Posts by bombastic bob

It's World (Terrible) Password (Advice) Day!

Re: Sensible Rules

just hand out the root password to everyone who might need it. Make sure it's so cryptic that you have to write it down or store it someplace. Problem "solved".

@Squander Two - you're trying too hard here.

Just do the 'correct horse battery staple' with predictable non-alpha-numeric characters between each word, like: "correct-horse+battery/staple". To "change" your password, merely change the value and/or order of the non-printables, making it easy to remember, difficult to crack.

back in the day Compuserve issued passwords very similar to that concept, consisting of two unrelated words separated by a non-alpha-numeric, like "kettle?gear" [no that wasn't my password, but I still remember what it was, more than 20 years later].

Also a line from your favorite movie might work, with similar characters between words... "go-ahead+make!my/day?"

Pentagon in uproar: 'China's lasers' make US pilots shake in Djibouti

Re: Laser canon and sonic death rays.

maybe we could just equip military aircraft with a kilowatt laser that "fires back" at the laser? "Send it back" with 'interest'!

That's right, "mine's bigger". Wanna see? Heh!

FCC shifts its $8bn pot of gold, sparks fears of corporate money grab

Re: Overcharge

"Maybe they should quit collecting the money for six years."

Maybe they should quit collecting the money for six years AND SCRAP THE PROGRAM

fixed it for ya.

This "program" (aka wealth transfer of O.P.M. to buy votes) has CERTAINLY outlived its usefulness (if it ever had any), especially with how cheap cell phones are these days... [and WHY should _I_ pay for SOMEONE! ELSE'S! PHONE! LINE! with TAXES???].

if you don't make a boatload of calls, you can get a <$50 phone with pre-paid from AT&T for $100/year. that's what I have, actually. works for me, just fine.

Microsoft's latest Windows 10 update downs Chrome, Cortana

Re: I've outlined the reasons on El Reg countless times

" Insiders = nincompoops. Fanboys, not professional QA testers."

Yes, Micro-shaft definitely made it VERY UNFRIENDLY for *ANYONE* who became an insider in order to improve the product by feeding opinions back to Micro-shaft, when such feedback did NOT fall in LOCK STEP with the FASCIST REGIME opinions of Micro-shaft.

Dissension was rewarded with BANS and DELIBERATE+OBVIOUS BIASED TREATMENT of so-called "term of use" violations. Fanboi trolls would deliberately engage people, "a comment" that didn't even violate TOU would be issued from the target, and then *POUNCE* and BAN. They got REALLY BAD after a while, like they were DELIBERATELY trying to clean out EVERYONE who dissented, so they could have a nice "pleasant" forum of like-minded sycophantic groupies.

One day 4 or 5 individuals commented to me in their forum about things that were irrelevant, but it was like 'sock puppet' posts, people who were CONSTANT violators of the TOU (they were frequent ad hominem attackers, for one). Next thing I get is a 'ban warning' (a "last warning" in fact) for allegedly doing something NOT COVERED by their TOU. At that point I abandoned their forum to their own folly. It was obviously NOT going to help any more to tell Micro-shaft why they were screwing up, with examples and specificity, in as many areas as I could think of [which I did for about a year, actually, and did NOT violate their TOU]. So yeah I saw it first hand. They didn't want dissenting opinions. Many other dissenters left the forum at the same time.

Yeah, no @#$% this really happened.

If you're a Fedora fanboi, this latest release might break your heart a little

Re: A differente audience

smells a lot like Ubuntu, looks a lot like Unity.

Unless it comes with Mate I'm not even going to download the thing - I don't like using rpm packages anyway, tried/tested CentOS and wasn't all that impressed with it. I got used to dpkg/apt a long time ago and I can stick with it.

But at least the screenshots weren't all "2D FLATSO". I appreciate THAT much.

Ubu has non-free packages. I guess this may have driven RH to do the same.

But I believe in "true freedom" so I welcome the [mis-named] "non-free" package repo, particularly when it's 'non-free' as defined by STALLMAN and his hippie/commie fanbois. Stallman's fascist approach to GPL is not relevant any more. Who _CARES_ if the 'GNU List' of "approval" doesn't include Fedora? What matters is what the users/customers think.

And right now, RH "gets it". Well, minus the whole systemd and gome-3-ness...

Re: In Linux, "freedom" means you have no freedom but to bow to Stallman.

"If you're really free, you're free to release your code as you like, and install any application you like."

True.

As for the topic line:

you have no freedom but to bow to Stallman Poettering.

fixed it for ya.

Google will vet political ads to ward off Phantom Menace of fake news

Google's twichy bums

I think they want to have the last-minute filtering "authority" so that MORE DEMON-RATS can be "elected".

After all, telling the TRUTH about Mrs. Clinton's crimes is being universally withheld across the non-Fox media (in the USA anyway), telling the TRUTH about Mueller's so-called "investigation" is ALSO being universally withheld, and telling the TRUTH about Trump's many accomplishments and the improved economy and world-standing of the USA is _ALSO_ being universally WITHHELD by "the left", the lame-stream non-Fox media, and [of course] GOOGLE wants to have THAT kind of POWER, too.

Because shaping public opinion, using emotional manipulation, is the CORE of controlling "the masses", and it can be done through advertisement, "clever" filtering of news, "social media", and the BLOCKING of ANY CONTENT that you deem "unworthy". And the more they slurp, the easier it becomes.

THAT is apparently what Google wants. Their left-leaning slant [by corporate policies and political involvement] is WELL documented. And THEY want Zuckerberg's kind of power, too.

Why does the world need the new 'Arkraino' network edge stack'?

just dont make it...

just PLEASE do no make it:

a) another systemd

b) another 'gnome 3' or unity (referring to the effect on the X11 desktop)

c) another 'dot not' (i.e. bloatware, "change for the sake of change" ware)

d) another SOAP

e) another Silverlight

...

Do one thing, do it well, do it with COMPACT CODE that can fit on a tiny microcontroller or in silicon, yotta yotta. Don't force us to have megabytes of RAM just to run THAT, then make it so you HAVE to "run that".

NASA demos little nuclear power plant to help find little green men

Re: Down Range

"If downrange is the sea, then it doesn't matter"

Well, even _I_ wouldn't go THAT far, to say "it doesn't matter". But "the solution to pollution is dilution" more often than not.

The sea is 'full' of a lot of materials, in extremely low concentrations. However, I don't really want to increase the amount of radioactivity in it, if at all possible.

When nuclear ships (U.S. Navy, anyway) need to discharge reactor coolant, they filter it first (there are a LOT of reasons why this must happen). And they hang onto it (in a storage tank) until they get back to port, if possible, where it will be appropriately processed. But occasionally they may need to discharge coolant into the ocean [and then they keep a log of how much, etc.]. As a general rule, it's "not that radioactive" but they still have procedures to avoid doing so when possible [and this was back in the 80's, so maybe they're even more careful now?]

Re: Down Range

"Any more dangerous than the radioisotope generators we've hurled into space already?"

probably not, just more radioactive material in them. In fact, based on the 'hotness' of a typical radioactive thermal generator, it might be (short term) environmentally WORSE than a much larger amount of uranium.

Now, if a spacecraft with one of these was returning to earth, let's have them ditch the thing towards the sun before they get into earth orbit. I wouldn't want a 'burn up on re-entry' disaster to release FISSION PRODUCTS, which are a whole lot WORSE than Uranium fuel.

Re: So basically....

"dynamically allocate current from different resources."

yes, including batteries, super-capacitors, flywheels, and other 'power storage' means, to absorb the surges while the individual power plants adjust themselves to the changes in demand.

You could even use a hydro-electric method that pumps water into a large storage area to absorb excess power, and then uses it to generate power when demand exceeds capacity. Just a thought at the moment. Its like the epitome of the whole concept.

I am pretty sure that "the power grid" (and the people running it) already uses fossil-burning plants and hydro-electric plants to handle demand changes (at least in the USA), while allowing nuke plants and solar/wind systems to run at full capacity as much as they can, then brings on 'peaker' plants to handle peak demands (gas turbines, diesel) when necessary. That assumes that GUMMINT didn't enviro-regulate everything to the point where no peaker plants were built... [so say hello to 'rolling blackouts' when it's cloudy and hot and humid and wind speed is low due to some kind of tropical depression, or whatever].

Re: So basically....

"am I misunderstanding how they work"

No, you're right. Heat rejection is a big problem for the moon. I don't know how deep you'd have to dig for a "lunathermal" solution, either. On earth it might be 20 feet or so, depending [then you just put a bunch of water piping undeground to reject heat into the earth]. On the moon you could do the same thing, but it's not very 'portable'.

I assume that the ginormous circular reflector is for that purpose. NASA knows how to make this work, as they did it on the space shuttle. But it's worth pointing out that any heat engine (including the Stirling engine) needs a differential temperature to work. So does a peltiere device, which is what I originally thought they'd use. But peltier devices aren't as efficient and would probably weigh more for kilowatt capable power.

I would also expect inverters and batteries to manage short-term transients. I can't see speed control on a Stirling engine being all that easy. If differential temperature drives it, then that's also what controls it [and you can't heat/cool things fast enough for speed control to work really well]. So they'd probably use 'load control' to also control speed, and use batteries as a 'surge' to keep speed within a safe band [with some safeties to burn off power or 'put on the brakes' when necessary].

In other words, controlling a Stirling engine generator could be like balancing a pole on your nose. Then again it might have some natural speed control built in, due to fluid friction and/or momentum, with that back/forth fluid motion thing going on.

It's a fair bet that the stirling engine + nuke plant would respond poorly to rapid transients, though. But the U.S. Navy solved this a long time ago in their own power polants, since you can go from "all stop" to "all ahead balls to the walls" in a reasonably short time on THOSE systems. Even so, electric power generation transients are usually a LOT slower than "flooring it" on a propulsion system. So maybe it's not an issue?

Re: So basically....

It's the "Son of SL-1"

There are (unfortunately) a couple of significant similarities...

a) small, low power reactor that's portable

b) a single control rod can make it go critical

If there is a way of doing a safety shutdown that does not involve "that one control rod" it would certainly be a LOT safer This is because the fission products in a fission reactor are often "physically bigger" than the original material. Reason: higher density for uranium, lower density for "what it splits into". basic physics.

Basically, the fission process causes 'fuel swelling' as the fuel is burned off. This could cause 'blistering' and/or 'swelling' of the fuel material to an extent that it impedes control rod motion, depending on the design.

And that "single control rod" can EASILY get stuck as the fuel changes its shape over its lifetime. This means you lose control of the reactor. Oops.

To compensate for this, designers need to make sure that you have rod channels that resist the effects of swelling and blistering, as well as having "some other means" to shut the thing down.

NASA needs to work with the U.S. Navy on this (if they aren't already), as well as General Electric and Westinghouse and other military contractors that know how to build small reactors for submarines.

For a bunch of reasons, the reactor core needs to be very compact, as compact as possible. This not only reduces the fuel loading, but it improves the temperature coefficient. Small reactors tend to have negative temperature coefficients, which means that as temperature goes up, reactor power goes down. this makes it stable. Very large reactors tend to have positive temperature coefficients, which means you can't change power levels very fast, and have to constantly monitor it and tweek it to keep power levels stable, because an increase in temperature makes power go UP [in a transistor they call this 'thermal runaway']. Large reactors, however, can have a much larger fuel load so (in theory) you could go longer without refueling. Additionally, a large reactor could be fueled with 'fuel pellets' inside of a permanent tube structure, rather than alloyed fuel material that has to be completely changed out, making the refueling process a lot simpler.

So large reactors have their advantages. they're just WAY harder to control.

In this case the small reactor would be perfect. Down side, it would very likely have 'alloyed' fuel, meaning that it would be subject to swelling and blistering that could cause the single central control rod to stick, resulting in a potentially uncontrollable reaction. The end result could be a partial meltdown, but probably would just overheat everything and damage it beyond repair. Or, it might just slowly drop in temperature until it shuts itself down. There's no telling. Any of these are possible for a number of non-obvious reasons, caused by changes in power demand [among other things], and despite the highly negative temperature coefficient, it's still possible [following a large power transient] for a stuck rod to cause power levels to go unstable and either melt it down right away. or temporarily shut it down and make it go into a 'cyclic' uncontrolled shutdown/restart mode that results in an unrecoverable power transient that completely destroys the thing. Not 'boom', just melt.

So, yeah. That single control rod is a big concern.

Re: Hmm...

DOH!

Ahem! Uber, Lyft etc: California Supremes just shook your gig economy with contractor ruling

Re: More complicated in the US

"although in reality few can afford it"

I know, it's been a HARDSHIP since Obaka-care took over a huge slice of the economy, and I haven't purchased ANY insurance because of it. I don't want it anyway. but it's a HARDSHIP, and I've said so on every tax form since that became a requirement to crawl out from underneath that STUPIDITY. Because, it IS a hardship. $1000/month, typically. I'd rather NOT have to move into a GHETTO and live on rice+beans to compensate.

Good thing the "individual mandate" (an UNCONSTITUTIONAL provision that should have NEVER happened) is GONE now.

If I need a doctor, I'll go to a clinic of my choice and pay cash. There's one 1/2 a mile from my house, next to a dentist office.

Re: What if ...

form an LLC. it means paying extra money, though, and filing separate tax returns, setting up a payroll service, yotta yotta yotta. _I_ think it's worth doing, because it puts you more in control and has other benefits.

Re: Work Choices

"for a period in the 80s and early 90s it was a lot more lucrative for both employer and employee for the programmer to be paid as a contractor but that extra loot came at the expense of the taxman."

YOU, sir, deserve a BEER!

This is NOTHING MORE than a clamp-down on contractors (in general), Gummint just wants our money. I'm glad you DARED to say it!

Re: About damn time

*NO*. Just *NO*.

I do _NOT_ want gummint limiting my ability to be a direct contractor for any individual or organization. This is just a (yet another) POWER GRAB to force employers to pay into "the system" with payroll taxes, etc.. Just like the earlier rulings that said a contractor can claim unemployment insurance MEANT THAT _I_ HAD TO START PAYING INTO A SYSTEM THAT WILL NEVER GET BACK TO ME. Since I own the corporation, and contract through the corporation, the rules are (for now) a bit different, but GOD DAMN them, because you KNOW that people like *ME* are on their targeting radar, too... [for more money to be extracted, more regulations to be imposed, etc.].

Even though i'd fail the current ABC test for being "an employee" because a) I do work at home on my own gear, and b) even if I'm on site, it's through a corporation of which I'm an employee. Fortunately I can still choose how much to pay myself with 'wages" and how much "with other things" and things like computer hardware, software, online services, etc. are all business expenses [so they are off the top of revenue, BEFORE being taxed], though it's a wash when you consider all of the OTHER taxes that I have to pay (including that UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE that I will never be able to claim - 'FUTA" - I have 'grade F' and the rate is one of the highjest, for some reason - *A* *TOTAL* *RIPOFF*).

It also makes me wonder about the job-shopping temp agencies. How will this affect THEM???

Press F to pay respects to the Windows 10 April Update casualties

Re: Sadly

"The unwanted ( by pretty much everyone) 3d crap is still there"

proving that, to Micro-shaft, '3D' meant something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT.

When _I_ say '3D' I mean an XP-like or Windows 7-like interface (not "the Metro" 2D FLATSO with shading like lipstick on the non-oinky end of the boar).

Micro-shaft missed the boat on that one. Easy to do when you've already jumped the shark and fallen off of the cliff...

Re: "Upgrading users should be able to ignore the viewer as before."

"once you've navigated through a maze circle jerk of help options, none of which quite address the problem you are having."

fixed it. you're welcome. sometimes a local 'grep' gets you the answer faster than being jerked about by link-hell.

(ok it means installing Cygwin on a winders box, but I generally do that)

Re: "have mobile Internet on their phone for when the PC is broken"

"There are still some situations" [snip] " and you would still like to have help available"

I've already tried these kinds of "cloud based only help" things before [read: DevStudio after 2010] and NEVAR want this kind of ABOMINATION *EVAR* *AGAIN*!!!

I don't need internet bandwidth choke points (or service outages) to get in the way of me doing work. wasting spending time commenting on El Reg takes up too much of my time already...

Re: "Upgrading users should be able to ignore the viewer as before."

"Most people have mobile Internet on their phone for when the PC is broken, and wired Internet on their PC for when their phone is broken."

I'd downvote with the link but the count is currently '42'

Re: "Upgrading users should be able to ignore the viewer as before."

"Sometimes we just want"

And Micro-shaft makes sure you ONLY GET what *THEY* WANT you to have!

What could Facebook possibly do next to reassure privacy fears? Yup – make a dating app

"Hate" speech

Article: "Facebook briefly went a bit nuts and asked people under every single post if said text or image was 'hate speech.'"

Let's mark everything that we disagree with as "Hate Speech", on BOTH sides of the political isle, just ot make sure that the entire process is obfuscated into non-existence. [well, P.C. tries to do that with everything said by conservatives already... so time for some 'tit for tat' I say]

Re: Facebook absolutely cares about your privacy.

especially now, with the "dating app" concept. So it harvests your personal info based likes, dislikes, and visits+interaction with web pages and links related to ANYTHING with the 'F' icon and tracking script+cookies+whatever-else

"they" determine FOR you who is compatible, thus potentially doing a kind of 'genetic engineering' on the human race. In a few generations, EVERYONE is programmed to do what Faece-bitch manipulates them into doing, thus LOCKING IN the dependency on "Big Faece-bitch" running every aspect of your life, tracking your every moment on or off-line, and so on.

"Big Brother" was a typo, along with "1984".

(that's my new conspiracy theory)

Got my first 2 dating matches this morning

Admiral Achbar: It's a TRAP!

/me gets coat, again

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match

one that can get me a whole lot of snatch nevermind...

On a related note, maybe this is Zuck just reacting to the tendency of millenials to do EVERYTHING via a 'phone app'. Next will be a plethora of safe-sex adaptors, one type for each of the "8 genders". With a USB micro-B adaptor for your phone. It will re-define the meaning of the words "data slurp".

coat, please.

NASA dusts off FORTRAN manual, revives 20-year-old data on Ganymede

Re: Computing power...

one company I consulted for had a PC 9 track reader that was about the size of the PC it ran with. I suppose you could've stacked them. I found at least one being sold online as 'refurbished' (and the web site said "in stock")

Re: Jupiter's magnetic fields

jupiter most likely has some kind of core which consists of heavier-than-atmosphere materials, perhaps all squished up into a high pressure ball, and the pressure might cause 'molten core' kinds of activity. Iron and Nickel (because of the lowest binding energy per nucleon) is common in the universe, and probably exists on every planet and celestial object in at least some amount. That being said, it might also be the same reason why the sun has a magnetic field

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_magnetic_field

Jupiter emits radio frequencies and as such could have some level of plasma activity (like the sun) that could be the source of its magnetic field.

Or it could be a combination of factors like these [and other things not considered yet]

/me expects Jupter's core to have a lot of diamond crystals in it, like Uranus.

Re: Contractor rights

and the new data that needs to be correlated [prompting the analysis]. It's highly likely that the new data wasn't even thought of 'back then' so how COULD they have done the right kind of analysis?

Re: Don't understand

yes, because money. it's always that, along with the political prioritization of the day.

And until recently, that money was prioritized in projects that were "of a political nature". But not any more.

Maybe NASA needs a specific 'data archiving budget'? It would go very well with education if it all goes into a public accessible database. [and keep it in native format, too, and document the format for posterity - no filtering, no cooking, JUST the raw, unfiltered data, and a valid schema for it]

Re: Article is a bit light on facts.

unless you're playing with raw data from COMMON blocks, shouldn't be a problem. However, this was a common practice for storing databases, using COMMON blocks and EQUIVALENCE for the record as an array of bytes/words/whatever

Yeah I spoke FORTRASH for a while, as recent as the early 90's, working with ASK products like MANMAN [on HP and a bit on VAX]. Yes, that's it's name. They also had other things with 'MAN' at the end of the name. I may even have a few hard copy tech MANuals [pun intended] someplace in the dead tree archive...

Re: Boot ROMs.. we dont need no stinkin' boot ROM's

was that a 'unibus' address? I am only familiar with doing things like that no a PDP11 and DG Eclipse. PDP11/34 had a console-based boot though [but the paddle switches were still on the front panel]. As I recall you'd press the boot switch, then enter the device name at the 'boot?' prompt, and it would boot from that device. or you'd toggle the address in with the paddle switches before hitting 'boot'

Re: Paper tape anyone?

"Sadly you can't give schoolchildren neat gin to play with!"

chem labs often use toluene in lieu of alcohol. Just keep the nitric acid away

Re: Paper tape anyone?

googled "paper tape reader site:ebay.com" - got several hits

Re: Keep old drives

I worked for a tape drive company back in the late 80's (and the 3 companies that subsequently bought each other, as an I.T. consultant). They made 'conventional' drives for UNISYS, as well as the more "modern" front-loaders that accepted a tape reel in a manner similar to a VCR cassette. Not for HP though. HP made their own, as I recall. Funny, because the company used an HP3000.

I don't recall even an old DG Eclipse 'self loader' conventional-style tape drive (in 1979) making that kind of noise, though.

Re: Apocryphal story

old keys may be weak and easily crackable

Re: The problem probably wasn't the software...

it might be time to back all of that stuff up onto more modern media, as well as a RAID someplace with images that can be loaded (and run) by something *like* simvh

I've got a few simvh-compatible images for PDPs and I know the VAX images exist as well... so we can avoid the problems of ancient hardware [though it's still fun to play with it] and potential data loss.

NASA may be a little weak on the I.T. front...

post-edit (after reading a few more replies in this topic)

simvh would solve nearly all of the language and hardware format compatibility problems identified, from the FORTRASH lingo itself, to the non-IEEE floating point format

Windows 10 April 2018 Update lands today... ish

Re: "Peer-to-peer patch distribution over the LAN"

I might want to say "it's about time" while simultaneously snarking about its very existence...

That is something that pretty much everybody wanted at least 2 decades ago. Only thing NOW is that it's being CRAMMED UP OUR AS DOWN OUR THROATS. It's like adding lube to the unpleasant experience involving Micro-shaft's customers bending over, etc. to make it "easier".

To me this was an OBVIOUS thing, i.e. "how to share updates". but when "update" typically means "take away things I did for customization" through "give me a UI from HELL that I never asked for", why bother?

Except when it's FORCED upon us...

Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, oi oi oi! Tech zillionaire Ray's backdoor crypto for the Feds is Clipper chip v2

Re: "the next step will be to make non-possession of phones a crime..."

"No phone, no credit."

*ahem*

How **DARE** they **FORCE** you to **PURCHASE** **A** **PRODUCT** **BY** **LAW** like that!

I'm glad THAT would NEVAR happen here in the good ol' U.S. of A ... no, wait...

Re: Making Non-compliant Encryption Illegal

this is looking even more and more like the war against law abiding citizens owning/carrying guns. Or knives. Because, if such things are illegal, ONLY! THE! CRIMINALS! WILL! HAVE! THEM!!! (and unless "they" will have a qualified officer of the law following me everywhere, online or offline, ready to POUNCE and protect me at a moment's notice, I think it would be better if I did that for myself, ya know? And that includes the use of STRONG encryption that can't easily be cracked)

In short: it's a war by "the elite" to make sure that everyone NOT in their "special people" club may NOT defend themselves, whether it be encryption, or any form of weapon.

What are "they" going to ban NEXT, *MARTIAL* *ARTS* ??? KEYS TO YOUR HOUSE?

At some point the people need to say *ENOUGH*. That point is *NOW*.

icon: because 'big brother' _IS_ watching you [and he needs your 'keys']

Double double, soil and trouble, fire burn and heat shield bubble: NASA cracks rover, has dirty talk with ESA

Re: time to revisit miniature pumpe propulsion?

I did a quickie search on this and only found a summary of an article by Whitehead.

However from the summary I think I know what they're talking about: something smaller than one of those massive turbopumps they use on liquid fueled rockets nowadays. The article even suggests something piston powered.

I suggest a 'swashplate' design:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_piston_pump

On one side, you have a swashplate engine, the other side a fuel pump. The engine would use a 2-part fuel, possibly ignited like a diesel engine [you could time fuel injection to prevent excessive knocking]. If a mechanical injector pump were used for the fuel injection [directly tied to the engine shaft] then all you would need to do is start it spinning [this would require a 'start gas' of some kind, maybe pressurized tanks of N2 or He or whatever]. Air starting of diesel engines isn't a new concept [it's done on submarines for example]. Then the fuel pump inlet valve would open and fuel would start-a-pumping. And so, you could apply start air to the fuel pump inlet (and make it work like a motor for the startup sequence), then the air shuts off when the engine fires up, then at the proper RPM the inlet valves open, and then the rocket fires up, etc.. Of course the lubricants and components need to work at cryo temps but this is more or less 'a given" being rocket fuel, etc..

As for the rocket engine itself as long as you can produce enough fuel volume for the engine to produce reasonable thrust, it oughta be a complete "no brainer".

Worthy of mention, an effective use of a swashplate engine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_48_torpedo#Propulsion

NOTE: for a cooling system, you have some very cold fuel that could circulate around the engine before being pumped and/or burned by the fuel pump itself. This is already done with a typical rocket engine in which the fuel is circulated through the engine jacket prior to going into the combustion chamber. Additionally, the rocket bell could be cooled by forming a laminar layer of fuel along the inside surface, such that temperatures could actually exceed the melting point of the engine. At the expense of a small amount of fuel that forms the layer, you'd get to use a much higher burn temperature. [I don't know if this laminar layer trick is being used already, but most likely it is, as it's too obvious not to have it in a modern rocket's design].

get those rocks back to our home world.

all joking aside, the lack of a proper hitchhiking ring might prove to be a problem...

So maybe it's time to ship a few landers? And a robot mothership?

Here's the thing: Let's say a robotic lander has some kind of secondary booster, like the Apollo's LEM. It can be an SRB type, just to make it physically smaller. The booster would be designed to get the payload into Mars orbit, with some kind of guidance capability so you can at least get something predictable to happen. After getting into Mars orbit, "the robot mothership" would rendezvous with it, along with the "plethora of others", and then [eventually] put itself on a return course back to earth.

Getting samples into the landers shouldn't be too hard, given you have a) rovers, b) robotic arms, and c) the possibility of moving small buckets to/from the surface and into the landers. Buckets would be weighed when 'in place' (and covers locked down), and the relevant information would then be used to help calculate orbital 'whatever' because you'd need precise weight information to do that.

This probably means some of SpaceX's experience in remotely landing a rocket on its tail might prove to be useful. In fact, if the lander stage was also the guidance stage on launch, they could re-use some stuff and maybe cut back on the total weight. Still you're shipping a rocket to Mars that's designed to take off again, something we haven't done before. It should be interesting.

A few test runs to the moon might be worth doing, to work the bugs out.

Boss sent overpaid IT know-nothings home – until an ON switch proved elusive

Re: try working in schools

for an extra fee you should offer to relocate the printer to resolve future problems.

Oh, wait...

Re: “...hated us for being over-paid and under-skilled.”

"If you hold the cd tray eject button while powering a machine on it'll usually open the tray before attempting to boot from what's in it."

and sometimes it tries to re-close while you're attempting to remove the CD/DVD...

/me notes that on a refurb XBox 360 it came with a game disk still in the drive. It was not one I wanted, though... [I also had to erase all of the old user info and installed games, kinda painful but the price was right]

Re: Way Back...

RE: light switch on a power outlet...

On a related note, the old 'National Technical Schools' TV repair correspondence course included some basic notes on house calls. In that chapter they pretty much pointed out that (more often than not) the TV will get unplugged so that someone can plug in a vacuum cleaner, and then be 'left that way' followed by a house call of "my TV is broken". This apparently happened so often that TV repair people basically needed to impose a 'minimum charge' just to show up or they'd invariably be giving time away for 'yet another pointless house call'.

Additionally, the U.S. Navy Electronics Technician school has you always begin your troubleshooting by making sure the equipment is correctly powered up by examining the input fuses [which light up when the fuse blows] and making sure that the "O.N./O.F.F." switch is in the "O.N." position (and the equipment is plugged in and the outlet energized, if that is part of the equation). Because "power supply" is one of the most common reasons for failure. [they also had you basically 'play with the equipment' and put it into 'test mode' and observe what happens before opening up and doing measurements, etc. because in a lot of cases, doing 'test mode' like that narrows the cause of the problem pretty fast].

Leave it to Beaver: Unity is long gone and you're on your GNOME

Re: Does Wifi Work?

You could try something 'external' for your laptop. Yeah it sort of defeats te purpose but sometimes USUALLY the laptop makers don't give a rat's ass about "linux compatibility" and you end up with something that ONLY works in Winders.

Re: MATE fix

/me checks - looks like FreeBSD's ports system snapshot has 1.20 on it (thanks for mentioning that). The 2018Q2 snapshot has 1.18 though...

Re: More evidence that the Gnome crowd have the Win10 problem:

"I've honestly never really understood the appeal of Gnome (or Unity) at all"

In the 'gnome 2' days it was a pretty good desktop, a bit lighter weight than KDE (or that was my impression of it), with plenty of compatibility if you wanted to run KDE applications. It tried to do things that irritate me [I don't need auto-mount, it gets in my way, and I don't need a network manager or power manager] but I could always shut those things off. And the panel design (back then) was pretty nice, VERY flexible, configurable the way you want it. "Mac-like" menu at the top, or "windows-like" menu at the bottom. Whatever you wanted. And in gnome 2 you can position icons wherever you want on the panel.

Gnome 3 broke a LOT of what was good in gnome 2, particularly with icon spacing on the panel. In gnome 2 (and now, mate), I can cram 30 or 40 shortcut icons onto the panel for the things I typical.ly use. In gnome 3 you're lucky if you can do HALF of those, and you have to use triple-bucky keystrokes to alter them (instead of a simple right-click).

So when you say 'gnome' I assume you mean what it's de-evolved into, rather than what it was when it gained its popularity.

Well, at least you're not FORCED into 2D FLATSO with Gnome 3, at any rate...