Posts by BristolBachelor

I suppose that it's possible, with about the same probability of you throwing a brick up in the air and taking out an airplane. (throwing while standing under a parked plane doesn't count!)

These things will be released at a lower altitude than sats normally orbit (hence why they won't last long)

The plan I saw had the beam hitting the earth with about 1kW/M², which is about the same as the power from the sun (in countries other than the UK where it is cloudy instead). The advantage over pure solar power on the ground was 24hour power, except for 70 minutes eclipses during the equinoxes, and better efficiency of the beam receiving equipment.

The orbital slots were on the GEO belt. The gaps between sats up there is still big enough that we could fit a few of these in there. Plus it hasn't been said anywhere, but taking a miserly 4-16kW of the juice to run a few bent-pipe TV relays won't really hurt the power generation of the satellite. In fact, selling payload space might help pay for the things.

At the risk of more downvotes (wtf?). The problem with setting up production on the moon, is that all the equipment to mine, refine and manufacture has a LOT of mass. You would need to be building a hell of a lot up there for it to be less mass sending all that equipment, rather than just launching a few rockets to Mars.

Of course, if we start building ships on the scale of Star Trek, then the moon makes more sense.

It is a sad state of afairs that a lot of their tech has just wasted away sitting around outside :( In it's day, it did fly, and automatically too, up and back by itself.

If they had caught the capitalism virus sooner, they could've sold all the stuff to museums to be displayed and looked after like the US shuttles. (There is a reasonably well conserved Soyuz in the space museum in Leicester by the way)

LED "bulbs"

I recently found an LED GU10 "bulb" that would fit into my ceiling fan*/light and could be operated by the control in the fan (normal ones either blow-up or flash even when off). It looks quite nice, and is made by Philips so should be good. but costs 45€ WTF!!!

*Yes ceiling fan because in the summer it costs a lot less to operate than air-con (see; I'm green!)

Brian, that is very true. However I stopped using tape for backup when it took a cabinet of tapes to backup a small server (I can't afford the latest LTO), so I now use HDDs for backup. HDDs are fine for backup because they are relatively reliable.

Now if you change everything to SSD, with unknown reliabilities and failure rates quoted that they cannot have tested because they don't have enough time, how reliable are your backups? Especially when some of the problems are down to a small firmware change that effectively resets all the testing hours for MTBF to zero.

Possibly the upset is people just looking at the surface of this and seeing it as a SIM just without the connector (read the post above!).

Then people think that it is a bit cheeky to apply to patent that.

Then people think that the US patent office will just grant the patent (and would even allow you to patent "the removal of waste from the body by shitting", and allow some patent troll to sue the crap out of everybody)

Was it also Beagle that relied on an air-bag landing system that was clasified by the USA, so they weren't allowed to know anything about how it operates, how to work with it, etc.?

@AC 16:43

"I take it you switch to Japanese or Chinese quite a lot when talking about technical stuff. "

Actually I find it midly humerous that when I've been with groups of Japanese people discussing technical things, they say things like: (Appologies to Jasper Carrot)

Wikki-wikki wikkkki wikki-wikki HARDDISK wikki wikki-wikki TRANSISTOR wikki-wikki wikki....

@Mike Dimmick

"Are there any music stores left that use DRM? Amazon and iTunes now just include a tracking ID in the metadata, linked to the purchaser's account on their system, so it's possible to track a leaked file to who leaked it. The music is completely unencrypted, though, so will play on anything (that's licenced for the format) and no matter how many copies have been made."

My wife buys her music from iTunes. It won't play on the digital TV, nor on the digital set-top in the other room, nor the MP3 player in the office (although it plays fine on her iPod and her Mac). When transfering her iTunes from her old computer to her new one, it moaned like hell and she had to talk to Apple help to get it sorted because it had been authorised too many times, and she couldn't play any of the recent stuff anymore (and in fact even lost it off her iPod).

Meanwhile, I keep taking CDs off the shelf and playing them in various HiFis and the car, no problems. Also the CDs I've ripped play on everything, including her Mac and iPod. Oh and I also have a lot of CDs (even from this year/last year) that don't appear on iTunes / Amazon / MS database of CDs.