re: Thermodynamics

If only we could revolt against our evil thermodynamic overlords and overthrow their monstrous reign of terror and inevitable thermodynamic doom.

Re: Look at all the craters

And that is why you would want to build your facility as deep underground as is feasible. Not only does it help protect against the inevitable small impacts, it also gives almost 100% protection from those nasty cosmic rays and other sources of radiation out there in space. Living long term on the surface of the moon seems like an excessively risky proposal.

@KrisM

This would be like when we switched to microUSB, manufacturers would no longer need to ship chargers which meant less cost, smaller packaging, etc. They never did deliver on that one either.

What will happen is that manufacturers will now start to ship 2 chargers. One wireless and one wired. And increase the price a load to compensate.

@peter_dtm

Don't know about the visa issue, but broadband over 12 miles is easy enough via either a wireless link or a semi-permanent cable. 12 miles of shallow fiber to a permanently anchored ship shouldn't cost that much compared to the cost of the ship itself.

Pirate radio broadcasts fall under international treaties wrt regulated radio broadcasting so are much easier to tackle, I suspect.

@Lydonator

I see nothing illegal with what you describe. Of course if Samsung did decide to do this, nobody would buy Samsung TVs any more because they can get a TV from a competitor that doesn't insert ads when turned on.

TVC doesn't have any competitors yet. Once (if) the broadcasters catch up and start doing live IP broadcasts as well, TVC is likely to lose a lot of people because the broadcasters can do with less ads, better quality, etc. at the same profit margin

@trt

No, the whole point of the article is that the toilets don't suck. If they did there wouldn't be a problem.

@Sir Runcible Spoon

That is no mere exhaust plume, that is a cloud of rapidly expanding plasma, created where the air inside the railgun is pushed aside by the projectile and turned into plasma by the enormous electrical energy required to propel said projectile.

This heating in turn causes the very air itself to combust, oxidising the nitrogen in the air. Then there's the minute amounts of material being torn off the railgun's rail and the projectile itself in the process of firing and after exiting the barrel, you get a considerable shockwave from the supersonic projectile throwing up dust.

Re: Archive

He did, but someone changed the file formats since then and it's impossible recover from the backup as a result.

@Absent and Ilgaz

Absent: You meant the problem where you could bridge the electrical gap between the 2 antennae, causing a serious reduction in sensitivity? Because as far as I can see with the new design it still has 2 antennae and an electrical gap placed where it can be bridged to detune the antennae. And we're still dealing with antennae meant for different wavelengths so bridging the gap is likely to be a big nono still.

Ilgaz: Pick your android phone. Any android phone. Now instead of typing your request into the google bar that should be on your homepage, press the little microphone icon instead and issue your request in the same natural language you would have used for the iPhone.

Admittedly, it will not offer to call the nearest restaurant for you, but it will show you a list of Google search results including a link to the map so you can see where the nearest restaurant is. Apple has polished things a little and made some improvements to the functionality that the Google boys haven't yet but the big thing they're going on about with the natural language searching? Yeah. Google and Android were there first.

re: Any relation

Seems unlikely. He didn't try to get himself killed with those helium balloons after all.

@A_been

Nokia vs Apple, Nokia wanted triple damages because they considered Apple's infringement of its patents to be will full (ie, they knew about the patents and then went and didn't license them anyyways).

Samsung may be suing over FRAND patents, but they could also have some patents specific to Apple's 3g implementation that weren't included in patent pools because they work as extras or add-ons to base 3g?

re: Simples

Better solution. Put a nuclear rocket engine in orbit, fly to Mars in about a month, less if it happens to be in a favourable position at a time. This also helps reduce the risks from radiation, micro-meteorites and various random failures as a result of equipment decaying over time.

Actually, put 2 nuclear rocket engines in orbit, so that if the first suffers a failure while it's idling in Mars orbit, the second can come to the rescue. Use SpaceX's cheap rocket lift capability to put the required parts and the manpower needed to build it in orbit and you can probably have one for the same cost as the planned return to the moon.

re: Wither IE

From what I understand, TLS 1.1 is available (Uncertain on 1.2, it might be as well), but TLS 1.0 is the default.

As noted, the only browser that both supports TLS 1.2 and uses it by default is Opera.

re: cc protection

Yes and no. You are effectively covered because you can in fact dispute the charge with your credit card company.

You aren't covered because Paypal will then freeze your account, all the money in it and send you a bill for the amount you disputed + fees. I've personally had to take them to court over this when they refused to refund a fraudulent transaction, I had my bank pull it and they froze my account and sent me a bill. Small claims court here in the Netherlands found them in the wrong and gave them a 100 euro fine for every day my account was frozen, starting 14 days after the judgement was passed.

@Gary B.

You mean the air planes typically flying at kilometer or more above the ground? You know, a good distance away from the Lightsquared 4G implementation?

Some supplement may be necessary for landing guidance, like ILS and its radio beacons.

So no, this really won't be a problem for the next gen air traffic control systems. Especially since those GPS systems haven't been deployed yet and as such have absolutely no reason not to have sufficient filters.

Re: Uninformed

Yes, it will eventually suffer from a decaying orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.

However we'd like to continue spaceflight for the next few thousand years, not get stuck on the planet because there's too much debris in orbit to get there safely. Once debris reaches the tipping point, it's entirely possible that large parts of Earth orbit become nigh impossible to traverse for hundreds if not thousands of years.

@Bill Cumming

Just to correct you. Relative speeds of up to 7km/s are possible in GEO. At those speeds, objects impacting eachother pack several times more kinetic energy than exploding TNT.

Also, the anime PlanetES.

@Boris the Cockroach

Even then, getting to root from user space is going to be a lot harder for the malware writers. I'm not going to say that they won't manage sooner or later anyways, just that it'll hopefully be easier to closer the gaps there, contain the malware to userspace where it can be relatively easily cleaned up.

re: Couple of questions please

Well, such an e-mail would give reasonable grounds for the police to subsequently seize and search all of the back-ups to confirm wether or not those e-mails are indeed fake. Then if it turns out they're not fake they'll have obtained legal evidence against the lot of them.

Unless NI went around cryptographically signing all their e-mails (And their encryption keys weren't nicked in this attack), there is no way easy and certain way for anyone to confirm wether or not a given e-mail is genuine without going through the back-ups to find it. The offline back-ups, that is.

re: Dead in the water

Do you think any other encryption was different in its beginning implementations? Of course not. We're still finding implementation flaws from time to time in every modern encryption scheme.

And then we plug them and we keep looking for more of them, in the hope that we can find them and plug them before someone malicious manages to find one and abuse it. This particular one sounds like an implementation flaw that really should never have happened. The detector should never fall over to normal measurements during the key transmission sequence.

Re: Stupid Stunt

Darwin awards do not require the recipient to perform his stunt unaided. They do require that no innocent bystanders are injured.

Of course the man is disqualified from a full Darwin award for the simple reason that he's already reproduced, I propose an honourable mention to the man.

Now on to things less likely to annoy the moderatrix.

Can anyone find out with who the idea of self-burial for good luck originated? They need to be informed that clearly, self-burial is a bad luck charm. Look at how bad this guy's luck became after burying himself after all.

@Gene Cash

And because Elon Musk is afraid of that too, he's keeping a majority share in the company. If the shareholders disagree, his vote alone will push whatever he wants to do through any ways.

As for it being premature, we should have started with serious space exploration well over 2 decades ago, when we had the technology to put a nuclear reactor in orbit and use a NERVA to get to and from Mars in a month or two.

re: Oh yeah?

There is one major difference between opening port X for a given IPv6 address and forwarding port X for a NATed IPv4 address. You can only do the latter once, which means you are shit out of luck if two computers/devices on your network want to use the same port to receive inbound connections.

Not much of a problem for most programs, as they can switch ports, but want to play the same game on the internet with 2 people on a LAN? One of the people on the LAN must host, otherwise the other person can't join. Is the game using a peer to peer approach? Well, you just got screwed over because now it'll never work.

Clearly not a ninja

As the police were able to find him in the first place when he obviously did not want to be found, he also failed to escape using smoke bombs or some similar diversion.

re: Pregnant sheep

If you established that a pregnant sheep is a sheep which bears 1 lamb, then yes, this makes sense.

Of course that would be silly with animals that have a high chance of giving birth to twins or triplets and you would instead say that a pregnant sheep is any sheep which bears any number of lambs. Now your pregnancy rate is down to normal again.

Phase 5

Will be to drop support for it entirely.

re: Oh Yes...

If you had an understanding with the system admin/tech guys, surely you could just unplug the motherboard, showing a complete non-boot and then store the undamaged machine just in case you ever need a temporary machine or want to see a computer burst into flames because you applied 230v AC to the motherboard and CPU?

Particle radiation shielding

Have the boffins in question considered anything with, say, hydrogen atoms in it? Like the water supply the astronauts will have to bring with them? Surprisingly good shield against both neutron and high velocity particle radiation.

Alternatively, there are a number of plastics out on the market that are quite efficient at stopping these types of radiation as well. No need to go all the way to high powered electromagnetic fields to stop a little radiation.

re: Don't complain

Or c) Get a bailout from the UK government for a few billion pounds after a portion of their customers leave.

Crime and Punishment

While EA and Bioware can enforce whatever rules they want on their forums, if they're going to ban people from playing (singleplayer) games for forum infractions, I do want to see them dragged to the courts to defend their T&Cs and DRM.

Claim physical damages equal to the cost of the game and emotional/mental damages as ridiculously high as you can go.

Where the hydrogen comes from

The reactor core is getting hot enough to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. From what I understand, this process starts to happen at around 1200 degrees Celsius in those reactors which is only possible if the reactor core is partially exposed to air.

@Saggar

The 7 to 1 ratio is for a return trip, Earth orbit to Mars orbit and back.

It's a bit high for commercial space flight still, but plenty low to use for Mars missions.

And when the thing gets back to Earth, you can just refuel it and perform any required maintenance before sending it back out. It won't be a single use design.

@P Henry

Not sure on the specifics of the engine proposed for the mission, but 39 days from Earth departure to Mars orbital insertion with a good VASIMR engine and a nuclear reactor to power it is not at all an unreasonable figure.

For example, a trip from Earth to Mars AND BACK! takes only 30 days if you can keep up a constant thrust of 0.01g (You will expend roughly 370,000m/s of DeltaV doing so). For a VASIMR drive with a specific impulse of 50km/s, that would require a ridiculously high mass fraction (Specifically, 1636:1. Meaning you carry 1636kg of propellant for every kg of spaceship)

A slower transit, taking 39 days would result in considerably smaller mass fractions. A quick back of the envelope calculation gives a 7 to 1 mass ratio for a 39 day transit. Of course that doesn't get you into Earth orbit or down from Mars orbit.

re: OEM = sold with a PC. However...

I don't know about the laws in the UK, however I suspect that like here, they do not allow such clauses and if the software providers changes the license without informing, the new license does not apply.

Depending on the judge and his interpretation of the original license and the new license, it may even get the contract considered unenforceable entirely.