Posts by John Robson

Re: Ob H2G2

We've not designed rovers that can contemplate the rushing noise and their own existence before wondering if that big round thing will be friends?

Re: Customer survey email..how pathetic..

"And I'm very white and very middle class...

Everyone knows the drill. Be courteous , be professional and everything works out fine. Start playing games and expect your ass to get kicked. "

There speaks the voice of someone who isn't in a minority (a lofty position I share).

When I get that post from a young black man or a muslim then I will give it more weight.

Re: None at all @John Robson

I think that the civil service are completely hamstrung by the regular reversals of decisions.

There is only so much that you can plan for when the target moves more often, and more erratically, than a cockroach with ADHD.

Re: Painless

Think you're good - it's a pure exit node, so if you are bouncing off a pi at your house then you are at your house as far as the BBC is concerned.

Re: 70's electricty

"If we start extracting all that natural wind and atmospheric movement are we leading ourselves down another path to armagedden?"

If you start extracting it all you stop extracting any very soon after, you need the wind to carry on past the turbine to allow fresh wind in...

The theoretical max is under 2/3rds if I remember the numbers correctly. And of course there are substantial gaps below and around the turbines, let alone the size of the gap *above* them...

"eCall: Who gives a shit?"

Probably anyone with it in their vehicle when they have a single vehicle incident.

Re: software used to protect humanity

More importantly - how will we debug it :p

Re: New! Improved! oxidiser

Quite a high velocity hopefully

Re: On a related topic...

That might be the first time I've laughed at such a suggestion... even if only a chuckle (because of the number of people who will know suggest it in all seriousness)

Re: Not just that

Anything which limits the amount of walking and standing you can do in a day.

You can get a coffee made, then go to the machine, get the cup and load the next pod.

You only make one trip per coffee, not two. And yes that *is* important to lots of people.

The problem is getting out of said dragon in your own personal spaceship (an EVA suit)

Re: Yup.

No they won't - they don't want to charge their advertisers any more than they already do.

They might shovel more ads at their product (users) though..

Re: to a list of people deemed worthy...

Along with? What other definition of worthy did you think applied?

Re: I wrote the article

And the more stuff you have in house the more risk you bear...

Are you buying more reliable hardware than amazon is, are you looking after it better, are you tolerant of it's failure?

For many small and medium sized companies... cloud acts to mitigate risk, they can't afford to employ a suite of people to look after the hardware.

Re: "Server error 500"

Those affected didn't feature on my list of people I was laughing at.

Re: You can guarantee

I was think a planet and moon with a rocket taking off between them

Re: it does not have a valid license

Wouldn't be hard for them to put a ground station in india... in fact it would potentially be beneficial - I wonder how hard they could work it as a backbone out of india?

Re: Maybe switch to Moon flybys in future

Great visuals, very risky (a very small miscalculation will have unexpected lithobraking), but still a smaller kick than a comparatively safe fly past the larger planet. Of course that safety does depend on people not being complete idiots, and that state is depressingly common amongst decision makers.

Re: Let's see what damage is done to diddymoon.

Sample size of two is hardly conclusive (but it's certainly a strong option), and I'm pretty sure that DART itself will suffer badly - even hitting a reasonably sized cloud of dust at >6km/s will do that to... well anything really.

To some extent the JWST *is* a swarm - there are quite a few mirrors which will be unpacked and lined up.. I wonder if there is enough scope to assemble a few of these and dock them together...

Re: Still surprised

"There are some which are pretty close to that size."

I've just realised that I didn't specify RIE style hearing aids, and the size is rather dependent on the hearing aid type.

But wearing them for 18 hours a day...

Re: Heisenbug

Not a bad decision - I would expect them to make at least one of these calls every week (probably more) that we never hear about.

Re: We used to think bigger

That’s just a 12 sky crane fleet… what’s the problem?

Re: miners

Except that there is an exchange rate, so there is a "this GPU costs this many bytenotes" or whatever.

The alternative is a gold standard currency, and we abandoned that in the 1930s

Re: So NASA will *never* make it to the Moon

Hence the idea to use dragon for landing the meatbags.

The lunar lander (apollo) was first tested on the moon (yeah, slightly disingenuous, the ascent motor was a single use, and therefore each individual engine couldn't be tested).

There is no reason we couldn't have the starship lunar version do an automated landing without people on board (and there is the difference between the 60's and now).

The lack of an independent abort option is the challenge, but NASA have already accepted that, since there are a variety of abort options available - there are six engines on the rocket, and they aren't all needed for a lunar landing.