Posts by Killing Time 478 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Apr 2011
Oh you cynic. Sadly though, my first thoughts when he resigned in a blaze of glory were equally cynical.
Politically and personally, would you want to be remembered for resigning on a principle (apparently he has some) or for squandering nearly half a billion pounds of public money in a time of austerity with sod all to show for it.
Hmmm…it’s a toughie….
'It is an interesting cost equation to work with'
Yes it is but you can bet your salary on the fact that it is one which has been fully explored by Space X.
Musk is first and foremost a businessman and as such although he 'gets' technology, as crass as it may seem, it's all about the money.
It's not luck that he became and remains a billionaire, It's shrewd business acumen tied to financial courage and engineering nous.
Controlling the cryogenic temperature is a balance between controlling the vapour space pressure and the incoming ambient energy to the liquid. If your vessel insulation cannot cope then you have to start venting vapour and losing oxidant. Fundamental decisions will have been made regarding vessel insulation effectiveness and time on the pad at design time. It's all part of the learning curve...
The article suggests a confidence level of 5.1 sigma, I hope science at that level would have considered the number of events required to back their findings.
I am afraid it is precisely this kind of analysis and speculation that leads to media embellishment of matters still part of the scientific debate.
They haven't actually announced anything yet. Lets wait for the paper to be released hey?
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t rise to the bait however given from what I know of your entertainment choice and your whining that you can’t get it, when you want it from your streaming service, I have enough data to reach a conclusion.
Without any data to the contrary I would classify you as someone with a head full of fluffy bunnies not seeking anything particularly emotionally or intellectually challenging but ready to opine as if you do.
I on the other hand, prefer emotionally or intellectually challenging subjects and try to absorb as much of the subject matter as I can, both for and against.
I have absorbed enough data on this subject to conclude the situation a ‘travesty’ without any further input as you suggest.
Amazingly, I am familiar with ‘ the basics of documentary photography and film making’ and how it can be used to form opinion as I am familiar with how people in any authority structure for personal and political gain will continually step outside of reason if they are arrogant enough to believe they won’t get caught.
As I have concluded the situation is a travesty I am also mindful of the fact that there is the rule of law which still applies and as such the opportunity to ‘put it right’.
I dearly hope they do.
If Netflix can produce something as enthralling as 'Making a Murderer' every now and again they are welcome to my subscription. Watched it over the weekend, got completely hooked and am still trying to assimilate how such a travesty can come about in a country ruled by law...
RE: "we have just received word the landing was not successful". They did pretty much announce that on the hosted feed around twenty mins after Stg 1 was due to land ( the hosted feed was about 10 mins behind the live feed, I was watching both).
Yes,it was a fortuitous failure of the barge feed and when both the live and delayed (hosted feed) failed to show events on the JFTI it was pretty clear things had not gone to plan.
30 mins to gather their thoughts, make a preliminary assessment and refocus on the moneyshot which was the nominal launch of Jason 3? I can forgive them that.
Look a little further than Wikipedia and you will find Pearlman was a journalist, manager / founder of BOC and manager of Black Sabbath along with being a prolific record producer. Not disputing Steppenwolf used it as a lyric but as a descriptor of a genre, the balance of debate favours Pearlman.
I have been a rock fan from the early seventies and until the late seventies all references I recall were to hard or heavy rock. Perhaps this is why Lemmy rejected that Motorhead were a heavy metal band.
I assert that the term is being applied retrospectively to the early bands and the likes of Led Zeppelin in the sixties, who for the record, in my opinion are not a heavy metal band. Their style is of the original description, a hard or heavy rock band.
The term 'Heavy Metal' was reputedly coined by Sandy Pearlman to describe the style of music produced by Blue Oyster Cult in the 70's, quite different from the Motorhead output which just happened to come out at the start of the NWBHM.
The reality is though that Motorhead are musically simple, extremely loud and original. As such they bridged and influenced sub genres and genders. Punks accepted Motorhead, later Thrash and Death Metal bands freely admit to the influence and Girlschool would not have had the exposure they achieved at the time without Lemmy's support. Society at that time wasn't as equal as it is now.
Even though he sung that the girl had 'No Class' this is precisely what he did have, form is temporary class is permanent.
So Long Lemmy, thanks for the great memories...
Never caught the Damned but I saw MH on 'The Ace up your Sleeve' tour and even though it is a rather hackneyed comment I will swear to any God (you choose) it was the loudest thing I have ever heard in my life, despite working in heavy industry for a large part of my career.
The front of the hall was just a wall of Marshall cabs and bass bins. Pre H+S legislation, there was little regulation on volume levels in those days, it took me a week to get my hearing back.
The concert was in a big old wooden building and I swear the whole structure was resonating and upping the volume levels, the effect of it passing up your legs from the wooden floor is not something I have experienced anywhere else. A life event I remember distinctly, good times....
However, broad comparison with the whole shuttle refurbishment cost is highly conservative. Comparison with the refurbishment of the shuttle’s propulsion system would provide a better contrast and I am sure the data exists on the success and costs for reuse of those engines as NASA did it for years.
Elon Musk and his investors strike me as too shrewd to have entered into this game without considering this.
Space X rock!
Errr... I think the Chinese are pretty much mimicking the US and the Russian designs.
There are only so many variations on a shape which can sit on top of a rocket, contain personnel and equipment, be robust enough to maintain itself as a pressure vessel through multiple pressurisation / depressurisation cycles and have the requisite aerodynamics and toughness to survive multiple re-entries. The mention of a weld-less design indicates they are working on the durability,welds are a real point of weakness in a pressure cycling equipment.
What were you expecting? Something out of Flash Gordon with a control desk and decked out with vanes and pointy bits?
Hmmm... I heard Mr Hadfield filling transmission time last night, I didn't really buy it then and I don't buy it now. I also heard Helen Sharman suggest she had waited a similar period for the airlock on her trip.
I know the Soyuz spacecraft is getting on a bit but I would have thought they have progressed to computers, sensors and log files to gather data? And to keep it even after the the system is 'shutdown', isn't this the business most of us are in?
Three cosmonauts in a box with little else to do other than waiting for the door to open, two and half hours, how much data are they going to accrue and voicenet back to base assuming the aforesaid data logging is not in place?
Even if they are scientists and astronauts, my enquiring mind always challenges statements made under pressure (live tv), so sorry, to me the simplest explanation is waiting for materials to stabilise and make a gas tight seal.
That's got to be a temperature matching issue with the seals themselves. It's surprising the extent that materials shrink and distort at very low temperatures. Pressurization should be relatively quick once the seals are made.
Makes a mockery of the entertainment industry view where characters pop in and out of air locks at their leisure.
Space is difficult...
Proper Planning and Practice Prevents Piss Poor Performance...
A walk through of the required isolation's could have identified this potential failure prior to actually doing it, ideally by someone who knew what they were doing, an electrician doesn't necessarily understand the 'process' the electrical supplies are feeding no matter what his level of competence.
It's pretty clear the task just wasn't planned effectively.
...with all the hype and supposed development around drones and product delivery...
As far as I can see they are severely lacking in payload capacity/range with no likely mid term solution.
Even if that were resolved there is the not insignificant matter of and glacial progress surrounding managing airspace, ask Lester!
And finally there is the matter of transfer of ownership. Would the shipper transfer anything of value to something they couldn't positively identify as secure, to someone they couldn't identify, or transport it via something which could easily be intercepted, knocked or blown out of the sky with relative ease or generally be forcibly disabled and robbed. Equally, Would the development and infrastructure economics work for low value items?
It strikes me as a solution to a problem which doesn't really exist.....
Re: Worst of all the 'eighties revival' has lasted longer than the bloody decade did originally!
That's because the premise "A decade best forgotten" is complete bollocks!
Late Punk, Ska, New Romantics, NWBHM, Rockabilly, Red Wedge (politically motivated), Electropop and onto Club, to go along with the mainstream 'pop' which was influenced by it all.
All diverse music genres which came on the scene in that decade, name another decade with such musical diversity.... no you won't...
Re: WTF is a "nibble-serial CPU"??
As I recall a nibble is four bits (half a byte) and given that all I have read suggests that the processor is probably a 'bit splice' design, i.e. entirely custom and created from discrete logic IC's, its not inconceivable that the data is shuttled between memory and accumulator in a serial fashion as opposed to a parallel bus. No doubt error checking and reliability being a major driver behind the design.
Its a long long time since I have been involved in that stuff but its not a complete punt more an educated guess.
get taken in by this bollocks.
At best they are a mediocre engineering company with an excessive marketing budget paid for by the high price point. A colleague of mine recently recounted how his 90 year old mother was talked into a £20/month warranty/service contract on a vacuum by a Dyson 'Engineer' (had the van and everything!).
Anybody seen 'The Blade' ? Please...... what's wrong with a paper towel or a conventional fan?
I hear he is reinventing the wheel next week, they will probably call it the Circumvolution or some other crap once his bright young things get hold of it. He wants to sell you the concept and lifestyle by repackaging the mundane....
It would be interesting to know how the NH data rate in relation to distance compares with older technologies such as that used on Voyager.
Voyager 1 is roughly four times the distance from us and still calling home. That investigation and comparison alone should warrant some funding to extend the mission.
"Separately, the nuclear deal with China was criticised by a group of 21 British scientists and academics who have written to The Times to accuse the government of embarking on a “slash and burn” policy towards renewable energy in order to fund nuclear power stations"
Who knows? Perhaps the esteemed group missed the 'gravy train' that is the PV generation and feed in tariffs and it's just sour grapes.
Both technologies are CO2 lite and we as the end users are financing both. The differentiating factor being that you have, and have had an opportunity of a 10% tax free ROI with PV but nothing when your money goes to finance nukes. The change will make no impact on the running of existing power plants, only the energy market will do that.
Article Correction - the big tariff reduction is coming on Jan 1st not last August, there's still time before it leaves the station.....
OK, I can see why you see it like that, I actually meant the proportion of the decision attributed to luck would be more given less supporting information, however these decisions are very soft there are no hard and fast rules.
I don't doubt the online tools appear useful, they would need to if the goal of the developer is to introduce a trojan as per the article subject.
Regarding hand tracking programs though, I genuinely don't see the advantage. I personally don't play the same two hole cards the same way with any consistency. Not to labour the point but it depends on the information. In a live gave that is all received in the first person, there is no intermediary and least risk of modification.
As much as I enjoy the game I have always been wary of online.
As it is essentially a game heavily reliant on multiple sources of information relating to your opponents, online play cuts this information stream down,increases the variables and therefore the luck element.
This creates a market for the support programs mentioned to compensate, resulting in an attack vector external to the game to really gain an edge....
Yeah, that canned statement sounds as if it has been lifted straight out of a corporate motivational seminar. To my mind it lacks authenticity to say the least. Sad that certain types cannot drop out of character even for a moment to demonstrate that they share emotions like the rest of us.
"Nuclear rockets were designed, developed and built over 50 years ago"
Tested and validated? No...therefore they don't exist.
You may be surprised but I do have a handle on the physics.
The 'hollowing out' bit? I don't know of any technology which is state of the art, let alone 10,000 years old which has hollowed out a void in rock approaching 10 km across. Perhaps you mean tunneling but that is wildly different to "hollowing out a rock 10km across".
The fact that you consider Alan Brown's point "a more effective objection" speaks volumes about your grasp on the subject.
I think AB may be confusing spinning supermassive objects such as neutron stars in the uncertainty of how they hold together.
There are enough small rotating bodies rotating at reasonable speeds in the local vicinity of the Earth for the physics on that one to be pretty much nailed.
"That's easy enough; Use nuclear rockets to increase the spin of small bodies.....hollowing the things out and living on the inside"
Easy??? Don't think so, relies on technologies which don't exist.
Terraforming, despite its massive obstacles is the easier route in the view of the general consensus. Either by violent or slow change of the atmosphere.
We have the technology and a track record on that......
'We would be settling the Moon and asteroids first'
Unfortunately we need gravity or else our bodies start falling apart. Not much living being done when a large proportion of your time is spent trying to fend off the debilitating effects of the micro gravity environment.
Come up with a technology to counteract that and then you can then consider settling the smaller bodies.
I visited there a number of years ago and it wasn't as 'hippy commune' as I had imagined or as maybe it comes across, definitely full of ideas.
It's worth a visit if you are in that area and if energy is your bag, checkout Electric Mountain (Dynorwig), that's Big Engineering and not too far away.
Yeah, but if you don't know the background you see a buffoon and Chris Eubank is anything but.
And, for the record, as Eubank is and always was a counter puncher he only stepped up when he was taking punishment and getting hurt. You are entitled to your opinion but Benn V Eubank 1 and sadly Eubank v Watson, enough said...
Due to his fighting style you are unlikely to see a tougher boxer than Chris Eubank and that punishment seems to have helped shape a truly unique character clearly not afraid to send himself up and have a little fun.
It's difficult to see how a younger audience without direct knowledge of Chris' past would get the joke and therefore how much mileage they get out of this premise remains to be seen....
Privacy for business is kind of a big deal...
I fully agree, as much a big deal for them as an individual user. Not all businesses keep hosting and services in-house though, do they. Even if they do, there is still the possibility of a rogue, criminal or spiteful employee causing all kinds of grief within the organisation's systems, same as a third party provider.
Undertake an informed assessment of the risks and make your choice. Review your decision periodically based on an understanding of the current technologies and offerings. Keep doing that until you die...That's life, gotta keep learning and moving.
You see, I ask that same question of a PC or a Mac. Who in their right mind would pay that amount when the upgrade cycle being forced on the user is shortening on an increasing scale. Unfortunately that is the type of money you would pay for a functional PC/entry level Mac, in the Chromebook world that is top of the range where you are out to impress others or spoil yourself. You don’t need to spend it just to get onboard.
I won’t get into the debate over what functionality is available to the Chromebook user apart from saying that perhaps your view of what software people use 'to do work' and the vast majority of users differs somewhat. In three years of using a CB I can count on the fingers of one hand when I felt that I missed some specific function. This soon passed however as I found a ready solution.
I don’t have to get bogged down in maintaining the tool, I can just get on with the work and leisure pursuits the tool is there to provide, confident my data and work will be there when I want it. The privacy argument (which is something that invariably gets thrown up), I am currently comfortable with, if and when I feel uncomfortable, I will find another solution.
Precisely my requirement from any tool I use.
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