* Posts by midgepad

278 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Oct 2020

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Juno what? Jovian moon Europa is looking rugged

midgepad

The Martian Way, by

Isaac Asimov.

I'm not sure we've seen the icebergs yet, but they might be there.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

midgepad

Re: Customer pushback

Even if you don't rely on aerobraking for any of the slowing down, you are climbing up the solar gravity well, so you won't need half the fuel at the far end.

You also have a much lighter ship to slow down than you started boosting from the vicinity of Earth.

One reason why Venus is so hard.

Post-Brexit 'science superpower' UK still hasn't appointed a science minister

midgepad

Conspicuously didnt

work.

Surprising no detached observer.

midgepad

Re: IMF

You vote for an MP.

In practice all of them stand on a Party prospectus.

midgepad

Public speaking

Is a core role in the job she has sought and obtained.

It is an important job.

There are other jobs, in fact all other jobs are not it.

We are not unreasonable in criticising her if she lacks a required ability, facility, skill, capability, or inclination ... and takes that job.

Update your Tesla now before the windows put your fingers in a pinch

midgepad

I've had Br Leyland cars with

lighting by Lucas.

Don't tell me that story.

Joe Lucas: Prince of Darkness.

Datacenter migration plan missed one vital detail: The leaky roof

midgepad

100 years ago

I think the bulk of construction would be done with subunits one or two people could keep lifting all day.

Tesla Megapack battery ignites at substation after less than 6 months

midgepad

Re: Look to Dinorwig

Bombastic rubbish.

midgepad

Constant speed propellors

Are old tech.

midgepad

Re: Look to Dinorwig

Balls.

There is z lot of inertia in one turbine, and massive something like inertia in the Grid.

(Why was it built)

Generators on the Grid are synced, the people doing it have had some practice.

midgepad

Re: Look to Dinorwig

You were planning to hide it?

Rather than deal with it?

Like BP in 1974

midgepad

The energy

To spin up comes from the wind.

Which, you know, free.

'I Don't Care About Cookies' extension sold to Avast

midgepad

Annoyingly Reach sites "countyonline" continue to ask.

Ah well, next version or extension.

'Last man standing in the floppy disk business' reckons his company has 4 years left

midgepad

Re: "Extinct media still in demand"

In the wild?

Document Foundation starts charging €8.99 for 'free' LibreOffice

midgepad

You know better than the scare quotes.

French has libre and gratuit, English conflates them as free.

Libre Office is, perhaps surprisingly, libre. Free as in speech.

The FSF and other FLOSS licence writers make it perfectly clear that charging for media, convenience, configuration, support is fine.

That many do all or some of those things gratuit is just an indication of the size of actual costs involved. Too cheap to meter.

Appeals court already under fire for upholding Texas no-content-moderation law

midgepad

Place called Britain

2000 years ago there was, and the Romans were there, no?

midgepad

Re: Consitutaional right to block content and legal precedent?

Are they publishers?

How this Mars rover used its MOXIE to convert CO2 into precious oxygen

midgepad

Very, if you have

CO2, and don't have water.

midgepad

CO2

Ww2 submarines had episodes of up to 4%CO2.

Gradual rise in prolonged hiding.

People didn't feel well, but they didn't die of that.

midgepad

Pure...

It is partial pressures, not percentage.

Some inert gas is good, to stop absorption atelectasis - small portions of lung losing gas and sticking shut.

But given the 3psi of O2 you'll be fine.

Given 30 psi of O2 you'll convulse.

US warns cryptominers must cut power use to avoid busting US carbon goals

midgepad

Ban it from the planet

The difficult question about solar power satellites was always how thd power that paid for them, and an orbital infrastructure around them, was to get to the planet.

Use it up there. Ship the data.

Make use of power within Earth's atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere illegal, watch as had panels dread.

If they'd like to drop inward a little - more sunlight, less eclipses - then thry could cluster around L1 and marginally decrease Earth's insolation helping to counter existing trouble from prior burning.

A few implementation details, but the market I'm told will work such things out.

NASA picks a tailor for Artemis moonwalking suits

midgepad

Re: " ... land a woman and person of color ... "

in no way excluded.

Why the end of Optane is bad news for all IT

midgepad

MUMPS/M and globals

I know little of this stuff, but I gather MUMPS, and then M, regard the whole collection of data - a medical record system for instance - as a global.

And it is mapped onto an area of hard drive.

MUMPS has been around for a long time, but perhaps would prefer Optane to rust already?

midgepad

Re: Amazing... But also a bit stupid

1. For Petabytes of data, according to the article.

NASA scrubs Artemis mission yet again because SLS just can't handle the pressure

midgepad

Leaving the Moon

Catapult at a slightly complicated level I think, straightening out toward ejection end.

Nontrivial to build, the Moon being a harsh mistress and all that.

midgepad

Legate

perhaps?

midgepad

Methane makes no soot

In the rocket, hence good for turnround on Earth, and is one of the easier fuels to make on Mars.

But it does make CO2, which we have too much of, albeit less than RP1 would.

Hydrogen makes water, which drops out.

Convicted felon busted for 3D printing gun parts

midgepad

Re: Can any American gun enthusiasts please explain

A racist thing.

They've not got over slaving yet.

Tesla Full Self-Driving 'fails' to notice child-sized objects in testing

midgepad

Re: But ....

Nobody does.

midgepad

Quite often human drivers

manage to miss pedestrians.

Quite often these automated systems manage to miss pedestrians.

It is nice the smaller the gap gets where neither manages it.

The large overlap is in retrospect.

Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'

midgepad

I'm a pessimist

And after several decades my interest is in failure modes.

I teach people how to stop the car.

Then I tell them how to start it.

midgepad

You might remember Buncefield

The Trusts involved had sensibly demanded that their backup systems were in a separate data centre from the primary.

And their provider did that.

East Wing, West Wing.

Next to the boundary of the oil depot which went very boom.

Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban

midgepad

Not really.

With low flows in rivers the plant can't be run full-power because it would cook the fish with waste heat.

Scaled back to maintenance levels or usefully more the water suffices without getting bath like.

Why is there a problem? Because hydrocarbons have been burned vastly.

midgepad

Re: Wind and solar

I've seen no suggestion they are not.

$2.8m gene therapy treatment is America's most expensive drug ever

midgepad

New mutations may occur

For various conditions.

UK hospitals lose millions after AI startup valuation collapses

midgepad

For actual value,

Licenced redistributable source code might have had some.

Emergency services call-handling provider: Ransomware forced it to pull servers offline

midgepad

Distinction between data and programs

would help, no?

Theres text, and there's pictures, and there's numbers in tables.

And there are some programs.

DoE digs up molten salt nuclear reactor tech, taps Los Alamos to lead the way back

midgepad

Neutron economy

I gather there are limited spare neutrons available to burn up isotopes, but getting the results out of a working reactor should be a lot easier than with fuel rods and pellets.

midgepad

A couple of Soviet reactors made water

I think just by boiling it, as well as electricity.

I suspect since then the effectiveness of reverse osmosis has overtaken distillation.

Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?

midgepad

Useful, needs naming

Yes,no, not saying, essay about other desires/why that's a silly question.

Teenean?

Major IT outage forces UK emergency call handlers to use 'pen and paper'

midgepad

The answer is known*

Dragging it all into one big system and trying to use it to program people less so, though

* no

midgepad

Re: To doctor or not to doctor...

Fellowship, (in/) the FRCS, not a consultancy.

It is a bit outdated.

Probably several sociologists could earn their doctorates of philosophy (PhD) by contributing new understanding of why.

Meanwhile, doctorates in Philosophy followed doctors doing medicine and when natural philosophers got going theiy aspired to doctorates.

Philology, etymology, that's where to look.

midgepad

111

Passes on a bit more when there are failures.

To fewer, tireder, doctors, with more calls on them jn hours and out.

And a government that for 12 years has been trying to damage the health service. Do try not to elect them again.

Data brokers amass profiles of pregnant women – and, of course, it's all up for sale

midgepad

Re: I used to be nice to christians, not any more

Their actions.

Note the OP and some recent specifics.

Prosperity gospels are particularly invidious.

midgepad

Some odd Buddhists in Myanmar

WRT Muslims.

midgepad

Re: I used to be nice to christians, not any more

It isn't.

It requires the belief professed in an external directing or observing entity of supernatural power.

The rest you can work out for yourself, share, construct as consistent guidelines etc, and isn't religion.

Lapping the computer room in record time until the inevitable happens

midgepad

Watts per cyclist

Chris Froome who to be fair is an unusually good cyclist had a threshold not much below 500W

So 50W from a domestic (rather than domestique) cyclist is not very good.

US regulators set the stage for small, local nuclear power stations

midgepad

Dubious study

Wasn't it?

I paid for it, that makes it mine. Doesn’t it? No – and it never did

midgepad

I've seen modern Shakespear

on stage.

It is not clear that a film cannot be remade.

midgepad

When did we get zip-

-ties?

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