Posts by gecho

Bids for ISS demolition rights are now open, NASA declares

I wonder if something like the AMS experiment could be salvaged and moved to a new station. They went to the trouble to repair it, so it must be sort of important. A commercial station would certainly have a much different orbital inclination favoring launches from the US as there would be no need to accommodate Russia. I get the impression changing the inclination of an orbiting object is much more complex than changing its altitude.

Musk's mighty missile is ready for launch once FAA says OK

Re: Cost

> Is it SpaceX's problem though, if their competitors can't get their shit together?

More of a humanity problem with so much power in the hands of one unstable individual.

Re: Cost

Perhaps one of the more unsettling things about Starship is the power it will give SpaceX in space. They can launch everyone else's cargo at just enough under competitors rates such that the competitors will find themselves unprofitable. Probably at least 8 years until anyone beside Blue Origin has a hope of fielding something similar since they'd have to develop both heavy lift and propulsive landing at the same time. Meanwhile SpaceX can launch all their own stuff at cost giving all their ventures a huge cost advantage. Right now that is just Starlink, but that could quickly expand into other areas either developed in-house, through acquisition or partnerships.

Cost

The marginal cost of building another ship / booster is about 3 orders of magnitude less than an SLS. The development cost will also be spread out over thousands of launches vs maybe 8 total for SLS. Hell current billion dollar launch tower will only be used twice for SLS before being scrapped because they need a new billion dollar one after switching to a taller second stage.

Intel seems to think Wi-Fi 7 is too cool for old-school Windows 10

Well my slightly newer ipad (first retina one), won't even load most webpages anymore maxed out at iOS 9.

I'm using a Core i5 from back when the cpus just had a 3 digit part number it definitely won't support switching from Windows 10 to 11. Crazy that a computer from 14 years ago is still perfectly usable today.

NASA still serious about astronauts living it up on Moon space station in 2028

Re: Mass Matters

If Starship becomes operational in the near future it will change a lot of things. I have to wonder how much effort SpaceX is putting into the DragonXL cargo vehicle as there really won't be any reason for it to exist. I think NASA is quietly hoping to roll the Falcon Heavy / DragonXL resupply contract over to Starship.

Moscow makes a mess on the Moon as Luna 25 probe misses orbit, lands with a thud

Move Fast and Break Things

Musk sues law firm for overcharging Twitter when Twitter was suing Musk

Earned Their Pay

They managed to get Musk to cave and pay full price for Twitter rather than having what they dug up during discovery become public record. I'd say they did a smashing job.

Turns out people don't like it when they suspect a machine's talking to them

Verbose

I find AI generated text overly verbose. Almost like the developers were socially inept and looked to Hollywood dialog as a guide for how normal people talk. It comes across as condescending.

Third-party Twitter apps stopped dead with no explanation from El Musko

Live

I noticed this week that Twitter got rid of live (ie: chronological) results for hashtags. It's making Twitter useless as a local news source for me since it only shows Top results from a week ago.

Fat EVs may cause 'more death on our roads' – watchdog

Temporary Problem

Solid state batteries expected within a few years should reduce battery size and weight by 30 to 50%, which in turn means weight can be removed from the vehicle structure as well. We're in the late early adopter stage for EVs. Most of the vehicle electrical systems are quite mature, it's just the batteries that need a bit more work before mass adoption.

US postal service electrifyies its next-gen delivery fleet

Re: With a "quantum computer"? With "cold fusion"? With "superstrings"?

Large fleet operators often have their own onsite fuel tanks. I don't see it being any different with EVs. Several shipping container sized batteries to act as a buffer so they aren't hammering the grid.

Public EV charging stations will likely need on site battery storage as well to help balance demand. They can recharge their storage at night when power is cheaper, or through solar on the charging station canopies.

Galactic anti-nuclei travelers could help illuminate dark matter

Accronyms

"A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE)"

Reminds me of the Norm MacDonald bit.

ID

I stands for I

D stands for dentification.

US ends case against Huawei CFO who holed up in Canada for three years

China fucked with Canada for years over this costing billions of dollars in trade and held a few citizens hostage in retaliation. All for doing America's thankless bidding.

On the plus side it forced Canada to invest in processing canola domestically instead of exporting raw seed. Downside, I think a lot of that is destined for biodiesel, not human consumption.

After lunar orbit trip NASA's Orion capsule is on its way back home

Re: unbelieveable accuracy

Yes it's an OMS engine not an SSME.

ISS resupply drops off experiments for life in deep space

Private Space Labs

I imagine the red tape and lead time for getting an experiment flown on the ISS is rather spectacular. We should see a (metaphorical) explosion in research once the private space stations launch. The uncrewed New Shepherd flights always seemed to be flying a bunch of experiments, which made me wonder how much science you could do in a few minutes of microgravity.

Twitter set for more layoffs as Musk mulls next move

Remote Procedure Calls

The comment about remote procedure calls in Elon's architecture diagram brought up memories of Trump's sharpie modified hurricane path visual aide.

FTX disarray declared 'unprecedented' by exec who cleaned up after Enron

LOL'd at this one

"For example, employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line 'chat' platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis."

Twitter engineer calls out Elon Musk for technical BS in unusual career move

Made up Words

I was talking with my boss once and couldn't think of a particular word. I ended up saying something that I don't think was even a word, then she started using it all the time.

All the US midterm-related lies to expect when you're electing

"let us see what they say after the GOP sweeps"

They'll still say there was election fraud and just complain about their margin of victory. They are equal opportunity d-bags, sore winners and sore losers.

NASA uses space station dust sensor to map 50 methane 'super-emitters' on Earth

Republicans immediately announced plans to defund NASA.

Twitter's most valuable users are ghosting the platform

I deleted my account a few months ago. What finally made me ditch my account is when they introduced topics and bulk subscribed me to hundreds of them completely flooding my feed. You had to remove each one at a time.

There are still a few people I like to follow. Twitter must have realized a bunch of people were doing this because after you scroll past a few posts on the web the UI get locked and you are prompted to log in.

California legalizes digital license plates for all vehicles

Where I live they ditched expiration stickers 20 years ago (along with front plates). Maybe they make more sense in places with police that do foot patrols. Whenever a driver gets pulled over the officer punches the plate # into their in vehicle terminal to check registration status. And now an increasing number of police cars are equipped with plate scanners.

Er, Musk's trial hasn't stopped, no matter what he told Twitter, says judge

Yeah, sounds like a delaying tactic to slow the court case, which is something he wanted from the start of litigation. If he did managed to get the case dropped or paused, there would be a problem with financing after a drawn out period of nothing happening.

"said he would go ahead and buy Twitter after all, provided he had the debt financing in place to bankroll the acquisition and that Twitter's lawsuit against him in a Delaware court was immediately brought to a halt."

US accident investigators want alcohol breathalyzers in all new vehicles

Also

Proof of registration / insurance detection. Proof of authorized operator. Driver attentiveness monitoring.

Don't want to get run over by a Ford car? There's a Bluetooth app for that

Re: V2X

No the ones here are cameras, I looked up the model on the manufacturers website. Before that I did actually make a corner reflector and attached it to my bike to no effect.

Over the past few years they "upgraded" to new cameras. The old ones had a huge sweet spot for detection. The new ones are much more focused so they can ignore vehicles making right turns. But the wind knocks them out of position, and on a bike you sometimes need to ride in the oncoming traffic lane to trigger a change.

Re: V2X

Oops:

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/08/v2x-is-finally-dead-as-court-refuses-to-stop-fccs-5-9-ghz-reallocation/

V2X

This sort of thing is supposed to be address in V2X in a more cross industry wide basis. I would expect that the tech would eventually be mandatory in all phones / vehicles as an OS feature, not a 3rd party app. I think its based on broadcasting position and direction vectors.

It should cut down on rear end collisions by detecting when vehicles ahead of you out of site suddenly brake. Or a when a vehicle from the side is going to blow a stop sign / red light.

As a cyclist I really looking forward to it. People have a habit of waiting until the last second to pass cyclists, screening you from the vehicle behind until they have completely switched lanes which ends up being 10-15 feet behind you, then blam-o zero time for driver behind to react. Would also be a huge help for pedestrians when drivers are making right (left in UK) turns and typically only look upstream for traffic not even looking the other way for anyone on the sidewalk.

It would also let traffic light know that a cyclist is approaching. The camera based detectors which are on 95% of our intersections only pickup cyclists 25% of the time. No detection, no green light, if a vehicle pulls up behind you they are too far back to trigger a green as well.

One obvious abuse would be to attach something with V2X to done and flying it into traffic to trigger auto braking in cars.

FCC Commissioner demands review of Starlink rural broadband subsidies

Re: Good! Give the money to Starlink!

I thought rural folk weren't down with that socialism stuff.

Dish

I wonder how much SpaceX will be able to reduce the cost of the dishes over time. Looking at tear down pictures, the dish is one giant circuit board with an array of hundreds of chips.

Elon Musk sells Tesla shares worth $6.9b as Twitter lawsuit looms

Re: Musk's sofa

This sofa change will probably generate a billion dollar tax bill. This hedging alone cost him the Twitter breakup fee in just taxes.

Bill Gates venture backs effort to bring aircon startup to market

Copper

Since the refrigerant stays in the unit there will be no need to run copper tubing to an indoor evaporator, which should help reduce cost, complexity and a failure point.

Elon Musk considering 'drastic action' as Twitter takeover in 'jeopardy'

Re: Burn

He could make a bunch more by taking SpaceX public, but then he'd be subject to SEC oversight and whims of the market on that business too, so it's the last thing he'd do.

Which he won't be able to do. Twitter didn't court Elon, they wanted him to F%&K off. Elon forced this deal on them.

Re: Burn

Elon does what billionaires do to avoid paying taxes. Instead of selling stock which generates a taxable income, he uses that stock as collateral for loans. The only reason he sold stock last year was to cover the taxes on stock options that were about to expire. With his shenanigans causing the stock price of Tesla to fall, he's at risk of the banks demanding more collateral. If he's suddenly forced to sell a bunch of stock to cover the twitter deal he could be facing another billion dollar tax bill. And dumping more Tesla stock could further drive down Tesla's stock.

NASA wants nuclear reactor on the Moon by 2030

I wonder how useful solar would be on the moon when night lasts for 2 weeks. If there is much point installing panels generating extra power for 2 weeks at a time for a small permanent outpost.

SpaceX reportedly fires staffers behind open letter criticising Elon Musk

Re: Never directly criticise the person paying your wages in public or work time ...

It should be worrisome that employees at a company that builds giant bombs may become afraid to speak up after examples are made of their co-workers.

Cult

Never question a cult's leadership!

AI helps scientists design novel plastic-eating enzyme

End of the Polymeriferous Period

I wonder if such an enzyme could be produced by bacteria in the wild or if it would always be something that needs to be synthesized. Plastic being made from hydrocarbons I'm assuming the byproducts will be hydrogen and some sort of carbon molecule.

Elon Musk won't join Twitter's board after all

Re: Dodging a bullet

He is controversial enough as it is. If he became super politically polarizing it could cause serious problems trying to win government contracts for SpaceX.

Driver in Uber's self-driving car death goes on trial, says she feels 'betrayed'

"At first everybody was all on my side, even the chief of police."

Yup that's pretty typical for a driver running down pedestrians and people on bikes. Officer will take the motorist's statement while the person on the ground is wheeled off to the hospital or morgue. Won't even take the statement of a survivor before filing the paperwork. Might even go on camera to advocate on the driver's behalf. For the victims the burden of proof is often on them, and often requires media coverage to generate enough outrage for a real investigation to occur.

Sun sets on superjumbo: Last Airbus A380 rolls off the production line

Re: They only made 251 ?

And I believe at least 3 have been scrapped for parts already.

Samsung is planning to reverse-engineer the human brain on to a chip

They should start with a cat, when it completely ignores everything you try to teach it they can claim success.

More Boots on Moon delays: NASA stops work on SpaceX human landing system as Blue Origin lawsuit rolls on

Good Value

SpaceX is proving to be good value for NASA. Got their commercial crew flying before Boeing for less money. And using Falcon Heavy for Europa Clipper instead of SLS will save NASA over $1.5 billion.

Boots on Moon in 2024? NASA OIG says you better moonwalk away from that date, because suits ain't ready

Commercial Space

The bureaucracy of government run space programs seemed have resulted in stagnation / maintaining the status quo. With so much red tape and being subject to the whims of the ever changing government leadership, NASA seemed to just stick with whatever worked.

Newer commercial space companies like SpaceX are motivated to continually improve to reduce cost. The old guard NASA contractors are stuck in the old cost plus model where there is little incentive to make anything cheaper.

US govt calmly but firmly tells Blue Origin it already has a ride to the Moon's surface with SpaceX, thanks

Go Fever

I wonder if the mad rush to the first Starship orbital launch is for a "in your face" directed at Bezos' for his argument against SpaceX selection being that Starship is an unproven platform. Its looking like booster 4 will fly before the 20 engine thrust simulator is finished for use on booster 3.

After the final stacking yesterday they rushed to install 29 engines in well under 24 hours before even finishing the welding.

They probably know enough from the completed tests to be confident the booster will survive launch. And since they aren't going to try catching it, the other testing can wait. I guess the test is more about advancing the Starship design than the booster.

International Space Station stabilizes after just-docked Russian module suddenly fires thrusters

Since when did Boeing start building Russian space hardware?

Annoyed US regulator warns it might knock SpaceX's shiny new Texas tower down

Musk could shoot a starship into the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any fanboys.

Happy with your existing Windows 10 setup? Good, because Windows 11 could turn its nose up at your CPU

I've been happily using my core i5-750 since 2009. Currently runs Windows 10 with dual 4k / 1080p monitors just fine. Only reason I even bothered switching to Windows 10 was for the independent monitor scaling.