Posts by Rich 11 4584 publicly visible posts • joined 8 Jul 2009
It's the kind of thing Obama would love, tho.
You just can't help yourself, can you? Like Trump, you blurt out any old nonsense to fill your need to slag off his predecessor.
You must think this was all a bad idea.
Please don't tell me they also take their personnal mobile phones along with them for the ride too?
Cast your mind back to the Iraq war and you may recall that soldiers' personal mobiles were the primary form of communication between many units because the newly supplied radio gear was so naff. The partial Bowman system first issued to infantry squads was quickly nicknamed 'Better Off With Map And Nokia'.
Gordon Brown cost us about £5 Billion
And George Osborne cost us hundreds of billions when he decided that protecting the UK's triple-A rating was more important than investing in industry and in training to boost the economy and get us out of recession. The ongoing cost of that decision is still present, with the double-whammy of low wages and precarious employment hitting people in an everyday environment of artificially high asset prices, a structural deficit not expected to be cleared until 2025 instead of 2015 as first promised, and Brexit looming on the horizon.
It's almost like the country has suffered for generations under chancellors who didn't have a fucking clue, serving their time before blithely walking away to take up highly-paid directorships in the City, the bastards.
his ability to think the same thought for any length of time is limited, and the fellows in the three-letter agencies probably don't care for Assange
All that someone from a TLA would have to do is photoshop a long beard and a turban on a picture of Assange and Trump would be yelling, "Lock him up! Take his ass to Gitmo!"
College students aren't the wealthiest of people. There'd also be a good chance in that environment that any woman threatened with coercion would have a couple of large friends overflowing with testosterone who were willing to go along to any proposed meeting and resolve the issue.
Unh. So if a star blows off its outer layers and the remnant is smaller than ten Jupiters, then it becomes a planet?
No. You're confusing smaller with less massive.
All known white dwarfs have a mass of between 0.5 and 1.44 solar masses, yet their radius is no more than that of the Earth. The Chandrasekhar Limit of 1.44 solar masses is accepted as the theoretical maximum mass for a standard electron-degeneracy white dwarf and is supported by observation, while the existence of helium white dwarfs of below 0.5 solar masses is hypothesised but not yet supported by observation (possibly because the hypothesis also suggests that it would take longer than the current age of the universe for a candidate star to reach this stage of its life).
Stars can shine, planets only cool. Simple.
No, it's really not that simple. White dwarfs do only cool (unless they acquire sufficiently more mass from somewhere, anyway). They are not producing heat by fusion; they are extremely hot stellar cores radiating inherent heat and will take tens of billions of years to reach background temperature. Rocky planets, on the other hand, are still capable of generating heat and radiating it away, although by nuclear fission rather than fusion (and don't get me started on gas giants).
They won't need super accuracy to attack a target like Camp Bastion.
True enough, but a target like that will have its own air defences.
The original proposition was about readily-available drones becoming better dogfighters than hugely-expensive F35s. By the time we reach that state of affairs, I think it very likely no more F35s will be being built or even being flown -- except perhaps by some very lucky well-heeled hobbyists.
Someone suggested that guerrilla drone operators (assuming they were of the jihadist kind) we would be willing to sacrifice themselves for the chance to take down an F35. I think good drone operators would be a valuable resource that their leadership wanted to protect, not throw away. So, it occurred to me that if the Blue forces wanted to take out an Orange drone operator hidden in a building in a city, then rather than use an overkill precision weapon they would have another option: target the comms gear on the roof by flying in low and slow, and drop a couple of hand grenades out of the cockpit of a Sopwith Camel...
my money would be on guerillas soon having drones that are "good enough" to be a real PIA
The drones might be good but those guerrillas are going to lose all their drone operators pretty fast, unless they can also afford satellites. Being able to control drones from a base well away from the theatre of operations is a huge advantage. The best guerrillas will be able to do is hide in a city, very close to a target that their enemy can't risk hitting with their overkill precision weapon.
Or, and this is my preferred solution, we can stop having kids (ideally an average family size of <1 child on average per couple - but <2 on average at most), quarter the population of the planet
Most countries of Europe and North America already have family sizes of below the replacement rate. The rate of population growth in most of the rest of the world has been slowing down since the 1970s; most of the people who will be alive in 2050 have already been born, and the global population is forecast to level out by 2100. The few countries which buck this trend tend to be war-torn ones like Afghanistan and Somalia.
Given that China's One Child policy had to be abandoned as unworkable (not to mention hated so much that even the CP feared there would be a violent backlash they couldn't control), how do you plan to impose your solution upon the world? Will it involve guns? Or will it involve the wealthier countries providing more international aid to further support the existing, proven path of increasing the provision of healthcare and of women's empowerment?
Voyager 2 is about 126AU out from the sun, so when it aims its signals at NASA HQ it only has to point at the sun with a beam which will be 2AU across by the time it gets here. That's just a one-degree angle, but I bet in practice it's a lot wider than that already. So, no, I don't think they'll be spending today hurriedly rewriting the specs for all their planned probe missions. ;-)
Printing videos. Yeah, I had the same request from an art student 20-odd years ago. She'd even brought in some nice, shiny paper that was actually suitable for our CMYK wax colour printer. She looked so disappointed when I told her videos didn't work like that that I made the time to show her how to take screenshots and arrange them in Photoshop, and she was happy with that.
Even pot plants will struggle to get any sense out of the chat bot.
I agree that the onus for their choice should be upon the student, but those young people need to be equipped with sufficient information to be able to look five years or more ahead. Someone has to fund that research, and you can be damn sure industry would slant it their way if they were the ones paying -- and they'd have no qualms about setting it aside if it became inconvenient a year or two later. Governments should at least be taking a longer view, one which benefits the country as a whole, and also -- theoretically at least -- can be held responsible for their failings. Governments are also uniquely placed to provide incentives to support a desired objective which is subjectively seen by young people as too hard a course, a vocation slagged off by the tabloids, uncool etc.
The automated bicycle.
Semi-autonomous personal transport used to be quite a common sight. It could take a little time to train their AI to meet your specific needs, but they could end up being very reliable and would last you for at least a third of your life. They required some regular maintenance but were fuelled mostly by hay and water, and the primary waste products were beneficial to your garden. They were surprisingly popular.
And while you're at it, pay for your own education, you annoying little sprogs, and stop being a burden on the taxpayer. Pay for your own damn vaccinations as well. And I don't see why I, the great British taxpayer, should have to shell out on Social Services to stop your fag-junky parents from beating the crap out of you and starving you to death, or for the police to arrest you or for the courts to try you, and definitely not forty-three grand a year to keep your lardy arse in prison for twenty years. God, look at what this country has come to...
In other words, fuck off AC, you ignorant twat.
"We can not rule out completely the ET hypothesis for the FRBs in general."
Surely a civilisation capable of generating such massive amounts of power could find better things to do with its time.
Maybe the ET hypothesis can't be ruled out completely (in the sense that absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence), but the odds against it being correct here are, well, astronomical.
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