Posts by Michael Maxwell 55 publicly visible posts • joined 15 May 2007
I got an update on 22 Apr to my iPhone to 13.4.1, but that is not the version said to have the fix--waiting for 13.4.5 for that (it's only out in beta now, and I don't get beta). I just checked now, and my phone tells me there's no update. So you might want to check whether yours was just the 13.4.1 (which doesn't help), or whether you got 13.4.5 sooner than I did.
BTW, there apparently are no 13.4.2-13.4.4.
And I'm looking at this page, where every "Reply" button is just a white-on-black rectangle, and I'm wondering what other buttons there are. I see "Preview" and "Submit" white-on-black rectangles, so I guess those are also buttons. Then there are hyperlinks to "edit your details" and "log in here"; at least those are clear. But there are other things that are probably clickable, like "Report abuse"--but that's just greyish text on a white background, so how do I know it's a button? Then there's "Add an icon", black text on light grey, which sounds like it ought to be a button; but below that is "Title", also black text on light grey, and that doesn't seem to be a button. Indeed, I just moused over them, and it's true--but completely non-obvious from the coloring. And more things that might, or might not, be hyperlinks or buttons down at the bottom of the page. I'm confused.
The Register, bring back real buttons!
I believe what he's saying is that you don't seem to be able to put an English sentence together. That is, while you jumble English words up, they don't make any sense together. (Or as someone put it above, the translator from Martian to English doesn't appear to be working very well.)
Also Google News, which was once quite good. Went bonkers some years ago, and stayed that way despite thousands upon thousands of negative posts about it (and nary a good post).
You bring up GMail: Terrible UI (so is Outlook's webmail, but in different ways). Whose stupid idea was it to make the '#' key the delete key? Did that person even know where the # key is? Of course you can mouse the garbage can icon, but I not infrequently click the garbage can on the wrong line, deleting the wrong mail. I have to use GMail (my university was seduced by the dark side a year ago), but I pull it up on my home computer using Thunderbird. A much happier "experience".
In sum (and agreeing with you), I find that Google doesn't care about its users; it cares about its advertisers. Which I suppose is to be expected.
I think the best analogy is the night that Sven's wife called him on the cell on his commute home. Lena said, "Now Sven, you be careful out dere. The news says dere's somevun driving de wrong vay on de freevay." Sven replies, "Ya, sure, if dere's one, dere's a tousant."
I propose that we name whatever hit proto-Jupiter and proto-Earth, Sven.
The other responses have been about fusion, which of course Jupiter is too small for. But the OP was about fission. Fission still occurs in the Earth, and is the source of the heat flow from the interior; this heat flow powers plate tectonics, in the sense that it causes melting.
The supply of fissionable isotopes was much higher in the early solar system, since most of those isotopes with relatively short half lives have by now fissioned away (with the exception of some that are themselves products of fission of longer-lived isotopes, like radon). So presumably the heat production due to fission (not fusion) was much higher in the planets of the early solar system.
Give that, plus the fact that massive planets might be more effective at separating out heavy elements--rather like a centrifuge (with heavier elements being more likely to be fissionable), your idea does seem plausible to me. But I'm no geophysicist...
IIRC, when Microsoft was asked why the ribbon was obligatory--why they couldn't make it possible to use either the ribbon or the old menu--the reply was that it was too much work to maintain both. That always seemed bogus to me.
Now for LibreOffice we read: "there are now a bewildering number of options for menus and toolbars. You can select Standard Toolbar, Single Toolbar, Sidebar, Tabbed, Tabbed Compact, Groupedbar Compact, and Contextual Single. You can also combine various options, such as choosing Tabbed UI, which is reminiscent of the Microsoft Office ribbon toolbar, and then adding the traditional dropdown menubar on top." So what Microsoft couldn't do because it was too much work, the LibreOffice developers are doing, and then some.
(I do suspect the Microsoft reason was really an excuse.)
"Or park the heat shield and re-entry lumber in LEO, go to the moon, and pick it up and drop back to earth that way?" That is what Apollo did; the lunar lander was not capable of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, only the command module (which had the heat shield).
The lander that Apollo 13 carted along did come in rather handy... although I suppose that's not a good reason to cart one along on every trip.
IIUC, it's not easy to transfer fuel (and oxidizer) in orbit. That said, it can be done. But don't forget that half of the Apollo lander stayed on the surface of the moon. If you wanted to re-use the entire lander, not just the part that flew back up to orbit, you'd need more fuel.
Also, the flagpole appears to be about an inch (a couple centimeters) in diameter, while that other shadow is easily six inches (15 cm or so) wide. And the light is coming from the wrong direction for that width to be a shadow effect. (Also, I can't imagine why everything else would have shadows pointing one way, and the flag another way, even with studio lighting.)
There must be someone here as old as me. I remember Lloyd Mallan's claims. I wanted to believe them at the time, but I was a bit skeptical. One of his claims was that the pictures Luna 2 took of the back side of the Moon couldn't be right. (IIRC, because they didn't show any significant maria.) A few years later, when US spacecraft orbited the Moon, it of course turned out that the Soviet pictures were quite accurate (if a bit blurry).
"ordering another 10,000 toilet rolls" You laugh, but in The Ship with the Flat Tire (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18001514-the-ship-with-the-flat-tire), the Supply Officer (a fresh Ensign) orders a certain quantity of TP, because his Chief thinks the unit of issue is the roll. Turns out the unit is the case--something like 100 rolls per case. When it arrives, they have trouble finding places on board to stow it. But as you might guess, it saves the ship later on.
So what's wrong with punch cards? If you make a mistake, you can stick it in a different slot of the card reader, and have the reader copy the old card onto a new card, up to the column where you made a mistake. At least I could on the machine I learned programming on, back in 1969. Copy-punch, we called it.
No matter what you may think of google, this is not about them. They--and probably all other search engines--will dutifully obey the robots.txt file that the tax preparation companies put there. In other words, you're very unlikely to find the free file programs in *any* search engine.
"they don't pass in front of their star when we're looking": that could of course be, although the missions are planned so that they look at the same stars frequently. The real problem is that the plane of the planet's orbit has to make the planet pass in front of the star from our perspective. Putting it differently, we need to be in their ecliptic. The problem is that most planets don't orbit in such a plane, so we'll never see them pass in front of their parent star, even if we watch continually.
By the same token, an alien living on one of those planets would only see the Earth pass in front of the Sun if they happened to be on our ecliptic.
I guess that depends on what you mean by fusion power. My understanding is that fusion takes place only in the core of the Sun, and that it takes photons thousands of years to get from there to the surface. It's of course not the same photon ending that journey and emerging into space that started it (assuming photons have an identity in the first place).
As it happens, I just packed two VCRs in a box today, to be given away to a used-things place that actually accepts them. BUT: they haven't picked it up yet. So if you send me 300 BC in the next 48 hours, I'll pull the VCR out of the box and ship it to you. (Free shipping, such a bargain!) Then you can watch your tape!
"claim that silver particles embedded in samples of gold can become superconductive at 236 Kelvin or -37.15 degrees Celsius" If that's room temperature, somebody really has their AC cranked up. (It would of course be considerably warmer than previous "high temperature" superconductors, but temperatures like that are found in the Arctic... in winter. Or maybe Minnesota.)
@Scott Gilbertson, you mentioned an add-on that provided "vim-like keystrokes" to Firefox. Years ago (I think it was Windows 3.1) I modified some code I found on-line to add vim-like cursor control to all apps in Windows. It hooks the keyboard, so Ctrl-H is left arrow, Ctrl-J is down arrow, Ctrl-D is 7 lines down, etc.; and Ctrl-Q puts you into "shift" mode, so the same keys now select. I've always wondered why Windows didn't just provide such a mechanism built-in. It still works with Windows10, except for some reason in Edge (which I didn't want to use anyway, so no great loss).
Then I suppose a 'protocol' must be a first 'col', whatever that is. And there can be only one protozoan, all the other amoebas, paramecia, stentors etc. must be that protozoan's descendants. And only one thing can be prototypical, all the others are imposters.
I could go on, but I think you get the idea. You're arguing from the etymology: in Greek, protos (προτος) means 'first', but that doesn't mean it always (or even ever) means that in English.
"We old farts are DINOSAURS, sticks in the mud, living in the past, refusing to change, refusing to adapt, refusing to believe that what THEY want to do is so superior to the way things have been done for DECADES."
Stop it, I resemble that remark!
And for the record, I also resemble point (a) in your description of millenials: arrogant.
One reason we got rid of steam trains is that it's hard to build an efficient condenser that uses air as the coolant; the heat transfer is too slow. Water, on the other hand, is quite good at heat transfer, so steam plants that use condensers cooled by water (as in lakes or oceans) are much more efficient. And as I'm sure you know, the efficiency of any heat engine is determined by the difference in temperature between the hot working fluid (steam, ICO a steam plant) and the cold working fluid (condensate).
Fossil-fueled steam-driven ships lasted a lot longer than steam trains, in part because the ocean makes a great coolant for the condenser. I was Main Propulsion Assistant on one of the last ones in the US Navy, decommissioned in 1993. Steam plants were replaced on non-nuclear naval vessels because the darned steam plants were getting too complicated and too dangerous: 1200psi steam at 975 degrees (F) of superheat, and we had around 5000 valves in our plant (four boilers, two main engines). I'm told that the gas turbines that replaced them are much simpler. (Possibly more efficient, I don't know.)
Um, no. It's got words, sure, but the hieroglyphics are in the way. The ribbon wouldn't be half so bad if I could turn off the icons. At least now it allows some modification (although not as much as the old menus allowed); when the ribbon first came out, it was definitely of the ilk "You can have any color you want, so long as it's black." Lots of worthless items (Mailings, for instance), and missing some of the things I need (Language). (For the record, I admit that most people probably don't use the Language item, but I also think hardly anyone uses Mailings. It's just something to get in the way.)
Another negative of recent versions of Office is the color choices. And here it really is a Henry Ford choice: any color you want, so long as it's gray. (Pale gray, paler gray, and palest gray.) And no way to tell by looking whether an Office app has keyboard focus.
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