Posts by John Smith 19

"Don't you have to apply KW of electricity to see this effect, as per the original experiments? "

Funny you should say that.

Because that's just about what current Ion thrusters need to generate milliNewton thursts from a big tank of (expensive) Xenon.

Until they run out of course.

IIRC Most people thought Shaylers explanation of how the thruster worked was BS.

However several teams claim to have demonstrated thrust is being generated. And if you don't understand how something works how do you know what it's safe to ignore (or just leave out) in the design? "I left the power transformer out of the amplifier I built but it should work fine anyway." WTF?

The really attractive part of a propellantless thruster is not that it could drive a probe out to Pluto (with a fission power source of some kind).

It could then bring it back afterward.

"Perhaps they'll also penalize the idiots who insisted on foisting insecure "smart meters" on us."

Starting with the Peer who inserted the relevant clauses-for-cash in the necessary Bill.

This is not an EU requirement.

It is driven by Tony Blair wanting to stuff up Gordon Brown.

Nothing else.

"People are also becoming much more aware that their data has value,"

They are, but very slooooooooooooly.

60million people versus 490million It's not a playground fight John, then again

Tell me that after the UK tries to negotiate any new trade deals and isn't part of a 550million person trading block and 1 of 1 instead of 1 of 28.

Back here in 2022 say?

That episode was based on a book called "Mutant 39: The Plastic Eaters"

I think you'll find it's the other way round.

IIRC there were several novels done by Read & Pedlar, using roughly the plot of an episode but losing the Dept of O & M connection.

When oil had just quadrupled in price (I looked it up. to $12/barrel) and people thought the human race would wise up (and a big mainframe had a whole 512KB of core store).

What should really scare people is that 4 decades later the human race has not wised up.

In Thunderbirds "The Hood" was an occasional hazard for International Rescue.

IRL he's the new British Home Secretary :-(.

The world did not get Space:1999. It got Captain Scarlet and the even more sinister UFO.

But don't worry. A short visit to "Dr Jackson" and you'll forget about such inconvenient memories.

The different perspective it shoots suns out should ....

have read.

"The different perspective it shoots suns (potential extra solar plants transits) at should also pick up candidates (for extra solar planets) that probes in the ecliptic plane do not."

Apologies for the quite intense level of confusion that paragraph may have caused.

Clearly this will make setting up a carosel fraud harder.

Wheather that is a good or bad thing will depend on wheather you're

a) A UK taxpayer seeing one guy (allegedly) trouser £750k from HMRC

b) A person actually planning a carousel fraud

Crony Capitalism at it's best

Like the clause in the DMCA that means copyright on a digital recording is not owned by the artist but by the recording company.

Helpfully inserted by a Senatorial staffer who later joined a large record lable.

How many Senators actually wrote this law?

How many will read it?

How many will actually understand it's implications?

And this is the benefit for no life limits on Congressional seats in either house.

French not only won more battles during the Hundred Years War but won the war overall.... :)

Was that in points overall or was their a ref's decision?

""UK's Rural Payments Agency is 'failing on multiple levels'""

Which is notable.

But not in a good way.

$62 for a Falcon 9 launch compared to about $10M for a BFR.

We'll see.

People thought they'd cut the cost of launch further once they'd demonstrated reuse.

Didn't happen.

What really lowers prices is effective competition.

No competition --> No reason to lower prices.

"he upshot of this is that OpenPGP messages are way better protected against

such kind of attacks than S/MIME messages. U"

So bottom line.

If you really need security don'f FFS send HTML based email.

Live with a more direct style. More text, less "rich content"

my impression..the cabinet..incapable of..deciding..brewery the celebration piss up will be held in,

And you would be correct.

Although with the likes of Boris Johnson and Jakob Rees Mogg no doubt it will be somewhere with centuries of history and the serving staff will be superb.

If nobody voted, it would have a considerable effect.

Not really clear how this "First past the post" system actually works, are you ?

the sooner we start to build our capabilities again the less we will hear about how

You have it backwards.

Being in Europe would allow the UK to gain European funding for building a launch system other European countries (indeed other countries) could buy and operate.

"I find it hard to understand how we got to be where we are now,"

If you're talking about Britain I'd suggest you look at the history of the "Suez Crisis 1956," which had a traumatic effect on the UK ruling class.