Posts by vtcodger

NASA spanks $34bn on a disposable rocket – likely to top $50bn by 2024 moon landing

Re: then the dates for subsequent missions may drift to the right

Dear Mr/Mrs/Miss Scotland

We're sorry to report that your coat (and rocket) have been inadvertently sent out for dry cleaning. We regret the error, but you have to admit, they were pretty grungy. We expect them back in 2024 or 2025 or maybe 2026. The fee will be around $8B US. Or maybe a bit more.

In the meantime, we can lend you some burlap sacks to protect you from the weather.

Sincerely,

NASA

Your business and continued support are very important to us.

Can't you hear me knocking? But I installed a smart knocker

Smart?

Very funny piece.

Anybody have any idea why IOT gear is referred to a SMART? As far as I can see, its virtue -- when it has any virtue at all -- is consistency, not intelligence.

Re: There is of course a new approach here

Chineseium screws are designed so that the groves in the head all rub off when the screw is halfway inserted

On the other hand, the center of the screw is somehow made of harder material that will firmly deflect the drill bit when you absolutely have no choice other than to drill the jammed screw out. Achieving all this in one simple, inexpensive metal device was apparently invented by the Chinese in the seventh century BC and has been perfected in subsequent millenia.

I doubt the Chinese use this technology in screws made for domestic consumption.

Judge shoots down Trump admin's efforts to allow folks to post shoddy 3D printer gun blueprints online

Re: Why a 3D printed gun?

People still get shot in London all the time (24 last year)

24 shooting victims is a slow Saturday afternoon in Chicago. Total this year as of November 9 = 2394. Difficult as it may be to believe, that's fewer than last year.

see https://www.chicagotribune.com/data/ct-shooting-victims-map-charts-htmlstory.html

Section 230 supporters turn on it, its critics rely on it. Up is down, black is white in the crazy world of US law

Re: The law of Unintended Consequences applies....

I know this will kill Facebook ...

It'll be tough, but I think I could somehow get by.

Gas-guzzling Americans continue to shun electric vehicles as sales fail to bother US car market

Re: Electricity in the USA

Given that I don't anticipate charging stations being a common feature in areas with a population density of 5 people/mi^2 (1.9 / km^2),

Indeed. If you're looking for something to do for an hour or so, try working out the logistics of a weekend ski trip from Los Angeles to the nearest reliable snow at Mammoth Mountain in a Tesla. That's 300+ miles. At night. High Speed driving (You'll lose some range to drag). Through high desert (i.e. temps once you leave the LA Basin will likely be sub-freezing. You WILL almost certainly want heat). It can probably be done. But the queue at the Mammoth Lakes chargers when the lifts close on Sunday afternoon is likely to be impressive if very many Tesla owners try this.

Re: Electricity in the USA

"But most people don't travel very far in vehicles."

That's maybe OK for a second or third car. Heck, as an ICE vehicle approaches End Of Life after 20 years or so, it's likely to be on life support and not something you want to take more than 20-40km from home as it's maybe not all that reliable. I don't see that an EV would be any worse. A vehicle with limited range is OK for local shopping, errands, and commuting to work or school. That's assuming that one has a handy facility for charging your EV.

But in North America, most of us need, or think we need, at least one vehicle with "unlimited" range.

BUT, current chargeable EVs are priced like first vehicles, not second cars. Hybrids get around many of the limitations of EVs of course. Personally, I think hybrids may well be the future. The only reason I don't own one is that in recent years, new cars have sprouted a vast assortment of baffling and often quite poorly designed controls that I have no interest in fighting with. And my low-mileage, 15 year old Nissan with an after market GPS and rear-view camera meets my needs.

I suppose the combination of an EV and an older, but reliable, low-mileage ICE might work for some.

I doubt Americans will change as long as the pricing for electric cars are still pretty expensive

Exactly. Cars are a major purchase item for all but a few Americans. In most cases, they are going to buy the least expensive vehicle that meets their perceived needs That's VERY unlikely to be an EV. At most, they might spend an extra 3% or 5% for an "environment friendly" high gas mileage hybrid, but that's about it.

The only way I can see that changes any time soon is if some outfit somewhere builds an extremely inexpensive EV that has all the EV problems (slow refueling, limited range, lack of "free" cabin heating, probably limited interior/cargo space) but is REALLY cheap and proceeds to sell tens of millions of them in Africa, Asia and Latin America. And if they can somehow get those things past US/EU/Canadian safety requirements. And if they can compete pricewise with low end ICE compact cars. Then maybe Americans will flock to them as they did in the 1960s to VW bugs and the 1970s to Japanese sedans. ... Perhaps. ... Maybe.

Uber CEO compares pedestrian death to murder of Saudi journalist, saying all should be forgiven

Re: He then argued that everyone should be forgiven.

Uber is all about the Gig Economy. They probably have one or more local drug cartels on call for body disposal gigs.

Morrisons is to blame for 100k payroll theft and leak, say 9,000 workers

Perhaps ...

I think what is being suggested is probably that the data should have been encrypted using a KPMG provided public key that Skelton couldn't use to decode the data. Perhaps.

Who would be responsible for implementing such a process? Morrisons? The UK government? Skelton? KPMG? The EU? Maybe Joint and Several Liability applies here. There are some quite deep pockets amongst that lot.

One man's mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of Europe's Galileo satellites going dark

Re: And we wonder why people want to exit the EU

Actually, there are several alternatives cited in other answers. Or, if you have unique requirements, you can possibly design and launch your own GPS/GLOSNASS,Beidou,IRNSS (pick one) compatible satellites as Japan seems to be proposing with QZSS.

Re: So in short...

Closely followed by a second report on how to cut ballooning costs by removing non-management staff.

You're suggesting they should outsource the non-management part of the effort? There ARE non-management workers somewhere in the organization structure -- right?

Re: Doesn't inspire confidence....

I thought at first that the organization chart might be similar to xkcd's Python Environment chart https://xkcd.com/1987/ But on further analysis, I think the Python thing might be clearer and simpler.

To avoid that Titanic feeling, boffins create an unsinkable hydrophobic metal with laser power

Re: Hmmm...

You're right of course. Archimedes wins again. Damned Greek spoilsports. But I wonder what a surface coating of air bubbles does for or to drag. Any chance these laser teated metals might lead to more fuel efficient hulls or propellers?

NPM today stands for Now Pay Me: JavaScript packaging biz debuts conduit for funding open-source coders

Re: Is there someplace I can go ...

"This is shallow thinking at its most obvious."

Sorry my friend, but I expect you'll eventually, probably after many years, conclude that Thomas Hobbes "The life of man in the natural state is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." was a lot clearer thinker than Ayn Rand.

I'm sympathetic to Libertarianism. Any reasonable person is. I'd prefer a universe where Hobbes was wrong. But in practice, everybody does what they want and it all works out simply doesn't work. If you want problems solved, you tackle them -- mostly one at a time -- instead of throwing up your hands and saying "It can't be helped".

Right now, malicious web scripting is a problem. A serious one. Not a simple one. And it's getting worse, not better. I expect that Google and others will eventually try to tame it. They employee some very clever people. Maybe they'll succeed. But my bet would be otherwise.

But thanks for at least taking the time to express your viewpoint -- unlike the general population of apparently inarticulate and I suspect rather dimwitted downvoters around here.

Is there someplace I can go ...

I'm not against paying for open source software. I've even been known to do so as well as contribute some spare change to Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.

Javascript On the other hand ... Is there someplace I can go to donate to a fund to eliminate the menace of website scripting -- not just Javascript, but ALL web scripting -- from humanity's future? I appreciate that it is a complex issue. There are worthy things -- interactive maps for example -- done with web scripting that would otherwise probably need to be provided by browsers. But the internet has become a rather bad neighborhood. And it's getting worse. And Javascript is clearly one of the reasons the neighborhood is going downhill.

Comcast-owned Brit telco Sky to hire 1,000 new staffers, half of them engineers

Re: They are not engineers

they didn't know what that meant and it wasn't on their script

No kidding. I, and my family, have attempted on two occasions to report damaged cable distribution boxes to Comcast. (One smacked by a snowplow, one bent up by my wife's car). We have concluded that there is no way to do so, We are now (thankfully) ex Comcast customers. Our somewhat shaky DSL connection is probably technically inferior to Comcast's cable. But there are intelligent lifeforms at our phone company's offices.

Re: They are not engineers

They are not engineers

Of course not. What use would Comcast have for an engineer?

Remember the Uber self-driving car that killed a woman crossing the street? The AI had no clue about jaywalkers

Re: Surely

One should have hoped so. 'cept it ain't.

The requirement should probably be to do what a normally cautious human driver would do -- slow down until the object and it's trajectory is positively identified. If it can't be identified, try to creep around it in a safe fashion. In no case strike it.

Will such behavior be unpopular with other drivers? Most likely. Especially when the object is a scrap of paper or a tumbleweed. OTOH, I doubt that violent arm and finger motions accompanied by verbal abuse from other drivers would bother autonomous vehicles one bit.

Re: Surely

FWIW - In Arizona as in most (all?) of the US, you aren't supposed to mow pedestrians down even if the pedestrians shouldn't be in the road.

Relevant law: per https://activerain.com/blogsview/1497199/watch-where-you-re-walking-arizona-revised-statutes-pedestrian-right-of-way

28-794. Drivers to exercise due care

Notwithstanding the provisions of this chapter every driver of a vehicle shall:

1. Exercise due care to avoid colliding with any pedestrian on any roadway.

2. Give warning by sounding the horn when necessary.

3. Exercise proper precaution on observing a child or a confused or incapacitated person on a roadway.

It doesn't surprise me that Uber's "autonomous" vehicle doesn't seem to comply with relevant traffic laws. Bunch of greedy sociopaths if you ask me. Likewise Tesla. Waymo OTOH seems to be run by adults. If you ask me, Uber, Tesla, et. al. vehicles should be required to be led by someone on foot waving a red flag or a lantern (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws) until such time as they demonstrate reasonable concern for public safety.

I cannae do it, captain, I'm giving it all she's got, but she just cannae take another dose of bullsh!t

I was wondering much the same thing

I've only seen one actual IR spectrogram in my life. 60 years ago. In college. And all I know about Raman spectography is what I read in Wikipedia. But I came to much the conclusion you have. I suspect that it's probably possible to use spectrograms in quality control to check product consistency. And I expect you can use spectography to check for specific impurities -- Arsenic, Cadmium, etc and maybe some toxins. But detailed analysis of a meal? How do you know if that strong (probable) CH bond peak is from fructose in honey as opposed to ethanol in beer or the starch in mashed potatoes?

Re: Gluten intolerance affects less than 1% of the population

I have been diagnosed with Gout, which is extremely painful

You bet it is painful. You have my sympathy.

But the thing about gout is that once you've built up MonoSodiumUrate crystals in your joints or elsewhere -- which you likely did years ago, gout attacks can be triggered any change in blood urate concentration -- downwards as well as upwards. And they probably can be triggered by other events -- stress, surgery, etc, etc, etc. At least so we're told

Most of us gout sufferers can tolerate plant and dairy purines far better than animal purines. Again so I'm told. And it certainly seems so for me. And we probably do need some protein and therefore purines for health.

I assume you're taking Allopurinol or some other medication(s), and that MAY help bring your blood urate under control and eventually subdue the gout attacks. It doesn't work well for me, but does for many.

You might want to consider buying a blood urate meter. They aren't outrageously expensive. I think mine cost about $40 US. Test strips also aren't outrageous. About $1.00 per test if you buy the strips from Amazon. And you don't have to test every day. Once a week might well be adequate. Anyway, the hope is that in a few tens of months all the urate stashed in the body will dissolve and gout will be a thing of the past ... At least as long as I'm very careful about animal protein. So far, it's promising. Measured urate levels are well below the purported solubility level. Of course, it's not clear how accurate the meter is. And the actual as opposed to theoretical solubility level is a bit hazy. (Toe, Ankle, and Knee joints are not necessarily at exactly the same temperature as one's blood). Anyway, my gout attacks have become less frequent and less severe, so I'm sticking to veggies, faux meat, and cheese.

USAF spaceplane back on Earth after mystery 2-year jaunt in orbit. Jeepers creepers, what has it been doing up here?

Re: James Webb Space Telescope

as someone who struggles to fold a map...

It's possible to fold maps back up again? To the original dimensions?

Who knew?

Chrome devs tell world that DNS over HTTPS won't open the floodgates of hell

Re: Missing the point

Apart from this, I don't see what problem DOH is meant to fix.

What problem? !!!ADVERTISEMENTS ARE BEING BLOCKED!!! You and I may not view that as a problem, but Google's customers are advertisers. It seems probable that THEY view ad-blocking as a problem.

Running on Intel? If you want security, disable hyper-threading, says Linux kernel maintainer

Re: Updating Firmware isn't easy

Updating OS kernels is (usually) tractable. I can test the new kernel for hardware compatibility and other issues without destroying my system. Or if the testing failed to show a problem that becomes all too apparent later. I can (probably) recover from a problemetic update one way or another.

BIOS and other firmware upgrades OTOH have the potential to be a "final solution". If I brick the hardware, am I going to be able to unbrick it?

It's dangerous to go alone! Take Uncle Sam and the Netherlands: Duo join naval task force into China's backyard

Those are dangerous waters

My guess is that the Chinese will generously provide the round-eye flotilla with a suitable 24/7 escort of modern Chinese warships to ensure that the foreigners come to no harm..

Re: > that's over half the Navy!

"The fact is that the number of the officials and the quantity of the work to be done are not related to each other at all. The rise in the total of those employed is governed by Parkinson's Law, and would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish or even disappear." Parkinson's Law -- C Northcote Parkinson 1955

Like the Death Star on Endor, JEDI created a ton of fallout and stormy weather in cloud market

Re: Whaaa?

"I've followed this reasonably closely since 2012 when AWS/Google started to make significant in-roads into DoD IT infrastructure. ..."

Thanks -- vtc

Whaaa?

Is anybody around here actually familiar with what JEDI is supposed to do? I did some Googling and found lots of articles about the process of awarding the contract, but very little about what the $10B actually is to buy. The closest I could come was from the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50191242

The Department of Defense wants to replace its ageing computer networks with a single cloud system.

Under the contract, Microsoft will provide artificial intelligence-based analysis and host classified military secrets among other services.

...

It is hoped that Jedi will give the military better access to data and the cloud from battlefields.

That looks to me to be quite nebulous. They're going to draft Clippy and send him off to fight ... Who? How? Why would anyone even think that might be a good idea? They are going to make battlespace management dependent on some sort of AI entity/entities at the end of a probably questionably reliable communications link?

This sort of reminds me of the 1960s era USAF Automated Logistics System which managed to burn through $250M (big money back then -- a couple of billion in current dollars) on a poorly defined mission and ended up with pretty much nothing to show for it.

I imagine that Microsoft will make money off this. But I wouldn't be shocked to find that in the long run there will be a lot of folks at MS who will end up wishing Amazon had been awarded the contract.

Microsoft explains self-serve Power platform's bypassing of Office 365 admins to cries of 'are you completely insane?'

Re: Employees buying software for their company?

I think this a dubious idea.

But I do recall that back when I worked for big companies, at some level managers (where I worked at least) had a small discretionary budget they could spend without stumbling through the requisition-purchase order-whatever jungle. Perhaps that sort of thing is what is being targeted.

Uncle Sam demands summary judgment on Snowden memoir: We're not saying it's true, but no one should read it

Re: Snowden's memoirs

"I would say that Snowden comes across as a true, almost religious, believer in the US constitution and the power of the US democracy"

Apparently that attitude is a poor fit to the NSA's ethos. I'm not terribly surprised. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Re: Free publicity

They (probably) can't ban it. As far as I can see, they are just doing this to harass Snowden and to discourage future leakers. If I recall correctly, Snowden's publisher is in England which will probably make it somewhat more difficult to seize profits which they quite likely could do if the publisher were in the US.

Talk about a killer feature: Home, Home Mini gear replacements promised after fatal update bricks gadgets

Re: Google forcing people in to Google Accounts not just Nest.

"I installed Tiny Tiny RSS on a private webserver ..."

The thought of using RSS never crossed my mind. But I'm tired of dealing with with Google's crappy Javascript that works properly nowhere but (possibly) chrome and slows information delivery to 1200 baud modem speed. A couple of tests look like RSS feeds might be an answer.

Thanks.

Re: Google forcing people in to Google Accounts not just Nest.

"Google News became worthless to me after the redesign in 2017(?)"

Yep, they certainly made a mess of things. Out of curiosity, did you find an alternative or simply give up on trying to get news on-line?

We're late and we're unreliable but we won't invalidate your warranty: We're engineers!

The previous owners of this house apparently had a toolkit consisting of a hammer and a roll of duct tape. You can do a lot with a hammer and duct tape. Who could have guessed that duct tape used in place of a proper joining fitting between a bathtub and the household drain pipes could last for decades before failing and flooding the garage?

Your local hardware store will probably sell you a small bottle of purple liquid for about the cost of a cup of machine coffee that will permanently glue PVC piping together. OTOH odd though your setup looks, there's a lot to be said for if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

Not LibreOffice too? Beloved open-source suite latest to fall victim to the curse of Catalina

Re: How things change

Exactly what have you done to earn access to the awesome power of being able to copy web site addresses?

Traffic lights worldwide set to change after Swedish engineer saw red over getting a ticket

Re: But not for long.....

If current trends hold, the yellow delay on internet connected traffic lights will crease at 1.013 sec/yr as the traffic lights send increasingly detailed images of you, your vehicle, and everything on the seats to Google, Facebook, and Amazon. That's on top of the existing CIA/NSA delays and the packet delay time to Croatia.

Do not be surprised when ads for car washes and auto repair shops start appearing in your email and instant messages. The only way to avoid those will be to keep the exterior of your vehicle in pristine condition.

'We go back to the Moon to stay': Apollo vets not too chuffed with NASA's new rush to the regolith

Re: Historically, the cross over from space exploration to other situations ...

LSI is NOT a product of the space program. In point of fact space qualified electronics takes so long to develop and test that it is generally a few years behind what you can buy at Best Buy or your local drugstore by the time it actually makes it into service. There are other concerns -- power budgets, radiation hardening, vibration hardening materials limitations, temperature ranges -- that also hold space qualified designs back a bit relative to commercial products. If you are curious, here's a link that addresses a few aspects of space qualified electronics. https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/challenges-for-electronic-circuits-in-space-applications.html

The only example I can think of where "space" work actually drove civilian technology was the funding of supercomputers by the Anti-ballistic-missile people in the 1960s and 1970s, and I honestly don't think it made all that much difference. The oil companies needed big iron for seismic data analysis so supercomputers probably would have happened anyway. The oil companies even built their own supercomputer, the TI Advanced Scientific Computer.

Maybe GPS counts. It's certainly very important. But it's a military technology that has been hijacked by civilians. It's not a fall out from the civilian space program. The same is sort of true of other enormously useful satellite technologies -- weather satellites, communication satellites, satellite resource mapping.

I think if you do some research, you'll find that NASA does a lot of great science. But the notion that it's a wellspring of useful innovation that then makes it's way from space to civilian products is mostly a product of the dubious mental processes of PR folk.

Re: Let's start with the basics and then work forward from there.

That's actually not a bad idea. In *practice* it's impossible.

Perhaps it's impossible. But we could try to avoid doing things that obviously aren't very productive. Right now -- and for the foreseeable future I fear -- an appalling percentage of our space activity funding is going to be spent on building huge rockets rather than on the payloads. Seems to me that's closer to pyramid building than science. Spending resource to get the (spectacularly late and over budget) James Webb Space Observatory out to L2 certainly qualifies as science. Hopefully the damn thing works.

Spending resource to get a few astronauts back to the moon OTOH seems mostly pointless.

Don't you think the requirements of a sustainable moon base might have some spin offs in areas like water and air purification as two easy examples?

Probably not. Those are problems that have been extensively studied over the last century for a variety of reasons. I imagine existing solutions will be used.

Historically, the cross over from space exploration to other situations has been surprisingly small. Doing stuff that could be done in labs on Earth at the end of long and exceedingly costly supply chains is unlikely to be a cost effective way to approach most things.

Of course, some stuff can't be done on Earth, but I don't see a moon base -- or the ISS for that matter -- as being the best way to get that research done. I think Skylab -- an orbiting laboratory that is occupied for a while every now and then to do complex experiments that actually need to be done in space and can't easily be done using unmanned vehicles was probably a better approach.

Moonbase? Not a current need I think. Instead, spend a lot less, spend a couple of decades looking at the moon intensively with rovers and low altitude observation satellites. Then -- If there is stuff that actually needs human inspection, by all means, send some folks out to look at it.

Russians, Nonsense ...

It was Bigfoot. I mean look at the size of those things. Who else could have done it? Expect a Science Channel special on the subject any time now.

Virtual inanity: Solution to Irish border requires data and tech not yet available, MPs told

Re: "There are over 200 roads that cross the border."

Buildings, roads, and properties that cross borders are probably the least of your problems. Famously the Haskell Library/Opera House(Auditorium) in Derby Line, VT/Stanstead, QC not only straddles the US-Canadian border, it was deliberately built that way. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haskell_Free_Library_and_Opera_House The Mohawks manage to somehow control a modest territory including parts of New York, Ontario and Quebec. If they can keep two countries, a US state and two Canadian provinces at bay, I expect the Irish can work something out provided they don't get too much help from Westminster and Brussels.

Iran tried to hack hundreds of politicians, journalists email accounts last month, warns Microsoft

Re: Flock of Seagulls

Pretty much everywhere is your neighbor in cyberspace. I find it hard to get worked up about email hacking. If you're doing stuff you shouldn't be doing using email, figure out how to use encryption for heavens sake.

But when some bunch of ninnies in Washington or Moscow or Peking or somewhere else aggravate Iran or Taiwan or North Korea or the Grand Duchy of Fenwick into actual cyberwar, the cyber warriors are not going to stop at turning all the digitally controlled traffic lights in North America permanently green. They are going to try to turn off your and my electricity and drive every vehicle that does over the air software updates into the nearest structure and shut down air traffic control with hundreds or thousands of planes left to figure out how to land safely with no coordination and do all manner of harm to all the poorly planned infrastructure unwisely hung off the internet.

I suppose that we really should be more concerned than we are.

Linky revisited: How the evil French smart meter escaped Hell to taunt me

I don't know why you think that

At least if everyone's on the same model of 'smart' meter, it's likely that model will continue to get supported.

If Silicon Valley were involved, you'd have two months to "upgrade" your meter. And after much protest, that would be extended to four months and the cost of the upgrade would be cut by 15% so you could claim a victory.

What, Big Tech predatory? How could you possibly think such a thing?

RAF pilot seconded to Virgin Orbit for three years of launching rockets from a 747

It'll be interesting

... to see how this all works out. About 60 years ago, some friends worked on a project to determine the feasibility of launching satellites from aircraft. Difficult as it may be to believe, it was perfectly possible back then to design an aircraft not dissimilar to the 747. The B-52 -- still the American standard long range bomber -- dates to that timeframe.

As I recall, their conclusion was something along the line of. Yes, you can (probably) build it. Yes, it will (probably) work. BUT There's no particular benefit to doing so. The aircraft's velocity does subtract from the roughly 17000/24500 mph/kph necessary to stay in low Earth orbit. But you still need one big mutha rocket to get the rest of the way to LEO.

And launching from say 30000/10000 ft/m does eliminate some atmospheric drag. But rockets don't travel that fast in the lower atmosphere where drag is greatest. They are still accelerating at low altitudes.

A flying launch vehicle is going to be complicated and expensive. Where are you going to mount the launch vehicle? If you sling it below the aircraft, how will you take off? If you mount it above, how do you get it clear of the rudder assembly when the aircraft and launch vehicle separate? How will you make sure that the second stage doesn't damage your flying first stage when it is released and ignited? All (probably) tractable problems. But problems non-the less.

Time will presumably tell.

EU's top court says tracking cookies require actual consent before scarfing down user data

Re: That was nice

"Not correct. The GDPR applies globally to the information of EU citizens and US based websites most certainly are in scope and liable to fines."

True. However, considering the difficulty you folks have getting US corporations to pay their taxes, I wouldn't be overly sanguine about your ability to collect fines from them. A more effective approach would probably be to arrest corporate officers whenever they wander onto EU soil, and lock them up for 30 days or so.

Astronaut Tim Peake reminds everyone about the time Excel mangled his contact list on stage at Microsoft AI event

Re: Not defending Excel but

I downvoted this and I don't believe in downvotes without explanations.

In point of fact, most spreadsheets make perfectly usable SMALL databases. Most are sortable and searchable. For many people, much of the time, that's all they need. Excel, which is prone to capriciously alter the user's data, is the exception, not the rule.

BTW, the much simpler Microsoft created spreadsheet distributed in early versions of MS Works worked fine for undemanding situations and did not surprise unwary users by helpfully changing their data in unpredictable ways. Personally, by the time I finally encountered a problem beyond the scope of the works spreadsheet, I'd had sufficient experience at work with Excel and its peculiarities, that I downloaded Open Office -- a choice I never regretted.

600 armed German cops storm Cyberbunker hosting biz on illegal darknet market claims

How to get there

For the curious, the command bunker complex is marked on Google Maps. It's at 49.699118, 7.083355. There's what I take to be a trailhead ("Wanderparkplatz traumschleife Boerfink") on the road a few hundred meters SW of the buildings with a path that will probably take you and 599 of your closest friends into the heart of the surface complex without having to bother the folks at the gate.

TAG, you're s*!t: Internet advertising industry bods admit self-policing approach is a sham

Re: "... a racket that extorts fees from good companies..."

"Yes, you can still lose out via PayPal, but it's pretty rare."

Back in the days when Google gave us a hit count, a search on "PayPal Sucks" generated a truly impressive number of hits. Anyway, in the US where I live, PayPal operates as a largely unregulated bank. My dear old mother was a fan of "Trust But Regulate" Overall, I have to think that entrusting financial details to an unregulated bank may not be prudent. Not to mention that PayPal is almost certainly very high on the list of hacker targets.

Things may be better in the EU where I believe PayPal operates as a real, regulated bank.

Margin mugs: A bank paid how much for a 2m Ethernet cable? WTF!

Adelphia

Ah yes, Adelphia. They were once the cable company in this particular part of the Vermont countryside. I recall that at one point back when 32K modems were premium devices, there was a bit of a hubub when tests showed that Adelphia cable internet service was somehow SLOWER than Bell-Atlantic dial-up. The Adelphia operation was subsequently bought out by Comcast which actually seemed like an improvement at the time.