Posts by Snowman

Even that is problematic for them to do

It was brought up how bad the licensing chosen when transitioned from Oricle to Apache was announced, it was set up in a way they can not easily include LibreOffice's improvements but LibreOffice can include most anything from OpenOffice other than things like trademarks of OO. Granted one of the reasons for the split was there was a ton of third party improvements that had not been merged into the core code base and they did a lot of clean up too, so it was likely going to be a long time before OpenOffice would be in a position to be doing work that was not already done on LibreOffice even if it had gone well and attracted a much larger set of devs.

Re: But a 14KW Power Wall...

Since the history of batteries is pretty much putting some of the most caustic substances in a small container probably not, even the ones that do not spontaneously catch fire usually could leak materials that should not be touched.

Re: Actually an argument for a public utility to own the last mile

I somewhat suspect it would be easier and less problematic for large and medium cities/metros to have their own fiber utility than states, it likely is not even an option to have it be a federal agency.

No need for Canada to say sorry over this

"PS. Ashamed to be Canadian right about now."

The fault here rests on the Pan American Sports Organization, basically an organization formed by all the national olympic committees in North & South America. Host cities/countries rarely get much say in changing PASO rules and it is not uncommon to have to change laws to 'win' the bid to host.

Re: 'Meh'

The Simpsons were nowhere near the first usage of it, maybe it made it more nationally known but it was already well established on the west coast by the 1950s

Re: Hindsight

Actually not much has changed on Android profitability, Samsung was the only one that ever had a long run of respectable profitability with it. There was plenty of articles before and around the time of the memo showing how bad profitability for all the other Android venders were at the time, so it should have been well known by someone in the industry it was not an easy path to money, though it was also clear by that point that Android would be an easier sell to customers at the time due to the base user experience and app availability at the time, the only major change of opinion I can think of since then was more people thought MS might be able to catch up on market share in the mobile space with iOS & Android given their history and possibility to leverage corporate entrenchment in MS products.

Re: .com doesn't belong to the USA!

Technically it is still under some use administration, just they have tended to contract that out to be administered by Verisign for a long time, though it apparently still falls under US legal jurisdiction. Granted there are elements of the US goverment trying to extend legal reach to every other country regardless, but that is a whole other topic. Back to the point the curent lease is up in 2018 if they want to take that back over, which is unlikely.

Re: No wonder Obama wants to thaw relations

It is not like there were not were no other options before now, cuba's economy has never really recovered from the loss of aid when the USSR collapsed.

Re: Lies, damned lies, and US government statements

I do not think they were trying to imply that was how much Silk Road made, it is pretty common for US police agencies to publicize numbers like this as a self serving statement, that whichever group made the bust is good at their job and at least needs to keep getting their funding at the current level if not higher.

Re: <7.5million km, >110m ...

"Does that make the moon a hazardous object?"

The moon's orbit had already been assessed and it is gradually moving away from us at ~3.78 centimeters per year, this rate though will slow as it's orbit increases so it will have an even more stable orbit over time, baring a collision with another large object of course.

"I don't see why he's accusing Farmers of over-using fertiliser. Presumably fertiliser isn't free, so why anybody would waste obscene quantities of it is beyond me."

They overuse because there is relatively little downside to them for putting more on, cost of the extra fertilizer is extremely cheap verses if they put too little on and the entire crop fails.

Re: not sure it'll be tried on the next launch

"Have SpaceX actually said they'll attempt a landing with the Deep"

He did say for an attempt next month, so it will be soon in any case, there is a comm satt launch then.

Though given this satellite was created before the Falcon 9 was designed there is the possibility that it was planned for a smaller rocket that SpaceX was able to underbid for the contract, since it was probably competing with ULA.

The curent engines have been stated to be capable of more than 20 full burns, though the tests between launches would at least cut it down to half that many launches. Though once recovery is in place there will be some math done on what will lead to the most economic operations.

Re: Same old arrogance

You jest but with county of residence and birthdate is enough to uniquely identify most of the people in the country. Other data can be pulled from different sources once a person is identified.

The reason for returning to land is salt water is hell on the engines and other components, it would need expensive maintenance after every splashdown, possibly more expensive than just ramping up the production of new cores. They looked into parachutes first but determined it was not going to work for their needs.