Posts by Chris Rowland

A nice review for once, better than the usual anti-eco ranting from the Register.

And it looks like a practical car if you don't need to travel long distances all the time. I can imagine getting one, it would cope with 95% of what we use a car for and hiring something for when it can't seems to me to be better than using something that's usually far too big all the time.

As for the deniers, with their attitude we would still be using the horse and cart, "What's the point in getting one of these new motor cars? They keep on breaking down, they run on petrol! My horses use the hay I grow for myself - and they produce more horses!"

The press have brought this on themselves.

Their behaviour, in lying, cheating, stealing and bribing is what has caused this. They have behaved in a totally immoral way where the only constraint is "can I get away with it".

This is not a few bad apples. It is the whole lot of them.

I can think of no other business where lying, stealing and bribing is considered normal business tactics.

Having demonstrated they are not fit to run an honest business they will be, I hope, forced to do so.

Given a choice between the government and the press I'd trust the government's honesty and integrity more than the press.

It seems similar to the Dunning Kruger effect, the less someone knows about something the more they underestimate its difficulty.

I'd trust Andydaws opinion more than the "how hard can it be!" brigade.

But a cheap, simple, efficient, reliable and safe power generation system would be really nice.

Printing in wax?

It could be useful if they were to be able to print in wax, then use the lost wax method to cast things in metal.

Do any of the 3D printers do this?

Paying attention to what the press say about this seems to me like asking the criminals what sentence should be imposed - and even what counts as a crime.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong about having a patent and licensing it to the people who wish to use it?

It seems to me that the problem is that it is too easy to patent something that is obvious.

I wonder if a turnover tax would work, maybe at about 1%

Companies would pay tax either on their profit or on their turnover, whichever is higher.

This isn't the same as VAT because that's only paid on the change in value.

I'm another leaver of TT. I moved from them to BT because it was cheaper and faster - 36 times faster!

Their system had worked with no problems for me and I left with no animosity.

Then I discovered that they were still debiting my DD. The process of contacting then to sort this out was so awful that it turned me from someone who would have gone back if things had changed to someone who will not only never go back but will encourage people to avoid them. As I said on their customer satisfaction survey I entered zero only because there were no negative values available.

The problem seems to me that when someone as influential as Linus is rude and abusive, using profanity and personal attacks instead of rational discussion, it tends to set the tone of the whole community.

0. The Antikythera mechanism?

I can just imagine it in 15 years...

"Does anyone know how to read these 15 year old disks?"

"Let's see - - no, we haven't used those for ages, I think the last reader died about 5 years ago".

They did give some away

Early on, Eben took a load of them to a school and the kids kept them. IIRC complete with keyboard, mouse and SD card. Maybe PSU and cables.

One kid put it on eBay, there was a bit of a fuss on the Pi group and Eben said that it was a gift and they were free to do what they liked with it.

That doesn't excuse this guy though.

From a look at the orbital elements published on the Heavens Above site the X37B and Tiangong-1 are not even visible to one another. The orbit inclination is the same but the longitudes of the ascending node for the two craft are over 100 degrees different. If the orbital periods are about the same then I think it will stay like that unless something pretty significant is done.

He's got some seriously clear skies to manage that.

He made the scope as well.

The fuel on board should give it enough delta V to be able to slow it down enough that it doesn't need a heat shield. After all it's enough to get it to Mars and get into orbit there.

But doing a soft landing - at least soft enough that parts can be reused - seems a bit optimistic, especially as the reason it's stuck here is that they can't control the motors.

It's a shame.

I'm saddened to see how many people think that a person who has a belief different to theirs should be fired.

I originally thought surprised but then realised where this is and that intolerance and general nastiness was no surprise at all.

Hope the guy gets a job with a better employer.

I got my late father on the internet; he gave up at about 89, six months before he died.

He could cope with email fairly well but the www was more of a problem.

He couldn't find links, mostly because creative people would design web pages with their own slyle. Saying that you can tell where the links are because they are in blue and underlined just didn't work reliably. He needed that sort of simple rule and there aren't any.

As people say, it's more than an hour's work. The sort of thing you will do for your close family.

I did it in the 60s

A school friend and I had some fun doing this in the 1960s, using a torch bulb as the source and a photo transistor as the detector - an OCP71 IIRC.

Not quite so fast but we got speech transmission.

title

A few thoughts:

Could the aircraft be suspended directly from the balloon with the suspension arranged to give the 45 deg launch angle? This would avoid the additional mass of a separate module attached to the balloon.

I wonder if the release method could be by running the attachment cable through the rocket exhaust so that when the rocket is fired the cable is burnt through and the craft is released.

The suggested multi rocket design seems to be vulnerable to problems if the rockets don't all start at the same time.

Are folding wings neccessary? It's additional complexity and there aren't any narrow spaces it has to fit through.

No Ambition

A forum I moderate has blocked *.cn

The number of spam registrations dropped to almost nothing.

Just don't fill it up!

They did say fully fuelled...

All you have to do is not fill it up; trade range for carrying capacity.

And my glider takes off and lands on one wheel.

I hope I never fly with you lot

It's not the deliberate RF emissions that are the problem, it's the noise from all the digital electronics.

A friend of mine (retired from a senior position in a company making RF shielding) tells the story of a 747 in the cruise, on autopilot, that was gently rocking from side to side. After some investigating they found somebody in the first class cabin, just behind the flight deck, who was using a CD player. They got him to turn it off - aeroplane flew straight - on - plane wobbled. Better keep that off.

There's no real control over the emission levels of consumer devices, and when they are in the plane they are inside the planes Faraday cage so the level of attenuation is much less than for things outside. Most things outside are further away as well.

Maybe most devices are OK, but which ones? How does the airline tell? Even if there was a list of acceptable devices can you imagine the mayhem if the cabin staff were trying to explain that some devices were OK but others were not.

And to those who think they know better than the airlines, how many of your friends are you prepared to sacrifice to determine exactly what the risk is?

It's not full!

There's only six people, that means there's a spare seat...