Posts by DJO

DARPA zaps popcorn with laser power beamed 5.3 miles through air

This may work well as long as battlefields are always free from rain or smoke and have perfect unobstructed line of sight.

Also it might be a good idea to place this high up to avoid toasting too many grunts.

A laser and big parabolic dish about 20 feet off the ground would never be an inviting target so I can't see any problems here.

I just suppose it's a good thing no potential enemy has any form of IR vision because when you are painting your battlefield with bright lasers, you really would not want to give away your forward positions.

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

To my dear downvoter:

Will black South Africans be as welcome as white South Africans? If the answer is yes I apologize, if the answer is no then I am correct in my assertion.

"they can be assimilated easily into our country." This was decried by many as thinly veiled racism.

This is grossly unfair, it's not "thinly veiled racism", it's overt racism.

Meta's still violating GDPR rules with latest plan to train AI on EU user data, says noyb

Re: Consider...

Indeed, but the training set needs to be curated. Just giving it tons of random crap means it'll give all posts the same weight regardless of their quality.

A small curated data set will give much better results than a large uncurated data set.

Oh, and the curation should be done by people, not another "AI". Possibly use an existing "AI" to pre-screen before the meatsacks get to look at them to reduce the large volumes of posts.

Fusion eggheads claim modeling fix for particle escape - at least in stellarators

Re: I'm sure they could model .....

Rocket science ain't that hard. Rocket engineering on the other hand is devilishly complicated.

It's much the same for fusion, the science is pretty well understood, engineering that science into a working reactor however may be unattainable for many years if not decades.

Amazon tested warehouse robots and found they're not ready to replace humans

Re: Why the same pods?

Right: Design the process for robots, do not design robots for existing processes.

Re: Capitalism is dying

5) Affordable housing

6) Decent free education

Helpful but not 100% essential:

7) Functional and affordable public transportation

Nvidia boss gets 45% pay bump, but is the billionaire happy?

Re: As a rule

It's obscene. Many years ago the difference between a CEO and an average employee was a factor of 10 to 20 now the factor is in the thousands.

If a company is doing well then every employee should be rewarded - the people who do the actual work should be rewarded for their effort.

There should be punitive taxation for people who are this greedy.

BOFH: HR tries to think appy thoughts

Re: "HR tries to think appy thoughts"

You seriously believe it's the same PFY‽

After a few years the PFYs either move on to become BOFHs somewhere else or find themselves getting cosy with a carpet and quicklime in a quarry somewhere.

Trump wants to fire quarter of NASA budget into black hole – and not in a good way

Re: Make Aerospace Grotty Again

You're wasting your time. Climate change has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt.

Unfortunately there are many people with unreasonable doubt who are so invested in their position they will not even consider they could be wrong and definitely will never look at the oceans of research but persistently cling to idiotic straw man arguments.

Trump admin freaks out over mere suggestion Amazon was going to show tariff impact on prices

Re: Chlorine trifluoride

Whoosh

HO-H

Re: Dihydrogen Monoxide

Dihydrogen Monoxide isn't that scary, wait until you hear about hydroxyl hydride, That hydroxyl group is nasty:

When biological systems are exposed to hydroxyl radicals, they can cause damage to cells, including those in humans, where they can react with DNA, lipids, and proteins

citation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxy_group#:~:text=In%20chemistry%2C%20a%20hydroxy%20or,one%20or%20more%20hydroxy%20groups.

Windows profanity filter finally gets a ******* off switch

Re: Could Latinise the Anglo-Saxon profanities instead of asterisks

The transcriptions of the Watergate tapes went a bit like this:

<expletive deleted> and the <expletive deleted> <expletive deleted> <expletive deleted> said that the <expletive deleted> White House .........

Downward DOGE: Elon Musk keeps revising cost-trimming goals in a familiar pattern

Overnight would do it. That was just an example of how one could fall foul accidentally. Historically all immigration agencies have ignored issues that were not the fault of the traveller, now the USA ones are in too many cases not being reasonable.

It's the second paragraph that's important, it's all about trust and America has lost that.

Underlying issues by having a plane delayed that put you over the visa limit due to no fault of the visa holder.

The issue is that trust is hard to earn and easy to lose and nobody trusts the USA at the moment. It'll take years and a lot of work for that trust to be regained, if ever.

Sure there's lot's to see in the USA, a great tourist destination. But the almost daily reports of legal visitors being detained and refused entry is a bit off-putting to many people and as Trump is "a bit unpopular" in the rest of the world and also rather unpredictable the USA is seen as not an ideal holiday destination, coupled with almost every country in the world advising LGBTQ not to visit, the USA will lose all of them and almost everybody who is sympathetic to them, which in many countries is the majority.

The USA is not the only place with good places to see, Europe has 100x as many attractions if you have an interest in history, Asia too

There's many things such as National Parks, museums and other venues that aren't going to be changed by politics.

Oh yea? He's already targetting the Smithsonian, environmental programs are being gutted and the National Park Service has already been cut so the parks will be less desirable once the staff reductions cause parts to be closed to visitors as they cannot be staffed safely.

Domestic tourism will plummet too as people find their earnings are not going as far as they used to.

To make things better people, companies and countries need to learn from their mistakes but in America it is drummed into people from infancy that the USA is the best country and everybody is jealous and wants to live there. This is a total lie, no country is "the best country" every country has good and bad points, nobody is jealous of the USA and I've not met anybody in Europe who not already stupidly rich who wants to move to the USA, it's seen as great if you are rich, otherwise not so much.

The point is that before you can learn from your mistakes you have to acknowledge you've made a mistake and people like Trump will never admit to an error so they can never learn. This attitude is destroying America - Learn some bloody humility.

You'll find things a lot easier to book in a few months, the existing full order books are because they were booked last year and couldn't be cancelled without financial loss so I hope you have a nice holiday wherever you go.

If the cuts were far more targeted and really hit the indisputable wasteful spending

Sure but we all know that was not the case. Cutting science, cutting environmental protection and removing as many "checks and balances" as possible.

Cost reductions were never the goal, introducing new avenues of corruption and punishing opponents is the only intention.

Like everything else from the Moscow Agent Governing America it will backfire and damage America economically and reputationally. Already tourism to America that last year was worth $2.7trillion has dropped by over 15% and will drop even more probably losing at least $1t by the end of the year and putting maybe a million Americans out of work which will in turn cost even more in lost taxation and the cost of whatever minimal unemployment support USA provides.

So far the law suits and compensation and other legal issues are estimated at $138b with a lot more to come. The overall impact of DOGE will be ruinous - more money spent and services decimated for no benefit whatsoever.

Do you realize how heavy the pressure vessels to hold hydrogen are?

Hydrogen does have some excellent applications but in most cases using electricity to make hydrogen and then using the hydrogen to provide motive force or back to electricity is significantly less efficient then using the electricity directly or storing it in batteries, pumped hydro or similar such as compressed air energy storage which in ideal circumstances is 70% efficient, it's lousy for motive force but excellent for fixed installations.

Currently most hydrogen is created using electricity and most of that comes from fossil fuels.

Actually most hydrogen is made by the catalytic breaking of methane which produces exactly the same amount of CO₂ that you'd get from burning the methane.

Also while hydrogen is very energetic it's light and of low density so while less mass is needed to produce a given amount of energy, methane requires less volume to produce the same amount and is far easier to handle. Also LPG infrastructure is in place, although admittedly not common but it's a solved problem - all that's needed is a cheap non-fossil source of methane.

Interesting that hydrogen proponents always forget how much energy it takes to compress hydrogen. Hint, it's a lot.

Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims

Re: Damn.

but with robotic injection molding machines, less labor is needed.

It's not that simple. You could fit all the mouldmakers in the USA in a small room, in China you'd need a stadium.

America can build all the factories it wants which would certainly help the construction industry but the factories once built would mostly be idle because you have lost the expertise to operate them.

Blair was right about one thing: "education, education, education". The GOP has been degrading education for decades and you are now paying the price.

Trump blinks: 'Substantially' lower China tariffs promised

There's no point in building lots of factories in the USA, they do not have enough skilled workers to man the factories they have, and now they are throwing out the very immigrants they need if they want to ramp up production, and with the attacks on education there won't be many skilled workers entering the workforce either.

And that's before we consider the time it takes from saying "let's build a factory" to having stuff rolling out of the gates.

Microsoft: Why not let our Copilot fly your computer?

Why not? How could this possibly go wrong?

/s

Anyway think of the poor stockholders, billions of dollars pissed against a wall, they need to see a product, any product, to try to justify this madness.

AI is making hyperscalers' sustainability pledges look more and more like a Hail Mary

CCS DAC

Spreading ground olivine on the ground to absorb CO₂ is perhaps one of the most stupid things I've ever heard. Yes it'll work but olivine is green and will absorb solar radiation really well. If as they suggest they're going to cover a large area in the stuff it'll totally screw up the local climate.

Olivine is a common mineral which weathers really quickly, the quick weathering will release the captured CO₂ as the mineral breaks down so in order for it to work they'd have to be collecting and replacing the spread olivine all the time so the running costs and CO₂ emissions for that would completely defeat the objective. It's hard to see how this could even be carbon neutral let alone reduce the amount of CO₂

But the main stupidity is if they just planted trees over the same acreage it'll remove at least an order of magnitude more CO₂ from the atmosphere. But it's hard to make a lot of money by planting trees and processing the wood a few years down the line.

CCS DAC is a nice profitable greenwashing business for other businesses to hand off responsibility and pretend they are doing something worthwhile.

CCS on smokestacks and at the point of CO₂ production does work but even then it can be a bit questionable unless it was built in at the design stage.

Trump doubles down, vows to make Chinese imports even more expensive for Americans

Re: At business, the Chinese rarely lose

Don't be silly, when the economy collapses he'll blame it all on Biden and Europe.

Re: Made-in-America Electric Vehicles

The necessary minerals are found all over the place, Africa has some large reserves but China has the refining operations and vast tracts of land where it can do easy open cast mining to access the minerals.

It is possible for other countries to supply rare earths but the lead time to construct the infrastructure and the cost of that infrastructure is prohibitive without international cooperation. America could have easily entered partnerships with African governments or mining companies to set up joint operations to extract and refine rare earths but it was cheaper just to buy it all from China.

For success long term planning is needed but the powers to be in the west are only worried about the next electoral cycle while China has plans for 50 and even 100 years ahead and is willing to make investments now that won't pay out for a generation if ever.

Also China invested in education so now they have a workforce that is well enough trained to succeed in modern high tech industry, the USA has systematically degraded education so even if they wanted to they can't reconstruct the manufacturing sector without importing expertise from countries that still value education. And Trump is now throwing out the very people the USA needs.

Boffins turn Moon dirt into glass for solar panels, eye future lunar base power

Re: Little lugging required

How weak do you think the gravity on The Moon is? Did you see the Apollo astronauts drifting of the surface?

1.62 m/s² means in 5 seconds an object will fall 20.25 metres which quite adequate for this sort of process. Anyway floating is the only way to make decent panes of even thickness. Certainly it'd be slower than down here but that's not a significant problem.

Brownian motion is not an issue, the materials are too viscous for it to have any noticeable effect. Once the glass is on the tin it is cooling, tin melts at 232ºC while depending on composition glass melts between 1400°C & 1600°C. Molten glass is poured onto the tin to cool, here it's a continuous process but that would be difficult to replicate on the moon, instead simple pans to make panes around a square meter would be easy to construct - it's not like optical quality glass is needed, a few imperfections really don't matter.

As for getting tin to The Moon, assuming some of the landers were on one way trips, it would be easy to make some non-structural internal panels on the landers out of useful materials like tin so getting it there would be effectively almost no cost. Or canned food sent up could be in pure tin containers, many ways to get materials up there without just being dead weight cargo.

Re: No wind to spread dust.

Interesting point but dealing with charged particles is something we're quite good at now. If the panels were designed for this kind of application, a way of discharging any static build up to earth is easy.

I suppose it depends on how dusty the surrounding area is. If the panels are in green fields then except in drought conditions there won't be a lot of dust to stir up, concrete can be dusty but can also be cleared, perhaps by autonomous industrial sized vacuum cleaners.

Re: No wind to spread dust.

Why the hell would it fall slowly? With no air resistance to slow it down it would fall at 1.62 m/s². A dust particle and a hammer will fall at the same rate in a vacuum.

Re: No wind to spread dust.

Not if you spray all the surrounding area with water first. Also the angle of the panels would deflect the dust to the ground, the wet ground, where it would stay.

But you're right, just using a chopper without the prep first would indeed be counter-productive.

Re: No wind to spread dust.

And nobody tried to fly a helicopter over them to move the dust?

As you suggest dust is not a problem on The Moon, the retroreflectors placed there by the Apollo astronauts are still usable.

Re: Little lugging required

...you can't float it on water like how we make sheet glass down here on Earth...

I'd like to see that but from a safe distance, say 2 miles. Float glass is made by floating glass on molten tin and there is no reason why that couldn't be done on the moon if it was in a pressurized structure. The lower gravity may slow down the process but wouldn't stop it from working.

One would expect water to be 100% recycled, dirty water is easy to distil, it's not economically viable on Earth but on The Moon with abundant solar energy it's very economically viable compared with other water sources.

Dev loudly complained about older colleague, who retired not long after

Re: Poorly defined task

I've also dealt with the moving goalposts problem in completing a task

Are there any other kind? I don't think I've ever encountered them on anything more complicated than a 25 line applet.

I've done many file parsers and I would hope in the case described there was a selection of sample files provided, without those you are pretty much screwed.

Americans set to pay more on all imports: Trump activates blanket tariffs

Re: Tuition

Do you have the slightest idea of what is needed to get a (higher) degree, it not a simply "passing a course". You need to do original work which then has to pass peer review. This is a useful skill in any discipline. Yes there are some "Universities" that are just diploma mills but that's a defect in the system that allows such entities to exist.

I think you misunderstand what the "investment" here is, it's not just financial but sociological as well. Having well educated citizens raises society improving life for everybody. It also passes down, well educated parents tend to encourage their children to get the most out of their education.

The types of courses you are railing against are a insignificant proportion of courses available and are less than a rounding error in the overall education budget. So somebody wants to study Sumerian cuneiform, big deal, so what, how does that affect you? Anyway they may find a curator job in a museum somewhere which would use those skills.

I'm not suggesting a "scatter gun" approach, just ensure the courses people want are available and encourage students from an early age to consider what they will want to do and to think about what might be a valuable skill when they reach employment age. Maybe even put a few hours aside during the school term where they can discuss this together along with a careers specialist.

When I was at school (before the microprocessor explosion revolutionized computing) the job of "programmer" barely existed outside of academia and very big business but I was able to go to the local college one day a week after school to get some hands-on experience on their mini-computer which helped get me to where I am now. I went because I thought it might be a useful skill in the future and it looked interesting. This is the sort of opportunity all school kids should have, to develop their interests outside of the curriculum.

Education is all about creating opportunities that otherwise would be unavailable.

Re: Tuition

I don't upvote often but you got one.

Look at China, 3 generations ago they were pretty much an agrarian society, now they are a technological leader and that is 100% due to the emphasis on education. It's no point building factories and labs if you don't have people educated enough to run them.

Re: Tuition

And even if they did exist, which they don't, acquiring a degree of any kind is a mark that you can work to a high standard, which is a desirable attribute if you're after any kind of work in an increasingly competitive job market.

The point is education is an investment, and like in all investments not every "bet" will win but the objective is that there are enough successes to cover the exceptions and still come out on top.

Also it's impossible to predict what skills will be needed 10 or 15 years down the line so it's hard to educate for the future so it's sensible to cover as many possibilities as possible.

Re: Tuition

That has resulted in salaries beyond my wildest dreams or expectations.

And this is the crux of why education is not a cost but an investment. You now earn more and probably pay a lot more tax than you would have without the education, certainly more than the education would have cost but spread out over the duration of your working life.

Re: I feel liberated already...

One has to wonder if he even knows what macroeconomics are. It is self evident that he has no knowledge in that discipline.

He does have an education, of sorts, he has a degree from the Dunning-Kruger University.

NASA doubles odds of Moon hitting near-Earth asteroid

Re: Our moon has protected us

It's also possible that the surviving dinosaurs were not on the evolutionary branch that included the big ones so they didn't have that evolutionary path available.

Without access to a handy time machine it's all speculation, informed or otherwise.

Re: Our moon has protected us

...resulted in fish walking out of the sea to become us...

That is complete rubbish. The Chicxulub event wiped out the megasaurs but breeding populations of small mammals, insects, reptiles and small dinosaurs survived (it's not sure if monotremes emerged before or after Chicxulub - the fossil record is ambiguous).

Dinosaurs evolve slower than rapid breeding mammals so the mammals were able to occupy the ecological spaces left by the megasaurs so only the small flying dinosaurs kept going and as the name "dinosaur" has a bad rep, became nice friendly birds.

Signalgate: Pentagon watchdog probes Defense Sec Hegseth

Re: And why not

No.

When Biden was found to have a few papers he shouldn't he handed them over immediately and fully cooperated with the investigators.

When Trump was found to have some papers he lied about them, refused the to cooperate and tied up the courts with procedural nonsense to delay it as long as possible in the hope of election where he could sack all the people involved in the prosecution.

If you are unable to see the difference between those scenarios then I give up completely. They are not remotely comparable.

How do you explain what magnetic fields do to monitors to people wearing bowling shoes?

Re: Just needed to scroll down a bit

No, everybody loves fiddly narrow scrollbars that disappear when you want to find them. It's fun.

Share and enjoy.

Forget Signal. National Security Adviser Waltz now accused of using Gmail for work

Re: Proud to be dumb in government

The fascist mindset can never countenance the idea that they are wrong so anything that fails is always someone else's fault. Hence they cannot learn from their mistakes because they never make mistakes. This always destroys them in the end but unfortunately it can take a long time.

France offers US scientists a safe haven from Trump's war on woke

Indeed, pretty much the only place in the world where real communism is practised is in the (or used to be) the kibbutz in Israel but if you tell a kibbutzim he or she is a communist, they'll beat you to a pulp.

Communism can work on a small scale but it does not scale up at all well and doesn't stand a chance on a national scale.

It seems to be a rule that if a country has the name of a political system in the country name, they are the opposite of what the name implies.

Re: Wow...

If they behave like the Nazis did.

If they persecute the same sort of people as the Nazis did.

If they suppress academia like the Nazis did.

If they salute like the Nazis did.

Well there might just be a good reason to describe them as such.

Los Alamos boffins whip up a speedometer for satellites

Re: Relative to what?

Orbiting bodies are relative to the barycentre. As satellites compared to the Earth effectively weigh nothing, that's the centre of the Earth.

Re: is there no GPS in space?

...this new offering measures the speed against the plasma...

I'm not sure if that's a problem. If the craft was going in a straight line then yes but they are in orbit so the angle of incidence to the plasma stream is constantly and predictably changing so it should be easy (after an orbit or two) to allow for that and calculate an accurate speed.

Microsoft wouldn't look at a bug report without a video. Researcher maliciously complied

Don't be silly, an "AI" might accidentally give a helpful, useful and even relevant reply.

Saturn runs rings around Jupiter

Re: too early to have killed the dinosaurs by at least 30 million years.

It is as usual in space science a lot more complicated than that. While the gas giants may well deflect objects away from the inner solar system they can equally well deflect otherwise harmless objects into the inner solar system.

Most of the harmful rocks were used up in the early bombardment phases of planetary history. A planet capturing a wandering rock into a stable orbit is incredibly unlikely, there has to be a combination of angle of interception and relative speed that is just right or the rock will alter course but whizz past or smash into it. The majority of these moons (moonlets?) are probably due to collisions of objects already in orbit.

Re: too early to have killed the dinosaurs by at least 30 million years.

Absolutely, a rock can easily wander around the solar system for tens or hundreds of millions of years without intercepting anything, until it does.