Posts by Rich 11 4578 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
All we need is a buzzy name and we can get waterfall development back in fashion.
TQAIASSM (t'-kwai-as-'m)
Total Quality Artificial Intelligence Administered Stateful Software Management.
I can feel the dollars rolling in already. I'll write it once I've been funded enough to retire to a distant tropical island (volcano lair optional).
Provide an argument for remain based on real world facts and/or data,
Sure. We retain a stable economy by remaining part of the largest free trade bloc on the planet. We retain the influence we have on the global stage as part of the EU. Given our population size and the size of our economy, we effectively share the leadership and direction of the EU with France and Germany, so we have far greater influence within the EU than nine-tenths of the members. Much of this is determined through the Council of Ministers, where you can see that in the ten years prior to 2016 decisions went our way 87% of the time (a figure which any British government would have been proud of in Westminster over that same period).
i.e. no opinions and no FUD?
Now you provide the argument for leaving, based upon real-world facts and data, without resorting to opinion and FUD.
... if you haven't tried to find the roots of a quadratic equation using FORTRAN 77 on a RM Nimbus 186* PC with aforementioned green screen.
Was that the RM which was a hefty black box with square aluminium handles, looking more like a modern rack-mounted server than like any PC on the market back then? Yeah, I remember one sitting at one end of the college lab. I also don't remember anyone ever using it.
On the surface that's the most practical solution I've yet seen, but then it occurred to me that the Faragists would be frothing at the mouth about our lovely British blue honesty boxes being polluted with euro cents that had once been in a French trucker's pockets and still smelled of Romanian garlic.
Or sending those to Phobos and using that as a staging post.
Is Phobos's gravity sufficient to make that a practical matter rather than so small as to become a problem? I'd have thought it would be easier to insert food'n'fuel pods into Mars orbit and gather them up as you need them.
How many of those involuntary pioneers had the skills to survive? With that in mind, how many people would you have to send to Mars to create a viable colony? And what sort of warm welcome would they give you when you turned up to take possession? Your 0.3g golf course and hotel venture might look profitable on paper and attract the money needed to fund the spaceship, but I don't think you would see much actual return on your investment.
I could easily imagine a slow outbound trip and then sprinting home, burning the shielding.
You're certainly right that it needs a lot of investigation and analysis. One of the problems to be overcome, though, is that not all shielding is equal. A substance which is good at blocking or attenuating protons (the primary component of the solar wind) might do so in a way which induces a secondary neutron shower, so you need a secondary shield to catch all of those. This usually implies a lead/steel and water combination. If you're also burning fuel during the trip instead of falling under gravity after an initial burn to break planetary orbit, you don't have the luxury of being able to orientate your ship so that it provides optimal shielding if you're carrying little or no fuel and left out the heavy shielding. Resolving that will add a lot of engineering and introduce more things which could go wrong, because if there is a solar flare heading towards you you may lose three days of burn to avoid returning home minus your skin, and at a critical point could miss getting the ship home at all. It's complicated -- and I am far from an expert, so it's undoubtedly a damn sight more complicated than I think.
Nope. Forty days there, maybe forty days on the surface, forty days back.
I can appreciate why you'd want that, but you'd need a shit-tonne of fuel to do it. The most fuel-efficient Earth-Mars transfer takes about 260 days, and you'd have to arrive at Mars with over half the total fuel needed for the trip or have that amount sent ahead and waiting for you in orbit. I'm not going to sit down and do the calculation now, but your 40-day requirement would take about ten times as much fuel, because when you leave either Earth or Mars you're having to accelerate the fuel you plan to burn along the way. That needs a bigger ship (and hence yet more fuel) or dozens of discardable tanks to be left flying around the solar system in long, narrow orbits. Messy.
Microwave ovens don't use ionising radiation but would you stick your head in one?
No, because I know the difference between 1000W and 250mW and have heard of the inverse-square law. Have you?
Yep. The only thing worse is the "experts" who think that non-ionizing radiation is, axiomatically, "safe", regardless of dosage.
Florida1920 said nothing about non-ionizing radiation being automatically safe. Why did you choose to read it this way?
Fucking hell. It's the same old shit every time this subject comes up. Do we just get different people every time or does no-one bother to pay attention and do a bit of basic reading? Still, at least it's not vaccines or Brexit...
That's discrimination that is.
People's wealth is something which can and does change. You could win the lottery one day and be bankrupt the next. Some of these circumstances might be beyond your control, or things you never experience, but most are something you have a say over (you don't have to buy a lottery ticket, you can manage your money wisely).
What people are born with doesn't change (race, sexuality, gender dysphoria, etc) and is something they have to live with through no fault of their own.
Societal discrimination affecting one of these two categories is patently unfair. Can you work out why?
Shouldn't that be 'how many enemies and civilians'? All you're getting is a total, to help you decide if your surgical strike is worth the cost of a smart missile. The decisions on whether killing all the civilians just to kill your enemies is either moral or will be worth the negative publicity are entirely separate.
but having no plan to leave was brexiters fault.
But the leading Brexiters did have a plan to leave, and they told us how it would all work out, back during the campaign. The easiest thing in the world, we were told. Simple. Not a problem. Dozens of free trade deals signed on Day One. How could they know that unless they had a plan? Surely you aren't go to ... shudder ... tell us they were lying?
That being said, from about 11:30 pm until 7:45 am, the physics department could keep all of the processors at 100% for weeks at a time.
They told you they were running fission/fusion simulations, but in reality they were rolling in from the bar and playing Trek all night.
First he was a comedy act that couldn't win a primaryThen he was a bully that couldn't win a primary
The he won a primary
Then he was a racist who couldn't be president
Then he was a sex attacker who couldn't be president
Then he was a sexist who couldn't be president
Then he was a bigot who couldn't be president
Then he became president
But he demonstrably is a comedy act, a bully, a racist, a sex attacker, a sexist and a bigot. His very own words show this. The fact that he became president simply demonstrates that slightly less than 50% of voting Americans either didn't care about any of these facts or were positively encouraged by them. Do you think that's a good thing?
Things like manufacturing and tourism are already booming before Brexit has even happened.
Are they booming because of the Brexit vote or in spite of it? What about the strong run of good summer weather helping tourism? Or are you going to claim that the Brexit vote causing the pound to lose value was a really good thing, in which case you should be demanding we really fuck up the economy because it'll be good for tourism and exports. Oh, wait, you are....
It is nothing about having a working system. But it is everything about political ideology.
Which is why they put Irritable Duncan Syndrome in charge of it, the serial liar and failed Quiet Man who was so detached from reality that he thought £57 a week was quite sufficient to live on (he himself living rent-free in a £4m house owned by his father-in-law).
I think you need to look a little wider, because it's a bit more complicated than you seem to think. Languages change (unless perhaps you are a prescriptivist).
Gender was commonly used as synonym for sex up until maybe a century ago, when its dominant usage shifted towards the grammatical meaning before moving back a bit several decades ago. Note also that nouns described as gendered are not necessarily based on being feminine, neuter or masculine in languages outside of the Indo-European group.
Fifteen years or so ago I worked in a place that required a semi-annual Health and Safety workstation assessment, long before they became, ahem, popular. The software on my PC was sufficiently non-standard due to the requirements of my job that the assessment software (which only worked in POS IE6 and used a Shockwave plugin or something) wouldn't run due to compatibility issues. I'd just go and log in on one of the test PCs in the corner to carry out the assessment. Box ticked. Workstation unadjusted. H&S never noticed.
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