
Bet you....
somewhere, there's an equivalent of a sandal-wearing beardy going "8 bases?? Ha! I can create a fully functioning ecosystem with 4! //spit Millennials!"
119 publicly visible posts • joined 22 Jun 2009
From the NASA Deep Impact mission's web page at: http://deepimpact.umd.edu/faq2.html#q2
Spectroscopy, yes, but also because "engineering". My assumption is that these reasons apply to Hayabusa2 too.
<quote>Copper was chosen because it will cause the least interference with the measurements that will be made during the impact, will not leave a residue that would confuse potential future measurements, and can be made into a structurally strong impactor. In particular, all the inner shells of electrons for copper are completely filled. This means that it reacts very slowly with other elements, such as with the oxygen in cometary water, and it will end up producing relatively few bright emission lines in the spectrum of the vaporized materials. Other materials such as aluminum would produce far more and stronger emission lines (mostly due to aluminum oxides). There are only a few materials that satisfy this criterion and copper is the least expensive of them that is structurally sound. The material used to make the impactor is actually a copper alloy with about 3% beryllium to make the copper more stiff.</quote>
@Geniality - you didn't read that link did you?
Money quote: "But at 38 microseconds per day, the relativistic offset in the rates of the satellite clocks is so large that, if left uncompensated, it would cause navigational errors that accumulate faster than 10 km per day!"
So - relativistically tiny speeds still causing 10km per day error.
Pretty meaningful in my book. Your mileage may vary. (Ha! see what I did there?)
@Geniality "You need to be going very close to the speed of light (299,762 km/sec) for time dilation to become meaningful on a macroscopic scale. "
Tell that to the GPS satellite physicists. They'll set you straight^H^H^H^H^H^H freefall trajectory through curved spacetime.
http://physicscentral.com/explore/writers/will.cfm
More like culling of the weak and infirm....
XP: "I'm not dead!"
Customer: "What?"
Microsoft: Nothing -- here's your next forced update.
XP: I'm not dead!
Customer: Here -- he says he's not dead!
Microsoft: Yes, he is.
XP: I'm not!
Customer: He isn't.
Microsoft: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
XP: I'm getting better!
Microsoft: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment....
// you know the rest.
* They follow me around the web, and my privacy be damned.
* They show stuff I have no interest in buying.
* They show stuff I've just bought and won't be buying again for ages.
* They support sites that generate otherwise worthless content - quality be damned. If sites made content that is valuable to people, then those people will pay to access it.
* Sites are designed around them, rather than the content the site is providing.
Anything that diminishes their presence on the web is a good thing, imo.
Once your data is out of your network, it's not your data anymore.
I use a pre-Dropbox system - anything I want to hold off-site gets dropped into a holding folder, which a task picks up and encrypts the file using 7-Zip (AES-256, and with filename encryption enabled). The task then puts the resulting .7z file into the Dropbox sync folder for uploading to Dropbox.
Obviously, this isn't suitable for mass sharing. But for off-site storage whilst keeping my data private, I think it works a treat and means that if anyone wants to pry, they're going to have to ask me first.
I dipped my toes into Apple waters, and they are now getting vigorously towelled off and drying by the fire. Not one penny more from me.
The battery on my work Pro Retina is dying - 40 minutes offline max. I thought - I'll ring up the Store (tm), make an appointment in advance. They can have a battery ordered and waiting with my name on it and I can wonder in, watch them swap out the battery, pay, leave and get back to work.
No, no, no, said Apple. Bring it in. We'll do a diagnostic. If it _is_ the battery, we'll order one in. Then you can come back and leave your machine with us, having backed up and erased and confidential data (of course). We'll then replace your battery and it will take some time between 3 and 5 days. DAYS! Then you can come back again and collect your work machine. You'll be happy, because you won't have been working for a week and you'll be all rested. The you can restore everything from your backup and return to work.
3 round trips to a store (100km away), and a week lost. For a fucking battery.
We need some decent WEEE directives that make implementation of such a f**k-awful design economically impossible. Function over form - that's what I need, and Apple can't, or won't do it, and whilst we continue to give them our money, they absolutely will not stop. Ever.
This far, no further. The line must be drawn _here_
------------------------------------------------
@Mr Dabbs - Wish you well in your new surroundings. It's pretty good here.
When I moved out to France, still as a full-time employee of a UK company, that company had to register with the URSSAF tax body and get a Siret number. I pay tax/NI to France, *as does the company*. It was a bit of a runaround.
If that's going to be your situation, check out Titre Firmes Etrangeres - TFE - here: https://www.tfe.urssaf.fr
[[Vienna convention comments]]
Others disagree - http://www.connexionfrance.com/Vienna-Convention-1969-expats-rights-residence-Brexit-17867-view-article.html
Particularly of note to my situation - UK citizen residing in France - is that France opposed the Vienna convention and didn't sign it, so that's not a good start.
The money quote: "The London School of Economics’ professor of EU law, Damian Chalmers, said: “Basically, this argument of acquired rights for expatriates has nothing going for it. " "
Lots more explanation in that article, but their conclusion, to paraphrase, is "don't bet on it".
>> No-one tilting at the Tory leadership is saying up front and clear "you can stay"
> "I commit today to guaranteeing the rights of our EU friends who have come
> here to live and work," she > said. "We must give them certainty there is no
> way they will be bargaining chips in our negotiations."
> -- Andrea Leadsom, Tory leadership contender
Thank you AC.
Have I missed any other contender's similar pronouncements?
We can only hope.
IF (caps) deportation comes to pass then we are in the roundup buses and leaving everything we worked for and built here.
Currently, we are seen by Theresa May as no more than a "negotiating point" http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-immigration-eu-citizens-theresa-may-uk-a7116971.html
Colour me not reassured. No-one tilting at the Tory leadership is saying up front and clear "you can stay". Hollande isn't exactly taking the line of someone prepared to defend the position of families like us, especially when Le Pen is finding such support amongst both young and old.
Don't forget. The default fallback position, if all 27 remaining states fail to accept the settlement terms after 2 years negotiation (unless extended), is for all treaties to cease effect. That means no right of residence for any EU families in the UK, and no right of residence for any UK family in the EU.
That's an appealing outcome for the far right in Austria and the Netherlands.
And that means buses.
Very much IF and very much "hope not", but very much not 100% "not going to happen".
Bit of a rant on my part there, but we're the ones currently in the bait box, if not yet wriggling on the hook.
[[The prospect of UK politicians playing chicken with the EU for as long as they can get away with is good for no one.]]
It's good for me as it brings non-EU status to the UK _after_ I've been resident in France for 5 years and I can take out French citizenship. My family's fate is rather uncertain at the moment particularly if ($deity forbid) forcible repatriation of EU citizens occurs.
Allez les bleus!
FFS - hitting a moving project target is difficult enough without having the platform underneath you constantly moving as well.
Can someone at MS just take a deep breath, step away from the kool-aid vending machine and damned well make up their mind what they're actually trying to do, and just deliver a stable platform please?
/rant
(correction to withdrawn comment owing to maths fail)
The Total Solar Irradiance measurements taken during the satellite era show a variance in the range 1361 to 1364 W/m2, or about 0.22%
Professor Hunt's comment about mirrors directing "say 2%" away from Earth is therefore some 10 times the effect of Sol's own variability, so I think it justifiable to say that such a scheme would have a measurable impact.
Quite whether it is justifiable to block 27W/m2 of solar energy from all of Earth's plant life is another matter, given how much plants have evolved to compete for sunlight. It's side effects like the possible failure of crops that lead me to want to invoke the precautionary principle on such schemes.
No inference should be drawn on what position this commentard holds re climate change. I believe the following to be an absolute.
No scientific consensus is "overwhelming" - it matters not what, nor how many, scientists think, only what Nature does. To believe otherwise is hubris.
Ask Barry Marshall - Nobel Prize winner for his theory bacterium-induced peptic ulcers, and his experience of trying to advance his theory in the face of a lucrative antacid industry
Ask Daniel Shechtman - Nobel Prize winner for his discovery on the structure of quasicrystals, having been "ridiculed" and "treated badly" by his peers.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-15181187
Before I trust someone to validate something on my behalf, I try to make sure that I've got comeback against them if they do a bad job.
What's the comeback on Comodo et al for issuing a fake bank certificate? e.g. How many strikes before Google decides to blacklist a CA certificate in Chrome?