Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward 26111 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Dec 2009
>A major improvement could be made by simply banning all form of direct or indirect corporate lobbying, sadly this won't happen.
Leaving only churches, pressure groups, unions and politically motivated individuals to lobby for their desired outcome?
> a majestic steel giant holding wires aloft. A small price to pay for the benefits of mains electricity,
Also useful for containing Trolls
If the Scotland-Yorkshire line is built with them - then Lancastrian Trolls will be safely contained
Less so than before - what exactly can the USA do to SpaceX?
Once upon a time it could stop US suppliers of advanced rocket parts to your little rocket company.
Now SpaceX can build it's own rockets in Mordor with European engineers, German machine tools, Taiwanese chips and Japanese chemicals and launch from Narnia There aren't many vital parts the USA can ITAR.
It could ban US customers from using SpaceX and force them into the monopoly priced arms of Boeing - but that would be effectively enforcing sanctions on itself (see Brexit) and leave US space customers in the wake of those foreigners with ever cheapening access to space
They aren't a huge problem for optical astronomy, they are only visible when they are in sunlight - so only close to dawn and dusk
They are terrible for radio astronomy
Another concern is perhaps the ozone layer. We hand wavingly say 'space is big' and a couple of rockets can do anything. But these atmospheric layers are very sparse in terms of total mass of a chemical, with 1000s of launches dumping exhaust gas or manoeuvring fuel into a thin layer might be a concern
Depends on the orbit - Starlink are in a very low orbit and will deorbit quickly. Unless somebody deliberately blows one up and sends the debris higher.
By comparison there are around 65M shipping containers, with over half of them being in transit at any time. Somewhere >1000 are lost every year and these are a risk to sailors lives.
Surely we should ban international trade until the FTC does a study on them ?
> But then again, it is the IRS, whose specialty is unnecessary complication of all things.
With funding controlled by politicians, generally in opposition to the other lot of politicians currently in power, and fighting for re-election.
"Hello, I'm your candidate for Dunny-on-the-Wold and I was responsible for increasing funding for the IRS which allowed them to more effectively collect tax from you."
But if you're the owner of a financial news network and you are considering of a presidential bid - you might decide to report that all Chinese motherboards have hidden undetectable chips that communicate with China.
Nobody else managed to find any evidence of these ? That just shows how undetectable they are !
So the ballot boxes and processes for counting are 100% cyber-secure - great
But certain single letter messaging sites sending you to voter registration pages that aren't actually registering you, just collecting your info for marketing - doesn't count because it's not 'election technology'
>Welcome to the Living Language, where your language is defined by the vast majority of people who don't know how to speak it properly
Where this particular language is defined by the IUPAC committee on naming.
If we are now required to spell Sulfur with an F like some ignorant colonials - they can at least spell Aluminium properly (which they used to do until 1925 when somebody made a typo and refused to admit it)
>Which then brings the question of if its worth doing at all. I dont know the answer but could reasonably be to not bother
Depends how much of the hidden costs you count.
Worth running the process to extract the value of gold = no
Worth it to reduce the amount of heavy metal waste going into landfill = yes
Worth it considering the amount of toxic waste solvents generated by the process = someone should check
There was a big deal about "mining" slag heaps for rare-earths with some interesting solvent mixtures. But the result was a small amount of rare-earths and a mountain sized slag heap now saturated with toxic solvents that had to be disposed of somehow.
You haven't done firmware updates by dialing a remote piece of kit, hitting the control key to get into reprogram mode, sending the new image as zmodem, typing the new init vector entry, hitting the get-out-of-program-mode control key, rebooting and praying.
>With PIP and Pypi (the official Python package manager and repo) now existing, most of the reasons for most users to use Anaconda have gone away.
One use of conda (that seems to be less well known) is to create conda environments.
You can have multiple separate python+libs installations that are completely isolated but simple and ligthweight compared to a Docker container / VM etc.
