Re: Thank you, Jesus . . .
Unfortunately this shit is so embedded in every aspect of daily life that "You've got to deal with it whether you like it or not, grandad"
15029 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Feb 2008
" It may look like an "IP address" to anyone but inside each IP addresses is a VMware instance and blocking that IP address blocks all other legitimate traffic."
And?
The outfits hosting such IPs usually ignore any/all complaints/actions short of that and even beyond it until it actually starts affecting their income - we saw that 20 years ago in the Spam Wars and nothing's changed since then
McDs and related outfits are FRANCHISES
It gets even more tricky because corporate can leave and withdraw licensing for the signage/processes/supplies/marketing but they can't force franchisees to close up (ie: they could change names to HackBoeing, secure alternative supplies and carry on)
Infosys may be Indian and India may be backing Russia, but it's clear the Indian _PEOPLE_ don't feel that way
Indian oil importers grabbed a shitload of cheap Russian oil - only to find they can't offload it to anyone - nobody wants to buy it
This is what happens when money-focussed mercantilists meet consumers with ethics
"Apparently nobody died"
The stats on previous ships after ammunition stores exploded lead me to suspect rather differently.
It tends to be terminal for nearly everyone below decks even before the vessel sinks
Turkish coast guard responding to the SOS only pulled 58 russian sailors out of the water and at that point the ship was on its side
An awful lot of young men are dying to massage an old man's ego - young men that Russia cannot afford to lose when you look at its demographics profile. The population age curve is already upside down and it's the fastest falling population on the planet
After this mess is over (assuming we don't go full WW3), Russia is going to be a complete basket case for decades - and it needs to be emphasised that the circumstances which put Putin in charge were the direct result of Western right wingers NOT liking Russia's tenative move towards social democracy, therefore backing the coup back in 1993
Those were the days.... AMD K5/K6 cpus ran 50% faster than Intel for integer ops, so if you wanted to run non-GUI stuff (linux servers), that was what you purchased
Cyrix were ok but rather....toasty (not as toasty as 80286s - who else got serious fingertip burns off one?)
"Starlink has designed their satellite coverage based on assumptions about which locations and to how many people they'll be able to sell their service"
Those assumptions didn't include much coverage in Europe because terrestrial coverage is good and there's decent local competition
The USA is an entirely different market which is only possible because of massive local manipulation and monpolisation - you can see how the telcos have been trying (and failing) to get Starlink shut out of their cozy income streams. What is likely to actually happen is that they'll suddenly find that all the "too hard" places to provide service to suddenly became possible after all - at a reasonable price - but customers won't care after 20+ years of being shafted
Africa is a massive market which hasn't even been touched yet (dozens of countries), as is most of Asia. If you look at starlink.sx you'll see that South America has grabbed it with both hands as most of the countries there are taking advantage of an opportunity to connect citizens in ways previously unattainable
If you take a closer look you'll notice that Starlink is now capable of providing service to large chunks of the atlantic and pacific oceans. With V2's laser linking it gets even easier
marineised dishes aren't a thing (yet) but they'll happen. As will aviation-specialised ones
The income stream is there, and not where you assume it's coming from.
Apart from the massive potential for Ships at Sea and Aircraft in Flight (both currently playing eye-watering fees to Inmarsat, etc) there's the wee issue that they can provide intercontinental linking of financial centres (particularly asia-EU/asia-USA) at lower latencies than any terrestrial cable) and the income from THAT could pay the entire constellation all by itself once it comes onstream
I've been asked to provide a report on the feasibility of using Starlink for providing linking to hundreds of remote villages in a very deprived country and at first glance I can't see any particular obstacle. Until I suggested it the proponents were looking at commitments of billions of dollars for worse bandwidth and being beholden to the possibility of authoritarian local governments cutting off connectivity
Terrestrial IS cheaper where the population density supports it but there are large chunks of the planet where you simply can't put infrastructure (water, mountains) or there aren't enough people to justify it.
I spent a good part of the 1980s-90s on the end of a geostationary satellite link and know how frustrating that is. LEO birds are a godsend. I get that the French are doing this for various "because we're french" reasons but they're probably going about it the wrong way
The US Feds are currently mulling walking away from the whole mess. The war on drugs was lost a long time ago and the only ones benefitting from its current form are the dealers
(It's a Forever war because you're attacking a symptom (usage), not the cause (WHY people are falling into addiction). A "war on sneezing" would be just as effective if you wanted to eliminate the common cold)
"The Earth had CO2 levels as high as 700-900 ppm and life on this planet flourished"
last time the planet went past ~850ppm, Very Bad Things Happened in a short period of time.
Look up the Permian Extinction event. Once it hit that kneepoint it was all over in less than a decade
World: not destroyed
Oxygen levels: substantially reduced and stayed that way for a long time
Extinction level: Extreme (93-95% by biomass or species count)
Flourishing life: Red Tides on Steroids (Ironically, producing much of the oil we're now burning), not much else on land or sea
Humans can't survive long-term in an atmospheric oxygen sea-level equivalent much less than 17% and it's a particularly nasty way to die (altitude sickness - you essentially drown in your own lungs)
I've had this discussion with a couple of UK loonies. They see a dish on the horizon and think 5G, etc etc.
Explaining inverse square laws, how the phone in their pocket is giving them millions of times higher doses and how that's nothing compared to laying on an electric blanket is amusing
Kinda like the recent shenanigans at Chernobyl. Soldiers shouldn't have been digging in the Red Forest but readings 50 times higher than normal aren't anything to write home about (they're normal in some parts of the world). Sure you don't want to live there for an extended period (years) but even a few months is fine and I speculated that soldiers had been either doing something extremely stupid or up to no good (or both), such as selfies at the Elephant's Foot or attempting to steal items they shouldn't be going anywhere near with someone else's 10-foot bargepole.
Sure enough, it came out that dolts were doing things like handling Cobalt-60 sources without protection and attempting to steal various radiologically red hot items
Back on the antenna front: One of the fun things back in my telco days was to put up antennas and wait for the objections to roll in - only then would we attempt to connect them to equipment, having "calibrated the local loony brigade".
In a few cases we put up painted wooden/plastic replicas at one location whilst having disguised ones elsewhere. In no instances whatsoever were there evere complaints about the non-visible ones, but the wooden ones upset a lot of chakras
"France's biggest telecoms operator, Orange, inked a deal [PDF] with Eutelsat in 2020 under which it bought out all available capacity on Eutelsat's Konnect satellite to cover the entire French territory"
Back in the late 1990s, Telecom New Zealand did the same thing with all satelite and cable bandwidth into the country to prevent anyone else buying it - doing so allowed them to keep prices up. The cost of the unsused bandwidth was significantly lower than the profit hit they'd have taken by having to pricematch incoming competition
In other countries (Cook Islands, Fiji, Tonga, Philippines) the incumbents simply got the government to declare they were the only company allowed to offer international services - sometimes by the simple expedient of requiring a license to operate, which they would simply never ever issue
The US was about to invade Japan (with the allies) and stood to lose around 1 million soldiers in the process. They're STILL (in 2022) handing out purple hearts minted in anticipation of that 1945 land invasion
Japanese civilian casualties were projected to be around 10 million
Meantime another 25 million people would have died in China - a US ally at the time - as the IJA continued its scorched earth retreat policy for at least another 6 months
The Japanese leadership weren't even particularly impresssed with Hiroshima. Compared with the one million dead in the Tokyo firestorm it wasn't even a drop in the bucket. What got their attention was that it was achieved with ONE bomb and they only realised that 3 days after the event
Hindsight is 20/20 but even Japanese will tell you that the 2 nuclear weapons saved more lives than they killed
It's unlikely. The country is too big and too fragmented to govern
What we call "Russia" is something like 87 "autonomous republics" and it's more likely that many of those will announce full independence
It's lkely that by June 90% of the aviation fleet will be grounded (only 5% are 100% russian-built and getting spares/support for the rest is essentially impossible) with large chucks of the sector already idled. The significance of that is the lack of year-round passable roads across large chunks of the Russian hinterland
That kind of setup relies on earth (and rocks) being a pretty good insulator, so you can deposit and withdraw heat as needed year-round
Geothermal benefits and suffers from the same issue. They always start out well but once you draw off heat they invariably suffer from very slow replenishment issues unless sitting on top of a mantle plume or magma chamber (and even then it's iffy)
That kind of fission design was produced in the 1960s (98-99% output waste reduction, and hot enough to produce supercritical steam, which virtually no current fission reactor design can do)
It also reduces input waste by 89% (that's how much is wasted when you enrich uranium to "reactor grade") and can act as a nuclear garbage disposal for existing nuclear waste including that wasted "depleted uranium" (which is important because depleted uranium is actually your base material for nuclear weapons production, not the enriched stuff)
Fission reactors as we know them are built around the waste products of weapons-making because the original power reactor was and IT was built that way "because that's what was available"
There are better designs. Alvin Weinberg proved that in the 1960s and promptly got drummed out of the US nuclear industry (ironicaly he built the original fission reactor as we know it and built the better one because he didn't like the way his prototype was being scaled up to dangerous sizes). Several countries are working on that and China's 2MW test unit went critical last September. We should be seeing announcements on progress towards their 100MW electrical test unit soon
"if everything is compiled by GCC, where's the innovation?"
In a commercial environment it's driven by competition and the risk is monopolism (embrace, extend extinguish)
In a GNU environment it's driven by the commons itself. If something's better it WILL be folded into the mainstream, Sucessful forks flourish and become the mainstream, Unsucessful ones have the useful parts incorporated into mainstream anyway
As an aside, IIRC the original Atari ST roms were coded/compiled using Lattice C
in the early 2000s someone recompiled them using a more modern compiler (I don't know how much source mangling was required), resulting in them occupying less than half the ROM space as well as running significantly faster