Holding your breath

I watched the Apollo landings as a child and whilst it was enthralling I didn't have the context to understand its importance, so I didn't get the same emotions as later on watching the very first shuttle mission - when that was a New Era dawning - not only for the safety of the people aboard, but the future of manned space travel and so of all of humanity. When it landed safely the very first time I suspect millions finally breathed again....

I agree this has the same feeling about it. Commercialisation should open up lots of possibilities, again the future of mankind in space is at stake. Plus the heart-in-mouth feeling that if the ISS were destroyed, or nearly so, very possibly no human would go to space ever again.

OK, I know the Chinese will, actually, and independently of the West+exUSSR, if they can, but nontheless, that's the feeling....

Performance loss at altitude?

Um, don't they mean that at altitude the vacuum you can get is going to be less *in comparison with ambient*. That is, if you're trying to test a thing to withstand vacuum inside and 1Bar outside, doing it at altitude is no good. Ie. if you start at 800mBar, you can only pump it down to 800mBar below ambient ie. 80% of the relative pressure that you might want.

But for your application, you only care about absolute pressure in the vacuum vessel, so it doesn't matter at all that you're at altitude. IMHO. So your losses are coming from somewhere else.

Weekend bibbles

I assume the weekend pulsing has been smoothed out of that graph. For a while Chrome consistently overtook IE at weekends, as people used their own machines where they have a choice, then IE goes ahead in the week when people at work use their IS mandated setup.

Was there any reason except bloat for the graph to be a flash animation?

Paralysis

Just: he's absolutely right about the paralysis of basically the whole of the West AFAICT in executing on anything new really, not just big stuff. Building *anything* new seems to be prevented by allowing objections on the grounds that people will go there, and the building traffic will be noisy and dangerous, so we're doomed to endure the infrastructure we have and no more; ever. ;-(

Telegraph idiots....

...say "Wind farms cause climate change". Deliberately misleading dontcha think?

The Atom was more a system 3

albeit with totally different video. But a system 1 had no video and no qwerty keyboard at all.

Best machine ever made, the Atom.

Problems with this...

This would be OK so long as it's the link speed you get to your exchange. But the same eejits who complain about their net speed right now would complain that their download speed from Timbuktu was 6kB/s even though their local link speed is 24Mb/s. So it doesn't solve the problem of the general public not understanding what any of it means.

The result of course would be a tripling of the nominal price, because many people pay only 1/3 of it... so...

Second problem, so I'm fortunate enough to live near the exchange. I'm happy paying $OldPrice; they introduce this and my costs triple. Can I have it backed off to 1/3 the datarate for 1/3 the money?

From Newsbiscuit

http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2012/04/08/james-cameron-astonished-to-learn-there-really-was-a-titanic/

But it never said the dead beast sank then exploded, so the pressure at depth is irrelevant. It said it floated and bloated then burst and sank. Didn't it?

The Secret State

The PM cannot order a nuclear strike; he or she can only authorise nuclear release. The military command(ers) order it after the PM has authorised it.

Seems that as always they sued the wrong person

Sky paid the FA for "exclusive" UK rights to FA generated content, yes?

Seems to me that Sky should have sued the FA for allowing the FA-generated content to be available by means other than Sky, rather than the little guy who made use - legally - of those other means. Ie. it's the FA that leaked the data by selling it to other broadcasters too. If those *broadcasters* didn't make their forwarding of the content limited in scope, then it's the FA's problem - but of course they don't care - so it's up to Sky to make them care by suing.

Solar wind comes from the sun?

...so the orientation of the day/night sides of the planet in your picture seem, ahem, implausible....

Unless the planet's orbital velocity is meant to be waaay greater than the solar wind speed, which I don't think is the case?

Supersonic in terms of the speed of "sound" in the ambient solar wind I expect.

Hmmm, beer 'o'clock already...

"capable of redirecting calls your bank has made to verify"

I think the article means "dupes the *customer* into redirecting calls your bank [will] made to verify [transactions]" - ie. they trick you into the change-my-phone-number dialog and substitute their own number without you seeing. Scary.

UFO

What's that UFO from 1:01 to 1:03 in the upper atmosphere?

Jupiter?

Water and free electricity

...at the lunar poles; constant sunshine, and huge temperature gradients for thermoelectric too, so long as you turn the equipment slowly...

Google shares tank...

..with sharks with frickin' laser beams?

Another tagline where I couldn't tell the nouns from the verbs without reading the article.

Cheap batteries

Yeah, Kodak name seems today to only exist on cheap batteries, and presumably flash cards for cameras and other peripherals - ie. no added value at all, but you could see the sense when it was a name for things photographic.

As for Fuji succeeding, remember Fuji is part of that whole Fuji Heavy Industries zaibatsu, which makes ships and cranes and trains through diggers and dozers and all Subarus down to nuts bolts motors chips and PCs. It was already multi capable and robust and massive, makes Kodak at its best look like a niche chemical co.

That would be...

"hacking and stealing a US aircraft" which was illegally in its sovereign airspace.

So perhaps legally intercepting and impounding might be better words.

OK, we don't know either way where it was when interfered with, and probably never will.

Read Lomborg

Read 'the Skeptical Environmentalist' to grok how these stats can be used two diametrically opposite ways.

Eg. more children die of starvation in Africa than ever before - but the proportion is smaller than it's ever been. Both are because more *don't* die in childbirth, of other diseases, war, &c - so things are *better* than they've ever been. But Presentism (qv) and charity publicists must always find the doomiest story....

Windows 2000 is stable. Now.

My laptops run either Ubuntu LTE, or Windows. The Windows ones have become extremely stable in the last year since they stopped doing updates to Windows 2000; since then, I can just turn the machine on and it, like, works! without using all the CPU and disc for 20 minutes on MS update, without insisting on a reboot, without any wizards bothering me. It's like it actually does the job it's supposed to, without stealing my time or electricity or attention.

Less likely?

"An asteroid collision with Earth could now be less likely" - wtf? Surely the likelihood is entirely unchanged by the existence of new tracking software. ITYM An *unexpected* asteroid collision with Earth could now be less likely....

Happens everywhere

This happens everywhere, the BBCs 'most read' and 'most shared' periodically suffer ectopic articles that are from years ago but interesting/weird enough headlines that I, for one, click to see what it's about, thus regrettably driving it up the ratings. It's not a stable system 'cos there's no "Bale out 'cos I didn't want to see this" back-button to withdraw your pseudo-vote for the story.

7,8 = EE Canberra, Glostor Meteor

I recently saw a Meteor flying at Duxford, beautiful, first post-restoration show.

Our first deployed jet aircraft.

Idiots

..conflating the speed of teh interwebz with "Broadband speed".

Broadband is just the final link, it'll be the same all the time for a particular endpoint.

GNAB

...that's bang out of order.

Grunt == Ground?

Surely....

Zeppelicious?

Radar images?

So how come the Radar images appear to be illuminated from above? Surely our ping comes from right here on Earth so we would see it illuminated full-face?

Or do you mean radio-frequency images, so the illumination is from the Sun's RF output?

Or is it all faked, like the pretend Russian mars-mission that just finished? ;-)

NatWest Online working now

Unsurprisingly, as they are one and the same.

They have warnings about some bits not being working yet, but no idea which bits, if any; probably just anticipating any left over wobbliness.

Open door for Pirates?

So when FM stations are illegal, everyone will listen only to the unlicensed FM stations, which will make a mint from the advertising, since they have an audience....

So, which speed of light?

Are they using speed-of-light through rock and that, or actual c in the comparison?

If the former a) it has to be an estimate, so error prone, and/or b) as neutrinos don't interact much with matter, surely the vacuum c is the applicable one? Maybe this'll say something important about neutrino interactions, rather than about c....

Stalkers' paradise

'nuff said.

BTDT

Yeah, in the early '80s playing too much Battlezone on an actual pub-type game that took money (!), walking back home (sober, daylight) I heard a light aircraft, and started turning left and right on the spot searching for the incoming missile. Didn't last long. But all this is no different from feeling jumpy and nervous in the deserted car-park after a zombie movie or whatever, or paranoid and depressed after watching The Wall....

One man cheese and wine society

Are you sure you haven't mixed up Jon P's Doctor with Jason King? Easily done.... frilly shirt, velvet smoking jacket...

Bogus sexist generalisation - do not read

Women think nuclear causes odd-shaped babies, which really really worries them; men don't care about babies of any kind so much? All sweeping generalisations are rubbish, I know.

American isolationism again

Their view that people who are not USAans are not really people and don't really matter, and nor are USAans who consort with them, comes though very clearly, depressing isn't it. It's especially noticeable IMHO that US politicians and media/adverts always say "Americans want..." rather than "people want..." thus excluding anyone else from the debate/opinion-forming. Imagine if a British politician started always saying "Britons..." or "The English" instead of "people" - it would play right into the hands of the EDL et al, .....but America is already there.

Blinding weapons

Isn't the problem with that usage that blinding weapons are illegal? So you have to either set fire to things or burns/kills people with the undesirable, unavoidable side-effect of a bit of blinding, or use a very low power laser which causes only temporary dazzling or short term recoverable blindness.

Not that I have any moral problem with blinding pirates or suicide bombers personally.... its when you accidentally do it to civilians, after all we're talking about the USA here.

Last...

When I was young, I always dreamed I would see the first flight of a reusable space vehicle, and I did; but I never dreamed I would see the last... (with apologies).

This is the 4th and final last mission because it's the 4th of the 4 shuttle orbiters. D'oh.

At home....

...surely your mobile coverage is not important; if you have t'internet, you also have a landline, so use that. And WiFi for uploading pictures &c.

Call me old-fashioned?