Posts by steelpillow 905 posts • joined 16 Jun 2016
"I frequently give free electronic copies of my books away, more or less to anyone who asks, but that's very different from me grabbing a million of other people's books and handing them out to anyone who can find a website."
Don't forget that one digital copy given away can very quickly become one hundred thousand pirate copies.
I put out electronic editions through the major sales sites and they tend to earn more for me than the paper editions.
Oh the joy when my school computer club received our weekly batch of programs back from Cambridge without having been fed into Titan - because a technician had dropped the lot in a heap on the floor.
I was one of two sufficiently nerdy geeks (or was that geeky nerds?) to punch out the line numbers.
But the 80-character limit also arose when home computers arrived and the TV was hijacked as a cheap monitor. 640 pixels per line was pretty much the limit of their resolution and, by coincidence, it yielded the same 80 characters. This led it to be adopted as the VGA standard.
My next SF novella is now going to have the main protagonist, a solar-powered AI space station, buying laser boost from a handy laser "filling station" whenever it is in a hurry. What to call the station brand? It won't be BP.
Shame that any patent will have expired by the time it actually happens. You read it here first!
Now I am no astronomer, but I do know that if one object has 6 solar masses and another has 4, then the heavier is certainly not orbiting the lighter. Throw in a second 6-solar-mass object and the 4-baby is just a bit of fluff. So how one of the bigger ones "orbited an invisible [smaller] companion" needs some explaining, as does the apparently total rubbish artist's impression.
In fact, as an example of the three-body problem, either this system is highly unstable or the mass estimates are way off.
I still have my working RISC PC but TBH I moved across to Linux/x386 because things like network interfaces, decent graphics and software upgrades were so darn expensive and getting hard to find. Also, killer apps like Sibelius and Xara had moved across.
Still, with RISC OS now available open-source, maybe one day I will have a decent RISC V/RISC OS workstation (with unpwnable OS in ROM) alongside my AMD64/Devuan.
"the consequences have been announced a LONG time ago, on those pages and others
How can it be unintended ?"
Because most civil servants are ignorant as shit and assume our outcries are just swinging the lead* - as they would naturally do in our position.
* How language changes. I feel the need to explain that the origin of the phrase is a nautical one meaning to sound out the depth of water with a lump of lead on the end of a rope, to see if one can gain passage and not run aground. Outside of its original context, it has connotations of trying to get away with a con.
SELinux is one of the few tools I'd like to see a smart assistant for:
"It looks like you are configuring SELinux. Can I help you with that?"
But unlike other smart assistants, after the click-through it then tells me exactly what it has done and what the consequences are.
We see so many because so many are happening within detection range, which is basically a timecone back into the past as well as outwards. The buildup to the event is not significant to detection when it happens.
We see more like a cross-section of the ripples as they wash past.
Do different frequencies travel at different speed? Theory says no, but I'll bet those detectorists would be the first to tell us if they did!
Judging by the slap-happy trails of some, many who get tested positive for the virus but still feel active will simply leave their mobes at home or switch off the app. How many will want to risk a reminder of what they already know perfectly well, that "You shouldn't be here", followed by a bunch of cops in bunny suits?
Armbands with a virus logo would be a better warning than some stupid app, plus a law to bang you up in solitary if you are caught without it.
President of Zirconia: "What shall I do with these bloody things? They've managed to get weakly magnetized."
Grand Vizier of Zirconia: "Chuck 'em out the garbage chute when we pass that planet that's coming up. That'll hoover 'em up and keep 'em out the star lanes for a few billion years."
President; "Okey dokey. ... Done!"
I'll bet plaintiffs unable to print their documents would not be accepted as a reason for delaying.
I could go in with a workstation airgapped from their network (i.e. mine) and set up the facility for them in the time it takes for them to give me their email address.
They should be stung for this, and stung bad.
AM coverage used to degrade gracefully. Just fit a better antenna and boost your signal. Longer waves even go round corners; Long Wave AM is still unbeatable as an international broadcast medium. But even with techniques such as SSB (single sideband) it is subject to interference and fading, so for music junkies FM is much better. Sadly it lopped off the highest audio frequencies to save bandwidth, so HiFi enthusiasts turned against it. And it cuts out rudely instead of fading, for instance when going under bridges, so even truckers were left with their doubts. But it still didn't save enough bandwidth, hence DAB to push out more channels and make more money offer more choice. But early DAB was both crap, expensively license-encumbered and had poor coverage. Modern DAB is better, could be rolled out more widely, and the licensors are getting less greedy as they realise that "pile it high and sell it cheap" makes them more money in the long run. But even if the money were spent it would always be ridiculously broadcast-antenna dense and when it does degrade it will always makes filthy burps at full volume. Moreover you can cram more channels in by squeezing the digits, and what industry is not going to resist that?
If I ruled the world I'd bring in FM2 - full 20kHz+ digital audio with modest compression and basic mobile techniques such as multipath equalization and error correction, carried over an FM signal with GMSK - basically just a HiFi version of GSM, somewhat simplified for one-way broadcast and and run over a much lower frequency band. A relaxed level of compression would allow introduction of compression/transmission algorithms which decay gracefully to listenable music rather than Volume Level 11 vomit.
Planet have also let support slide. They say they haven't and I know they are working hard on Cosmo's many bugs. But fixes that also apply to Gemini are just not making it across any more. Moreover, their customer communications have always been basically nonexistent and they show no sign they give a shit about that.
So yes, highly desirable device - when my Gemini eventually dies I will probably replace it with one of these or its successor - but you are buying the moment not a lifecycle.
"I can't help but think that bluetooth keyboards for more mainstream portable screens are a better solution"
Back a few years my S5 became unusable. The first generation of Linux netbooks had just come and gone (Thanks, Microshaft), so I got a Nexus 7 tablet, Bluetooth keyboard and leatherette wallet. When folded up it looked for all the world just like the standard 80's Filofax. Used it routinely, never once took either out of the wallet.
But the keybaord was so-so. You can keep your Bluetooth to yourself, thank you - especially as the Master of the Keyboard Martin Riddiford has not designed it!
The designer, David Riddiford, was burned by that on the original Psion Series 5, for which his classic keyboard provided the prototype for Planet. This slider is his fourth iteration - if anybody can make it work, he can. I certainly would not trust Apple any more - butterflies or butterfingers, I'll take Riddiford's bling any day.
Oh yes the government should. Big Money Defence plc buys the most successful drone kit manufacturer, develops damage-tolerant upgrade with greater firepower and sells assembled horror to gov't for 1,000 times the old kit price. Pass along quietly please, nothing to see here, kids.
Thankfully they are too busy right now streaming videos of their streaming noses to act on the opportunity. (And I do honestly hope they get better soon, I wouldn't wish this covid shit on anybody).
It just goes to show that the Internet of Shit(TM) follows its lead right from the very top. It takes a non-Internet organization, the ISO, to force these piles of utter shit that call themselves Internet administrators to behave like human beings. What a bunch of (look away now, children) stupid c**ts!
Sorry, a school friend of mine used to live there. Sark is a very, very special place - in both its natural landscape and human community. It deserves love and respect, not moronic oppression.
Photons orbit a black hole for two reasons. The basic reason is that, close to the event horizon, spacetime is so warped that a photon which happens to be going that way ends up circling the black hole just like we circle the sun. Put on your mad scientist hat and a spinning black hole actually drags spacetime round with it as it spins, a phenomenon known to mad scientists as frame-dragging. This helps keep those durn photons from gettin' too ornery. But the outliers do manage to spiral outwards, or bump into other stuff and get bounced away; these are the ones we see.
Einstein's theory of General Relativity is essentially a theory of geometry. It is this geometrical model of spacetime which predicts the formation of black holes.
The mass warps spacetime before it ever collects into a black hole. That warp is known as gravity (a gravity wave is literally a ripple in the fabric of spacetime) and propagates at the speed of light.
When the black hole forms, its event horizon bounds the region from which nothing can escape - not even more gravity. But nothing else really changes. If more matter falls in, it brings its gravitational distortion with it but most of that was already way out there and simply merges with the rest.
Black holes do come with their accretion disks at all angles. The thing about this particular black hole is that it is not far off face-on, that was one reason it was chosen for the photograph. ISTR it is about 15-20 deg off being exactly face-on, so a little spherical geometry shows that maybe one black hole in 30 will be striking a suitable pose for the camera.
A physicist friend of mine did a lot of work on NMR scanners. The imaging was always integral to the concept - doctors would have had trouble understanding Matrix-style number cascades. He told me that they had to rename it because of the nookelar skary bit.
The best story is the scanning algorithm. The things make quite a lot of noise and early patients found the weird, dissonant hums and buzzes quite disturbing. So they redesigned the software around the even-tempered musical scale. Sadly, many nowadays opt for earphones and piped Radio Googoo, so they miss the really rather pleasant music the things have played ever since. I heard it for the first time a year or two ago when I went for a scan and, to the nurse's surprise, refused the headphones.
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But then the God as you imagine Him is also a construct of your mind. Ultimately you have only faith in your arguments to place Him on an objective footing, just as atheists have only faith to deny His objective footing.
Evolutionary biologists have suggested that our genes are the objective source of any universal morality which we may have. I am not sure that I wholly agree with that, but it is certainly a part of the story. The missing part may be as conveniently called "God" as anything else.
I just love the old joke about Bill Gates turning up at the Pearly Gates, whereupon St. Peter whips out his laptop.
"H'mm ... Mr Gates. Darn! Not these gates! Damn thing has crashed now. Can't let you in unless it's fixed."
"Here, let me try, I used to make these things."
"Okay, see what you can do."
"Oh, darn again! It's a Chromebook...
... AAAAaaaaaahhhhhh........."
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