Posts by werdsmith

I can turn any car into a self driving one using nothing more than a housebrick on the accelerator.

AKA, Audi driver.

Oh, it was a b. Sorry, haven't go my reading glasses.

Re: Comments are missing the point

The statement from Musk said:

Data logs recovered so far show Autopilot was not enabled & this car did not purchase FSD.

Re: Genuine Question

Yes, that's how it's always been.

Re: Defending Tesla

But Tesla repeatedly tell drivers not to use the FSD unattended. On the dash screens and expect hands on the wheel. Tesla do not tell people use devices to bypass the measures that require a driver to be in control.

Re: WTF breaks ITs MRDA Cover

In fact. It would be some frisbee throw from a Lunar rover. Of course I meant Mars Rover.

Been studying Lunar rovers today and they are on my mind.

Re: WTF breaks ITs MRDA Cover

If it tips over, could you pop out and put it back on its skids?

Maybe if there was some kind of lunar rover nearby with a robotic arm, it might be possible.

Re: @Graham Dawson - Nothing there...

Because our planet is tectonically active and very wet, a crater from a meteor strike fades away.

On the moon, for example, such craters stay as they were created for millions of years as only the solar wind affects them. So if you can find a million year old event that hasn't been disturbed you can study million year old history.

Re: Adaptive learning

I think people asking about testing the software before flight are being tongue in cheek.

But of course they may have fresh information sent back by the new Mars car thingy and have taken that into account. Doing OTA update to a little quadcopter on Mars which is a sub-vehicle is pretty amazing and always makes me feel good to know people can do this stuff.

Re: Nothing there....

If my imagination were that dead to see this amazing science as “a photo of a rock”, I doubt I would want to live on.

Re: What's to stop... Misconceptions

I don’t suppose they were so busy adorning the rover vehicle with camera that they forgot to put a robotic arm on the rover?

Seriously. I don’t know why NASA bother recruiting their highly trained and educated engineers when they could just ask on the register forums and be told where they are going wrong.

Re: No TV

I find the British to be largely apathetic about the royals. My old dad referred to the queen as “the old crow bait”.

On Diana funeral day, I was in Ireland and I had put the coverage off to watch Italian Grand Prix qualifying .

Coverage this time round has been ridiculous and unnecessary, with talking heads clawing desperately for platitudes and banalities, barely knowing what to say. I’ve discovered a lot more channels down the epg. Smithsonian is excellent.

BBC put up a page for people to register complaints about the amount of coverage, then they had to pull the form because it was deluged with complaints. Their ratings absolutely tanked. Serves them right, media has been misreading the public for decades. We generally don’t give a shit.

Re: Little Miss Sunshine

Germans done away with the diminutive honorific Fräulein a long time ago and use only Frau.

Re: SpaceX have turned rocket science into Spaghetti Engineering

"Look at SABRE and Skylon for the radical, new and innovative."

New as is conceived more than 40 years ago and so far only tested as discrete component stages and no integrated motor with pre-cooler has run yet? Reaction were formed in 1989. It has

Unfortunately, British R&D means British investors who are shit-scared to invest and therefore snail-pace development. The guy who came up with the idea retired 4 years ago, they've had 32 years already. There's no chance of a pre-cooled motor being in service in 8 years from now. I'll be shocked if one flies subsonic on a test airframe with three other turbofans to help it. Actually, I'll be shocked if an integrated motor runs on a test stand.

It was reported as something good when RR invested £20 million in RAL. I'm guessing one SpaceX Starship test launch costs more than that.

Unless somebody grows some balls and gives it real backing, RAL are nothing more than a long term academic study.

Re: A pound of water - in low grav

"The ISS isn't in low grav at all. It's only a few hundred miles up. Gravity up there is only about 10% lower than it is down here."

But the ISS does not meet the equal and opposite pushing back part of the equation that we have down here, so the picture is not quite complete.

Space Station has been up 22 years and a solar cycle is 11 years.

Some of it was up during the 2003 busy period.

Re: Call the RAC?

“ I think that retrofitting a GPS transmitter onto a low earth orbit satellite involves more than just fiddling. For a start you have to catch the thing and they are REALLY fast..... Assuming you can catch it as it whizzes by you “

Why would you want to mess with spacecraft in orbit when most of the constellation is yet to launch?.

Re: Clueless

Yes, a credible opposition leader would have destroyed May before Boris was in the picture.

Re: Budgets

Refurbishment of the flat is peanuts as by 1960 the buildings at 10,11,12 Downing Street were virtually condemned and had to be rebuilt behind the facia. This took almost 30 years. In about 2006 further structural problems were found and more major building took place. The place is constantly under remodelling and improvement so decorating the living quarters is really not anything to wet your bed about,

Re: Never been a better time or a lower bar for entry.

Not to forget, cleaning toilets and any kind of cleaning is extremely important, especially in a healthcare environment.

Yes, well known problem, it’s called “the curse of knowledge”.

The further into maths you go, the more it depends on understanding other parts of it. It builds on itself.

Re: Shouldn't be optional

Undergrad STEM subjects such as sciences (especially physics) will require coding skills and will include coding modules.

But, of course, CompSci is far more broad a subject than coding.

Re: Have they considered paying more for IT?

My IT salary in the UK is an issue for the business.

Because they can recruit three of me in our other location in another country for the same amount.

Increasingly work is going there.

Fortunately they over there often need me over here.

Maths is something I'm not cut out for, but I have to do it.

It's practice, practice and more practice for me. I am so jealous of people with maths aptitude who do it easily. Maths is much like learning a language, or learning to play a musical instrument (minus the motor skills part). It is enormous in breadth and depth and ultimately very satisfying to get the hang of.

Comp Sci will attract a certain type of person and there are less of those than might want an IT GCSE.

I'm an author and I do a bit of coding. The coding goes off into some other system and is never heard of again unless its causing some kind of trouble or is suspected of it.

But the author thing, you'll be surprised how much the success depends on promotion and getting it noticed, travelling round and appearing to do talks and signing sessions. Social media increasingly (ugh). These things are as much of the workload as the writing.