Posts by Stevie 7282 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Jun 2008
The answer is for a special satellite (and a special payload for the ISS as this method works in any orbit).
The satellite (or ISS Modulette) is loaded with that high-expansion foam they sell at Home DIY centers for making door and window frames bend so the door or window won't close properly.
Once in a likely junk-heavy trajectory the satellite (or ISS modulette) starts forming a big foamy ball of sticky gunk. Once formed to, say, a few fractions of a mile in diameter, the BFBoSG will act as an inelastic target for all this junk, capturing any that impact it nicely. Best of all, it won't knock bits of fthe ISS if it hits it on one of its junk-removing orbits because it's soft and bouncy at the relatively low approach velocities we shall arrange for it by choice of deployment orbit.
Once it is as full of crap as it can get without shattering we de-orbit it over someone we don't like. They'll be picking junk out of their topsoil for years, and that sticky foam is murder to deal with after re-entry has melted it into tar. That'll teach 'em.
This plan offers the following significant advantages:
a) all off-the-shelf technology, no new costly R&D needed.
2) totally green unless you count the places we drop the junkball on after de-orbit, but then, we shall pick the most deserving smug bastards to host the Return of the Satellite Bits so that's all right.
#) gets all those cans of expanding foam off the DIY store shelves so they can't be purchased and deployed by unwitting home handymen, thereby saving the cost of foam-removal-from-windowframes the next day.
I see no downside.
One reason for poor sales *might* be the insane love the bloody thing has for crossing Manhattan no matter what well-known alternative routes exist nor how much those routes are recommended nor for how long they have been known to be alternatives nor how idiotic it is to even consider driving through Manhattan on a Friday night at 4pm when the signposted road directions are made useless due to improvised and undocumented new routes set up on-the-fly by the nycpd "to improve traffic flow".
True life example: It took me ten minutes of fighting the UI to get it to accept that I'd rather pay a 10 buck toll to cross the Verrazano Narrows Bridge than spend another four hours in gridlocked Manhattan, during which the device insisted it did not know what the Verrazano Narrows Bridge was.
On the way back I told it to take us across the Outerbridge Crossing (the bridge on the other side of Staten Island) under the assumption that since our destination was Eastern Long Island it could work the rest out for itself and take us across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge by itself. It attempted to plot a route that took us across the Outerbridge Crossing, then north and across the Goethals Bridge (back into New Jersey, 180 degrees wrong from the intended route and completely the wrong State) and - you guessed it - through a tunnel into Manhattan. At rush hour.
Perhaps it isn't so much an iPad App the TomTom people need so much as a fscking clue.
The revelation that the company is Dutch suggests a reason for the bizarre agenda though.
Naw, not to judge by my OpenOffice experience. The product is much better than it was three years ago (which to be honest wasn't saying much for them of us wot know the difference between an office suite and a word processor/basic spreadsheet lashup) but it still has odd problems.
I'm currently developing a large workbook app in OOCalc and have come across all of the following: Arbitrary and undocumented nesting issues with bracketed function calls (the ones that take arguments) requiring inelegant and otherwise unnecessary "staging" of parts of a nested function in another cell, memory management issues requiring the book be closed and reopened to ensure proper recalculation, slow process when certain on-disk size is reached (512 K seems to be the current magic number) and a macro recorder that destabilizes the whole affair by using it.
Also: Workbook Macros need to be invokable by hotkeys to be really useful, but that feature is yet to be added to OpenOfficeCalc.
That said, it is a good little product for those that don't need an Office Suite with legs, and orders of magnitude better than it was three years ago.
And to get back on topic: BOOHISS to the ribbon. A less intuitive interface I have yet to meet.
Well *I* expected the rush once the price fell because I know that once something is priced under 100 dollars people will regard it as a safe bet - cheap enough to toss if it is a piece of tat - from all the console game shenanigans I've seen over the years, and that Palm have a loyal audience who were just waiting for the form factor to become useful when the whole idea was junked by the IQ brigade now in charge because the exact same thing happened when palm was bought up by 3-Com (Handspring Visor was born out of that one).
Call me a liar again and I'll kick your snoof organs so hard you'll see God.
I quite agree. I haven't flown anywhere since these stupid and pointless searches were instigated - and flying is considered the only way to travel any distance here in the land of the free (upgrade with 25000 air miles).
If enough people put their money where their mouth is perhaps the Airlines, in a bid to become not bankrupt (again), will get things changed.
As we all know, the actual holes in any airport's security are behind the scenes, despite assurances of "background checks" on all concerned. Would anyone reading this put anything valuable in checked luggage voluntarily?
Bread and circuses.
Well it would *help* if the stupid software didn't tell the cracker when each character had been guessed. I can't count the number of Casino Heists, intrusions into government computers by disaffected radicals with unfeasible tech or penetrations into vaults in secret SPECTRE hideouts have been facilitated by that nitwit stupidity.
Encryptors! Bloody well keep the whole password secret until the entire thing has been guessed!
The last clockwork Welshman passed away in 1963. All Welshmen are now either gas- or electricity-powered and require no winding.
It does seem from the comments here that some of the English are still using the old key-and-mainspring system though, and they no longer come with a stiff upper lip.
"All they seem to care about is money".
You guys do understand that this kind of operation isn't set up for fun, don't you?
What you should be complaining about is the un-businesslike approach to making money the company has adopted that has led them into this Fiasco.
From where I sit it looks very much like the updates that started this whole mess, and the subsequent fix, were penned by someone who didn't "get" that the game was now a business and not a hobby.
Being on the defensive automatically grants initiative to the opponent letting them dictate the pace, timing and form of battles fought. This is a basic Warfare 101 principle.
Internet resources and assets are by their nature fortresses: i.e. they are totally defensive.
It is a trivial exercise to extrapolate that a priori web-connected assets are an inherently vulnerable infrastructure, and that the advantages lie with the attacker.
Are we adding in the cost of recovering the crew re-entry vessel in that?
I seem to recall that in previous versions of this idea large portions of the Navy were required to get the crew back home.
The Shuttle had one massive advantage - it could bring the crew back to the place they were expected without the need for an aircraft carrier, escorts, Sea King helicopters, divers, pilots, reconnaissance aircraft etc, and wasn't as scuppered by typhoons, hurricanes etc as the other option was.
Easier to land the Shuttle somewhere other than planned and transfer it later than move a fleet of ships to a different ocean.
No doubt this has been factored in, and not conveniently left off as a "detail" best sorted out after public funding has been gotten for the so-called "private industries".
Especially considering it was the bloody ISS that drained the funding needed to keep the Hubble Space Telescope in operation.
I don't understand why people are so down on he shuttle for its loss of design vision and consequent cost overruns, but so up about the ISS which has been an expensive boondoggle from day one, compromised to the point it barely fulfills any of its stated design goals.
Why would that be a good idea? We have no spacecraft capable of reaching it if we move it much further out, let alone GEO. The function of the onboard observational sensors would be badly compromised by the physics of the distance to intensity ratio and GEO is a prized and expensive place to put anything.
If you're going to move it about, and assuming the trusses can stand the strain of doing that (haven't done the sums), surely there are more useful destinations?
I'll be interested to see whether the modules are still habitable in ten years time myself. For all the tears cried over MIR, and admitting it was a great achievement, it was clapped out and a danger to all on board by the time it was decommissioned.
In the real universe there are problems involved with only-just-tech societies keeping space habitats viable. Actors and politicians don't have a say when it comes to this, only technologists and astronauts/cosmonauts and, if they are good and keep very quiet, scientists.
Of course, it might be possible to convert much of the operation of the thing to telepresence.
But then: why bother. The point of space is to go there in person. Otherwise, why have it in the first place?
I'd say the most insidious danger is when someone starts your SMS-enabled borgemobile inside your built-in garage while you are asleep.
But as the article says, the idiot desire to control everything from a sodding iClone is not restricted to cars, but has been expanded to some pretty stupid industrial places.
Stupid people with stupid toys.
Engine block heaters are not designed nor intended to warm up the engine, but to keep the oil at a temperature at which it will flow when the engine is turned over.
Your engine will be "cold" for quite a bit after starting even with a block heater in any place you actually need one, with all that that implies.
Who cares what you did on a toy computer? Real geeks were coaxing 1900s to perform 15 years after their useful service life had expired with a PLAN opcode card, a roll of paper tape and the light of Jesus in their eyes.
Real discs aren't given letters and don't "flop". They have octal numbers, eleven platters and are a foot across.
Whippersnappers!
I *think* it means that should you be important enough, someone could get at your creds by switching out your firewire connection with a custom-made one c/w small chip o' cleverness built in and rifling your mac while you blithely type in the passwords you need to get into your own machine.
I've seen precisely 3 blue screens since I bought XP in 2001. One because a disc controller failed (so we can put that one down to the hardware manufacturer rather than MS) and the other two I ascribe to a certain AV company's nagware since once I disabled it the problem went away.
I've never seen a Blue Screen on any of my at-work XP workstations in the 10 years I've been using them.
For me, mentioning the Blue Screen immediately devalues whatever the other guy has to say because, well, it shows they are out of touch. Years out of touch.
Kudos to Apple for the address jiggery-pokery. It is irrelevant who did it first. Apple have done it *now* and deserve an Attaboy.
I saw the first shuttle launch after Columbia from a golf course in Kissimmee. Boy that sucker was moving! Across the sky like greased lightning.
Penn Jillette tells in one of their book on how NASA has (or had) one of the best sight gags in history in he Space Shuttle. He says you have just enough time, when viewing from the VIP seats, to turn to the person next to you and say "I thought it would be louder". That's when the loudest, deepest, most organ-shaking noise you ever heard in your life hits you.
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