Not so expensive
So we are looking at 7-figure numbers, max?
16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008
A great and proud country that used to show the rest of the world how to live with honour, dignity and respect and was willing to fight not one, but two world wars, not to acquire territory, resources or influence, but to defend a way of life.
In spite of recent political tarts' efforts to retcon WWI into a fight for "the freedoms", this is and stays utter ahistorical bullshit and you should be ashamed to be take the history rewriting enema from your masters.
WWI is and stays a war between colonial powers, with the UK getting into it to guarantee a continental balance of forces. That's all there is. Someone in your family died? You have been had. Suck it up!
> 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???
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...
The sad part is how hard it was to find the money behind the sofa to actually finance the new cover.
Things can still go pear-shaped. Ukraine is sometimes ravaged by wildfires. A wildfire in Red Forest will blow the nucleides into the atmosphere and cause definite trouble.
Plus, no-one is talking about the impact on the Belarusian side, which has an even more extensive Zone that, however, is not all too clearly marked and research into it is being a bit suppressed, innit.
While not being interested too much in sociological writings, there is a book I would consider as "not bad" on the nice obfuscation process (likely also practiced by the WHO whose numbers about health effects look suspiciously low, low, low): The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl
I wonder how many deaths would have ensued had the Fukushima power plant been coal, oil or gas fired?
Probably none and it would have been easier to clean up too.
Also dodged a bit of a bullet as the reactors loaded with MOX didn't melt down, it would have been testing time for what happens if MOX transforms into corium.
Then again, Fukushima was an olden US-issued boiling water reactor ... why not use nicely compact pressurized water reactors, or a CANDU reactor instead?
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?
systemd
free Linux distro Devuan releases second beta
You have to be swivel-eyed, window licking, barking mad nuts to use an xml parser in your boot process.
Full-on bullshit of the lowest "imma gonna hack me way out of this, in a manly way" sort
At least you can get exact error messages, the user knows what type of value he must and can set in and where (you know, XML Schema, dude!), and the data can be tested against the specs without running the boot process.
> McCain who seems rather tame
Well, that's just like, your opinion man.
McCain was crazy ass bonkers while trying to the presidency. "Bomb this and Bomb that (especially Russia and Iran)" and nothing except confused neocon soundbites. Basically the Clinton hard-on for war from the Repukes' side and not hidden under the leper's clothing of "Progressivism".
Gas!
He cared only about his scientific achievements, no matter the cost in life.
He was apparently an all-round PHB. Here's a story from Helmut Hölzer, talking about the design and development of the A4 guidance computer (a world first in embedded electronics), in original Krautlang:
Ich will hier die elektrische Modellgeschichte einmal unterbrechen und später darauf zurückkommen, weil ich chronologisch einigermaßen genau bleiben möchte. Der Grund dafür war ein Besuch von Dr. von Braun’s (1939) in unserem Labor. Er war ziemlich aufgeregt und erzählte mir, daß alle vier Firmen die unter Vertrag waren, eine Kurssteuerung zu entwickeln gestanden, daß ihre Berechnungen zeigten, daß die Steuerungen im Flug instabil sein würden.
Der Grund dafür sagte er, wäre bei allen vieren, daß die Teile verwenden wollten, die ursprünglich für Flugzeuge gedacht waren, und daß einige, insbesondere die Servomotoren die die Strahlruder bewegen sollten, zu langsam waren. Letzten Endes hat die Rakete nur 60 Sekunden zum auskorrigieren einer Störung, während das Flugzeug den ganzen tag hat (so zu sagen). Sie erklärten, daß sie entweder schnellere Servos haben müßten oder die Aufschaltung der Winkelbeschleunigung zusätzlich zu der Winkelgeschwindigkeit, welche von den Wendezeigern geliefert wurde.
Alles dies brauchte erheblich mehr Zeit und Geld beides war nicht da. Von Braun fragte mich: “Sie müssen doch ein ähnliches Problem in dem Fernsteuersystem haben; wie messen Sie denn die seitliche Geschwindigkeit?” Ich muß hier erwähnen, daß zu dieser Zeit die En twicklung der Kurssteuerung von der Fernsteuerentwicklung organisch getrennt war. Ich sagte ihm, daß wir die seitliche Geschwindigkeit nicht messen, sondern automatisch ausrechnen. Er sagte “ausrechnen? Können Sie denn nicht dasselbe tun für die Winkelbeschleunigung? Und wie lange würde Sie brauchen?” Er dachte offensichtlich in Wochen oder Monate. Meine Antwort war: “Es ist jetzt 9 Uhr; wenn Sie mal um 6 Uhr heute Abend wieder hereinschauen würden ...” Er faßte das als guten Witz auf und ging wieder weg. Für uns aber war das alles dank unseres elektrischen Simulators kein Problem und wir fanden ohne tief in die Theorie gehen zu müssen, stabile Bereiche. Abends versuchten wir von Braun zu finden, aber vergebens. Mir fällt da ein, daß wir öfter die Heisenberg’schen Unbestimmtheits-Realisation auf von Braun anwandten: Auf von Braun bezogen, sagt
Relation No. 1: Wenn man genau weiß wo er ist, kann man nie genau sagen was er als nächstes tut.
Relation No. 2: Wenn man genau weiß was er tut, kann ihn keiner finden.
Als er schließlich auftauchte und sah was wir getan hatten, erwarteten wir Lob. Aber alles was er sagte war: Dafür werdet ihr Kerle ja bezahlt. Wo sind denn die Wendezeiger in diesem Aufbau?” Wir sagten ihm, daß zusätzlich zu der rechnerischen Gewinnung der Wendebeschleunigung die Wendezeiger bei diesem Unternehmen auch gestorben seien und daß sie auch durch Computer-Teile ersetzt wären. Kosten: Ein paar Mark gegen ein paar tausend. Er sagte dann: “Oh gut! Ich brauche gerade mehr Geld für Antriebsleute” und verschwand. Er war ein großer Mensch, wir verehrten ihn alle.
This is a good occassion to post soviet-era ballistic dogs and hardware:
1st Soviet ballistic missiles & heroic space dogs in declassified Kapustin Yar range
Never heard anyone say "E.S.A.", definitely not people working in ESA.
The Register hopes at least some goes into software testing.
If the choosing nine correct testing scenarios depended on the live of a Schroedinger's Cat that absolute tries to survive, one could expect success.
Which is of course bullshit.
If the carriers want to have a piece of the cake, they better price their stuff reasonably. 1 dollar per device per month and no bandwith cost for such "low-bandwidth" operations sounds reasonable.
Not in that category? Mesh networks on free frequencies, here we come.
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.
Why weak and poorly defended only?
Here is the ugly secret that everybody knows: aircraft carriers cannot be defended against a sophisticated enemy. Had the Cold War turned hot, the Soviets would have simultaneously attacked any US carrier in the north Atlantic with a combo of
Air launched cruise missiles
Submarine launched cruise missiles
Surface ship launched cruise missiles
Submarine launched torpedoes
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.
US and French navies would not entrust them with protection of their aircraft carriers in the Gulf." A strong point: for all their electrical flaws, the Type 45s are world-leading air-defence destroyers.
Please remind me again who exactly has capabilities or the intentions to do airstrikes on aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf.
1) Israel
2) Turkey
3) Russia
4) Syria
5) Saudi Arabia
6) Al Qaeda
7) US
8) ISIS
9) Iran
10) Rump Iraq
11) Yemen
12) France
?
An entire mass transit system's IT gets badly mauled for money and the headline here is "Woot - free travel".
Better than the headline "An entire mass transit system's IT gets badly mauled for money and the headline here is "Passengers forced to walk because administration says nobody rides for free".
For some reason the Reg Videos still don't ply in my Firefox, here's stuff on YouTube:
Papatea Fault and Raised Coast - So long and thanks for all the fish!
Farm track ruptured by fault (if a cow has the disadvantage of being on the fault line at time zero, does she get catapulted, Monty Python style?)
House displaced by fault rupture with Will Ries doing SCIENCE!
Drone video of the Kekerengu Fault rupture.
Also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mizsfXP_I1w RUPTLY filming from a helo (now that WaPo has declared that RUPLY is a Putin's Propaganda Outlet out to Influence American Voters, maybe one should not watch this - still, those tunnels look unsafe!)
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.
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!
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.
All chatbots are really artificial nontelligence!
We are going where Neal Stephenson writes about (here is him clearly having learnt from Stanislaw Lem, writing in "Anathem"):
“Early in the Reticulum-thousands of years ago-it became almost useless because it was cluttered with faulty, obsolete, or downright misleading information,” Sammann said.
“Crap, you once called it,” I reminded him.
“Yes-a technical term. So crap filtering became important. Businesses were built around it. Some of those businesses came up with a clever plan to make more money: they poisoned the well. They began to put crap on the Reticulum deliberately, forcing people to use their products to filter that crap back out. They created syndevs whose sole purpose was to spew crap into the Reticulum. But it had to be good crap.”
“What is good crap?” Arsibalt asked in a politely incredulous tone.
“Well, bad crap would be an unformatted document consisting of random letters. Good crap would be a beautifully typeset, well-written document that contained a hundred correct, verifiable sentences and one that was subtly false. It’s a lot harder to generate good crap. At first they had to hire humans to churn it out. They mostly did it by taking legitimate documents and inserting errors-swapping one name for another, say. But it didn’t really take off until the military got interested.”
“As a tactic for planting misinformation in the enemy’s reticules, you mean,” Osa said. “This I know about. You are referring to the Artificial Inanity programs of the mid-First Millennium A.R.”
“Exactly!” Sammann said. “Artificial Inanity systems of enormous sophistication and power were built for exactly the purpose Fraa Osa has mentioned. In no time at all, the praxis leaked to the commercial sector and spread to the Rampant Orphan Botnet Ecologies. Never mind. The point is that there was a sort of Dark Age on the Reticulum that lasted until my Ita forerunners were able to bring matters in hand.”
Also ... that shutterstock photo!
"skeptical_hipster_with_phone.jpg"
Looks more like
"captain_nemo_slightly_disgusted_texting.jpg"