Posts by Flocke Kroes 4551 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Oct 2007
Last time he pretended to be the self-funded billionaire candidate. Himself+family have made enough money in the last four years that he can actually be a self-funded billionaire candidate this time.
Wall repairs may be expensive but Larry isn't Mexican so why is he paying?
1: Trump: Think Like A Billionaire
3: Trump University Real Estate 101.
4: Become President before the law catches up.
The plan is that Russians will get seats on commercial crew in exchange for Americans going to ISS in a Soyuz. You might be lucky and ride a dragon. With the way the Russian space program is going, a trip in a Soyuz will require courage. Perhaps one day fearless astronauts will go to the ISS in a Boeing CST-100.
The threat of being sent to LOP-G in an Orion is not something the next generation of astronauts needs to worry about too much. Orion has been launched on the discontinued Delta IV Heavy and the last 5 of those are booked by the NRO. The only other possibility for Orion is SLS. In the words of a former NASA administrator: "We don't have a commercially available heavy lift vehicle. Falcon 9 Heavy may someday come about. It's on the drawing board right now. SLS is real. You've seen it down at Michoud. We're building the core stage. We have all the engines done, ready to be put on the test stand at Stennis..." - Charles Bolden, 2014.
(Falcon Heavy demo mission: 2018-02-06. SLS was lifted onto the test stand at Stennis 2020-01-22. At this rate SpaceX Starship+Superheavy will launch before SLS.)
The disease has been around for decades. It would be nice if schools attempted to teach the meaning of GIGO to young children but the real challenge is to teach it to the politicians spending tax payers' money on blockchain AI social media facial recognition smuggler detecters.
A 'popular' part of commercial software license terms and conditions is that the license applies to software installed on a particular computer owned by a particular person or company. Change the computer or the owner and the license becomes invalid. It would be nice to think that the previous owner of the vehicle still has a valid license but I would find that surprising. It would be sensible for the license to move with the vehicle but there is no legal requirement for that to be included in the license. It would be astonishing if car dealers read the terms and conditions and took care not to sell expired software licenses. I find it disappointing that Tesla have chosen to copy the typical behaviour of the nasty end of commercial software and I hope the decide to do better.
It is almost as is the rabid commie free software loonies have been on to the right idea for years.
The GPL does cover future versions of a binary - that still includes GPL components.
Option A) You created the source code or hired someone to create it for you. You choose to release version 1 with the GPL license. You could choose to release version 2 (or version 1 for that matter) under any other license or not distribute it at all but the GPL version 1 would be out there and you could not prevent others from distributing it (with or without their own improvements) unless they violate the terms of the GPL.
Option B) The software is made of various components with different copyright holders and some of the components are GPL created by others you did not hire. If any of the components are not available with a GPL compatible license you cannot distribute at all.
Option C) You can create a new version by re-writing or hire others to re-write GPL components and by buying a non-GPL license from the copyright holders of the GPL components. When you have a non-GPL license for every component you do not have the copyright for you can distribute with a license that is not the GPL.
There is a way to prevent others from distributing GPL software: get control of something they need and withhold it from them if they distribute GPL software. Watch out for abuse of monopoly laws and your license to use GPL software may become invalid.
SpaceX use the bottom half of their rockets multiple times. For LEO missions the top half burns up in days. The next most common mission is to geosynchronous transfer orbit: an ellipse with the low end near LEO and the high end near GEO. The payload uses its own propulsion to get to GEO and stage 2 repeatedly slows down each time it gets close to Earth and is gone in months.
As for Starman and his car: Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space.
Take a look at how quickly things in low Earth orbit burn up. If a Starlink satellite fails when it first reaches orbit it will burn up within days. If one fails after reaching its working orbit it will burn up after about 10 years. If the satellite does not fail, the last of its propellant will be used bringing down low enough to burn up promptly.
Geostationary satellites do not come down. At end of life they go up and will be with us for millions of years.
To make an array you need mix the light from all the telescopes while arranging for the optical path length to be the same to sub-micrometer precision no matter which telescope the light enters. Perhaps this could work with a radio telescope because the wave length is far bigger but no chance with optical.
By the way, years ago I came across a book called something like "Astronomical events photographed in the UK" that had some beautiful photographs of clouds and rain. Anyone know what the actual title is so I can find it again?
Cameras stored images on film and could not send them over the internet. Spy satellites fell out of the sky and ejected the film which was slowed down by a parachute and caught by a helicopter. The Everyday Astronaut covered this in a video.
The Office 365 advert has comments disabled. Makes me wonder why.
Trump was against SLS because it is a really bad deal. He had to be talked out of cancelling it and, much to my surprise, seemed to understand why it SLS exists. In Trump's own words: "It is a jobs program". There is bi-partisan support for the pork rocket because bits of it are built in every state. Politicians on both sides can point at how much federal budget they are bringing to their state.
I would love to blame Trump for failing to cancel SLS but Obama could not do it either. Obama mentioned the possibility and found out how badly he would get trounced by both by both sides if he ever spoke of it again.
The reason NASA are doing SLS is because they are legally required to spend much of their budget on it. If they were actually using spare parts it would not be so bad. If you actually look at the parts, they are not quite the same as bits of shuttle. Each has had a change that sounds small but required a major redesign. Congress's eyes lit up at the words "much more money" and approved the budget.
The Artemis missions were sold to Trump with the idea that there would be Americans back on the moon before then end of his second term. That might just happen but SLS (and LOPG) are a barrier to getting there.
Energy per unit mass is about 10x better than a fly wheel, similar to ANFO (cheap explosive) and about one tenth of body fat. (Assumed: two spheres with 75nm radius and density 2500kg/m3. Energy=34pJ, Energy density 3.9MJ/kg)
If all the energy went into heating the dumbbells then the temperature would rise about 5500K. This is well over the melting point but I could not find the latent heat of fusion (or vaporisation). Each of those steps would reduce the final temperature but it certainly looks like a collision would break up the dumbbells into really tiny pieces.
"The 20 per cent appointments specifically have been used recently by the EECS department to respond to rapidly increasing enrollment."
Presumably rapidly increasing enrolment has resulted in rapidly increasing revenue from fees and a requirement for more hours of teaching assistant work. Teaching assistant administration is now a bigger department with a bigger budget and all possible costs must be cut to feed the head bean counter's new bonus scheme.
According to Oracle, APIs do not need to be published in the form of source code. They have a court ruling that makes a clean room implementation copyright infringement unless it is somehow shown to be fair use. Fair use is not a global concept and even where it does exist it has limitations like no commercial distribution or uses less than vaguely 10% of the source material. The boundaries of fair use are sufficiently fuzzy that you can expect nuisance litigation from trolls even when fair use is clear.
Open source ≠ Free software
Open source only means you can read the source. There may be wonderful permissions with an open source license - or not. There may be horrible requirements with an open source license - or not. There is a huge selection of open source licenses to choose from. Some of the most popular ones are compatible with the GPL.
Free software is about preserving the four freedoms for end users:
0: The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbour.
3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
You can mix Gnu GPL and CDDL version 1 source code in a project for your own use but you cannot distribute the the result to others. Gnu GPL requires that the four freedoms are preserved in the distributed work but CDDL version 1 requires allowing others to take those freedoms away.
Sun were aware that CDDL and GPL were incompatible. They deliberately chose that when creating CDDL. They created ZFS so they get to pick the license. Likewise many programmers chose GPL for their own works or chose to contribute to GPL projects.
If you are unhappy with that you are welcome to create your own kernel and distribute it with the either the CDDL or something compatible so you can use ZFS. Ideally you should be able to create something compatible with ZFS and distribute it with the GPL or one of the many compatible licenses so it can be used with Linux. Oracle may decide to sue you whether that is legal or not.
The benefit of GPL is the huge amount of high quality software available to link into your project. The cost is that if you do, you cannot take the four freedoms from others. You get to decide if the benefit is worth the cost. If that feels like being trampled on to you, imagine a big smile on my face while I go STOMP STOMP STOMP.
The world + dogfish were logged into US DoD because of default passwords and easily guessed passwords. One of Gary McKinnon's mistakes was to log in from a country with (usually simple) extradition to the US. Perhaps it really costs $10,000 to generate a few hundred random passwords, write them on post-it notes, stick them to monitors and change the passwd file to match. Add another $690,000 for staff training to not read those passwords aloud to anyone who phones up and the DoD would have plugged the hole.
It was unreasonable of the DoD to assign the entire bill to Mr McKinnon. Likewise assigning the full £230K to Batson is unreasonable when much of that money prevented a thousand other leeches doing the exact same thing.
9 months in prison seems reasonable under the circumstances but he does deserve big thank you for the incompetence required to be detected so quickly.
Xenon at about 170 atmospheres pressure has the same density as a human. Use that as your transport gas and humans will float as they are blown through Futurama tubes. There is the small problem of the time required for decompression afterwards but if you skip that then there is no need for suicide booths.
Blue Origin landed their New Sheppard (non-orbital) rocket backwards in 2015. New Glenn's first flight is currently in 2021 so we will have to wait a bit before we see Blue Origin land the back end of an orbital rocket.
Rocket Lab cannot buy 3D printers fast enough to support their customers so they will try parachute+helicopter+droneship recovery after a few practice runs with thalassabraking. Even if the tanks and engines are too dented to fly again there are some nice electric motors and lithium batteries on an Electron rocket that are worth getting back.
Musk's timeline (totally unrelated to everyone else's concept of time) has Starship landing from orbit in the first half of this year. (Starship is single stage to orbit with a payload of about 0kg.)
ULA have a picture of a plan to blow their Vulcan rocket into two big pieces, attach a hypersonic decelerator and a parachute to the bit with the engines then catch them with a helicopter. It sounds spectacular but do not wait with abated breath. This will be no earlier than 2025.
The physics of landing the SLS core stage shows the idea is sane. It uses electrical igniters built into the injectors so in theory the engines can re-light. The engines throttle down to 67% so one engine + the tanks has a thrust to weight ratio of 1.4. Even using two engines for symmetry the thrust to weight ratio is lower than popular estimates for a three engine Falcon 9 landing (3.7). Real world cows are not perfect spheres. Reserving about ⅓ of the propellant for landing would prevent it from sending Orion to LOPG which is the only non-pork excuse to have SLS at all.
I have confidence in Rocket Lab re-using Electrons in a year or two. Blue origin ought to be landing New Glenn's backwards shortly afterwards but gradatim ferociter should perhaps be spelled festina lente. It is quite likely that the next company to land a new rocket backwards will be SpaceX-Starship followed by SpaceX-SuperHeavy. Everyone else but Ariane and ULA will have to put something in orbit before I take their landing plans seriously. Ariane: where's the money? ULA: need to cryogenicly preserve Senator Richard Shelby so they can get funding next century.
I thought there were only 16 + an order for 6 new ones for only $1.5e9 ($170e6 per engine + $1.16e9 for the factory to build them). NASA has ordered 6 Orions for the first 5 Artemis missions with a threat of buying 6 more. If someone has found another 24 RS-25 engines under the sofa cushions I am sure congress would have provided funding for the extra 6 Orions. They are only $600e6 each.
I linked to King James, which is decisively correct because for each verse the translators prayed for a sign from God if they made a mistake. There are plenty of other versions with different phrasing but the overall content is substantially similar. The stone tablets from Exodus 34 are very different from the 10 commandments that are taught to Christians. Try reading what is actually written in your Bible some time rather than relying on what you are told is in there.
The actual ten commandments on the two stone tablets that Moses hewed as commanded by God are described in Exodus 34 verses 13 to 26. Some verses have no commandments and others can have one or two depending on interpretation but they do divide reasonably cleanly into 10:
(1) [When you are in the lands for foreigners] ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves. [stuff about jealousy and whoring].
(2) Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
(3) The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time of the month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out from Egypt.
(4) All that openeth the matrix is mine; [this refers to first born livestock and male children which must be bought back from priests. Also: what to do if you cannot pay.]
(5) Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.
(6) thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest,
(7) Thrice in the year shall all your menchildren appear before the Lord God, the God of Israel. [God promises to cast out nations, enlarge boarders and prevent foreigners from wanting your land]
(8) Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.
(9) The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the Lord thy God.
(10) Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.
The month of Abib seems to some time in Spring. As it is based on the Lunar calendar the date varies but I am fairly certain it is not now. As I have not entered Egypt I have never left so I am not sure (3) applies to me at all. Assuming you did leave Egypt in Abib you have to eat some unleavened bread. As far as I can tell, commenting on internet articles is not forbidden even during Abib.
The other good news is you do not have to honour your parents. There are no prohibitions on murder, adultery, theft, lying or coveting. Murder and theft will get you into trouble with most secular authorities and the UK government is planning a clamp down on lying on the internet but according to the ten commandments commenting here will not damn you to hell.
Also do not pay yourself directly. Have you IT company invest in your property company that buys and rents out your luxury homes. Rent them with fake names for the dates you will be there then cancel at the last minute.
To move move cash to your own account, buy shares with your own money, buy more with unlaundered money to drive the price up more then sell your own shares.
Most of the times I hear geek, egghead or similar the intention is a compliment. Occasionally the intention is to hurt. I just smile, say thank you and add a name to the list of the people I would not piss on if they were on fire. Some people used to try to hurt me with words when I was at school. At the time I correctly guessed the sort of thing they would say to me later: "Would you like fries with that?"
Sometimes these words are used by others to create social groups from which I am excluded. They are often selling some sort of snake-oil or cult membership and do not want anyone debunking their claims. I used to think "forget them, there are plenty of other people not that gullible I can be friends with". Now we have anti-vaxxers and Trump voters. Time for a new plan.
The Bene Tleilax slig was not an a great idea for a predator but if you are going to have capital punishment then the possibility of being tied down and fed to one might actually be a deterrent. Although tasty the porcuswine sounds a bit too defensive to me. Now if we could bring back megatherium and add some smilodon teeth then we would be off to a good start. Vampire bats are a bit small but mixed with fruit bat the result could be interesting. We isn't anyone working on a Polar hippopotabear, brown recluse wasp or a rattlesnake mongoose? Are the worlds evil scientists really so badly short of funding?
Not surprising at all. Under US law the comment was clearly protected free speech. The verdict has nothing to do with favouritism. It only has a little to do with money: any competent lawyer would have got that result but lack of a competent lawyer might not have. Musk has sufficient money that he can waste it on legal fees and is sufficiently out of touch with reality that he is convinced he won something.
An apology would have been much cheaper and have been a partial step towards healing the massive damage he did to his own credibility and reputation. That "My faith in humanity is restored" rubbish shows he does not realise he is already neck deep in a PR shit hole and I am sure he embarrass with more arsehole behaviour even though it is long past time to stop digging. Perhaps he can avoid a fine for his next "funding secured" tweet with an "everyone knows my tweets are even less factual than Trump's" defence.
I thought Brexit Dyson took the electric car money and sneaked off to Singapore.
It is always difficult to judge. The plan could be to identify the trouble makers and shoot them but I have such confidence in politicians that I believe the real answer is that back when they could afford to slowly increase prices they decided to delay because fairies riding unicorns would save them real soon now.
Do not worry! There is a solution! On the 12th of December we get to decide who else rips us off.
(This post has been edited to remove words and phrases that cause panick among the President's appointed snow flakes.)
CO2 lets sunlight through but blocks infra-red (what sunlight becomes after hitting Earth) this is the source of heat for Modal Warning. Burning fossil fuels creates CO2. Transport is a major use of fossil fuels. Increasing the price of fuel gives people a financial incentive to reduce distance travelled or to travel in a more efficient vehicle.
(Perhaps with the offensive words removed Minitrue will not rewrite fulwise to rectify malquoted misprints.)
Apollo astronauts used a mixture of courage and ignorance of the danger to get to the moon. If they had known then how dangerous their rockets really were - they would probably still have gone but would have used a larger supply of courage.
Commercial crew has to make do with much less ignorance and hardly any courage. To make up for it, Boeing is now far more skilled at fleecing NASA. Among other things, Musk wanted this project to fund development of retro propulsive landings. As everybody knows it is completely impossible to land a rocket by flying backwards with the engines burning at minimum thrust NASA stomped on that plan and effectively forced him to use parachutes. Musk has this strange concept of proving parachutes (don't) work by tying them to a lump of concrete and throwing them out of a helicopter instead of using the standard formulae for parachute design. This insane choice has caused delays because it turns out reality does not obey the standard formulae for parachute design.
The commercial crew per seat cost includes the rocket and and ground support equipment. NASA have chosen the number seats and launches per year so Boeing and SpaceX can work out how much overhead and non-recurring engineering cost to add to each seat. As NASA wants a new rocket for each launch both service providers have to build the same number of rockets but SpaceX get most of their rockets back and can use them for commercial launches and Starlink.
Human digestion is based on vegetarian + meat when it is occasionally available. It did not particularly adapt to omnivore and is nowhere near specialised carnivore digestion. If there is any adaptation it is for cooked food. Cooking massively reduces the effort required to digest food so humans can manage with a poorly optimised digestive system.
You are very welcome to eat meat if you want to but please do not pretend that meat is an evolutionary requirement or even that their is some benefit to being on top of the food chain. The longer the chain the more chances that one link will break.
I already get machines phoning me up and telling me I will get arrested for not paying my taxes. I answered one of them and got put through to a human. I asked why he was calling and he did not know. He tried to get me to tell him but I wasn't co-operating so he guessed Windows technical support. Things went a bit down hill from there as I do not have a Windows computer.
For the tax thing I was going to ask what my name is. Who is going to get arrested for not paying taxes? What question do I ask for Windows? Should Microsoft know my name, Windows license number or what?
Company cars are only doing 1750 miles/year on average. There cannot be a significant proportion of 300 mile/day car drivers when the average is under 6 miles per day (and under half that for privately own cars).
Source: nts0901.ods (libreoffice spreadsheet) from uk national-travel-survey-statistics.
Actually this was thoroughly researched decades ago. The conclusion at the time was that the national grid could take it. An electric vehicle fleet actually made things easier if people set their cars to delay charging until the price of electricity dropped to near the lowest value of the previous day.
If you have some modern research to back up your statements, please link to it.
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