Posts by phuzz 6738 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Feb 2010
"on the other hand, it looks like the State telling what is good to think and what isn't, the Big Brother way"
No "looks like" about it. This is absolutely the CCP telling it's citizens what it deems acceptable. It's not a democracy, there's no 'bill of rights' or anything similar. In China, the government decides what people can do online (or anywhere else), and the people have to obey that or face the consequences.
Mostly I agree with the downvotes you're received, however, in TFA:
"Grossman also announced Uncle Sam had indicted 17 suspects on RICO charges relating to the use and marketing of the AN0M handsets. Most of these people are said to be distributors, though the prosecutor said three were administrators who helped run the service."
So they're being charged for distributing/running the handsets that the FBI etc. used to gather intelligence. If they'd not done so then the FBI would have had to find another way to get crims to start using the phones.
That sounds a bit like entrapment, and I'm sure some of their lawyers will be claiming that their clients didn't know that their service was being used for crimes.
The more cops around the world that became aware of this, the higher the chances that one of them would be bent and would leak, either to a criminal, or the press (or to someone 'in confidence', who then tells someone else, who talks about it in a pub, etc. etc.). Or eventually it would come out in court.
This was always going to be a limited opportunity to get as much evidence as possible before they had to reveal its source.
Employers, especially in smaller companies, are also looking for someone they'd like to work with.
I'm pretty sure part of the reason I got my current job was because I share a sense of humour with my boss, and we've not hired people just because they annoyed everyone in the office.
There's not any way to prepare for that sort of selection though.
But going through finance vetting just to buy (eg) lunch on a business trip is a chore, so in a lot of places, managers are able to spend a certain amount at their discretion. This guy made sure that all of the invoices he submitted from his own company were within his discretionary spending limit.
Another way to play this (that might have been harder to detect), would have been for him to sell via Amazon's 'Marketplace' or similar. That way the invoices would come from Amazon. Of course, then he'd have had to find a way to make sure other people didn't try to buy his, presumably non-existent, products via Amazon.
Sure, but all the kinetic energy it releases when it hits the target come from the kinetic energy used to put it in orbit in the first place.
At the end of the day, if you want to drop things from orbit you need to use a boat-load of energy to get the thing above the atmosphere, then another bunch to extend that into an orbit, and then a similar amount to get it out of orbit and onto your target.
If you just use a sub-orbital trajectory like an ICBM, you only need the original boat-load of energy to get above the atmo, without needing to get into and then out of orbit. (and your weapon doesn't need it's own propulsion, or systems to survive for long in space etc.)
Pretty much the only benefit of a weapons system that can stay in orbit is the element of surprise, ICBM launches will probably be noticed, but a 'rod from god' is probably not going to be detected until it's too late. However, for a country with the resources to build and field such a weapon's system, it could be easier and cheaper to just get some special op's types to smuggle in a bomb.
The reason for the Shuttle's big wings was so that the USAF could use to launch southwards into a polar orbit, deploy or retrieve some kind of surveillance payload, and then land back in Vandenberg. They were not there to help it 'turn', more so that it could glide the ~1000 km back to the launch latitude after the Earth had turned underneath it's orbit. NASA incorporated the military requirements in order to get more support in Congress (in the end though, the military barely used the Shuttle).
Spacecraft are no use for 'dropping bombs'. If the shuttle had a bomb in it's payload bay and opened the doors in orbit...nothing much would happen. Depending on where the centre of gravity of the shuttle is, the bomb might slowly drift to the front or back of the bay.
Getting a bomb to drop down from orbit would involve scrubbing off ~7 km/s of velocity, ie, the same amount of energy used to lift it into orbit (although atmospheric drag would do most of the work, to be fair). As others have mentioned, if you want to drop a bomb on a country a long way away, the easiest way is to strap it to the top of a rocket on a sub-orbital trajectory. This would also be a lot harder to detect than launching a Shuttle.
The Soviet rocket scientists had looked at the Shuttle's designs, and couldn't work out why the US were building it that way, when the sensible option would be to build a civilian Shuttle with smaller wings and payload bay, and to use rockets for military payloads. The Soviet leaders saw the US spending loads of money on something which didn't make sense according to public information, and assumed that therefore it must have a secret military purpose! Hence, the USSR must have one too.
"when your NAS is Debian based, everything is supported"
Except weirdly a cheap 4-Port SATA RAID (maybe 'RocketRAID'?) card I had, which worked fine with OG FreeNAS (back when it was BSD based), but which had no linux support whatsoever.
IIRC I stuck with FreeNAS for a bit longer, then went back to just using DAS for simplicity.
Well, if you prefer, there's always Windows XP 64-bit ;)
(I wonder how many people actually ran that)
"When exactly was this golden age of F1"
Generally when someone is talking about a "golden age", or "the good old days", they're referring to their childhood. When everything seemed amazing, because they weren't yet old enough to see the flaws.
To quote DNA:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
GCHQ just collect the information, it's up to The Security Service (aka MI5) or the Police to do something with that information. They're the ones you should be aiming your rant at.
Although I presume you have a cast iron method for them to pick out the one idiot who is actually violent, out of the hundreds of others who say the exact same thing but never do anything about it...
In my last job, one of my users decided to get clever and added a BIOS password, which they then promptly forgot. After trying pulling the CMOS battery etc., my boss came up with a...different...solution.
He grabbed a 9V battery, and dragged the terminals across the motherboard until it was completely dead. Then he got me to ring up Dell and get them to come swap out the mobo under warranty.
I managed the opposite. I accidentally jiggled the power cable going into one of the PSUs in an HP blade enclosure, only to have all the PSUs trip, taking down every blade.
It turned out that one of the other 'redundant' power supplies was kaput, and failed when it experienced more load.
There's still a possibility, although not a plausible one, that they might agree a deal before the end of the year, but it won't be much different to 'no deal' because that's what the brexiteers want. No deal means they can rewrite any regulations and make money for them and their chums.
Had GMail created different domains at national level
IIRC in the UK, they started off with addresses @googlemail.com, because of another company already owning the 'gmail' trademark.
Eventually I assume they threw enough money at the trademark holder that they sold up to Google, and everyone went back to their @gmail.com addresses.
(Reminds me of Sony finding out that my boss had trademarked 'PSP' in the UK)
Sadly, we are unlikely to see another 25 years. While the probe continues to perform admirably, and engineers reckon the solar arrays will keep power flowing at least until 2026, other spacecraft carrying more advanced versions of its instruments are due for launch. It therefore looks like 2025 will see SOHO made redundant and the plug pulled.
That's not sad, that's good! It would be sad if it reached the end of it's life and there was nothing to replace it.
You think that's impressive, go look up the original Hayabusa probe! Despite practically everything going wrong, they still managed to return a useful sample.
There are many coins machines in pristine condition in wallets around the world.
Why would anyone bother with some which has been rotting away under the ground for 1000 years?
Reminds me of the story a friend told, about having to go find out why a whole school had lost it's networking.
Turned out that someone had decided to be "neat and tidy", by plugging a cat5 that had been dangling from a wall socket, into the socket next to it. The switches didn't have spanning-tree enabled, and swiftly took themselves out, trying to send packets around the loop
One part of my last job was keeping an eye on the backup system. One day, while looking at the reports it generated, I noticed that there was an option to print the report. "That sounds handy" I thought, and clicked the option with visions of a handy printout showing me that all was well when I got in every morning.
Of course, it wasn't that simple, the print out was the verbose log, including the path of every single file that was backed up.
Fortunately for me, the printer's output hopper could only cope with about 15cm depth of paper, and as I got in earlier than most people, I managed to cancel the rest of the job and jam the paper into a recycling bin before anyone noticed.
Well BT and OpenReach are technically separate now, and have been for three years.
The problem is, OpenReach inherited their network from BT (all the way back to when it was part of the Post Office), so they still have (almost) a monopoly on the wires across the country. It also seems they inherited some execs from BT as well, because their reaction to this monopoly is to use it to try and fuck over ever single competitor as much as possible.
It would be interesting to see if they're trying to raise prices for BT as well.
"3D printing" covers a whole bunch of manufacturing methods, and Rocket Lab aren't using anything like the plastic-extruding machines you might have at home.
I assume they're using something like Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) which can indeed produce parts which can stand up to high pressures.
I suspect they call it "3D printing" because that's a buzzword that bamboozles investors, but the industrial level machines are as far advanced as a fully-automated, multiple-axis CAD-CAM machine is from a foot-powered wood lathe.
Every day about 100 tons of asteroid dust burns up in our atmosphere, which is roughly the mass that we launch into space per year, and of course, most of what we launch doesn't come down.
While 100 tons per day does sound like a lot, the thing is, the Earth's atmosphere is really big. So while you've probably breathed in some asteroid particulates over your life, it's probably done less to you than standing in a room with a candle for five minutes.
That's why organisms on Earth don't really have to worry about anything entering the atmosphere, except the rare occasions when it's big enough to reach the ground.
It's ok, because the government didn't give a fuck about care homes, enough pensioners have died that the State Pension payments are due to be £600M less than they would have been.
I'm sure that the government didn't deliberately have a policy of "let the oldsters die off to save money", if only because that would be killing off their biggest constituency.
And I'm sure many of us have in the past looked for the answer to a question on expertsexchange.com. These days they use the slightly different URL experts-exchange.com.
(Until they started locking the answers behind registration and I imagine their traffic dropped off a cliff. Of course, I'm sure the exec that came up with the idea got a nice bonus anyway.)
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