Posts by cracked and broken

Want a clean energy transition? Better start putting cash into electrical grid

Re: I would be willing to agree that ...

Obligatory XKCD for the climate change deniers...

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Space junk targeted for cleanup mission was hit by different space junk, making more space junk

A vacuum cleaner, perhaps?

California toys with digital vehicle titles on private DMV blockchain

Re: Blockchain only has one purpose

Thanks for pointing out the value and usefulness of blockchain so succinctly. You have my one meagre upvote although I would like to offer more.

It's worth remembering that the creators of bitcoin wanted a currency which was not controlled by central banks or governments who can create money out of thin air (quantitative easing). This has the potential to devalue the money in your pocket and doesn't apply to real assets like cars because someone actually has to do some work to make a car.

Trusting the banks to maintain an accurate ledger of the ownership of the money wasn't the main problem. Similarly I don't have a problem with trusting the government to control the ledger of ownership for cars. If there is a different problem then blockchain isn't the solution.

Everything's falling apart. The Moon is slowly rusting up – and it's probably Earth's fault

Re: How long before.....

The plastic bags are there already...

One of the first things Neil Armstrong did was open the door and throw out the bag of rubbish. Unfortunately it then appears in the first photos too.

https://fstoppers.com/originals/first-photograph-taken-moon-neil-armstrong-featured-trash-bag-243698

Re: "1.5x10^27 oxygen particles [..] annually"

Using 6.02 x 10^23 particles per mol and 22.4 litres per mol of a gas at STP

And assuming molecular oxygen with molecular weight of 32 g/mol

That makes 1.5 x 10^27 / 6.02 x 10^23 = 2500 mol of O2

2500 x 22.4 = 56000 litres

or 2500 x 32 = 80,000 grammes

That's about 56 cubic metres or 80Kg of Oxygen

Running the figures through The Reg online standards converter I make that 0.0224 Olympic-sized swimming pools or about 9.2 adult badgers of our precious oxygen we lose to the Moon each year!

Google and Facebook abandon Hong Kong landing of new submarine cable

Re: USA's Clean Network

Of course the internet is just IP regardless of how many intermediaries there are and cutting off this leg of the cable isn't really going to stop the traffic flowing somehow.

But one of the benefits of a direct point to point fibre link that you can achieve very low latency and we already know that stock markets will pay huge money for cutting the round trip times by a millisecond or two.

With Hong Kong being the fourth single largest stock market in the world (according to Wikipedia) I am guessing this is more about trade wars than spying.

Whoops, our bad, we may have 'accidentally' let Google Home devices record your every word, sound – oops

Re: Switched off? for now, possibly.

These home assistant devices won't be acceptable until the voice processing is being done in the device instead of remotely. Preferably running open source software so that the functionality can be checked by a public review.

Huawei's first Google-free phone stripped and searched: Repair not too painful... once you're in

Locked bootloader

I gave up Huawei when they stopped providing unlock codes for the bootloader. The hardware is nice but if they treat me like a child I will go elsewhere.

Oh chute. Two out of three ain't bad, right? asks Boeing after soft-ish crew module landing

Re: What fun!

g=9.8 m/s/s

v=290m/s (650mph)

t=5s

(acceleration in units of g) = v/tg

In this case the acceleration was 290/(5*9.8) = 5.9g

FTFY

Would you open an email from one Dr Brian Fisher? GP app staff did – and they got phished

Re: MITM

Considering how much credit was given to Evergreen for their professionalism (see the first post in this topic) in using well designed and secure systems it seems unlikely that they would be accessing their corporate data from a coffee shop without a VPN and 2FA.

I think the MITM part of the story needs a better explanation.

"As others have pointed out it seems clear that Dr. Fisher's account was compromised."

It's certainly clear that someone had Dr. Fisher's contacts list. I wonder if Dr. Fisher had been sending public emails with all the addresses shown as To: or CC: instead of BCC: Amazing how often people still do this.

From there it's easy to spoof an email from him.

So, what's fashion going to look like on the Moon in 2024? NASA's ready to show you the goods

"to wear when they're inside lunar spacecrafts"

So why are these orange suits pressurised inside a spacecraft? Are they planning to need pressure suits during normal operation or just for emergencies?

I can see the helmets and gloves seem to be attached with some kind or sealed connections but not those boots. Just looks like the way my ski trouser legs hang over the tops of my boots. Am I missing something?

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

Re: Power Line Communication

"It was back in saarf-east London that my smart meter sent half-hourly updates over the air to Hell HQ."

And why exactly do they need half hourly readings for sending me a monthly bill?

If they want to offer variable tariffs they can read an aggregated figure for each of the tariff bands at the end of the month. A bit like my economy 7 meter provides a monthly figure for both night and day usage. They don't need to know that I was cooking my dinner between 7:00 pm and 7:30 pm on Tuesday.