Posts by Destroy All Monsters

Re: thats the polite version

> because our then government had failed to provide the manufacturing capability to defend ourselves

Dude! T'was the British Empire back then, with India and everything, what are you even talking about. And who would have thunk that the UK would enter a continental brawl to guarantee the neutrality of a rapacious colonial midget???

Re: Twinkle twinkle

Nope, people were admiring the burning wreckage while standing on the nearby bridge while being rained on by fallout and pieces of graphite from the core that had likely popped out of the reactor enclosure into the air and exploded like a fracking claymore.

Then the Soviet Union decided to recycle local produce by "diluting" it with non-radioactive meat and milk....

French news commentary declaring that the radioactive cloud had stopped at their border, no harm done were very confidence-inspiring.

IIRC, even in the mid-90s you could get a good radiation dose by eating mushrooms from some french forests. A submarine sailor could not get BACK on the sub due to high readings...

Re: Why 18?

Making an obscene image where the subject is intended to appear to be under 18 is an offence - so a 40year old women on a hen party in a school uniform is child pron

How can a 40 year old woman be made to appear to be under 18? That's just not possible.

Wait ... was that law written by sexually frustrated women?

Re: You broke it, you bought it.

How is something that is Apache licensed not permissive enough for a BSD core component???

Unless a "not" has been dropped in brain-to-keyboard translation, there must be huge corn cobs stuck up arses somehwere.

Re: So, you want an extra €400 million?

I haven't been able to find a good description of the Schiaparelli inner system structure, anyone have link?

Re: All in all it is unclear if RN is following the right doctrine

Well, in the type of news that make WaPo editors cry like sissies because there may be possible bad, bad and evil influence by Rodina, we read: Making Sense of the Russian Naval Task Force Off the Coast of Syria

What is, in your opinion, an aircraft carrier? Or, let me put it this way, why does the United States maintain a force of 10-12 heavy aircraft carriers? If you believe Ronald Reagan, it is to “forward deploy” and bring the war to the Soviets (that was, then, the rationale for a 600 ship navy and US carriers in the northern Atlantic). Nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is that US, British, French aircraft carriers are a colonial rule enforcement tool. You park one or two aircraft carrier battle groups a few hundred miles from a disobedient country, and you bomb the shit out of it until it rolls over. That is, in reality, the only rationale for these immense structures. And the beauty of it is that you can threaten most of the planet and that you do not depend on allies agreeing to your mission. So, we can say that US and other western aircraft carriers are a long range power projection capability used against weak and poorly defended countries.

I cannot prove the following, but I can just testify that I had plenty of friends in the US military, including some who served on US aircraft carriers, and they all understood that US carriers could never survive a Soviet saturation attack and that in case of a real war they would have been kept away from the Soviet shores. I will only add here that the Chinese apparently have developed specialized ballistic missiles designed to destroy carrier battle groups. That was then, in the early 1990s. Nowadays even countries like Iran are beginning to develop capabilities to engage and successfully destroy US carriers.

Re: Welcome to embedded system engineering

From: http://www.nytimes.com/1985/06/20/us/laser-test-fails-to-strike-mirror-in-space-shuttle.html

"Several critics quickly cited the failure as evidence of bigger problems to come. They said this mistake, a simple human error capable of upsetting a complex technological effort, was the type that could be the ultimate undoing of the proposed antimissile shield."

Yeah, I remember when the news was that one could get a functional SDI infrastructure for, like, 1 trillion dollar. Which is, what, 1/42th of the national debt now (or 1/200th by some reckonings)? And the only thing that does even work 30+ years later is anti-Iranian missile bases in Romania (more like first-strike caps on Russia, amIrite?)

The retardation and belief in technological marvels was just amazing.

Re: Sci-Fi Story

Nah, I would redo the ending with humanity having been taken over and euthanised by an evil collusion of pseudo-intelligent talkbots descended from Siri, Tay, Ms. Baidu et al. and badly programmed, insecure IoT devices.

These proceed to kick the Alien's arse fiercely because, well, they are soulless killer zombie bots from hell.

In the final scene, Clippy appears on the beleaguered Alien's Mothership Main Screen and goes: "Ding Ding! You seem to be trying to develop automatics. Do you want a little help?". Then everything is blown away.

THE END!

Re: Its called Failure Modes and Effects Analysis....

As I recall, FMEA and/or FMECA or similar analysis are required on any spacegoing systems at ESA, you can be sure this wasn't dropped on the floor.

Now, according to Jimbo's Patent Entry On Fault Tree Analysis, FMEA is a bit problematic?

Early in the Apollo project the question was asked about the probability of successfully sending astronauts to the moon and returning them safely to Earth. A risk, or reliability, calculation of some sort was performed and the result was a mission success probability that was unacceptably low. This result discouraged NASA from further quantitative risk or reliability analysis until after the Challenger accident in 1986. Instead, NASA decided to rely on the use of failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and other qualitative methods for system safety assessments. After the Challenger accident, the importance of PRA (Probabilistic Risk Assessment) and FTA (Fault Tree Analysis) in systems risk and reliability analysis was realized and its use at NASA has begun to grow and now FTA is considered as one of the most important system reliability and safety analysis techniques.

Within the nuclear power industry, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission began using PRA methods including FTA in 1975, and significantly expanded PRA research following the 1979 incident at Three Mile Island. This eventually led to the 1981 publication of the NRC Fault Tree Handbook NUREG–0492, and mandatory use of PRA under the NRC's regulatory authority.

NUREG-0492 (from 1981, 209 pages) can be obtained from yonder page or apparently for ~12 Brexit Pounds from amazon.co.uk (someone at amazon.com sells it for USD $183.38 wut?). It's very readable.

Re: The Big Question

Windows 10 includes all of the mitigation features that EMET administrators have come to rely on

So CERT knows nothing and that table is faux facts?

I hope this post isn't coming from the MS Hasbara operations down in Bangalore or wherever.