Posts by Death Boffin 69 posts • joined 19 Nov 2008
I had the opposite experience. After a frustrating weekend of trying to get some electrical equipment to work for an upcoming test, I got up especially early to call from the US west coast to the English valve company that was at the heart of the problem. The phone rang and rang. Finally someone answered it. I started to lay out my problem to him, only to be interrupted and told "I'm the security guard. Today's a bank holiday, call back tomorrow."
As a leftpondian forced to use SAP, I find it interesting that when you get down far enough in the menus, the error messages start coming out in German. And the time stamps are in European standard time. It is as if someone said "Good enough Rolf, no one will ever get this far."
The Second Amendment is not the place to look for this. In the main text of the Constitution, the Founders contemplated private armies and navies. Look up the sections on Letters of Marque and Reprisal and captures on land and sea.
Indeed during the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, wealthy individuals would supply their own units including artillery, the weapons of mass destruction of their day. Privateers were also sanctioned at times.
This is extremely useful for deep space probes. Navigation in the outer solar system has been by using very long baseline interferometry to determine space craft position. The problem is that the farther you get away from earth, the worse the position accuracy. Now you can determine spacecraft position to 3 miles anywhere within a few light years of Earth. This will allow much closer approaches to the outer planets as the spacecraft can be located much more precisely. I assume that the accuracy will improve as they refine the system and add more pulsars to the positioning catalog.
Really? The 10's of millions killed by the PRC in the revolution and Cultural Revolution beg to differ.
"I'd say that killing people is worse than restricting the freedom of speech. USA is in no position to criticize China on its human rights record."
That is the great thing about China, you get the best of both worlds; killing people and restricting freedom of speech. /s
From the US Weather Service forecast for Lompoc/Vandenberg:
Sunday Night
Rain. The rain could be heavy at times. Low around 54. South southeast wind around 15 mph, with gusts as high as 25 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%.
Monday
Rain likely before 10am, then a chance of showers, mainly after 4pm. Cloudy, then gradually becoming mostly sunny, with a high near 63. South southwest wind around 10 mph, with gusts as high as 15 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%.
Visibility is a big problem in these conditions.
The best theory I have seen of how it works can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.03449
Makes for interesting reading. As far as I can tell the theory of operation implies that the universe is not a closed system, neatly sidestepping the First Law of Thermodynamics.
A criticism of the idea can be found here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.00494
It will be interesting to see how this plays out.
Really? Seem we had to fight your lot here a couple of times. The reason we have a White House, is that it was sacked and torched. Then there was the little fracas in 1865. Lost a great-great-grandfather in that one.
Fortunately we haven't had to deal with one lately.
"The crews of the ships that fought at Trafalgar included sailors from America, Ireland, Prussia, Sweden, the West Indies, Africa, and even France and Spain against whom the British were fighting. On Nelson's ship HMS Victory there were 22 nationalities involved in fighting on the British side."
The Americans on there were one of the reasons that we had the War of 1812.
"Once you think about how long the production chain and how large the capital infrastructure must be to produce something as simple as an electric motor from raw materials in a friendly environment and a kinda-optimizing kinda-working economy and how rapidly disrepair accumulates even in organizations where funding can be forcefully secured from the populace..." -Destroy All Monsters
The thing is for space exploration, you do not need all that capital infrastructure. The reason that infrastructure is there to make the electric motor is that you are making them by the boatload; hopefully cheaper than your competitor's factory. On Mars, you only have to make it cheaper and faster than you can get it from Earth. So some kind of very inefficient, but very flexible fabricator is needed to produce the parts you need. This starts the process of building your own capital infrastructure on Mars, a little bit at a time.
Chances are very good that right now you are using a technology that government developed and then had it all tied up in a bow for commercial use. That technology is Gallium Arsenide. It is in most cell phones and WiFi access points. In the 1980's it was a laboratory curiosity, then the military started to develop it for their needs, funding the development and infrastructure to produce it. They also realized that to keep their costs down the producers needed a commercial market to get volume up and prices down. So in the 1990's, it began to be commercialized and entered the cell phone market. By the 2000's the commercial market led production.
This happens pretty often. The Guard and Reserves generally have people with a decade or more of experience and a similar amount of time working with each other. They are up against a Regular workforce that moves every two years and is highly tilted to inexperienced newbies and careerists. What happens is that the reservists usually win the first year's competition and then the Regulars' brass rejiggers the playing field to favor the Regulars.
All I want to do is go back to the 1950's:
"Mildred take a letter to Mr. Leadbum."
"Dear Mr Leadbum, your offer is seriously lacking in detail and does not have a realistic price."
"OK Mildred, take that, clean it up and prepare it for my signature."
What is so difficult about that?
The Fermi Paradox still presents a big problem here. It appears reasonably easy to colonize the entire visible universe with technology not very far beyond what we have currently. Anti-matter drives may not be possible by the laws of physics, but all the others are engineering problems. See the following PDF file for full details: http://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/intergalactic-spreading.pdf
Even if there were not change in sea level, most pacific islanders would be underwater eventually. The technical term for it is isostasy; the tendency of geological formations to find their own level. The Hawaiian islands are currently sinking at a rate of 2mm per year. About the same sea level rise as attributed to global climate change. For the final result, look up the term guyot.
I spent nearly a day faffing around trying to get the wifi working under Mint 14. This was on a Dell laptop with a Broadcom 4311 card. Its a good thing that I remembered a lot of the CLI commands from my HPUX days in the 80's, because I had to spend a lot time in there trying to get things to work.
I was also unimpressed with upgrade instructions for the new distro that started with: "Make a backup of your data and applications": Looks like it will be a while upgrading to a new distro.
Finally, I left the system running overnight downloading software. When I went to check on it in the morning, the system was completely frozen. I had to hold down the power button to reboot.
I had been using Unbuntu, where things just worked, but did not like the Unity interface. Heard good things about Mint, but did not experience them.
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