what you need to work.
The size fits. The battery life fits. The rest does not, which is the deal breaker.
The smallest laptops available are now 11", and this is what I am typing this on now. It is bulky and heavy compared to the netbook. (Lenovo E145 + Mint).
Recently my netbook (Samsung, 6years old, second battery, new keyboard) became unreliable. The screen works only intermittently. So I went to search for a replacement. It should be faster than the Atom processor, have more disk space (say... 500GB), similar long battery life (6-8 hours), and a similar size, and of course similar cost would be nice, the old one was 300€ with the RAM upgrade). Of course it needs to run Linux, 'cause that is what I use. Turns out this is impossible.
.. and so do the ... products I am about to ... leave at the small room 'round the corner. With the little icon on.
Please, have a beer for that comment! (I am having one in an airport lounge. Benefit of being a frequent flyer. Disadvantage: spending so much time at airports. I wish I wouldn't...)
Had an apron position upon arrival with a 380 on a trip from the US to Frankfurt (snowstorm, so a bunch of planes were stuck for that time, came in on one of the few slots, they had already announced in the plane we could be diverted to... dunno). Getting out of that bird and then standing close to it helps you appreciate just how big it is. Amazing. It does not look as big when just seeing it from inside the terminal, the general shape is close to that of the smaller Airbus planes...
"Just to add - some of the information is already out there. Why don't the researchers take a look at pollen analysis for archaeological sites across Europe and the ME for the last 2,000 years?"
They do. Not sure if the authors of that article do it (sounds like they look at isotopes), but in general this is being done.... plus they say that it is in general as warm (globally) not specifically in any single region. The spatial heterogeneity of the climate...
[quote]The vanadium dioxide coating, meanwhile, is transparent to infrared light below around 30°C but as its temperature increases gradually becomes more reflective. The UCL team summarises: "During cold periods stops thermal radiation escaping and so prevents heat loss; during hot periods it prevents infrared radiation from the sun entering the building."[/quote]
Well, without having read the journal article itself I can only assume (well, it was my first guess) that they refer to the temperature-dependent spectrum of black body radiation (Wien's displacement law), where the wavelength of the maximum spectral energy density is inversely proportional to the temperature of the black body.
...seems to be the important term here. The person (legal entity or real person) who applied the crypto to the message can be forced to decrypt it. This would not be new, as pointed out above. Of course I do not trust anyone to stick to this and not require a back door at a later point in time...
So: why the new law? What was their motivation if there were nothing new? My guess is as good as anyone's... but I tend to expect the worst.
Edit: just read http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/19/key_voice_encryption_protocol_has_backdoor/
I guess this answers some questions...
Reading the comments I can see why we have the headline on the other article. No, we are not really that excited about your newest products, myself included. I just want to get rid of the friggin' touchpad on my E-series. And I want my laptop to be netbook sized again - I travel too much. On a recent trip I packed the predecessor (Samsung netbook) even if it suffers from random screen failures because it is both lighter and smaller. Try opening any laptop bigger than 11" in an economy class seat (and that is reasonable Euro airlines, not the US carriers where I have problems fitting my knees in...). Luckily it was well behaved. I think I'll open it and reseat the cables or resolder them...
If you want me to buy your product: 10" screen (or 11" without bezel, 'cmon, it is possible), lightweight, huge battery for 7 hrs of working with intermittent WiFi use and programming / compiling / debugging, harddisk > 250 GB, make that 500 GB, CPU can be lowish end, but I need enough RAM... oh, and it must be able to run GNU/Linux. The Macs come close, except for the harddisk and they are slightly too big still (and really expensive....). The ASUS transformers look ok, but good luck finding all of the Linux drivers - same with the Lenovo Yoga, from what I read...
"There have been commenters stepping up to say that, Microsoft having acknowledged a bug in its download image, we should all consider that MS is not that shady and cut it some slack."
Yes, my first thought exactly and I do stand corrected. Doing the Pavlovian response of "they are eeeevil, eeeeeevil! I tell you!" would indeed have been correct. I just do not like that reflex of immediately bashing MS for all evil in the world...
They spotted it, pulled it, and now communicate their d'oh moment. To me that is ok. No, it should not have happened, yes, it nevertheless did. But "oopsie" indeed...
(usually run some flavour of Linux, and we too had strange things happening, gotta admit this, folks! And as an admin I was close to some really stoopid blunders as well - don't ask...)
Hm. No zip pocket? I like having one to store the cell phone and some cash when riding. I do not trust myself with the complicated process of pulling the arm warmers / rain jacket / whatever out of a pocket without tossing the phone out as well (even if it is in a different pocket).
... and please, do consider closing the helmet chin strap properly....
(and you left out the bike from the picture ;) - ok, checking out the bike on the cash'n'carrion HP that is no great loss)
Mine's the high-vis GoreTex one (because of the weather at Norway's west coast)
1) my thoughts exactly. Quite a part of the last attacks were delivered by "S" rated people (the letter they put on the records to point them out as a potential threat). However, they have far too many French with the "S" remark in their database to really keep them all covered adequately.
…and yes, the science behind strong cryptography is available to world and dog, no way to withold that information. However I guess by making communicating with strong cryptography a crime they can catch a ton of criminals (who are actually only concerned about their online banking and stuff…)
"I spent the weekend putting it together."
What? If one of my parents (in fact: anybody) had dared to interfere with the putting-together I would have been really mad (ok, that was mostly LEGO, and that is kind of the main fun part. And disassembling it, and building a trebuchet or onagar to bombard your brother's new castle). Why do parents think they have to put stuff together, robbing the kids of some of the joy? I mean, ok, help the kid if he / she is not able to do it. In fact, my niece asked me once to set up the... Barbie (or whatever) doll house. It was fun (and would have been better with less pink, but I disgress) and I actually made her do most of it.
About the slavery stuff: Meh, put the collar onto a Chinese Playmobil figure, or a red-headed witch ;-) or the captain, does he look "caucasian" as the 'mericans say? (Side note: I still wonder about that description, I am described by them as "caucasian", which is totally wrong, I do not look like I am from the Caucasus mountains. But then that is a country where an "entrée" is a main dish). I can of course see some of the problems there, the intolerance that was (and still is), the bad parts of history, etc.
Yeah. It should read "The knowledge gained from this project will impact how the world understands climate dynamics" - or possibly "atmospheric dynamics". Especially the interaction of the upper Troposphere with the Stratosphere is not that well known, and weather (and climate) models will indeed benefit from knowing the physics better.
Measurement flights with gliders are really an awesome thing, though. In my old home country they mapped thermals, which was (afaik) also used by the weather service to improve their forecasts and likely also fed back into model development. They are approaching a 1km scale resolution... just... wow.
"I've been in it, a couple of times"...
Never managed to do that - and now I stopped flying :( this makes me want to go back to it. A lot. I mostly flew LS planes (LS4, LS6 and the then-in-testing LS8-18). Sadly bad management decisions (I can only assume since the planes were very nice) sent Rolladen Schneider bankrupt. It was bought by Glaser-Dirks - linking back to the article nicely... (who continue to build the LS8 and I think LS10).
Good luck to all fellow glider pilots out there!
> "Stochastic" means it evolves over time in a deterministic way.
Sorry, but no. Just... no. Stochastic is non-deterministic. Chaotic is deterministic, trajectories of chaotic systems can be described by ordinary differential equations, and knowing the initial state exactly means we can (in theory) predict the exact trajectory forward in time. Unfortunately we cannot know the state exactly, and the uncertainties in state space increase exponentially in time. Thus, there is some limit time after which our forecast is completely uncertain and smeared out over the attractor of the system. There are some cases where it does not matter, any chaotic system observed with sufficiently low temporal resolution appears to be stochastic and can be modeled as such.
"The difference between a 4.2 per cent and 4.6 per cent annual failure rates on 368 drive-years worth of service is only 1.5 spindles."
Yup, if you want to compare things: Do It Like You Learned in Stats101. Even my geography students (1st years) should be able to come up with that point... (let's see, the exam is tonight...), although here the statistics are a tad more fancy, with stuff beind dscrete and all... Do not forget to communicate the uncertainties.
I forgot how the discussion was in the comments here, so maybe somebody saw this coming.
Meh, I'm stuck with what the Uni's hardware people buy anyway.
While the app that comes with this desk seems to be lacking there are ways around it using step counters or gait sensors (like Polar's S1 or S3) combined with a fitness watch. They sometimes can even be hooked up to the cellphone (Polar's stuff cannot, many others that follow ANT+ or low power Bluetooth can). Combine this with any of the running apps (like Runtastic) you can share your progress. Actually this is the part I _hate_ about runtastic, these things always try to _force_ you to social network, which I do not want...
centimetres 'cause they like the cgs system, not to be confused with GCS http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/DF2012:Giant_cave_spider, which will bite off your head. cgs just means your non-particle-zombie colleagues wish to bite off your head for not sticking to SI (or at least El Reg's SPB standard units).
Well, big deal. I can manage straight and level flight with a glider (admittedly you need solar power in the form of thermals). Oh, and I need power for the variometer, the noisy electrical ones (with GPS and McCready calculator) are nice...
Still: Fuel cells and engines are (too) heavy and I see this as a big improvement!
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