Posts by DJO 718 posts • joined 28 Sep 2011
Wibble.
Hard to know where to begin, so much crap, misunderstandings and deranged fantasies it could have come from the White House.
Incidentally in theory Black Holes can be quite small but the smaller they are the quicker they evaporate so a tiny one would disappear before anybody noticed it.
It's tempting to finger Trump, but the democrats have been plugging things up too.
Trump could have asked for finance before when the Republicans controlled the purse strings but he didn't, now the Democrats have control it's a national emergency?
This is (at least) 100% down to Trump, there is no emergency just a fit of pique from "Individual 1", a contrived problem and a transparent attempt to blacken the Democrats in the House.
Al the Democrats are doing is refusing to finance a pointless vanity project which everybody knows will have zero effect on illegal border crossings.
No, far too hot - the combustion products would break down immediately.
Anyway at that sort of temperature and pressure the electrons would be squeezed out and most chemical reactions are basically electrons moving about (vast oversimplification) so such reactions would be impossible.
You've no idea how bankruptcy works in the US of A. He deliberately drove his businesses into bankruptcy so he could pay off debts at something like 5c to the $. In a mature sensible country he would then be debarred from running a company for at least 5 years but America is neither mature or sensible so bankrupts can start another business the next day - wash and repeat 5 times to acquire millions of dollars of property for a tiny fraction of the true value while driving small companies to the wall.
Then all we would need to deal with is the serious civil unrest that I suspect would arise from that.
So what you are saying is national policy should be driven by threats from violent far-right thugs?
Surely that is diametrically opposed to everything British democracy is supposed to stand for, we're supposed to stand up to bullies not hide in the corner.
On the Galileo issue, in the planning stages one country was adamant that non-EU countries should not have access to the signals or be allowed to tender for any related work - See if you can guess which country that was.
No it's not bullshit.
The biggest threat in the USA is from domestic right wing terror groups, the most fatalities have been caused by white American right wing racists.
In Europe most fatal attacks are carried out by white extreme-right racists.
Any violence from left leaning groups is rare and quite possibly caused by agent provocateurs - Look at the UK police infiltration, spied on over 100 left wing groups and 3 right wing groups while all the violence came from the right.
And even if it did. What business is it of Google to censor the web?
Well the law prohibits racism, hate speech and promotion of violence from any source so it is their duty to censor it otherwise they would be breaking the law.
This is all very tricky. They should censor hate speech, racism, incitements to violence and similar criminal activities.
Almost all of such stuff comes from the right wing.
If the far right don't want their messages to be censored they should stick to the rule of law and not promote hate, racism and violence. Won't happen as without hate & racism they don't really have much to say except "tax the poor, reward the rich" which they try not to say in public.
The big problem with fax is that there is no method of asserting the recipient is the intended one
Wrong.
An important benefit of faxes is the reception receipt, admittedly these generally ignored by they contain the reception time and the recipients number. In fact this is the reason that faxes are usable for legal documents while other more easily spoofed methods (such as email) are not.
Further, there must be sanctions for violating this principle, with real teeth- think multi- million dollar fines to the government, just as they would give The Face Book, Google, etc all.
So you want to penalise the tax payers?
Fining the government has zero effect as the money just comes from the exchequer, no, if you want sanctions then disbarment from public office, personal fines to (then ex) ministers, confiscation of property, tar & feathers might be a bit too far but the principle of pubic humiliation as punishment for crimes against the people they are supposed to serve is correct.
Not true, usage of smart meters can save a fortune in energy charges, if you are a very large consumer such as a hospital, factory or university campus.
You need to know where power is being wasted in order to cut consumption and comprehensive readings at least every 30 mins are invaluable in this context.
However for domestic use they are in 99% of cases a complete waste of time, money and resources.
Also SMETS1 is a fuck-up, it should never have been rolled out except as a technology test for smart meters.
Spatz
Are you gullible or stupid?
It must be one or the other, either you believe the Trumps when they say their use of private email (commercial, really insecure) was completely innocent.
Or you think the CIA/FBI agents who set up and installed the presidential email server used by the ex-president and his wife ballsed up the job and left it insecure.
Here's a hint: Trump always lies.
The problem of course selection for optimal observation and of signal integrity back to Earth both have the same solution.
Don't send one probe.
Send a probe, then next year send another one* and then another and so on so you have a chain, when the first one arrives it makes simple observations so the following ones can alter course to make a better observation which can instruct the next ones and so on.
For signals each probe acts as a repeater sending the signal to the probe behind it.
* Actually it might be easier to launch them all at once but give them slightly different speeds so they form a chain that way.
Beware, as the first batch of Gemini that came off production had keyboard problems and had a different-than-promised SoC
To be accurate the first ones off the line had exactly the SoC that was promised in the original specification, the subsequent ones had a slightly better SoC.
The keyboard issues were largely rectified by the provision of replacement mats.
Hopefully the Mk1 will have some resale value, they're still selling them at about double what the original backers paid so it "might" be possible to recoup some expenditure.
The sensor list includes a compass as did the list for the Gemini but due to the magnets used to hold the case shut it was disabled at the hardware level. I've asked if they've sorted out this issue - perhaps using a spring instead of magnets but their reply was uninformative, i.e. the respondent didn't know one way or the other.
Obviously, there's no point in searching for "life, but not as we know it Jim" if we have no idea of what it might consist of.
Search for what we do know about first - look for high concentrations of free Oxygen and we wont go far wrong.
As for non C based life it's unlikely at what we would consider normal pressure and temperatures, however in high pressures and very hot or very cold then all bets are off, there could be life in gas giants, Saturn could be teaming with life but currently we have no way to identify it so there's no point in looking for it.
But basically anything that gives the companies an excuse to declare bankruptcy is to be avoided.
As usual the solution is painfully simple - Limited liability should not apply to fines or criminal proceedings.
One might almost think the incumbent administration has a vested interest in not doing so, I can't think of any other reason not to make that easy change.
If the Tories can't blame the EU for their mistakes and inaction they'll blame the Brexit process, after that they'll have to find some other excuse for their incompetence.
But the threat to penalise company directors is I suspect like most Tory promises, a few good headlines and then, nothing.
Modern li-ion batteries manage about ten times the energy density (in J/kg) of lead-acid.
Not comparing like-with-like.
You are comparing a theoretical ideal Li-ion to a cheap-and-cheerful car battery. A real Li-ion has 3 to 4 times the power of a Lead Acid but that just a normal one, by using lighter materials, a lead film electrode, and acid gel the power to weight ratio can easily be doubled so the actual increase for Li-ion over Pb-Acid is about a factor of 2 to 3, nowhere near 10x and nowhere near as important as the increase in efficiency offered by modern motors.
" It's also impossible to charge duty on electricity used to drive a car without charging duty on other electricity. Electricity is electricity."
ROTFLMAO
As soon as there's enough electric vehicles to significantly impact fuel duty revenues there will be the introduction of a mileage tax. All electric cars have GPS and are connected to the internet, they know exactly where you've been and when and WILL rat you out to the tax people when asked.
They aren't there yet other than in certain use cases
Batteries have improved incrementally over many years. But the power to weight ratio of the latest batteries isn't that much greater than for good old lead acid batteries, the ease of handling and the ability to form into useful shapes and speed and relative safety when charging is the main differential.
Motors made a massive jump in efficiency when Neodymium magnets became available and economically viable - that was the spur to make mass market electric vehicles feasible. Concentrating on the power source as the most important factor in the development of electric cars is an easy mistake but a mistake all the same. Other factors like regenerative breaking are arguably more important than battery development.
I'm not saying battery technology isn't important, of course it is but its not as important as some people seem to think, currently batteries are pretty good but ther's a limit to how much power can be squeezed into one as there's always the problem than any sufficiently dense power source be it electrical or chemical is effectively a bomb so the main areas of improvement are to wring as much out of every erg and so we're back to the motors.
Pussy not eat his fish, pussy get thin and waste away, I think.
You really should apologise to Douglas Adams
Footnote:
The President in particular is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. (DA - HHGTTG 1)
Trade and manufacturing dominance is cyclical.
150 years ago the USA shafted Europe by wholesale IP theft and cheap labour, then one country after another took up the mantle and China is now the leader but development there will push labour costs up so another country will take the crown, probably India and then if they can sort out the corruption African states will then eclipse India.
Yes China is being naughty but no worse than everybody else was when it was their turn to lead.
I'd task rovers or Mars-specific drones to find caves
No need, there are deep canyons that dwarf the Grand one in the USA, setting up camp at the bottom of those would limit radiation to just when the sun was directly above, solar panels and reflectors on the surface could provide power and redirect light.
Eventually sections could be roofed over and sealed to provide a reasonable working environment.
And if so, why haven't the bureaus themselves been directly challenged for dereliction of duty?
Where the fuck have you been for the last couple of years?
Their "duty" under Trump is to cosy up to the big cable providers and to soak up as much lobby cash as possible. Serving the public is now the antithesis of the role.
you'd think 14Tb is excessive and yet...
Of course there will be outliers who do need humongous amounts of disc space but they are very much the exception to the rule.
The vast majority of users will never need anywhere like that capacity and if they don't have multiple discs with redundancy then it's a disaster waiting to happen.
Really this kind of capacity is only of use to enterprise systems where they can afford to buy discs by the box full.
My Photo and Video library are close to 7Tb[1]. That's Stills going back to 2003 and Video back to 2014. All shot by myself. A quick check showed that I've added 476Gb this year so far and it has been a quiet year.
Which kind of makes my point - in 15 years you've generated almost (let's round up) 8TB so a 28 TB system assuming a slight annual growth in your output will last for another 25 to 30 years.
Far longer than the discs themselves will last and depending on your age, possibly longer than you will last.
Also as others have stated, 14TB in a system without redundancy is insane.
I also store various VMs
Ah, a valid use that may well eat a lot of space but how many VMs are needed?
I would love to get 28 TB of storage in my two bay NAS
Why?
At an average of 2GB per movie that's about 14,000 films, do you really need to watch 2 films a day for 20 years?
If music is your thing then assuming good quality FLACs at about 500MB per album that's 56,000 CDs worth or roughly 20 years listening for 8 hours a day every day.
Maybe you like reading, epubs average at about 250kb so about 100 million books, you may be a fast reader but not that fast. Mind you buy another one and you could store every book ever published (approx 130 million).
That's of course once you've collected and collated it all which would take a few years.
Alternatively I suppose it's big enough make a local mirror of PornHub.
No it's up to 4% (or 20 million euros but the higher would apply) of global turnover
That's the penalty for a tier 2 infringement, this kind of issue is a tier one infringement which is up to €10 million, or 2% annual global turnover – whichever is higher.
The determination of penalty level takes into account previous behaviour of the organisation or data processor but that can only be applied to actions since the introduction of GDPR so while it might not explicitly specify a penalty escalator that is what'll happen, except for really egregious offences.
It's 2% and that's only after repeated naughtiness.
The penalties that can be handed out under GDPR start low but increase for every repeat offence so an accident will get a slap on the wrist and a small fine, but regular "accidents" will attract the full force of the law - Assuming the local regulators (ICO - I'm looking at you) are up to the task.
I'd sure as hell expect one working for Intel to understand CPUs, no different than I'd expect a lawyer working for Oracle to understand databases
Not necessarily but I would expect them to pass their work to an expert in the field for checking before it's released. That's called "due diligence" and lawyers are supposed to do it.
Even a huge EU GDPR fine may cost less than what they earn from the data.
Maybe once, possibly twice but thereafter, no chance.
The GDPR penalty scheme has increasing penalties for repeat offenders leading ultimately for persistent repeat offenders to the much proclaimed 2% of global turnover.
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