Posts by Malcolm Weir

Re: And next: commercial positioning

I'm not sure that Starlink _is_ compatible with a GNSS application. I think there are three main issues:

-- As I understand it, the individual Starlink spacecraft have some degree of autonomy in order to avoid each other. So a given article may not actually know, precisely, where it is! Maybe it will be good enough, but...

-- I also doubt they have a highly accurate clock, because that adds cost, and as the whole point of the constellation is to maintain low-latency connections, whatever timing information a given spacecraft might need would be amply addressed by an IEEE1588 clock synchronization system.

-- The terrestrial RF links are narrow, with the system working like a cell system handing off "calls" to different access points/satellites and beam-forming used to solve the power problem. This means that the footprint of a beam may be tiny, e.g. a 10km circle.

So a classic GNSS is probably not on the cards. But if a Stalink satellite "knows" enough about a ground-station's location to steer a beam to it, that would presumably make it theoretically possible to get the position of that 10km circle. And successive spacecraft could, over time, improve on that ... but this is all assuming that the system doesn't already depend on GPS to steer the beams to the ground stations (which may or may not be the case, but I wouldn't rule it out!).

What I do think is very plausible is that, if there's a good business case, that there may be a GNSS variant of the Starlink spacecraft. One very specific business case that I know SpaceX has put thought into is... how do you locate yourself on Mars? If the answer to that is a Martian GNSS, an Earth variant is an incremental and useful addition, and Starlink proves they have the technology to launch and manage such a constellation...

Re: Move on

You will never know if your vote has been counted... ballot boxes get lost, electronic voting machines may or may not report tallies correctly, your name may not be correct on the register so they mark your ballot "provisional", etc. Think about the chaos of the Democratic primary caucus in Iowa this year!

However, for those who worry about those things, California has ways to deliver completed ballots direct to the polling station or (in my city) large collection boxes at City Hall.

Re: Space Taxis

10 flights per year exceeds the design goals of the ISS. The station is designed to support up to 7 people for ~6 months (I think the limit is 13 for a few days), with the idea of rotating about half the crew every 3. So the requirements of the ISS can be met with 4 flights per year, each with 3 or 4 crew members (Soyuz carries three). Of course, the shuttle flights had flight crew that returned with the craft after a week or so, so shuttle manifests with 7 or so people weren't uncommon (which is presumably why Crew Dragon can carry 7).

Simultaneous, Boeing has a manned vehicle that they are debugging. And Jeff Bezos is trying to figure out how to deliver packages to space with Blue Horizons, too.

I believe SpaceX has 5 trips scheduled over the next 18 months or so, and the Russians are still in the business. So for a while, we'll have (hopefully) significant excess manned capacity to the ISS, effectively using manned vehicles in place of robotic craft.

But that's the point: the ISS is just a convenient test destination. Ultimately, for SpaceX, this is just a stepping stone to crewed BFRs on their way to Mars.

Re: I hope it's a good result

The pragmatist notes that, even if the lawyers were working for free, the hours of any organization's staff required to fight a legal action have value. I mean, if you have a task that would cost you $10K to do internally, or $8K to hire a consultant to do for you, it's obviously worth considering the consultant... and similarly if throwing that $8K at a troll shuts them up (permanently), it's probably smarter to pay them than to fight.

Re: US Law applies worldwide

And the UK needs to join the US in the corner, in their case not least because of their habit of allowing libel tourism...

Funnily enough, the USA has a law known as the SPEECH act, which specifically voids enforcement of any speech-related judgment that would have unconstitutional if sought in the US.

So there's your model. Oh, wait, that business of only permitting compensatory, not punitive, damages is exactly the same sort of thing, enacted for the same sort of reasons!

Meanwhile I find the US judges getting whiny about UK judges interfering with their final order amusing, because the US judges got the case precisely because SAS didn't like the final Uk/EU order...

Re: "Not enough pressure in the LOX tank ullage to maintain stability"

While Starship is intended to be the Mars mission launcher, it first has a career as a orbital launcher. 42,000 Starlink satellites wont launch themselves...

This sort of data sounds like sensitive, but not classified, information (a category called "controlled unclassified information", CUI). In the US, the prevailing attitude is not that suppliers "should be barred" so much as noting that they (Visser) may have difficulty getting new contracts from their customers (whose data they allowed to leak)...

Re: Hobson's choice

Ignoring the anti-big-company bias we generally see...

My initial thought was that, as with the Coca-Cola recipe issue, that this creates a genuine conflict between trade secrets and and public policy with an adversarial legal system. Absent the adversarial thing, the court could appoint a neutral expert, but that's something we (US and UK, particularly) only do when it's the legal system's own secrets at issue (e.g. the courts routinely appoint special masters to examine claims of "legal privilege" which are fundamentally the same sort of idea, but they won't do that for non-lawyers, because... reasons!)

But then I thought again, and realized that there must be people who used to work on Google algorithms but don't anymore, and those people would already have the special SEO insight that Google claims that they're worried about.

So either Google is genuinely hiding a smoking gun (which doesn't seem too likely, because the papers in question have already been filed, by Google, and the fact that they are willing to allow a different third party to look at it), or this is a larger play in order to add credence to whatever the papers say ("they must be the crown jewels, because Google wanted to keep them under wraps").

Therefore, my conclusion is that this is a "line in the sand" to limit how deep into Google's code this (and future) courts can pry...

Re: Expectation

The breach was through unauthorized use of otherwise authorized credentials. So the statement makes perfect sense and indicates an unexpected level of anomaly detection!

Re: Ah, that old chestnut.

No, I'm not. But anyone using the "fire in a crowded theater" trope is (see the comment to which I was replying). And if you use that trope, you should at least have a vague clue about freedom of association _as well as_ freedom of speech.

Re: Travesty of Justice

Not really. Perens at least nominally owes the lawyers the amounts claimed; those are the damages that they are asking the court to award. If Perens and the lawyers agree to settle the debt with a lower amount, that's up to them and unrelated to the anti-SLAPP motion.

(Typically, when a settlement is reached for a lower amount than is asked, the lawyers typically agree to accept the amount in full payment of the debt. But they could insist on being paid the full $526,000).

Re: (e)to donate blood;

OK, so granted you may be in a lower-risk group than your age alone suggests... but (a) how does the NHSB&T org. know that (they do know your age), and (b) it's not unreasonable to note that people of your age tend to have greater notions of social obligation than people in theie 20s and 30s, and even if you are good to go, what about people who may take your acts as encouragement to put themselves (and people with whom they live) at higher risk?

Setting an example works by, err, setting an example. So please stay home and hoard that luverly O- stuff, so that when the worst of the peak is over, you are in a position to drop off a pint...

Re: New French study confirms results

Not really: there was no control group, so we have no idea what the prognosis would have been without the treatment (and I acknowledge that this is a horribly tricky issue for clinicians: if you believe a treatment will work, how can you ethically withhold it from the control group?).

The potential issue is the same as that which homeopaths have been using to scam people for ages: was the improved outcome a function of the treatment, or of other factors incidental to the treatment? (With homeopathy, the source of the improved results wasn't the magic of the treatment, but the fact that the "treatment" was clean water, while other patients got untreated water!)

Re: @DougS

To the extent that this is true (which is not very far, but it has a kernel of truth), it's worth remembering that the same was broadly true of the last occupant: the MSM went after Obama since he took the oath of office, for the precisely the same reasons!

It's what the media does.

Sure, Fox is sycophantic towards Trump and was/is hostile to Obama, but I'm have a hard time remembering when Obama got the full sycophant treatment from the allegedly left-wing media (drone strikes, etc.)

It is entirely possible that some of the "going after Trump" stuff is caused by, I dunno, stuff Trump does / does not do.

And to those who applaud Assange for wikileaks: compare and contrast with the way Snowden disclosed his leaks, notably avoiding naming people, unlike Assange who jeopardize people by dumping without editing out extraneous material (which is what the media does.).

Re: Figures

Also... Falcon 9 (and Falcon Heavy) are only interim vehicles; Starship aka BFR is the direction SpaceX is heading, as you'd know from the video: they want 3 launches [i]per day[/i] While a Falcon 9 can put 60 Starlink satellites in orbit, the Starship is expected to carry about 400...

As to the economics of 4, 5 or 100 launches: I believe this is a reference to the economics of Starlink, not regular commercial launches. But even then, the economics are soon to shift: they have 300 "v1" satellites in order, with another 58 "production ready".... and 420 is the number they need to start providing service aka generating income, with 780 to provide "moderate" coverage.

Of course, one of their target markets is "aircraft in flight", and that depends on the airlines surviving the virus.

Re: Repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act

Oh, that's particularly ignorant in this context: repealing section 230 would make websites liable for the content of commentards. You may or may not think that's a good thing, but in this context, it would do precisely what this article is complaining about: Yelp and Google's "organic" search results would both die (particularly Yelp), as their results would be considered speech, and Google's "sponsored" listings would be all that's left.

Remember when you submitted your website to directories, like Yahoo!? And then along came Alta Vista, then Google...

Also, "hewhoshallnotbenamed" would have been unable to post what he posted, as it could be seen as defamatory to Mike Lee, Google and Facebook. It's probably not _actually_ defamatory, but who'd want to go to court to defend that post?

Section 230 created the internet as it exists today. Politicians and big businesses eager to control discourse want to stifle free speech in favor of strict liability rules, because there's no-one with a greater interest in limiting the First Amendment than the Establishment!

Re: Ring any bells?

Well, fly them from Chicago to Florida on a 737 MAX. The 747 MAX has none of the issues of the 737 MAX, mostly due to the essential non-existence of the former...

Re: Does US Jurisdiction = planet Earth?

Well, yes... anyone "doing business" in a jurisdiction is liable to someone asserting that they're subject to that jurisdiction.

See also every ruling from the EU against Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc...

Re: And losers they are

While it's fun to claim the reason people used personal email addresses was to circumvent records laws, the much more likely explanation is the one that multiple people have offered: the US Government is crap at IT

Colin Powell, when he had Hilary's job as SecState, gave the same rationale as Clinton on the use of personal Emails: the security folks had gotten confused about who the boss was. It is not IT's job to tell the boss what to do, but rather to facilitate delivery pf the boss's needs. Clinton asked for a secure "blackberry" (actually made by General Dynamics, as Obama used), and the twats at State refused. So she used her own setup. SecState is the most senior cabinet post in the government...

As regards the classified information issue: precisely three (of 30,000) emails contained even partial security markings, and those were the (C) for Confidential ones. A total of 110 messages contained classified material at the time.

HOWEVER, the effort to throw political mud at Clinton ignores the fact that those 110 messages should not have been sent on unclassified email, regardless whether the unclass email servers were run by the State Department, Clinton, or AOL! So this is not an issue concerned with personal servers, just a perfectly conventional "information mishandling" issue. The State Department is also obfuscating this point because they don't want to look to see who else has been sending sensitive information on the wrong side of the red/black divide...

Re: I find this rather sad

Not really... Apple's strength has historically been in "technical marketing" rather than true innovation. Of course, they have innovated from time to time, but what makes Apple impressive is their ability to combine a bunch of existing stuff into something they can sell as special.

Re: The service animal scam is about to come to a very abrupt end

I've heard a number of people make this claim about "service animals" being a scam. First, they're talking about _support_ animals, which are not the same as _service_ animals, hence the different words.

Second, even if you are talking about _support_ animals, who, precisely, is (or should be) the judge of the benefit that the animal brings?

For example, if having a dog means you don't need to take anti-depressant medication, is that enough to qualify the dog as a "real" support animal... I know several people that were long-time patients taking doctor-prescribed meds, like Welbutrin, who quit the meds when they got the dog. Sure, the mechanism is probably that taking Fido for a walk everyday relieves the depression, but if it's the presence of the dog that inspires the walking, well, who's to say that's worse than popping pills?

I certainly accept there are some people with support animals that want the beast as a "petcessorary", but it seems to me that most of the regulations against (say) dogs are based on unsound motives. For example, the airlines hate emotional support animals because they don't get to charge ludicrous fees to transport them... and use their staff's tired "a dog bit me once" line as a justification (penalize the owners of dogs who bite, not everyone).

Re: Wait a minute

(Ditto Apple, of course)...

The problem I have with this viewpoint is that it's "just" picking on the largest players (Apple and Google). But the issue is generic: what about the CCTV, Wifi base stations, Bluetooth beacons... the latter at least potentially collecting metadata even from individuals that don't connect/pair (the mere fact that a device is in range is collectable).