
Re: Wait!
Why yes, I did mean the Apple Watch. I guess the product is so forgettable I forgot its name.
86 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Jul 2008
Dave, who needs details when you've lead such a rich and varied life as Jake here?
Jake Breeds & trains Cop dogs & horses and is Qualified to Judge Best In Show at American Kennel Club shows
Has friends in South Korea
Was a friend and neighbour of Steve Jobs and has his signature carved in his picnic table
Worked on spacecraft software/firmware
Mentored the founders of Google
Helped work out how to transfer the existing NCP ARPANet to the existing TCP/IP network
Has been Usenet & Mailinglist moderator for 30 years
Is a qualified pilot
Does track day driving
Has done arctic survival training and has eaten Lemming
Knows FORTRAN and COBOL
He ego-surfed the OSX source & found shit he re-wrote from AT&T source nearly 25 years ago
Has been making money from his knowledge of the PDP11 family since 1979
Has an extensive gun collection, was shooting gophers before he was in kindergarten and can fire his Great Grandfather's Kentucky over twice a minute
Watched a guy get killed by a claw hammer thrown from 35 feet up in Humboldt County
Watched a friend once won a bar bet by sticking 7 of 10 Craftsman brand screwdrivers into a straw archery butt at 15 yards in under 15 seconds
His kid/daughter (varies) is the Senior Member of the Technical Staff in a Fortune 150/250 (varies) corporation. She owns 6 horses, and is quite competitive in hunter/jumper, eventing & dressage
Can and has lived off the land, Makes road kill sausages several times a year, Owns a couple acres of Merlot grapes here that have Eucalyptus genes and grows Gravensteins (15 acres, originally planted by his great-grandfather)
Got kicked out of "Sunday School" when I was roughly 8 years old
Owns an outdoor 1875 stone bread oven
Owns a drilled-into-the-rock iron-ring tidal mooring on the Noyo River in Northern California. His Great Grandfather claimed it in 1872
Runs several "at risk yoof" camps every year.
Is a locksmith. Learned to pick locks before he was a teenager. Can open most house-hold doors with no more than a safety-pin & a bobby-pin.
Once could have shot the an intruder he had at chez jake, but when he got down to the kitchen, where he was, instead calmly put down his Kimber & picked up the phone & called the non-emergency police line. When they arrived, called off the dogs & he was transported to the hospital to stop the bleeding.
Can still read text/code on cards and tape, and sometimes "think" in octal and hex. A partially sighted friend can read punched paper with her fingers, similar to braille.
Accepted 7 contracts in the last 18 months pulling corporations out of the clouds. It's actually quite lucrative (apparently)
Has never has used google/youtube. Ever.
I for one think we have a great deal to learn from this man.
If you knew where to find all the hidden restart / save poles and knew how to get round all the special stages first time every time, it was entirely possible to have super sonic before the end of the first zone on Sonic 2. Then you could fly trough every level as super sonic without having the use any cheat codes.
My first impression after looking at their proposal and reading subsequent discussion in various space forums is that this will be the latest in a long line of here today gone tomorrow space ventures that makes a lot of big, appealing claims, drums up a load of media hype and then is scarcely heard from again.
I'm as annoyed as any space nerd that we haven't been back to the moon in 40 years but the idea that these guys are going to start from scratch and get a fully developed lunar transport architecture along the lines of what they're proposing is something that only people who know bugger all about space will swallow. There isn't even a current working US based system to get humans into orbit at the moment and they're going to develop a lunar transfer vehicle and a lunar lander as well? By 2020? Pull the other one!
People will get back to the moon one day but it won't be Golden Spike that gets them there and it certainly won't be happening before 2020!
Really old copper cable would have been patched up a lot over the years so could have a load of ropey joints all along it's length. That said, with the speed difference you're talking about, it probably wasn't copper. There's still a lot of aluminium cable in the network and it's really crap for data. They always replace old ali with copper these days which leads to big speed increases for customers on the end of it.
To you and other doubters here, I would wager that the man who founded and runs Spacex, a company that that has made multiple successful spacecraft launches to low earth orbit *might* be better placed than yourselves to decide whether it will or will not work.
Call me crazy but I think he'd have considered the enginnering challenges before going to the press.
Let's wait for more details shall we, hmm?
So you'll be alright on that front. As to the rest, 100 nukes landing at the same time, within 20 miles of each other will result in quite a nice light show, a really big (but not especially deep) hole in the ground and pretty much feck all else.
Even 1000 nukes all hitting the same spot would only realease the engery equivalent of a moderate sized meteor strike. That sort of thing has happened quite a lot to both planets in the past with very little to show for it.
IMO you're quite right in thinking it'd be easier to alter mars or venus to suit our needs than to travel to planets around other stars but the amount of energy required to make any tangible long term difference will make your head spin.
There are lots of other proposed methods apart from chucking nukes at planets. Look up Terraforming if you're interested in finding out more :o)
AFAIK Spacex manufacture most of their own hardware. Engines, rocket bodies, tanks, spacecraft bodies and loads of other custom parts are assembed in SPACEXs own factories. There's plently of photos of them doing it on their website.
There are probably a million off the shelf components that they buy in, but the ULA does that too and I'm pretty sure they don't list the entire staff of a parts manufacuturer any more than SPACEX do.
From their website:
"BT Engage IT is a part of BT Group. We provide consultancy, Unified Communications, managed ICT services and complete computing services for medium and large organisations. Helpdesks, hardware maintenance, staging and configuration, application delivery, high availability data, data back-up and managed print services are available. We can also supply an infrastructure audit report with recommendations for optimisation."
I agree there are some tree huggy medieval village types out there and they probably won't like it. They can fuck off back to the woods and go live in a Yurt for all I care.
The thing is, the momentum behind the current environmental movent has pretty much fuck all to do with them and a lot more to do with ever increasing mountains of evidence leading more rational people to the inescapable conclusion that we really do have a collective impact on the world around us and we are responsible for the consequences.
Anybody who dismisses that fact is as much on the fringe as the tree huggers IMHO.
The same fruitcakes that said when the Galileo probe was deliberately directed to collide with Jupiter the material in its RTG would kick start nuclear fusion in the core of the planet and give us a second sun!
We are never going to get anywhere in space unless we start collectively telling these numptys to get a clue or STFU!
They'll reprocess the spent fuel rods. I'm a bit spotty on the details but IIRC around 99% by mass of the spent fuel rod can be reused. The other 1% are (admittedly rather nasty) fission products that need to go into storage in a nuclear waste facility where they can decay naturally into heavy metals like lead.
It's not ideal, but not as bad as the popular myth that there are vast qauntities of the stuff produced every year.
...that SETI is barking up the wrong tree. Radio is obviously no use over interstellar distances so presumably all the aliens out there would have to have figured out some other kind of faster than light comms (subspace transmission, quantum resonance, take your pick) and as soon as we figured out how to do it ourselves we'd suddently be bombarded with a vast array of interstellar chatter.
In my experience only the most hardened audiophiles or people who work with audio on a professional basis listening on very expensive equipment can truly tell the difference between 16 bit 44khz CD quality and anything higher. I'm pretty sure the original developers of CDs could have set a higher standard if they'd wanted but it wasn't deemed necessary.
You might want to replace your car stereo then. My CD collection works fine in the car, every single one. I've had some of those discs for 15 years and they've picked up their share of smudges and scratches in that time. CDs have got pretty sophisticated error correction built in. I've never come across a vinyl record that had that ;)
a) Searching for and buying music using the Amazon 1 click buy button is just as convenient as any download store I've ever used IMHO.
b) People still like to have physical media when they've paid money for it. You can't put a downoad on display on a shelf and a hard copy is always more secure / robust than a download. Ok, it might not be the mainstream for much longer but CDs aren't going anywhere for a long time. FACT*
* the kind of fact I just made up to try and add emphasis