"the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and complete narcissistic moron"
Wow 97 years.
Kind of amazing the Republic lasted that long.
16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"Roosevelt's New Deal policy is said to have been pretty reasonable (very few of us will have direct experience, as this was back in the 1933 to 1938 timeframe). "
So 7 decades ago.
" protecting West Berlin during the cold war."
That would be the Berlin airlift of 1948.
However as a practical matter military planners gave West Berlin a survival time of hours should WWIII start. It was surrounded by East Germany. For some reason it also meant residents were exempted from compulsory military service, which attracted a lot of young people to the city.
More recently the US has been home to $T (1x10^12) deficits, repeatedly dead locked decision making in both houses (because of a system that ran district councils in the 17th century does not really work for the biggest economy in the 21st), multiple bank bailouts and multiply misguided foreign invasions, at least one of which blatantly lined the pockets of one former SecDef.
Let us not forget the infection of the US Legal system that is THE PATRIOT Act and the continual running of the Guantanamo Bay prison, most of whose inmates were never subject to due process .
(if you were offered a bounty equal to 2 years pay wouldn't you be thinking about who you knew who looked a bit "suspicious"? Especially if you had a friend in the local police force to do the arresting.) as well as the vast personal data hoover that is the NSA, which shows no restraint and no signs of being restrained by any outside body and which has already caused the DEA to lie about its sources since to admit they were the source would admit it spied on US citizens.
I haven't gotten onto the assorted collection of SEL's that is the Religious Right who will no doubt continue to ensure the US has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy of any "developed" country.
Reasonable? to misquote Rorschach "I'd expect more sensible behavior from a Romanian orphanage full of retarded children".
Obviously depends if that's his sort of thing.
Plenty of other embarrassing s**t they can record him doing instead.
Cross dressing, crushing, sounding, adult babies etc.
The trouble with this "dodgy dossier" (to coin a phrase) is it sounds like the sort of thing Trump would do and 'ol straight-as-a-die Putin would get him recorded doing.
But is it real, or is it just written just to sound real?
Whereupon The D will tell you :-
a) I did a brilliant job
b) I was betrayed by those around me.
c) My advisors were just not smart enough to carry out my vision.
d) You knew what I was like when you elected me. IOW It's on you (the voters).
e) All of the above.
Trump is what the American people asked for. Time will tell if he's what they wanted.
But f**k me sideways it's cold day in Hell when the best the only 2 parties with a serious shot at holding the Oval Office can spew up is Hilary and Donald. Sounds like the name of a quite dire sitcom. Lazily written, implausibly plotted, unconvincingly acted. :-(
"Circus of Buffoons" Hmm. I like that.
OK so he doesn't know how to update a CMS but he should have someone who
a)Checks for updates
b)Installs them
c)Checks the new install does not have the same vulns.
The point his company does not seem to have such a person in place is not a good sign.
There are 2 philosophies on IT web sites. Keep your best devs for you clients or showcase your best work on your own site. Both are reasonable PoV. But as a customer I'm thinking "If you can't look after your own site, why the hell would I let you look after mine (along with Ex Mayor of NY == IT Guru ??)
For reasons far too complex and stupid to follow all the nuclear weapons R&D labs are under the DoE.
Hence anyone who might be talking about weapons design or enrichment is definitely on their "We want to know more about them" list.
This is a 3d model made 10^7x bigger in plastic so they could test it in the press.
The rest is a (detailed) computer simulation.
To make real actual 3d Graphene it looks like you might as well build a set of manipulators to pick up fragments in a low H atmosphere and bring the close enough together that they form bonds directly.
The big takeaway seems to be their model does model the behavior of the 3d shape they printed despite being 10 million times bigger and made of photoreactive polymer, not Graphene. So maybe other materials fabricated with these shapes may have superior properties to using the bulk material.
So 3d printed geometries may be able to outperform the same material in bulk.
Who knew?
And if it explodes you get to release it in a few seconds.
Yes turbo pumps are high powe devices. Not high energy. That's why some launchers are starting to run battery powered turbo pumps.
However in the 8 decades since they've first been used in a rocket their design process has got considerably better.
Not very well known fact about space launch.
The amount of energy needed to put 1 unit of mass into low earth orbit is the same as that burnt in the fuel to take it on a round trip between London and Australia (Bono & Gatland, Frontiers of Space).
Yet somehow all those "massive flying bombs" manage to fly that trip (and equally long ones) every day without blowing up at an average of 1 in 20 flights.
Funny how that works, is it not?
Quite true.
SX like to say it's all engineering but I suspect a fair bit of this has involved pushing well past what's in textbooks.
The technical term for when you're discovering new things is "Science"
And Science does not make discoveries on schedule (outside of a DARPA funding pitch of course).
Indeed. A masterclass in fu**ked software engineering. But note also it was a case of "If it's not broke, don't fix it." In fact the SW should have been stripped out.
However 74 launches later they have not repeated it.
"SpaceX have done a good job so far, let down in one accident by a faulty component, and by pushing the envelope on rocket fueling in the other one."
Actually it's starting to look like they have had a recurring problem with COPV's (which BTW have historically had a pretty good safety record on all other LV's)
"All done on a budget a lot lot lot lot smaller than Ariane or Atlas had."
True, although it had long been suspected that industry cost models (which institutionalise mediocrity), government cost plus contracting and purchasing regulations (also "Just return" for European projects and the US practice of a contractor in every Congressional district), not to mention the "sub contract everything" meme multiplied the cost of such a project.
Surprise, surprise. The answer turned out to be yes.
The problem is the Aerospace Corporation have a thing called the "5/8" rule. A failure with in 5 launches of initial launch is probably a mfg flaw. At 8 or above it's likely a design flaw. This is the 2nd time a COPV issue has destroyed a payload (and it looks like the third serious incident they've had with COPV's).
That's looking to be a bit of a pattern.
Because they are not that rare.
F9 has now had 2 in 36 failure rate. You could argue it's 1 in 35 as the 2nd never got to a launch, but the satellite owner whose payload got turned into confetti would probably disagree with you.
Atlas V has 51 straight launches without a failure and manages to launch about 1 every 1-2 months..
Ariane 5 has 74 launches since its last failure (early dec 2002). about 1 every 2-3 months.
You can argue that's the price you pay for innovation but SX has a hell of a back log and some have already swallowed the hit and gone with other launchers.
Not sure about that. IIRC that was the issue with one of the F117 stealth bombers over Sarajevo.
Turned out the stealth coating was just fine in the Middle Eastern atmosphere but over soggy Europe it broke down.
The crew thought they were flying a radar invisible aircraft.
They weren't.
Back in the day a UK company called Husky computers used to make rugged laptops. One of the more novel accessories they provided was a 19pin plug to connect to the Rapier SAM for on board checkout (AFAIK Rapier was the only design win for the Ferranti designed F100 bipolar microprocessor)
Never saw any stories about connection failure.
Do you get the feeling the LM design, coding and test process is FUBAR?
Absolutely not (as I'm sure LM would tell people)
No one has any idea of the protocol used to transfer the data.
Any notion that dullards future insurgents could get into the system, let alone ready that data is quite absurd.
Honest.
Come on this is very high level boffinry.
I mean, being able to do the conductance of thousands of cubic kilometers of ocean.
From space.
The oceans are huge thermal flywheels so knowing where different parts of them are at regarding temperature at any given time is definitely going to improve GCM climate models.
Excellent work and I hope the results start being incorporated in those models as soon as a near full data set is available.
Something which would still be just a tinfoil hat wearers claim before Edward Snowden.
However hopefully some of it's clauses can be moderated and maybe the Supreme Court can review it's view that "Oh it's alright, it's not "collected" till a human actually listens/views the surveillance"
Let's never forget the real inspiration of this process. As the Cardinal put it 400 yrs ago.
"Give me 6 lines from an honest man and I will find something with which to hang him."
If they are not a member of a recognized regulator and don't submit to arbitration.
And does not come in to force until a Regulator is set up.
This is what you get if you have UK governments running scared of Murdoch and believing the claim that it's "The Sun Wot Won It" BS.
Newspapers should have come under fair reporting laws in the UK decades ago. They didn't. Self regulation has proved to be BS for Murdoch titles and the Mirror under Robert Maxwell.
They did it to themselves.
Of whatever stripe that government is.
Hard right
Hard left
Doesn't matter.
The bureaucrats have thoughtfully collected a dataset for any politician to use.
The only safe option is not to collect this data to begin with.
Oh you mean (it's just) Boris banging on about "Taking back control" ?
Seems he mean the Home Office taking back control (of bulk data sets).
Just to reiterate the UK Supreme Court view in a nutshell.
"Bulk storage of personal data is just fine. It's only if it's used in bulk that there might be an issue with Article 8."
No one else in Europe agrees. But then some of those countries (both North and South of the Iron Curtain) lived through what happens when the state is allowed uncontrolled bulk data collection.
Indeed.
D-Link are low hanging fruit in this and the fact they have a significant US presence means the FTC can do them some financial damage. I'd be very strongly surprised if D-Link have a leg to stand on and I doubt they will be the last unless US mfg's show very clear signs they are moving to toward making their products more secure and more updateable.
It's well past time every company that made an internet connected product factored in an upgrade program as part of it's product development plans. If the hardware runs Linux it's not a black art, it's a package manager. Hard coded passwords are a development smell. It's (barely) defensible if no one knows how to avoid it but that fact is it can be avoided, and once avoided the approach can be reused for the next project. Why is it that only the crap code ever seems to be reused?
Apple looks like they did a sweetheart deal with the Irish govt.
A sweetheart deal needs 2 people to agree to it. We know what Apple got from it (an obscene amount off their legitimate tax bill). What did the Irish govt get?
And the effort they are making is still more than the HMG have taken against any of CMD's old friends.
But wait till you see their new streaming video system. Something like this
In theory echo should delete everything it hears between commands (it's not a command) and at most log when and what command was requested.
In practice??
And best of all you pay for your own surveillance.
I looked up the history of this stuff a while back.
Back in the 70's the US was looking for the next generation of reactors. Knowledge of the liquid salt reactor was mostly at Oak Ridge, while other labs knew more about the liquid Sodium fast reactor.
The US put all its funds on the LMFR.
Turned out Sodium is a real PITA compared to LBE (although I doubt the US knew this at the time), the world did not run out of Uranium a) Because it's got lots and b) Because reactors took longer and cost more to build than expected. AFAIK all the 2nd generation reactor designs had troubles. I'm not sure how many of them actually got built
Then 3 mile island happened and US utility companies learned how you could turn a $1Bn asset into a $2Bn liability.
So 40 years later the PWR remains the #1 reactor type on the planet, despite most of its design decisions being tailored for powering a submarine at 1/10 the size.
Quite correct.
The Russians played this prank on the Americans in the 50's with the "nuclear powered bomber"
The Americans played it on the Russians with SDI.
Both with hilarious consequences as they say.
The trouble is that for a good strategic deception (which is what these are) you need something that's
a)Too important not to investigate
b)Needs vast resources to do so. IE multi $Bn budgets in today's money.
In principle an EM drive could be tested by a few cubesats. Say 1 for the drive and a couple to act as observers. Varying the shape of the chamber might need a couple more.
I don't think there's any size limit either up or down. If you can make their thrust exceed say 2x the air drag (still the largest single force on a satellite below 1000Km, everything else is smaller) then all you have to observe is do they (or at least one of them) break orbit and start flying toward whatever you've aimed it at or not?
Actually there is one high spec option which is to make the chamber walls superconductors. That would be really crank the price. You could spend $m on that.
Still not really going to bring an economy to it's knees though, is it?