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* Posts by Alexandicity

14 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Jan 2012

Skygazers prepare for 'blood Moon' caused by Earth eclipse

Alexandicity
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Re: Why is this a problem?

Not wrong; there are indeed orbits like you say to keep it in the sun. LADEE, however, is in a very low (50km!), circular and equatorial orbit, so it spends just under 50% of its time in the Moon's shadow - about an hour each time around.

Problem is that the batteries are designed with the assumption that they will get to charge every orbit. With a 2 (?) hour period where the moon will be much darker than usual, there's going to be at least one "charging period" that the satellite won't have the light it expects. This means the battery won't charge enough and, before it gets full sunlight again the battery will be drained "dangerously" low.

That said, normally they'd turn off many systems not necessary for the satellite's immediate survival to save power in such a case. Seems surprising to me that they can't keep it warm and alive with certainty if they turned off the science payload, for example...

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Falkland Islands almost BLITZED from space by plunging European ion-rocket craft

Alexandicity
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Re: Two Questions

Somewhere about 120km up! As soon as your precious space gizmo drops to about there, it's not likely to make another orbit, and so "ballistic trajectory of doom" is indeed the best technical description..

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Microsoft advertises Surface, Excel with maths mistake

Alexandicity

Error in Excel/Surface? Eh?

This is a bit silly. Some staffer who made this advert clearly didn't think that the hordes would analyse the numbers. He was just knocking up some quick illustration of a spreadsheet, and clearly didn't include the last two rows in the sum calculation. Nothing to do with Surface/Excel; pure pedantry on us interwebbers' part. Why is it newsworthy?

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UN to call for 'pre-emptive' ban on soulless robot bomber assassins

Alexandicity
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Re: Not sure I understand the issue

I don't think there's much soul in a attack pilot pressing a button in his cockpit and woosh goes a missile that a minute later will hit a hut somewhere. Some pilots might get up close to their targets to be able to see that what they're shooting at is actually a wedding, but I imagine most aerial bombings these days are from such a distance on to such a small target that the human element doesn't much help. The fighter - and its pilot - are identical to a auto-targeting drone in almost all cases.

In fact, you could argue that, with suitable advances in software, that a robot will be far more discriminating than a pilot about its targets. Before it looses its ordinance, it could analyse the target on arrival more thoroughly than any pilot could in a reasonable time (count number of people, determine behaviours, look-up registration plates on trucks etc). Still wouldn't be perfect, but would probably be better than having a human in the loop who is under pressure to complete his mission (and avoid getting shot down!)..

Then again, I'm not a pilot and I don't know how much involvement they have in target selection and verification once in the air... anyone know?

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Satnav blunder sends Belgian granny 1,450km to Croatia

Alexandicity
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Re: Question:

Very much still the case. In fact, the most reliabile indicator that you're crossing the German border into Luxembourg is that there are a cluster of a half dozen fuel stations within a 50m stretch of road.

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Curiosity finds organics on Mars, but possibly not of Mars

Alexandicity
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WTF?

Re: So what's the airspeed of an unladen Instagram?

You say that, but I am genuinely confused as to how they managed to take this photo. I can't see any way they could get this angle. Hell, the mast on which the camera is mounted is clearly in the photo some distance away! It's as if they came across a huge mirror on a stick.

I'm guessing it's a mix of surface photos and some very good 'rover CGI that someone has painstakingly stitched together for some purpose... can anyone enlighten me?

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Long-suffering Virgin Media victims see no end to vid PURGATORY

Alexandicity
Meh

Which VM network is this issue on?

Is this on VM's Fibre/Cable network, or their ADSL one? Or both? I was about to sign up for VM Fibre, but clearly if they can't deliver one of the most basic functions of a high-speed network, what's the point?

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Dating site eHarmony plays data-breach me-too

Alexandicity
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Good idea on the passphrases...

XKCD has a nice justification for what you're suggesting:

http://xkcd.com/936/

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Election hacked, drunken robot elected to school board

Alexandicity
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Re: Animated cartoon character versus a politician?

It's true, number of dimensions is my most important issue about a candidate!

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Alexandicity

Bender 4 Prez

They could have made their study a little more interesting. I assume that since the code was released for public testing, that the code was unlikely to see further detailed inspection. I might have added a discrete bit of work that would sit there until election day, add Bender to the actual list of candidates, and allocate plenty of votes to him. Would make for interesting watching when they wanted to release the final tallies :)

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Crap PINs give wallet thieves 1-in-11 jackpot shot

Alexandicity

My system for PINs

Probably should be an AC for this post but oh well. I assume you all are upstanding readers who wouldn't dare try to nick my card and guess my code.

I have 6 bank cards of which half are used frequently. The others I don't use so often and commonly used to forget their PINs (as a good bankee, I would never write them down). I have since build a system where each PIN is XXYY where the YY are the same to each card and XX are the two digits in two particular positions on the long card number. This way, each PIN is different, statistically random, yet easy to determine if you know the two common digits and the positions of the long number to read. I'm hoping there's no gaping hole in that strategy - the only vulnerability I see is if someone found out one of my PINs and somehow knew my strategy and got hold of a second card, they might be able to work out the second card's PIN.

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Alexandicity
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Re: Re: Re: Bogus research

While I get your point about people wanting to mislead the crooks via the study, they'd probably want to do it the other way around. They'd want to deter the crooks by indicating that the PINs are hard to guess while actually using very guessable codes. It is not to the general public's advantage, as I see it, to tell potential thieves and muggers that a code is easily breakable (even if it's not).

But this all assumes that the majority of the respondents are that cunning and think in detail about security when answering questionnaires. I didn't read it, but I assume the study also had some manner of consideration of incorrect responses..?

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Playmonauts could down airliners, Canuck flyboy warns

Alexandicity

In the UK, you issue a NOTAM - Notice to Airmen - before such a launch. This is communicated to any aircraft in the area. Balloons only transit the aircraft operational altitude briefly, the amount of time they spend there is pretty small. There's basically no risk to aircraft, even if such balloon launches were to happen as frequently as they did in the 70s.

Slightly peeved at the attention this Canadian Legonaut is getting; everyone's acting as if this was the first such mission ever. Such amateur balloonery, complete with patriotic lego stratonaut, has all been done numerous times before. Not at least by the PARIS team here (although, that was with a Playmonaut which is a COMPLETELY different concept...)

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Alexandicity
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Nah, almost nothing could do any damage to the aircraft

The aerodynamic forces over the nose of the aircraft would basically ensure that nothing could impact it. That's why you never hear of aircraft being hit by birds in the windscreens. This applies to most of the aircraft - the exception being the huge sucking engines, which are routinely tested resilience in such events. But, as you say, a balloon (or even the payload) of an amateur mission is unlikely to do much damage to a jet...

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