Posts by Yesnomaybe 332 publicly visible posts • joined 6 May 2010
The purchasing framework I am forced to use, bizarrely manages to price most things 10% above the normal retail-cost of whatever we want to buy.
And from personal experience, having a procurement/purchasing department is a 100% gold-plated dead-cert way of getting the WRONG equipment LATE and more EXPENSIVE that it would otherwise be.
"And where exactly do you think the governments get their money from?"
What does that have to do with fining a government for non-compliance with an EU law?
If you got a parking-fine, should it matter where YOU get the money from? Could you get out of paying the fine if you said "Oh, I'm going to have to mug a couple of old ladies to pay for this. Is that REALLY what you want?"
"The Commission has begun proceedings against the UK, Germany, Greece, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Luxembourg and Spain for not acting on the evidence uncovered by investigations, or for failure to bring in laws punishing environmental breaches."
The EU, wading in, faceless bureaucrats in Brussels telling us to ...uh... protect our population against pollution and ...er... trying to stop corporations doing whatever they want to make a quick buck!! Outrageous!!!
Thinking about AI.... When/if we get general AI. Do we need to elevate the machine to "sentient" and give it rights and so on? Opens a whole can of worms, doesn't it? Wouldn't it be easier to reclassify humans as "fleshy neural networks" or something. Then, we would be allowed to "kill" the AI, because it is just one type of program or algorithm terminating another. I'm probably being a bit clumsy with my terms here, but do you see what I'm getting at? There is an ethical conundrum coming up, and I think we need to get around it somehow. Probably a good idea to have a kind of hierarchy where fleshy outranks silicone. Otherwise, you know, armageddon and that...
Yup, that's "mud" to you and me. That sounds pretty perfect. It should be possible to tunnel through that, using only heat. and some kind of pump. What I propose (I could do with a BIT of funding, I'll set up a Kickstarter thing or something) is: Land on surface of mud-lake. Drop something hot onto frozen mud, tied to a string or something. (I'll flesh this out with details later) Pump slurry out of hole and away.
Lower the hot thing (I'm thinking a sub-critical lump of plutonium, heavily shielded) gradually. Keep pumping that mud. Keep going until you reach bottom, but pump a bit slower to create a chamber. Plug the shaft (using mud, now liquid, it will set like concrete!), but install doors in the plug in a couple of places. Now set up camp in your pressurized, radiation-shielded "warm" (-1 or -2 C) cave. Easy access to water. Tunnel horizontally outwards when you need more space. Refreezing bulkheads as you go.
I know I am sounding a bit flippant about this, but this could really be a game-changer if we are serious about colonizing Mars. This makes it possible. Up until now, a permanent self-sustaining colony has NOT been possible.
Hahaha, yes that helps! Touch wood etc, but they have been very reliable. Presumably the batteries will start failing at some point, but the aluminium shell does make for a rather robust laptop. And it's a bit of cheap "bling" for people to have on show in meetings. Yes, sad I know....
I am not a fanboi. But I love my MagBook Air. And it is becoming the default laptop I buy for people, as it is reliable, good ENOUGH, and "cheap". And the brand is still seen as one of the better ones.
So people feel good when I steer them towards an Air. Saves me money and trouble in the long run.
Knowing a bit about computers and phones and that, it IS tempting to go "Full Luddite". Comes down to a compromise as always. I don't do internet banking. I don't buy things using my phone (Android). When I buy things online, I use PayPal or a credit-card. Am I safe? No, of-course not. But I am hopefully safe enough that slower pray will be taken before me. So more of a "Soft Luddite" for me.
Perhaps this will turn out to be a very useful lesson for the US electorate. Long-term I mean. Letting Trump screw up might be a way of showing the hard-of-understanding that all these "easy solutions" are a fantasy. A useful lesson, as long as it doesn't lead us to a nuclear war that is...
"...."not make promises that engineering can't keep". Seems they love to surprise engineering types in meetings with customers about some product......"
We invented a way of dealing with that. In a meeting with customers, being ambushed by a rather ambitious scope-creep, and being asked if we could do it, we would turn palms upwards, shrug exaggeratedly and say : "...yes???..."
That L1011 used very little runway and climbed fast and hard, and descended the same way."
My first ever flight was on a Twin-Otter in some mountainous terrain, the day after a storm had passed. The pilot must have been pretty shit-hot, he threw the thing around in the air like a rally-car. Having no previous flying experience, I had no particular way of knowing if this was unusual, but the rest of the passengers were very quiet and white-knuckled. I loved it, and still like flying.
Someone (actually, a rather well known German company) once sent us an inertial navigation system for a submarine. We were not expecting it, seeing as we did normally only work with broadcast systems. (I figured out what it was, it was beautifully built, very high quality connectors and fittings etc, the Navy does NOT skimp on quality) So I called them up, explained we had one of their units delivered to us by mistake. The nice German girl that I spoke too was horrified, said that it was a highly classified bit of kit, to lock it up and keep it safe, they would send someone to pick it up. Two weeks later, I called them up again, explained the thing was still sitting on it's pallet in our warehouse. More shock and horror from the Germans, they would come and pick it up "straight away". When I left the company 3 years later, the thing was still sitting in a corner of the workshop. Several times we considered selling it it on e-bay or just dumping it in the skip, but we always chickened out. But why did they send it to us in the first place? Still a mystery.
"Earth has massive internal fission, replenishing oceans and constantly eroding atmosphere.
Earth has a magnetosphere, blocking destructive UV rays and massive Moon lifting the crust
and stirring the oceans. Required biosphere conditions are one in a million."
I find myself reluctantly agreeing with F.S.S. I think it's the first time, but I still feel a bit dirty...
The Earth (and our solar system) evolved in such a wildly improbable way, I think million-to-one is incredibly optimistic. Take the different characteristics in isolation, and yes; That will happen regularly. Add them all together, and the odds become "astronomical".
If we are talking about microbes and such, I think they are likely to happen elsewhere, but I think there is a reasonable chance we are the only self-aware species in the galaxy. (I deliberately didn't use "Intelligent" there, as it sets off the "Oh there is no intelligent life here either" comments, and they tend to irritate me.)
"use a (much smaller) laser to insert a modulated signal on the huge light output coming from a star."
The bandwidth would be very low though. I don't know how quickly you could change a star's spectral signature with a laser, and the author probably doesn't either. But even if it is a relatively quick process, the signal coming from the nearest point of the star would mess with the signal coming from further around the star unless the bandwith was well below 1Hz. Depends a bit on the size of the star obviously.
I bought a TV for the bedroom. The missus and I like to watch the news in the morning in bed with a cup of coffee (Jeebers, we are SO OLD!!!!) TV duly installed on a bendy-arm-type-thing (Oh yes; why oh why oh why invent a SLIGHTLY different alternative to a VESA mount to put on your crappy cheap TV? Why not just go with the standard measurements? WHY?!?!) Anyway: Put the thing up, turned on. Oh the glory of lolling in bed, coffee and news. Brilliant. On standby, the TV has a super-bright blue FLASHING LED on the front. It's like having the emergency services sitting on standby in your bedroom. Never mind, I am a resourceful fella. Out comes the black insulating tape. Now the remote doesn't work. The sensor sits in the same spot as the blue flashing LED torch! Gah. Foiled again. I am reduced to get out of bed in the morning, and with creaking back and protesting knees, bend down and switch it on by the wall-socket. Oh the humanity!
"You need a coarser grind when you don't use any kind of filter, in other words when making any kind of coffee by putting the grind in a cup and pouring water over it. Like turkish mocca. I learned that in - Norway. You can buy coarse ground coffee there; mostly used when going hiking. All you need is a kettle and a cup, no messing around with filters. You'll have to watch out for the dregs though."
Makes really good coffee though. It's called "kok malt" coffee, directly translated "boil-ground"
After you bring it (briefly) to the boil, let it sit for a minute, poor out a few cups, and poor them back into the pot. All the grounds will sink to the bottom, produces a really nice cup of coffee.
Yeah but...no but...yeah but... The HARDWARE as such is OK. Haven't had any problems. I quite like the thing. I just very rarely use it. I use my desk PC. Or a laptop. Or my phone. One day, I am sure I will find some kind of use it is brilliant for, but now every time I pick it up, I just get frustrated after 10 minutes switch to something else. I WANT to like it. But it seems to be a solution to a problem nobody had. I have the flappy keyboard for it. Doesn't help much.
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