Posts by frankvw

SpaceX wants to fill Earth orbit with a million datacenter satellites

"That's doable, of course

Is it, in practice?

Skylab, if I remember correctly, had roughly 50m² of heat radiator surface, which could dump about 4.2kW of heat into space.

The problem is that heat radiators don't scale very well. The larger they get, the lower their overall thermal conductance becomes. Look at an old-style heat sink for analog power transistors: they're thick in the middle and getting thinner towards the edges. That's because in the middle they need to conduct more heat than at the edges. So the bigger your heat sink surfaces become, the thicker they need to be on the "hot" end. And thicker means heavier which, in space hardware, is a problem.

Also, orbital systems are, on average, in sunlight about half of the time. At that point a heat sink pretty much becomes a heat collector.

In a theoretically ideal scenario a 50m2 radiator could dump well over 20kW of heat. In practice Skylab's radiation-based cooling system only managed just over 1/5th of that.

"In space you can't just dump waste heat into [water or air]"

Correct. Which is why the concept of an orbital data center is inherently flawed, because cooling it would be impossible. A single orbital DC would need a heat radiator so large that the thermal conductance would negate its capacity to radiate heat away into space.

However, bonkers as Musk's latest brainfart may be (and it is) there is one upside to it: a distributed architecture would at least mitigate the cooling problem. Distributing a DC across $RIDICULOUS_NUMBER satellites, each fitted with their own relatively large thermal radiator, might bring keeping the hardware cool(ish) back into the realm of actual possibility.

Too bad that the rest of it is still the product of a drug-induced hallucination.

Three clues that your LLM may be poisoned with a sleeper-agent back door

This is news?

No, seriously - what's the big deal here?

We've seen (and are seeing) that both shady malicious actors and the Official Powers That Be frequently manipulate the information that we're being fed, and that this is disturbingly easy to achieve. Search engine results can be skewed (and more often than you realize they are); social media content can be turned into fact-free propaganda (and almost all of the time it is) and even news from reputable outlets is often biased one way or another. Et cetera ad nauseam.

And now [gasp!] it turns out that the same is possible with LLM based AI systems. Duh. Nobody saw that coming.

So let me point out the glaringly obvious here one more time: LLMs are on the list of systems that being run by Big Companies who have Big Political Interests. Their infrastructure components and the ways they interact are vast, complex, insufficiently understood and impossible to manage to the point where malfunction and/or abuse can be ruled out by those who use it.

Film at eleven.

Re: yes ... 1000000000000000000000%

"How can you 'sell' something that you don't understand ???"

What are you on about? This is how politicians get elected, and have been for ages.

'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP

Not to play devil's advocate here...

OK, maybe I am playing devil's advocate, but I have to point out that the US gov't can still hamper FOSS as well. Remember PGP being classified as a non-exportable weapon? Yes, I know it was created by an American in the US so the situation is quite different, but bear with me.

PGP eventually circumvented export regulations, but in quite a cumbersome way (printed source code) which is not an option for most FOSS products these days given the size of their code base. Nor would that loophole be relevant today. But consider what happened to Truecrypt. The devs abruptly discontinued it rather than build in a backdoor for the US gov't. Their advice to the user community to switch to Bitlocker leaves no doubt as to what happened and why. Fortunately Truecrypt now lives on as Veracrypt based in France, but it might as easily not have

Both PGP and Truecrypt have relatively small code bases, which makes migration out of US gov't influence easier. But what about the leading FOSS suites these days? They have devs all over the world, but still it would severely harm them if devs in the US (which make up a sizeable portion of the FOSS dev community) were to be cut off (i.e. forced to resign) from maintaining things like LibreOffice, Thunderbird, your mainstream FOSS web browser of choice (I can't really think of one, offhand, because I'm not sure Firefox and Chrome count as true FOSS), Apache, MySQL, PHP and what not.

Dependency goes much further than most people realize. A mate recently suggested I started using Smash instead of WeTransfer or Google Drive to send large files, because Smash is based in France while WeTransfer is based in the US. Great idea! Except that Smash exclusively uses AWS cloud-based services, which defeats the whole point.

Granted, the US can't simply shut Europe down in under an hour if they scuttle US devs. And switching from proprietary commercial US software to FOSS is definitely an improvement. But Europe should not fool itself into believing this will solve the problem. It mitigates it, no doubt. But more has to be done if the EU wants to be protected from the effects of US digital dependency. Starting by ditching Cloudflare, AWS, Google, AI and the rest of that lot entirely. And that won't be easy, so it won't be a popular move. And in politics every move is dependent on popularity or lack thereof, so I'm not too optimistic.

I hope I'm wrong. Time will tell.

Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Murphy's law on electronics...

...states that "Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined."

Every burned out RPi is an important lesson learned. Cheap at the price, really.

Re: I touch my tongue to those metal things.

"The effect is electric if not magic."

I can attest to that. As a student I built a tube pre-amplifier, during which I decided to test it by injecting some hum into the input by putting my finger on the grid lead, while holding an earphone to my ear. Unfortunately the pin I touched was not the grid but the anode. With 350V DC on it. From a very chunky electrolytic capacitor. Which went through my anatomy from my right hand forefinger all the way to my left hand held against my ear.

Do you know what it feels like to be hit by a diesel locomotive at full speed? I do.

Re: O tempora o mores

"It's pretty easy to release the magic smoke, deliberately or accidentally, instantly and explosively or with a pleasing build up of intensity. Flames are rarer but can be achieved."

Oh, yes. When I built my first PC XT clone from second hand components in the 1980s, I connected the power supply to the main board, switched it on, and immediately there was a loud bang, a flash, a small flame and a big puff of expensive-smelling blue smoke. I was convinced I'd fried the board and broken the bank.

Fortunately it turned out that this board came from a Taiwanese manufacturer who had used Tantalum electrolytic capacitors for decoupling capacitors (this was in the days of 74xx series TTL chips) which one should of course never do, because their proclivity to go bang due to inrush currents they cannot handle. The board turned out to be fine, so I changed my underwear, replaced all the Tantalum caps with ceramic 100nF ones and went on with the build. The board has never failed.

Re: O tempora o mores

Kids these days... Sheesh!

Back in the early 1990s I inserted a 80387SX math coprocessor (quite pricey at the time) into its socket the wrong way. You may remember that the 387SX used a PLCC socket. While the chip itself was keyed (it had a tiny 45 degree angle at one corner) the either socket wasn't (on cheap Taiwanese boards) or the key was insufficient to mechanically prevent incorrect orientation. In other words, in practice correct placement relied on visual indicators (telling you which corner went where, just like with DIL/DIP sockets) and you could easily get it wrong if you were sloppy, in a hurry, or just to stupid or cocky to look what you were doing. (Let's be kind and assume I was too much in a hurry.)

Anyway, when I powered up the board the magic smoke escaped in less than a second.

Did I go online to announce this to the world? Did I get coverage in a leading IT mag? Heck, no! I simply did what we all did back then, which was to swap the damaged chip and board out with other ones we had in store, where it was discovered later that they didn't work and were returned as DOA under warranty, and I went on with my life.

These young whipper-snappers could learn a thing or two from us old graybeard. Now get off my lawn!

NASA delays Artemis II to March after hydrogen leaks bedevil countdown test

"Is there a good reason to send people back to the moon?"

The Chinese seem to think there is. So the US wants to get there first. So that's a good enough reason. Geopolitics and the military aspects of rocketry drove the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects in the 1960s and that's what also drive Artemis now. Russia has been replaced with China but othewise we've all seen this movie before.

And that, incidentally, is my main gripe with NASA and Artemis right now as well. SpaceX might be a bunch of yahoos, but they do innovate. NASA has simply upgraded their existing 1960s technology to a somewhat bigger and powerful version of the hardware but otherwise it's pretty much rinse-and-repeat. In the 1950s and 1960s they had the balls to accept RUDs as a necessary part of R&D (like SpaceX does now) but they're so politics-bound these days that they'd rather not try than risk spectacular failures. Too bad.

Re: SpaceX's approach ...has, in comparison, yielded more but patchier results.

True, but I take more-but-patchier over little-to-none or consistently-iffy any day. Go ahead, downvote me for it.

Frequently.

LH2 leaks were the leading cause of shuttle launch delays. So on the one hand you'd expect them to have some experience in mitigating that particular problem, although on the other hand it might not be mitigatable, which should give rise to the question of whether LH2's superiour specific impulse is actually worth the pain. (I suppose it is, or they'd have gone to liquid CH4 or back to RP1.)

Lego shrinks NASA's biggest rocket – accuracy sold separately

"...the solid rocket boosters separate..."

No, they start to resemble warp nacelles. Or maybe that's just me.

Sudo maintainer, handling utility for more than 30 years, is looking for support

Many vital open source resources rely on the devotion of a few individuals

XKCD 2347 has been pointing this out for some time.

Elon Musk merges xAI into SpaceX to spread universal consciousness via a sentient sun

Re: In other words

"AI is a cash sink that hasn't produced returns,"

I respectfully beg to differ.

It's true that in terms of hard revenue AI companies are money pits. But that is NOT the only form of returns. Stocks are soaring (ka-ching!), AI tech bro's have more lucrative political power than ever (ka-ching!) and while the bust is coming, the boom is ongoing (ka-ching!)

Don't forget that the biggest profits are made during times of quick, significant change. Like the Internet boom of the late 1990s. And now. Yes, the bust is coming, but for now the boom is ongoing. So there is a lot of money being made, although it does not appear on the books of the AI companies themselves.

On paper AI is a cash sink with no RoI, but the tech bro's behind them are raking in the dosh at a rate that beggars belief.

Finally - this is a good thing!

What an excellent plan! The best thing we can do with Musk's mecha-hitler is to ship it off planet. Preferably with Musk on board. The sooner the better!

Azure outages ripple across multiple dependent Microsoft services

Perhaps...

Maybe, just maybe, we are all (dare I say it) becoming just a tat too dependent on third party SPOFs hosted by overseas tech giants who care about nothing but their stranglehold on the market and their bottom lines? Cloudflare, AWS, Azure and what not have lately proven to be more of a liability than a boon to the IT using world. Or maybe that's just me.

BOFH: Eight pints of a lager and a management breakthrough

"Do Nothing"

It's Friday afternoon and time for one of these ----------------------------------------------->

So I didn't have to be told that!

Musk distracts from struggling car biz with fantastical promise to make 1 million humanoid robots a year

To what end?

Knowing Musk, this, probably...

Penguin in your pocket: Nexphone dual boots into Linux, Windows 11

"...run Linux and boot into Windows 11"...

That's the most concise yet poignant summary of how both these OSes perform that I've heard in a long time.

How an experienced developer teamed up with Claude to create Elo programming language

Re: Someone with appropraite skills manages to use 'AI' in useful way !!!

"'AI is not a tool that is useful to the general public, it requires skills to 'guide' it to give meaningful output."

Indeed. However, isn't that just as true for every tool? I've seen a seasoned carpenter wield a hammer in a way I (as an amateur woodworker) can't ever hope to even imitate, far less approximate. On the other hand, I can solder electronic components according to military specs, which is quite a bit beyond the average repair tech with access to the same fancy tools as I used.

That's the thing - AI is a tool. It's not the tool; it's the skill with which it is used.

Trump says he got a deal for rare earths in Greenland, but they won't come easy

Re: Ha

"But based on the 'we are all doomed' cult belief wont this be melting away soon"

Yes, most of it will indeed melt away soon. Unfortunately, permafrost (permanently frozen soil) is notoriously unstable once it thaws. Not what you want for mining.

The fine art of diplomacy

Mark Rutte and the Danes have played Donnie like a big old fiddle.

First they sell him a "deal" that he already had since 1951, and then they throw in mineral rights that they know he can only exploit by getting the US mining industry involved, knowing full well that the mining industry won't be interested, just like the oil industry passed on resuming oil extraction in Venezuela.

And Donnie thinks he's a great deal maker... Ha!

This is brilliant.

Cursor used agents to write a browser, proving AI can write shoddy code at scale

A waltzing bear

The impressive thing about a waltzing bear is not how well or gracefully it dances, it's the fact that it dances at all.

Having ChatGPT write code that works is a demonstration of that same principle. So the program works? Great! Neat trick! But it still waltzes like a bear. Don't expect grace or beauty. There isn't any, and there isn't going to be any.

MPs ask who's responsible when AI crashes the UK finance system

Re: There must be clarity on who is responsible:

I shouted out

"Who killed the Kennedys?"

When after all

It was you and me

The great prophet Jagger was entirely correct...

Ancient telnet bug happily hands out root to attackers

Who still uses telnet?

Telnet has been out of favour due to inherent security issues for decades. Which makes sense to everyone.

On the other hand, virtually every website hosting provider still allows plain FTP, which is just as insecure. And the Great Unwashed happily use it, because they've never even heard of SFTP. Which makes no sense at all.

Sometimes...

Splash-screen memories from a Bangkok ticket machine

Re: Windows, again

"Just another example of why you should use Linux to ensure a stable environment."

Not even Linux can prevent hardware issues. I remember a VERY long flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow with a flight entertainment system on board that only displayed console output while trying to load a driver that didn't want to play ball.

Something can always break.

Dead batteries cough up lithium after a bath in CO₂ and water, boffins say

Re: lithium metal

"I've seen videos of Li vs Na before... it goes kaboom quicker."

And then there's Rubidium and Cesium.

Re: lithium metal

"Industry standard demonstration was a glass Petri dish full of phenolphthalein solution on an overhead projector, into which a few shavings of sodium or potassium metal were dropped. Sudden fiery ball on the surface of the water and purple trails of alkali metal hydroxide in the previously clear solution."

So that's why the overhead projector looked the way it did! I've always wondered.

"recycling them cleanly and safely at scale is still hard..."

This is the long-standing problem with "sustainable" energy. Across the board the overall environmental balance is still positive (i.e. more benefit than harm) but not nearly as much as it's touted to be. PV panels, the associated batteries and the electronics have a limited lifespan, and they are partially recyclable at best. The same goes for EV batteries. End-of-life wind turbine vanes end up in massive landfills (they're not recyclable at all) and the leading producer of E-vehicles in the world is also the top producer of E-waste in the world. (Yes, I'm looking at you, China.) On top of all that, producing all these "sustainable" solutions come with their own massive carbon foot prints.

Which is I'm putting "sustainable" in quote marks: although these technologies are definitely a step in the right direction and a vast improvement over burning astronomic quantities of fossil fuels, they are not truly sustainable. They're just less unsustainable than what we had before.

So anything that can contribute to the recycling of the components involved will be a massive improvement.

Footnote: This problem is not just related to energy production. What the general public considers "recycling", the industry more properly calls "downcycling", i.e. reusing materials to produce a lower-quality second product. Good quality paper can be only be reused to make newspaper, while newspaper can be reused to make egg cartons. Good quality plastic can be mixed with new plastic for lower-grade products such as drainpipes or packaging, but few products make up 100% recycled plastics, and the ones that do tend to have a limited service life due to stability issues as a result of heat and contamination, leading to loss of strength. While glass and metal can be (and, due to the fact that it's profitable, are being) recycled pretty much indefinitely, even that comes with a certain amount of loss. Don't get me wrong: reusing as much as we can is absolutely the way to go. But let's not kid ourselves by believing it will save the planet. That will take far more.

Majority of CEOs report zero payoff from AI splurge

Re: AI is actually quite useful, just not a universal panacea

"...there are situations where AI has proven useful..."

This. Exactly this. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I can already hear the flamethrowers being fired up in the background, but I'm going to say it again: I struggle to understand the intense, vitriolic hatred against all things AI-related among the Reg commentariat.

Yes, AI is over-hyped. That's a problem with the IT industry and IT manglement, not with AI itself.

Yes, AI is no more intelligent than a Windows Solitaire game. The fact the some people think it's actually clever is a problem with people's perception of it, mainly due to the fact that AI is a misnomer. We're not dealing with Artificial Intelligence but only with Simulated Intelligence. If it were referred to by the latter, there would be a lot more realism surrounding it.

Yes, LLMs (which are only a subset of AI as a whole) are being trained on content in ways that are at odds (to put it kindly) with existing copyright law as we know it. That proves we need new copyright paradigms that accept the reality of content being incorporated in an LLM, as opposed to content being redistributed as-is. AI is disruptive technology. This is nothing new. The media industry tried to make war on digital audio and video being distributed on the Internet when that technology first became available; yet now we're looking at streaming services obliterating previous means of content distribution. Similarly, AI will also necessitate some radical paradigm shifts. But that problem is one of inertia within the content industry and its reluctance to respond to radical changes, not with AI itself.

Yes, AI is still unreliable and prone to failures in catastrophic (and often hilarious) ways. Of course it is: the technology is relatively new and still evolving. That's a problem with over-eager early adoption of new tech and a lack of caution by the user, not with AI itself.

Yes, manglement has become delusional to the point where they use AI to decimate the workforce and in some cases rehiring said workforce at a lower wage. That's a problem with incompetence and greed in the boardroom, not with AI itself.

Yes, some believe that buzzcoding can replace real devs. That's a problem with corporate stupidity, not with AI itself.

And so on.

Nor is this anything new.

Let's set the Wayback machine to the late 1990s, when the "New Economy" was the be-all and end-all. Tiny start-ups were given millions to play with and companies who had never made a single product, let alone any profit, went IPO and became worth billions overnight. I wondered out loud in those days how that sort of nonsense could ever be sustainable. I was met with scorn: my questioning the viability of the New Economy clearly illustrated my complete lack of understanding of how it worked. It was all about the Internet, and E-commerce, and the Virtual Workplace, and Java replacing regular applications, and Wearable Computers, and the words "dot com" which, when tacked onto anything at all, would ensure Instant Magic.

Then the bubble burst. And not a moment too soon.

But strangely, the Internet is still here, bigger than ever. Working remotely is still here, bigger than ever. Java has not replaced traditional software, but it has earned its place in the IT market; just look at large financial institutions or, closer to home, something like Apache Netbeans. Wearable Computer tech looks even more ludicrous now than it did back then, but everyone has a smartphone in their pocket, often with more computing power than the average desktop in 1995. E-commerce is also still here, bigger than ever: many of us order more goods and services online than what we buy through regular outlets.

My point (yes, there is one!) is that once the hype wears of, as it inevitably will, the core of technology that it sublimated around will continue to exist and function, and it will find its proper, useful application, whatever that may turn out to be. AI is no different. The bubble will burst, the hype will wear off, reality will set in, there will be a shake-out in which the more vapid players in the market will go under, and that is all as it should be. But AI itself will persist. It's here to say. Just look at history.

Just the Browser claims to tame the bloat without forking

"Ahem... PHP is server-side. It does not generate markup or client-side script."

True. Instead it's the PHP developer who tells the server-side PHP what to output and render at the client size. And therein lies the problem: the vast majority of PHP devs knows all about PHP but pitifully little about how to create client-agnostic HTML or scripts.

I got involved with professional website development at the start of the browser wars. This was in the days when what we now call "progressive enhancement" was still called "graceful degradation". We were constantly aware of cross-browser problems, such as the fact that <marquee> was only supported on IE, while frames could only be used on Netscape Navigator, so we learned not to rely on a feature's availability but ensured that we wrote markup that would render a proper (if not identical) user experience on all different browsers.

PHP devs, by and large, don't do that. They mostly live at the server side and write code that works server-side, where there is no need (or awareness of the need) for cross-platform client testing. If you're lucky they include some drop-in framework that wraps some sort of generic fluid layout around the output they generate and plonks in some JS and CSS that replaces a desktop-type navbar with a mobile-device-type dropdown menu, but at that point they consider the job done. By and large they don't test cross-browser at all.

And that's a problem.

Ready for a newbie-friendly Linux? Mint team officially releases v 22.3, 'Zena'

"...I18n and L10n are TOO precisely defined..."

I installed the upgrade, which was painless, with one small exception: my keyboard layout was set to "US Int'l with dead keys" but the upgrade replaced it with "South Africa" which is correct for my locale (that is where I live) but has no dead key support. I had to restore it manually.

No biggie, but still one wonders why, without so much as a by-your-leave, the upgrade removes things like dead key support. Oh well.

Re: "i18n for short"

"...I18n and L10n are more precisely defined..."

Be that as it may, I'm still struggling to see how I should read that as "internationalisation" and "localisation". What happened to using words instead of SMS/chatroom shorthand in real life? (Oh, wait, that should be "IRL".)

Maybe I'm just getting too old.

Re: painless

"...I was hoping for a newer version of VirtualBox..."

Agreed, but even more vexing is the fact that the most recent WINE version you get from the Software Manager (i.e. the Ubuntu repo) is still 9.0. That's two major stable releases behind the times. Upgrading to WINE 11 involves manually downloading and installing a signing key and repo source. And that's about as far from being un-nerdy as it gets.

These are essentially repo issues, not Mint issues, but still.

Coming soon: We interrupt this ChatGPT session with a very special message from our sponsors

Re: Preserve trust?

That's not what I got from ChatGPT:

On 3 January 2026, the United States launched a military strike against Venezuela, targeting military facilities and air defenses in and around Caracas in an operation codenamed Operation Absolute Resolve.

U.S. forces — including elite units like Delta Force and other Army, Navy, Air Force, and special operations elements — attacked and seized Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores.

They were flown to New York and brought before a U.S. federal court on narcotics and related charges, where Maduro pleaded not guilty and stated he was “kidnapped.” [Reference to Reuters source here]

And so on, for a whole page, all of which I fact-checked to be correct. Maybe I'm the one who is hallucinating here?.

Teach an AI to write buggy code, and it starts fantasizing about enslaving humans

" Research shows erroneous training in one domain affects performance in another"

Well, duh. We already knew that, didn't we? Failed real estate moguls make for bad presidents, to give you just one example.

Moon hotel startup hopes you get lunar lunacy, drop $1M deposit for 2032 stay

Re: The moon is a harsh mistress

And remember, kids: TANSTAAFL!

"conviction must bridge the gap between the status quo and the necessary future..."

Does that include GRU being convicted for swindling sometime in the necessary near future?

Fake Windows BSODs check in at Europe's hotels to con staff into running malware

Deja vu!

That brings back memories from the days when I had so much fun with the SysInternals BSOD screensaver!

What if Linux ran Windows… and meant it? Meet Loss32

The EU and the rest of the world

> ...could well decide "enough is enough"...

Oh come on. The EU can't even decide how to respond to the geopolitical threats running around unchecked in the world right now. None of the EU countries dares to say anything about anything. And with IT and everything else being weaponized to that end, such a decision won't be forthcoming anytime soon. Or ever.

(Let's see how many downvotes I can clock up with this one!)

Re: The last thing we want

The last thing I want is to keep having to struggle in order to get Windows apps to work with WINE. I make do, but it can be a pain. Take Adobe Photoshop CS6, for example. With a lot of hacking, fiddling and geekish stuff that the average user will not be able (or willing) to pull off it can be made to work... mostly. There are still many focus and screen update issues (leading to artefacts or to your image window suddenly disappearing) and the occasional crash. I only need it occasionally, but when I do I need it badly, so I live with the pain. It's still not as atrocious as having to run Windows in a VM (which is still plan B if all else fails and I've had to do that a number of times over the past year) because the performance penalty is, well, non-trivial.

Another thing is USB drivers. WINE has no proper support for it, which means that if I want to program, say, a GSM unit that comes with a proprietary Windows driver, I'm stuck because that doesn't even work properly in VirtualBox.

Steam is great, but focuses on games. I'm not a gamer. Nor are many of us. If we could run things like the Adobe Creative Suite, Autocad or even the full blown MS Office suite (yes, some of us do need to connect to corporate a back-end that lives in an MS-only eco system) that would be so much better. Linux equivalents (GIMP, Libre Office etc.) don't always quite cut it.

Will that ever work? I don't know. It's been a holy grail for decades, and after all that time we're... closer.

BOFH: The Christmas spirit has run dry – time to show some chiller instinct

Re: 44 gallon drums

"Isopropanol isn't all that toxic at least when compared with methanol or ethandiol (ethylene glycol) and doubtless actual scrumpy."

Brewer / distiller here... ^*

I can't speak for the scrumpy, but as far as the comparison between ethanol, methanol and isopropanol is concerned, you are both right and wrong. Different alcohols are metabolized differently, which makes it so dangerous. It's the type of toxicity that makes the difference here.

Methanol is metabolized into toxic compounds (starting with formic acid) which causes permanent nervous system and organ damage.

Ethanol and isopropanol essentially have the same type of toxicity (all alcohol is technically toxic, hence the term "intoxication") but the effect of isopropanol on the body is about three times stronger. That means that the really serious effects of alcohol intoxication, such as central nervous system disruption and depression, nausea, a plunging blood sugar level, and eventually unconsciousness or even coma) occur three times sooner.

Apart from that, isopropanol is metabolized into acetone, which is very good in making you extremely sick. So while head cleaning alcohol is three times stronger, the hangover is about thirty times as monumental.

Higher alcohols (typically butyl, propyl and their isomers) also taste sharp, "hot" and can have generally unpleasant aromas reminiscent of pain thinners and other solvents with a petrochemical base.

^* When I semi-retired from IT I needed another profession. Since IT had essentially driven me to drink and I already had a basic background in chemistry it was an easy choice. Let thet be a lesson unto you all.

Satellite radio transmissions are jamming telescopes and driving astronomers batty

"There are two separate problems here: the antenna side lobes, and spectral regrowth."

Absolutely correct! But, unfortunately, this is not the whole story. The far more serious underlying problem is not of a technical nature at all.

Large sat constellations are designed to be cheap and expendable. Like, say, LED globes (or light bulbs, if you're on the American side of the pond). The first thing the manufacturers of those lights leave out is the RF suppression parts. There's room on the circuit board for coils, capacitors and resistors to do that job, but they simply haven't been fitted to save a cent and a half per unit. The same happens frequently with other cheap household appliances or consumer grade IT kit. Elon's orbital WiFi routers are designed for mass production and a limited service life before being deorbited, so they are manufactured along the same principles: keep them cheap and easy to replace. Perhaps they're not as bad as a cut-price Chinese LED globe, but keeping other parts of the RF spectrum clean won't have featured at the top of Starlink's list of design requirements, I'm afraid.

Then there's the fact that radio astronomy is generally considered a useless, eldritch practice that is only popular among egg-headed boffins with funny beards and heavy-rimmed glasses. Few normal people are interested in it and even fewer understand the importance of it, if the average man/woman in the street is anything to go by. It won't bring down the price of beef, fix global warming this year or get a politican elected. So who's going to bother doing anything to protect it at the cost of lower profits for tech billionaires? After all, science is for lib dems and should be stamped out in favour of the industry making more money, so guess what will happen?

European Space Agency hit again as cybercrims claim 200 GB data up for sale

Re: honest question

I blame the boffins.

Any number of times during my varied checkered IT career I have worked with (and spoken with colleagues who worked with) people who were brilliant in their field but absolutely clueless outside their own expertise. To quote the assessment of an IT guy working at CERN: "Sheldon f***ing Cooper is the norm here." While stellar (no pun intended) at all things involving space exploration, pushing the limits of understanding in cosmogeny, particle physics and the engineering underpinning those endeavours, most (in fact practically all) boffins are appallingly naive when it comes to even the basics of cyber security.

So here's a top tip: if you want to penetrate the core systems of ESA, CERN or NASA, just send a few unlabelled CD-ROMS anonymously to a dozen or so people who work there. I guarantee you one of them will slot it and click on RUNMENOW.EXE just to see what will happen.

New York’s incoming mayor bans Raspberry Pi at his inauguration party

Re: The Banned Item List

I've been known to be a major geek / nerd / anorak over the years, but I have never even considered bringing a Raspberry Pi to a party. FFS, what would I do with it? Keep it in my pocket along with the battery, or show it to anyone (either accidentally or deliberately) and have everyone avoid me for the rest of the evening?

If security is the issue here: given how suicide bombers generally use bomb vests under their clothing, banning clothing would have made more sense than banning the RPi. If nothing else it would have made for a much more interesting party...

When the AI bubble pops, Nvidia becomes the most important software company overnight

Re: When the AI bubble bursts...

"Hey, this bridge needs replacing"

"Sorry we gave 10 billion pounds to a struggling AI slinger"

Not the stupidest thing I've seen governments do in recent years...

iPad kids are more anxious, less resilient, and slower decision makers

Re: 'read to your kids'

Even better: shove them out the door. Let them ride their bicycles without helmets, elbow pads and knee pads. Let them build a soap box cart and ride it downhill. Let them climb trees and fall out of them. Let them get muddy. Let them be unplugged, free range kids.

Yes, they'll come home with some scrapes and bruises now and then, and they'll get their clothes dirty and occasionally torn. Deal with it. They'll be better for it. It worked for us. It'll work for them.

We will be cruising at 35,000 feet and failing to update our Apache HTTP Server

FFS, have you actually seen it?

"...and movie-goers were being delighted by Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones."

No they weren't!

Not to start any conspiracy theories here, but I'd rather have my IFE display error messages from outdated software than that movie. I'd personally try to break it to prevent AotC being shown, actually... Hmm...

Microsoft wants to replace its entire C and C++ codebase, perhaps by 2030

The horror, the horror...

Microsoft, a complete code base replacement from C/C++ to Rust, and AI, all in one fell swoop.

What could possibly go wrong? <shudder>