Posts by brainwrong

Re: Sperling messteak

"Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong."

I tried that a few months ago and the article wasn't corrected. This one was funny, that is all.

It looks to me like you're using speech recognition to write? I can't see how that's a keyboard typing error.

Re: Has anybody thought..

Err, no.

The change is referring to the orbital period of the Didymos / Dimorphos system. They both orbit a common centre of mass with the same orbital period, which just reduced by 32 minutes.

The orbital velocity of Didymos (relative to their common centre of mass) will have changed by 1/104 of that of the change of orbital velocity of Dimorphos, because it's more massive and closer to the system's common centre of mass.

I'd be interested to know what the change of the orbit of the Didymos / Dimorphos system around the Sun is, but that wasn't the objective of the mission and will take a much longer observation time.

According to wikipedia, the two bodies were tidally locked. I imagine that lock has been broken (somewhat), and the eccentricity of their orbit also changed. This is surely worth investigating up close for an extended period of time, to learn something about how binary asteroid systems, and contact binaries, come to be.

Re: batshit crazy idea

That looks very tiny. I suppose it could be scaled up to be useful for that purpose, but it may effectively be a big red light advertising our availability to any passing aliens looking for "a good time".

Good luck!

Or snorkels?

Re: V2X

I've never heard of cameras being used for this. Sounds unreliable, but I'm sure someone has patted themselves on the back for using high-tech.

"The new ones are much more focused so they can ignore vehicles making right turns."

You must be in different country to me.

Where I am nearly all light controlled junctions have induction loops in the ground, and a box with an opaque window pointed at each vehicle approach, and also at the pedestrian crossings if present.

Then somebody programs the controller badly and causes unnecessary traffic problems for the next several decades.

I believe the boxes here use RADAR because they are accurately speed sensitive, some pedestrian crossings are programmed to stop traffic if you drive toward them over the speed limit.

Re: Missing

"dynamic island animations"

It has a live video feed of Anak Krakatoa?

I want one now.

If your hands are on the wheel, then why would you need software to drive the car?

Re: And them some

FLA's?

ITYM ETLA's.

Re: Heat engines

No.

The Sun dumps truly enormous amounts of energy onto the earth, our efforts are tiny in comparison.

A quick look at wikipedia gives 3 relevant figures: ->

Human production of energy : 18 TW

Geothermal output of earth : 47 TW

Solar irradiance : 173,000 TW

Re: High Frequency Trading?

HFT should be banned because it is a big risk to the stability of the global financial system.

What's the reaction time for someone to hit the off switch compared to the reaction time for HFT to sell off stocks in a falling market?

Re: hype

Wouldn't want those bugs to get out and into my house. Hope they engineered to require something else to live that the biologists give them, to keep them under control.

Given the awful quality of some modern plastics I see, I have to wonder if such bugs may already be about.

Re: OK, stupid question time

I often think some better write-ups would help. I read this article and don't know if it came from Khujirt crater or Dampier crater, or why they think it seems to have travelled from one to the other. I read about this meteorite a few days ago in an article written by an academic. They made no mention of it originating from multiple craters, but explained that using machine learning they found 94,000,000 craters, eliminated around 80,000, and were left with 19 candidates. Whilst I'm sure someone knows what they're doing, I'm stiff baffled as to what that actually was.

Re: How many values in FP8?

Either way there's a trap here, using such a low precision with a wide dynamic range means that when adding multiple numbers, small ones may not contribute to the total because they are individually too insignificant. If there are many such small numbers then you'll get a very wrong answer.

chinese rebuff

' Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian responded by calling the remarks "a smear campaign against China's normal and reasonable outer space endeavors."'

That doesn't look like a denial from the chinese, whatever the reality of Bill Nelson's words.

Not that they could defend the moon from invasion by american missions, anyway.

Re: Google can't count, nor can most of world

"states that a billion is 1 million million"

The long form of these numbers is logical =>

1 billion is a contraction of bi-million, a million million.

1 trillion is a contraction of tri-million, a million million million.

n-million=10^(6n), simple.

Instead people use the nonsensical billion=10^(3*3), because it makes things sound bigger than they are.

The other thing that's stupid is using the ratio of the circumference to the diameter. Using the ratio of the circumference to the radius makes much more sense mathematically, and would remove oddball factors of 2 from many equations.

err, life

Humans are a life form.

The only purpose of life is to exploit and consume as much resources as possible to reproduce and expand population.

All life forms must do this, else they die out.

Humans have technology, and something they call intelligence.

Technology vastly expands humans ability to consume stuff from our environment, enabling humans to expand their population.

When conditions are right, many life forms can rapidly consume resources, expanding their population, until the resources run out. Think of swarms of locusts, rats/mice.

human intelligence and technology has so far mostly prevented resources from running out for them, so they keep on expanding their population and consuming stuff from the environment, because that's what evolution has made them to do. humans are a swarm on the planet, but with little sign of resources running out to limit us.

humans cannot avoid trashing the planet.

Stopping global warming won't stop us trashing the planet. We'll still be over-farming land, digging disgustingly big and dirty mines, destroying nature to make way for our activities, polluting the place.

This damage is mostly cumulative, we consume much faster than nature can replenish.

The only way there won't be a major ecological catastrophe is for humans to limit their population, which they cannot do themselves. Although china tried that for a bit, did that work out well?

Could something anti-static work?

Yes, but probably not on a Mars mission.

https://news.mit.edu/2022/solar-panels-dust-magnets-0311

It involves moving an electrode over the panel, with the correct voltage applied between that and a transparent electrode covering the front of the panel. It requires relative humidity of 30% or greater, which would be the killer for this.

As a side note, I despair at the quality of much scientific news writing. The system described in the article above has nothing to do with magnets.

Quarters

CY3Q22 = 30th september 2022

Re: Misdirection about E2EE -- again!!! Please read the literature!!!

"sender and the recipient of such a message DO NOT KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT THE ENCRYPTION KEY."

That's not true. The sender needs the key to encrypt the message, and the intended recipient needs the key to decrypt it. This is still true even if the encryption is done on pen and paper and the resulting gobbledygook is typed into the device, which I think is what you're getting at.

Diffie Hellman key exchange allows 2 parties to agree on a common encryption key by only communicating information that doesn't reveal anything about the key.

Re: Efficiency

Well it looks like intel don't understand bitcoin. Making mining machines more efficient will lead to an increase in the hashing capacity of the network, so the difficulty will increase, so more hashes will need to be calculated.

The money stream feeding the miners is provided by the price of bitcoin. If a miner has the choice of computing the same hash rate for a lower cost, or a higher hash rate for the same cost, They're likely to want to increase the hash rate to increase their share of the mined coins. Especially considering that others will be making the same decision.

The energy usage of bitcoin will only reduce if the price collapses, they switch away from proof of work, or maybe if energy prices go up a lot. Energy is far too cheap currently.

Re: Stupid question?

"From the blog post"? I expected that to be one of the primary pieces of information in the article I was commenting on. It wouldn't have helped anyway, given that I'm neither a computer programmer or a windows user.

The article mentioned chromium, but I try to avoid toxic shiny things.