Posts by Rocketist

Re: Repeat this against a set of US tech entrepreneurs

Oh no, the false-positive rate would exceed 100%!

BTW: Does the AI actually stop when it's reached an identification? In that case we don't know yet, but it might well match a single innocent face to more than one criminal.

Re: It's life Jim, but not as we know it.

Or the unburied remains of the poor aliens who made that crater when they crashed into Ceres. On their way home from here probably.

"Not be generally mass-migrated"

...probably means that the average user of those 130.000 has stored emails of their last 15 years, at a rate of around 50 mails a day, without ever deleting anything, and Enders thinks there might be a little storage space saved there.

What Airbus appears to be saying is they'll give users a chance to forget all of this junk, and possibly extract and save those mails that actually still have any significance. Say the one with the cookie recipe, the one that has Fred's address in it that the user never learned to copy into their own contacts, and the one with that specific detail about project XY the user wanted to remember, or use as a template. Then again, don't quote me on this.

Re: The Golden Age of flying is over

In the Golden Age of flying, you'd cross the Atlantic in a narrow-body airplane; say a Boeing 707, Douglas DC-8 or (sigh) Vickers VC-10. All of which had narrower fuselages than the Airbus A320 does, and still had six seats in a row.

HOWEVER, the seats in that golden age were spaced much further apart (up to ten inches more than today, except with "some" airlines) and the boarding procedures, cabin crew, and meals were all up to the standards expected by a 1960's air traveler. Then again, so were the fares.

Might have posted this before, sorry in that case.

Re: What is the point of the cash pile?

Oh dear, AppleTalk. Almost as good as ApplePie :-)

Nay, there's two main things you can do with a pile of money: Prevent yourself being bought, or buy someone or something else when the need arises. With the current global economic and political climate, it can't be long before the first sovereign state puts itself up for sale to a corporation. That would make a great offshore base for Apple!

They could fund the US space program for like 15 years.

End world hunger (maybe).

Gold-plate the entire Apple campus and every street in Cupertino, with lots of cash to spare.

Fix the US public health system. Just kidding.

Or simply buy BMW, just for the fun of it.

Re: Pressure suits?

People, get your systems engineering right.

Linear acceleration could be similar to an airliner on take-off; a bit uncomfortable but nothing worse, although as someone mentioned above, it'll take a loooong distance to accelerate to top speed.

Breaches of the tube will "only" be a problem if a) they occur within the emergency stopping distance of the capsule, and b) they include a breach of the rails, or misalignment of the two broken-apart tube sections. In all other cases, it'll be an emergency stop and ticket refund; but in that combination it'll be a disaster.

Quite another topic, however, is turn radius. By my quick BOTE check, in order to keep centrifugal acceleration to an acceptable level at speeds of 1100 m/s or so, you'd need a curve radius of several hundred kilometers - the exact value depending on what you consider "acceptable". That means we're essentially talking arrow-straight tubes; which even in China would place a fantastic burden on the poor civil engineers tasked with routing the system.

Re: Bit of a long-lens-paparazzo then...

Psst. don't tell anyone what plans ESA has to re-finance the bird after the end of its science mission!

Celebrities of the world beware, they'll count the hairs on your heads!

Paris 'cause she's.

Re: Why not leave it.

Actually, that crash wouldn't bend a fender if Rosetta was a car. They're trying to set it down really gently; unfortunately though, for some obscure legal reasons apparently, they'll have to switch it off right after landing.

Anyway, I hope we'll at least get to see real close-up pictures of the ground.

Re:at the end of the day...

You have a point there. As is so often the case, there's legal, moral, political, and business aspects to this case. The legal ones may just be clear, and if they are, the authorities *must* act on them. The moral and political sides are far murkier, and the business... We'll see.

Re: "they form into long chains and synchronize their footsteps"

They all sing in choir, and march in step. Popular ant working songs are Queen's "We are the champions" and "House of the rising sun" by, you guessed it, The Animals. Ants like the 6/8 time that goes well with six legs, but they don't like to waltz.

Anyway, I think they do it all with acoustics.