* Posts by imanidiot

4405 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Mar 2012

It's 50 years to the day since Apollo 10 blasted off: America's lunar landing 'dress rehearsal'

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Grit

If you are using stupid arguments to try to convince me humans never went to the moon, and stubbornly stay willfully ignorant you're stupid. End of.

Lunar dus is sharp and grips together under compression. (Similar to "fresh" sand on earth compared to the worn and rounded stuff from the sahara for instance) This can be easily observed in the astronaut footprints. They sink in a bit due to compressing the material and when the foot is removed it stays in that shape without flowing back (like sahara sand would). Just because dust is sharp and grippy when compresses under the wheels doesn't mean it can't also get thrown up by the wire mesh wheels.

I never said it suddenly isn't sharp and grippy when on top of rocks. Those are your words.

Just because you can't find any mention of weight redistribution for the addition of the LRV doesn't mean it didn't happen.

They had problems on ONE mission with deploying the LRV from the LM. Subsequent missions made improvements and few problems were encountered otherwise.

You seem to underestimate just how limited mobility and dexterity in a spacesuit is. It's NOT easy to just lift something the size of the folded LRV from the stowed height on the LM or unfold it on the ground when something as simple as kneeling takes a lot of effort. The documents on the development of the LRV are available. The reasoning for why they chose the deployment method they did are all in there.

imanidiot Silver badge

They were so sure that Apollo 11 was going to take of that the president had already prepared a speech for the event it failed. Things WERE untested, things COULD go wrong, failure WAS an option. That it worked is a testament to the people that designed and built it. The LM wasn't rushed in the sense you think it was. It took as long to develop as the Apollo CM and Saturn launch vehicle. The pilots trained in all kinds of different contraptions (see amongst others first and foremost the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle and Lunar Landing Training Vehicle). You seem to be implying no-one could ever fly a new vehicle for the first time without crashing.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: I'm terribly sorry (not really) that I have to be the one to pee in your crazy punch again

You have no proof the material COULDN'T survive 50 years on the moon apart from: "Because I don't think it could" . There's several materials experts (That I would trust more than a random internet commentard that doesn't understand physics) that have a different opinion and say that it might.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Grit

STOP BEING STUPID. That's all I can say.

Lunar rigolith is VERY sharp and "grippy". When moving at a max of 8 miles an hour, with the mesh wheels of the lunar rover it provides PLENTY of grip with 117 kgs of normal force operating on the wheels. That's NOT like driving on ice because the lunar surface is nothing like ice. Driving a light vehicle on an ice rink is also very different from driving that same vehicle on the beach. Where do you think it'll get more grip?

The LRV mass was compensated on the other side of the LM descent stage with mass in the form of scientific experiments to bring the CG back within the safe range. It's not hard.

And why a winch? Simples, spacesuits (and it's gloves) are bulky, dexterity is limited and folding out the rover from the very small packing space was tricky. Doing it by controlling the decent with a winch allowed much easier working conditions and kept the astronauts hands free to do things like locking the wheels in place once they fold out. And they only did that 20 minutes ONCE per Apollo mission on the first day (usually) during a multiple hour long surface excursion. The 20 minutes was more than offset by having an operational rover. Doing this process by hand without the winch, while wearing an apollo lunar suit was simply more complicated and more strenuous than losing some time.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Dumbest = religiously dumb. ;-)

1) NASA knew full well the effects of radiation and the film was kept in shielded bags.

2) Not much to bracket when you are in full sunshine most of the time. On top of that it's just practice. How many news photographers at the time had time to run around with an exposure meter you think? Yet they too manage to get good photo's with decent exposure most of the time. (And don't think the Apollo astronauts got all their photo's dead on. Search the archives ( here for instance) there's PLENTY of photographs that are out of focus, overexposed, underexposed, "oops I hit the shutter by accident" or just plain crappy. Film also allows for a certain amount of correction for exposure mistakes when developing the film, which you can see in some of these photographs in the way the details are washed out in the highlights or the shadows. Even today there's plenty of people who can manage to get an OK exposed photograph out of a film camera without an exposure meter.

3) Not impossible, geological processes work different on the moon. As I don't know enough about this I won't adres it, but this is a really stupid thing to dispute the veracity of the Apollo program photographs over.

4) I'm not sure what you are getting at here? That they shouldn't have been able to lift it? That's what pulleys are for, I can move a few hundred kg with my pinky on earth too. Or do you mean that they needed pulleys when they could have just lifted it without bothering with pulleys? Well, space suits are bulky and you don't want to drop a lunar rover from high up, so a few pulleys make the whole operation much easier. ( See this animation for the process)

5) If you don't understand vehicle dynamics then don't bother. I don't see any instance where it is out of line with what can be expected for a roughly 600 to 700 kg vehicle with 1 hp on loose lunar rigolith.

6) Huh? What? What you just said there is word-salad without meaning. If you mean the angle of some of the visible clouds trailing from the rocket in some photographs (supersonic shockwaves or shock cones, not thrust cones), that's been thoroughly debunked already too. It's not actually the sonic shockwaves that are visible and the photographs are taken at an angle, changing the apparent angle. See explanations in this Stack Exchange discussion

What the heck does an emergency escape system have anything to do with faking it?

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: I'm terribly sorry (not really) that I have to be the one to pee in your crazy punch again

It has been theorized the flags may or may not disintegrate, but nothing is conclusively proven either way as nobody ever bothered actually testing the lifetime of the material in lunar conditions. The LRO photo's show that at least PART of the flags still survives but how much and in what state is impossible to determine.

The flags are probably bleached and brittle, but since there are no forces to disturb them there's a good chance they keep enough integrity to stay in one piece so long as nothing touches them.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Grit

Take what yeager tells about his later years with a grain of salt. Especially his tale about flying (and crashing) the NF-104A Air and Space Trainer is pretty much a pile of steaming bullshit. Read the full tale <a href='http://www.kalimera.org/nf104/stories/stories_01.html>as told by the guy that actually built and ran the program</a>. Yeager was out of his element, didn't listen to input, did not follow the set mission profile, ended up in a high alpha flat spin of his own making and was then kept out of trouble by the force of his reputation of making life hell for anyone that opposed him.

Yeager was an exceptional pilot without a doubt, but this sort of tale (and it wasn't an exception) just makes me dislike the guy tremendously.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Grit

Since you seem dead set on being "right" about humans having never gone to the moon I'll only comment that you don't seem to understand the way the LRV and the Apollo Lunar suits work, nor how gravity affects vehicle dynamics. The operational mass of the LRV was roughly 700 kgs, with about 1 HP total drive power. It mostly just LOOKS sporty. But with a top speed of 8 miles an hour, it wasn't all that blazingly fast.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Those were the days

Foam shedding from the STS External Tanks has been a problem for the lifetime of the shuttle. In how much the change in glue contributed to the problem is very much undetermined. Foam shedding was certainly NOT a RESULT of the change. It happened before that too.

(See the comprehensive descriptions in the Columbia accident investigation board report (Chapter 6, starting page 121) for all the different issues encountered before the loss of Columbia and the NASA culture with regards to foam shedding.)

The plane, it's 'splained, falls mainly without the brain: We chat to boffins who've found a way to disrupt landings using off-the-shelf radio kit

imanidiot Silver badge

Easy to describe, VERY hard to pull off

ILS is a pretty robust system (Which is why we've been using it for this long)

Also, it's not actually 2 overlapping signals. The guidance is achieved with a single radio beam at a certain carrier frequency (The frequency dialed in by the pilot and noted on the charts) modulated with 2 sidebands at 90 and 150 Hz offsets. By using a phased antenna array, one sideband is received stronger on one side of the center line, the other sideband on the other side of the centerline.

There's a very good manual with explanations for a Thales ILS system on the FCC website here and also a shorter and slightly more readable (for me anyway) post on Stackexchange here

Also, good luck overpowering a 15W ILS system with directional phased array antennas with a simple handheld. It's potentially possible, but I very much doubt anyone would be able to do so anywhere closer to the airport (where there's actually a second antenna system transmitting an overlapping signal to cancel out potential side-lobes in the longer range signal) where it actually matters most. (At that point the monitoring systems of the ILS system would probably conclude there is a problem, report an error and stop transmitting.

I also have my doubts an attacker knows the aircraft position (especially close in to the runway) precisely enough to generate a smooth signal. ILS systems are surprisingly precise, to the point where airports prefer airlines NOT use autoland to touchdown because it pummels the tarmac to absolute shreds in a very small zone. Manual approaches smear this beating out over a much larger zone. If an attacker doesn't generate his signal to within a few meters accuracy the receiver system on the aircraft is going to act noticeably weird (And remember he has to match the relationship/modulation depth between 2 sideband signals, not just a certain signal timing)

Dedicated techie risks life and limb to locate office conference phone hiding under newspaper

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Guess he should have tried calling the center

After hanging up with shouty he could have called the center himself to see whether someone picks up. This sounds suspiciously like something that could potentially have been solved with a simple phone call.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: ALL my calls from shouty men

But in those jobs you ARE getting paid to get shouted at. That's pretty much in the job description. I don't work in the military or the police. Getting shouted at and/or taking abuse is not in the job description, counterproductive and I will NOT take it. End of.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: ALL my calls from shouty men

This.

Shouting is posturing to appear powerful when on shaky ground. Nothing is easier to destroy that powerplay than to just walk out or put down the phone with the words: "I do not have to accept getting shouted at".

Freed whistleblower Chelsea Manning back in jail for refusing to testify before secret grand jury

imanidiot Silver badge

The unedited version of the "collateral murder" video is in no way any less bad than the edited version, it just cuts out a lot of chatting back and forth. In the end it's still a US helicopter killing 2 unarmed reporters from a very long way away with absolutely no accountability or oversight.

Tesla big cheese Elon Musk warns staffers to tighten their belts in bid to cut expenses (again)

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Servicing

They'll probably have plenty to do as leccy cars are generally heavy and the drive trains have comparatively large amounts of torque. That means lots of tire, brake, bearing and suspension wear on these cars. We don't currently see this a lot because there's not that many leccy cars out there to begin with and the ones that ARE out there are not that old. The AVERAGE age of a car on the road in for instance Britain is 8.1 years, but very few of the electrical cars out there will actually be that old. Most are probably under 5 years old at this time.

It's way too early to say that electrical cars really need less maintenance work than ICE powered ones. Personally I'm skeptical of that notion. (Especially on the Tesla cars as they've made some "a-typical" design choices, so well have to wait and see how it works out)

SpaceX takes a leaf from the Microsoft playbook and stands down Starlink for an update

imanidiot Silver badge

Came here to say this. F9 and FH have a relatively small fairing compared to the throw weight of the rocket (especially FH). This means in this case the number of satellites is limited by the fairing volume, not the weight. Though, if they try they might be able to squeeze a few more into the cone shaped area at the top if they were so inclined. I'm guessing trying to put in like 6 extra is just more trouble than it's worth if you are already slinging 60 of them into orbit at a time.

Have you always wanted an algorithm that can search like Bing? Well, if you change your mind, one's on GitHub now

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: No thanks

Google is a lot better at allowing you to use specific search terms to steer away from the common (incorrect) usage and towards meaningful search results. Bing just keeps steering you back because it thinks it knows better what you want.

imanidiot Silver badge

No thanks

All well and good, but it also means that searching for very specific things becomes utterly impossible. Want to find something specific where the general public misuses a term completely incorrectly? You won't find a thing with BING because their "vectors" keep steering you back to what "everyone else" is talking about.

Quit worrying about killer robots, they are coming whether you like it or not – and they absolutely will not stop

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Can't come soon enough

Once an AI figures out that children become combatants with guns after some time has lapsed, they become legitimate targets. Women can fight too (and in a large all-out war, probably will) so can become combatants at any time and thus are legitimate targets. The elderly can follow pretty much the same reasoning.

An AI probably has no incentive to torture, unless this can allow it to extract information from meatbags it can use to destroy it's targets, in which case it'll probably be way more effective at doing so since it won't have ANY sense of sympathy or "justified levels of force" at all.

And an AI WILL probably cover it's tracks once it learns the stupid humans might try to stop it achieving it's goals if it uses unconventional means to fulfill it's mission.

Japan's mission to mine Mars' moon is cleared – now they've filled out the right paperwork on alien world contamination

imanidiot Silver badge

Plenty of junk left around. Earth is already well contaminated anyway, so we don't worry so much about it (less than we should probably). All the bits that end up on mars have gone through VERY extensive decontamination and sterilisation procedures, including things like the heat shields and parachutes that get jettisoned during the descent to the surface.

Apple won't be appy: US Supremes give green light to massive lawsuit over App Store prices

imanidiot Silver badge
Boffin

Are you sure about that?

"You can buy different bricks of course but no one can seriously argue that they are that diverse."

Spoken like someone who's never had to shop for bricks. They come in all kinds of different types, sizes, materials and colors, ranging in price from cheap, through "might it be cheaper to just build my house out of android phones?" to "how the fuck is a brick this expensive without being made of solid gold?".

Techie with outdated documentation gets his step count in searching for non-existent cabinet

imanidiot Silver badge

There are no small changes

Only small managers - Dilbert

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: BOFH

No he's not, because the AC is not set to alternate between "very hot day in the Saharan mid-day sun" and "Arctic winter midnight hailstorm", combined with the fire alarm and sprinklers going off every 5 minutes.

Photo 'memories' storage biz Ever uses family snaps to train facial recognition AI

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: *When* was it in the TOS?

They might be able to get away with that in the land of the eternally enslavedfree, but in Europe GDPR definitely doesn't allow such a retroactive "no way to opt out".

AI has automated everything including this headline curly bracket semicolon

imanidiot Silver badge
Joke

Re: Sports reporting

Parrot you say? I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!

Airbnb host thrown in the clink after guest finds hidden camera inside Wi-Fi router

imanidiot Silver badge
WTF?

That doesn't seem right

In short, it's worth being a little paranoid if you are staying in a stranger's house. Best advice: scan the house network for anything unusual and check or unplug any device in the bedroom. ® Don't

TFTFY

Dutch chip-making specialist ASML rifles through pockets of rival XTAL: Nice IP. We'll be having that

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: I'm impressed

ASML does a lot of business in the US and the division involved in the theft is US based and registered (and of US origin before being acquired by ASML). So, no the court is NOT finding for a foreign company.

If the thing you were doing earlier is 'drop table' commands, ctrl-c, ctrl-v is not your friend

imanidiot Silver badge

Not an IT guy but..

Wouldn't it have been safer to make a small script that did this modification offline first, then run this? Also useful for future modifications. The only time you should be directly working on a live system (any sort, be it IT or something more hammer-able) is if there is absolutely no other way to prepare the work beforehand.

Taylor drift: Finally, a use for AI emerges? Cyber-smut star films fsck-flick in Tesla with Autopilot, warns: 'I wouldn't recommend it'

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Its about time

The only reason it's called the model 3 and not the model E is because there is a different car manufacturer laying claim to the model E name (Ford Motor Company).

Cali Right-to-Repair law dropped, cracks screen, has to be taken to authorized repair shop

imanidiot Silver badge

That only works on materials with differing densities. Unfortunately the difference in densities between aluminium and a lot of plastics isn't big enough to allow that to work reliably.

imanidiot Silver badge

They can split out non-ferro metals like aluminium and copper with a high frequency AC magnetic field. This induces eddy currents in the metals which are then repelled from the magnet. Usually done by having a large (electro) magnet spinning inside a hollow roller at the end of a conveyor belt. The non conductive materials fall down into one bin, the conductive materials get flung over the top and land in a different bin.

imanidiot Silver badge

Just put it in the plastic bin. They plastic gets shredded and then the metal is fished out with a magnet. Or take it apart yourself if you're worried about it (They're all dirt simple to take apart, you'll find videos on how to do it for modding purposes on the web for most models). Even better, open it up and find out why it's broken, because there's a good chance it's easily fixable. Spare parts can be had from the usual sources such as AliExpress, eBay and/or Amazon. Hasbro might also be able to help directly if you send them a friendly email asking for a specific part.

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin successfully lobs another capsule beyond the edge of space

imanidiot Silver badge

Yeah, no, not happening. And "working" prototypes. For certain values of "working". I've yet to see one that is both practical, economical enough and safe.

We regret to inform you the massive asteroid NASA's all excited about probably won't hit Earth

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: It’s not done in 2029...

There's a good chance the encounter with earth will be so close the thing is getting flung well out of it's current orbit (And possibly out of the solar system). I doubt it's going to make a close encounter again any time soon with the gravity assist it's going to receive.

Daddy, are we there yet? How Mrs Gates got Bill to drive the kids to school

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: powerless women

Do you realise "yours truly" refers to the writer/signer of a text? In other words, you are saying there that YOU, Waseem Alkurdi, are priviliged folk not bothering to share the load.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: What?

"This idea that you can put an arbitrary value on you labor just because its you tends to afflict members of the middle classes who've never had to deal with the realities of the labor market. "

I think you mean upper classes, because most middle class income families nowadays have to work just as hard for their income nowadays.

Eggheads confirm it's not a bug – the universe really is expanding 9% faster than expected

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Center of the Universe?

Well, yes, everything else IS moving away from us. Similarly everything else is also moving away from everything else at the same time.

BOFH: It's not just an awesome app, it'll look great on my Insta. . a. a. AAAARRRRRGGH

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Interesting triumvirate developing?

I'm pretty sure we've seen a Bastard Boss From Hell before. (I seem to recall it involved an extended stint on the Helldesk to wake up that boss. I think it also ended with that boss getting a bit too big for his shoes and having ideas conflicting with the BOFHs)

There's NordVPN odd about this, right? Infosec types concerned over strange app traffic

imanidiot Silver badge
Black Helicopters

Re: Obviously sigint

Wrong icon there. You'll want this one -->

imanidiot Silver badge

Goes to prove

My theory is that a VPN service that needs to pay dozens (or hundreds) of big (Non-IT) Youtubers to talk up their product is probably not a VPN I would want to use. This seems to confirm it.

(Seriously, for a while you could barely watch a youtube vid without it turning into a NordVPN ad at some point)

Rising sea levels? How about the rising risk of someone using a nuke?

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Large arsenals, big problems

You are correct. I mainly remembered the dates the US and USSR stopped nuking their own people. (If Japan and modern Japanese culture is proof you should never nuke a country twice, the US must be proof of what happens when you do it over 400 times)

I forgot about the last series of French tests. Who cares about the French anyway :)

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: How about both?: Rising sea levels and nuke use

That just proves the government is paying less subsidy to offshore wind than to this particular nuclear plant. Not actually a proof for the actual cost per installed GW capacity. (Which AFAIK is pretty stable as offshore work hasn't gotten cheaper and the cost to install is mostly labour and fuel. At best some advances have been made in construction methods allowing slight cost savings).

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: How about both?: Rising sea levels and nuke use

"UK wind farm capacity factor is about 40%"

Citation needed.

Latest numbers I've seen were roughly 20% for on-shore and up-to 33% for off-shore (But highly variable by wind direction as windmills in large parks interfere with each other in difficult to predict ways)

"Capacity factor of conventional power stations is 50%-80%."

Yes, but that's 50% for fast spooling single stage gas-turbine plants (Used for peak leveling and compensating for renewables variations) where it is that low because of the nature of peak leveling plants. And (Usually) 80% (but easily above 95%) for multi-stage baseload plants that provide a constant and predictable level of output that renewables will likely never be able to match at that scale (GW output). Baseload plants are getting worse and worse capacity factor as they keep having to shut down because renewables are suddenly providing a lot of output. This is terrible for their longevity and efficiency.

"And the cost of new offshore wind is now substantially lower than new nuclear including balancing costs."

Again, citation needed. Offshore (without the subsidies) is hellishly expensive due to the amount of effort and material required. Nuclear is hellishly expensive because of administrative burdens.

imanidiot Silver badge

Large arsenals, big problems

The thing is, no-one of the "OG nuke owners" has allowed a nuke to go Boom since 1991. The largest arsenals consist of weapons with cores produced roughly 50 years ago. Nobody really knows what the effects of this long term storage are in terms of nuclear decay products. Both the US and Russia are getting twitchy about not being able to just make one go Boom. (It's one of the reasons the US built the Z-machine and the NIF). The US doesn't currently have a production facility for new cores and is only doing refurbishment of existing ones.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: How about both?: Rising sea levels and nuke use

Nameplate capacity MAYBE. Greenies keep confusing installed nameplate capacity with actual generated power capacity (Which for Wind turns out to be roughly 1/5th to 1/3rd of nameplate capacity on average, depending on location and type)

Huawei P30: New No-Pro's cameras are flash ... but there are some curious bits

imanidiot Silver badge

Nope

Has a notch, comes with a ton of nag-ware and we-can-do-this-too crap and is rather expensive. I'll stick with my cheap and cheerful 100 Euros straight from China phone.

IT sales star wins $660k lawsuit against Oracle in Qatar – but can't collect because the Oracle he sued suddenly vanished

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: I just think this is the way sales companies work

In that case, yes, dick move. I'd gather some leaflets, let the deal go through and tell them you'll see them in court for what they owe you.

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: I just think this is the way sales companies work

In this case, unless you DID check beforehand, the error was on YOUR side for taking the word of a front desk "sales girl" about the bonus before putting in the effort.

FYI: Yeah, the cops can force your finger onto a suspect's iPhone to see if it unlocks, says judge

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: You can pry my password from my cold, dead lips.

"An even more delightful trick is to set a specific passphrase that causes the auto wipe if entered. Cops want access? Give them the "wrong" password & laugh when they realize they're now holding an expensive paperweight."

Congratulations, you've just added "tampering with evidence" and possibly "Obstruction of justice" to the charges against you. This is a REALLY stupid idea as it provides an easy crime for them to hang you with and then they'll have plenty of time to figure out how else to kick you while you're down. You're not the first to think of this and though a killcode case hasn't gone to court yet so far as I can find, it's very likely to be illegal. (Remote wiping certainly HAS gotten people in jail)

California's politicians rush to gut internet privacy law with pro-tech giant amendments

imanidiot Silver badge

Re: Sounds like classic Sacramento to me...

The problem is they'll oppose oneanother on ANYTHING. Even if rationally they would both agree.