Posts by Alister 3334 posts • joined 19 May 2010
My thoughts on this are:
1/ it doesn't matter what the headline speed is, if there is massive contention or traffic shaping on your broadband. If I run speedtests from my house, I get between 5 and 6 Mb/s on a regular basis, and the reported synch speed is 6.2Mb/s. However, on most evenings, I am unable to stream a program on BBC iPlayer, even on the lowest bandwidth setting.
The government should be shouting about improving backend infrastructure, not offering some meaningless figure plucked from the air as a minimum "speed".
2/ Where I live, we are STILL on a non-LLU exchange, so we have no option but to go with BT. Despite all the pretty leaflets I get through the door from Virgin, I can't take advantage of them - or any other provider. The first goal of the government policy should be to get every exchange unbundled, so at least people can choose a provider. Surely increased competition will drive provision of services.
Far from being "worthless" Mars is the only really viable place for Mankind to colonise, as it is (in astronomical terms) just next door, and has the potential to be terraformed using current or near future technology, to the point where living on the surface could be possible within a few generations. Contrast with the Moon where any colony would always be confined to artificial structures, and at the mercy of the low gravity (which has deleterious effects on human bodies).
It's all very well the boffins going "ooh look at star such-and-such, it's got goldilocks planets which can support life!" the reality is we are not sufficiently advanced to even consider travelling to any of these.
You say "I think we should concentrate on Mankind on this planet."
Yes, but we are in the classic "all the eggs in one basket" situation at the moment, where firstly, any extinction level event (whether from orbital impact or through our own foolishness) would wipe us all out, and secondly, we are running out of room and resources.
We either need to drastically limit the population growth in some way, or find another planet to move to. Doing this now, before it's too late, would seem sensible. But as you and the previous poster have said "Mankind's short sightedness may well be its downfall".
"As we begin this work, the United States has made clear to our partners that we will not enter into a code of conduct that in any way constrains our national security-related activities in space or our ability to protect the United States and our allies,"
They're a bit like a garage hoarder: "no, that's not space junk, you never know when it might come in useful for our national security, someday"
To be fair, there are already plenty of small Automated External Defibrillator, Pulse Oximetry, Blood Glucose meters and Blood Pressure devices on the market, so to combine them into a single unit with a simple AI to recognise common conditions would not be too big a problem. However, to be true to the Star Trek idea, you would have to make all of those work non-invasively (ie without removing clothing or attaching things to the body) which is probably a challenge too far.
Length
The standard unit of length shall be the EU standard (Florentine) linguine (unboiled at sea level), defined as 1lg, representing 14cm, 0.02784 perches, 0.462 Japanese shyaku or 0.0007568 Ancient Greek stadium ptolemys
A femtolinguine, is therefore, 1 x 10−15th or or 0.000000000000001 of a linguine, or to put it another way, bloody small!
"If someone thinks that something, which is generally regarded to be happening (by science), isn't in fact happening, despite massive evidence to say that it is, it's not unreasonable to call them a denier."
This is the typical strawman used by CAGW supporters. The vast majority of those who oppose the CAGW position do not deny that there are changes in global climate (for which there is, yes, a large amount of evidence), they deny, or do not accept, that there is sufficient evidence that the climate change is as a resut of mankind's activities.
PLEASE El Reg, lose the bloody annoying Microsoft Cloud banner add which keeps changing size, and causes the whole page content to jump about like a startled gazelle.
Yes, I know ads are needed to make you money, but FFS get ones that aren't written by a bunch of half-trained monkeys.
Sheesh!
Chief reason is we don't have the land area, compared to our population density, we just don't have the room to put sufficient power generation in place. As it is, we buy in a proportion of our electricity from France.
The larger European countries are able to have many Hydro-electric plants operating, and have done for a long time, so it's mature technology and the capital expenditure was paid off years ago.
We don't have the room to have that sort of infrastructure, even if we wanted to.
They keep saying they only have "a small window of opportunity" to talk to the damn thing, when it passes overhead a ground communications station. If it is that hard to talk to, how could they possibly expect to talk to it over the distance from Mars?
And why can't they bounce a signal through a comms satellite or two, which might have a better chance of attracting its attention?
"We need a fusion reactor project equivalent to the Manhattan project. At today's money the spent 24bn in 4 years or 6bn a year. Afaik ITER is a 10 year project which makes it around 1.5bn a year."
That's pretty much what I thought.
Trouble is, fusion has the word "NUKELER" attached to it (yes, I know its nuclear) and therefore must be A-BAD-THING(TM).
"If we put our minds and money to it we could have a working fusion reactor in half the time and help solve the worlds energy needs."
wot 'e said...
You do if you have more than one user in the household, or you take into account the contention of multiple households in one street.
I have a nominal 8Mb/s BT connection, on which I usually see between 5 - 6 Mb/s real world speeds, but if I and my kids are watching iPlayer we are sometimes lucky to get more than about 1.2Mb/s between us. Ok so this is probably down to contention and throttling, but if a 6Mb connection is getting throttled that much, then we need the headline speeds of fibre as a starting point to offer sensible real world bandwidth.
How typically arrogant and anthropocentric to assume that any "alien" species would use a sense organ that responds to the same part of the electromagnetic spectrum as our eyes.
Why, even on this planet, there are many species, even some mammals who use completely different methods to be aware of their surroundings, and many more species that see different bits of the spectrum compared to the frequencies we call visual.
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