Posts by allthecoolshortnamesweretaken 6157 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Oct 2015
Um, Henry Kissinger did win the Peace Prize. Or rather, Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were jointly offered the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the Paris Peace Accords which prompted the withdrawal of American forces from the Vietnam war. Kissinger accepted. Le Duc Tho declined to accept the award because the war had not ended. ("Peace? What peace?")
In 1976, I kid you not, Kissinger became the first honorary member of the Harlem Globetrotters - if we're doing 'absurd', that's a better example.
Anyway: Henry Kissinger, how I'm missing 'yer...
"Saving Skylab - the untold story" / Popular Science, January 1979 ( via googely books)
Skylab Reactivation Mission Report / NASA, March 1980 ( PDF )
It's perfectly allright to smile inwardly. Or use something like the Mona Lisa version.
As to Yuri Malenchenko - my pet theory is that he is related to Andrei "Grim Grom" Gromyko.
"If you call Surface cheap- you must mean diamond chips?"
Compared to what that sort of computing power (not that it would have fitted in such a small box) would have cost you, say, 30 years ago? Yeah, cheap. Dirt cheap. It's just a pity that most of the improvement in performance gets eaten up by sloppy coding, so to speak. But that's another story.
" Until MS get this stuff right, ... "
Aaaannnd there's your problem!
Seriously. I've never been a Fanboi as such, but so far they had stuff that was useful and usable for me to get the stuff done that I do. Sometime in the late 1980ies I had to make a choice, and as I'm in civil engineering that choice was DOS/Win because there was next to nothing suitable on the Mac. I had worked on the first Macs and it was great, and if I wouldn't have had the need to run software for structural design and a CAD program fit for structural design I just as well might have chosen Apple.
(Okay, apart from DOS/Win boxen I also had the odd Mac laptop, a string of Newtons, and for a while I worked with a CAD package that ran on UNIX, I think SCO, that would run on Compaq PCs, and every now and then toy with Linux on the old box that had been replaced by the new WIn box.)
All these years MS products were far from perfect, but they worked reasonable well and MS policy was workable.
But right now they are pissing me off, big time. For me, 2016 will be the year of the Linux destktop.
"900-year-old organisation with a mainframe"
First thing that popped up in my mind when reading this was "Vatican". Although it's actually much older, you could roughly double that figure, give or take.
Anyway, my point is: if something works for a long, long time you might want to take a close look at it and find out why before you try something new just because it's fashionable right now.
Yep, one way or another, we're doomed. The irony is not lost on me - civilisation will not end with a bang (aka global nuclear war as envisioned in nearly all the SF from the mid 1940ies to the late 1980ies). It will end with our smart toasters burning down our houses (after ratting us out to the ever increasing surveillance state), with our smart fridges cleaning out our bank accounts by ordering a 100 year supply of groceries, with our smart lawnmowers mowing down our pets, with our self driving cars blocking the roads to hospitals and power stations, and so on. Future historians, if and when a new civilisation arises from the ashes of ours, will call our era 'the stupid times'.
Completely off-topic, but here is a photo of a fish inside a jellyfish. Marine creatures are weird.
Invisible squids? We're doomed... As if the cuttlefish weren't dangerous enough...
Thanks for the link!
But I'm still a bit confused. From my point of view, any navigational device is something that tells me where I am. So I know in which direction I must turn in order to get where I want to go. And that's it. It doesn't seem a good idea to make that navigational device a part of the systems I need to keep the vehicle I'm in dirigible, or airborne, or afloat or whatever.
Yep. During the NATO campaign in Ex-Yugoslavia you could tell when the USAF were flying sorties - GPS would go a bitt wobbly. If you were in, say, Munich, your GPS would tell you you were moving if you were in fact stationary, and your position would be off by 50-100 m, even while receiving 6 or 7 satellites.
"In addition, the FAA is warning pilots flying the Embraer Phenom 300, one of the world's most popular executive jet aircraft, that the testing could interfere with flight stability controls and has said extra care should be taken in the area."
Just out of idle curiosity - what does the Embraer Phenom 300 have (or hasn't got) that singles it out?
Interesting, but ultimately a novelty that adds very little to existing methods. I still use pen and paper notebooks, and occasionally I take pictures of a couple of pages with my tablet and e-mail the pics, sometimes using an app to convert them into a PDF first. When a notebook is full, I put it on the shelf and get a new one. The odd page that may contain something important or brilliant will be photocopied, or rather, in these days scanned and stored. Done.
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