Posts by Dave Bell

My experience suggests the Switchover will improve things. I don't have a clear view of the nearby Belmont transmitter; like most of the village, we have to point our aerials at Emley Moor. The power increase meant that we could stop using aerial amplifiers, and we were also getting a strong enough signal from Belmont, about 100 degrees off-axis to be get viewable oictures. So it might be worth the wait for you.

Doesn't matter which ISP you're with, it's the strand of copper between you and the exchange which is the key. Your's sounds pretty decent. Maybe the evening choke-off will ease, as capacity is added to cope with YouView. I'm not sure I want any more TV, but will I have to subscribe to be able to get useful bandwidth?

I have some "hard" questions which the sales-droids never seem able to answer. That could easily be another, but since they will be advertising the hell out of YouView, I doubt it will be as difficult as learning whether there are plans for IPv6

The energy cost of a launch to GEO is trivial. This system will only need to run for a few hours to cover that.

But there are people who will see the figures, with all those zeroes, and scream and point about greenhouse gas production.

Similarly, some will make a fuss about the system pumping more energy into an overheating planet. Well, the Earth is pretty big, and the extra surface area is a tiny increase. Figure in the reduction in greenhouse gases: just make sure you use the "right" model for the effects.

In the end, this depends on being able to do the construction work, and, wonderful though the ISS is, this is something that is going to depend on robots. Not the mechanical men of so much sci-fi, but remotely operated machines, well beyond the automatic docking of a supply ship to the ISS.

NASA spent huge amounts on spacesuits to get a man's hands on the job. They might have made a better return on a mechanical hand, and the control and feedback mechanisms to let a human hand control it. Even if the astronaut had to be in the Shuttle (communications lag), did he really need that awkward personal spaceship?

There are ways to set up the domain so that email to the domain goes to an account held elsewhere. It's what I do. If i changed my ISP, I'd need to change a few redirects from my personally owned domain name, but I am my own tech support.

If a business has a domain set up by somebody who doesn't document this stuff, that somebody didn't do a competent job. An annual reminder is possibly a good idea anyway. Mention any new services, if you like. If you're selling domain-name services it's worth keeping in cont#act with your customers--few people deal direct with Nominet.

Actually, that last point can reasonably prompt hollow laughter. Who are Nominet's customers?

Moffat has managed to make all the awkward details that RTD used into irrelevances. The Time War, the Master ruling Earth, all the twists and turns between Nine admitting he's the last Time Lord and the whole damn lot of them coming back to bring about the end of time.

Oh, some of the tricks were quite logical, but I doubt RTD could cope with the lack of a definite ending in the DW format.

Is Moffat better? He's picking up stuff from all over written SF. He's not afraid to write for an audience that actually thinks about what's happening. DW has picked up some of the same appeal as a really good detective mystery.

There has been a change. I've been watching this show all my life, and I can understand why the discomfort about the shifts. But looking back at how I was trying to figure an answer to the problem that was set up back in April, I really want to know what this guy does next. Because He's set it up so the Doctor has to be discreet, has to be more subtle, has to save the day without making a big splash.

I think it is going to be interesting.

And, because of the interactions between the plasma and the magnetic field, a magnetic containment probably messes with the speed of sound.

This can't be the first scientific paper to have come out of work on the ISS, and maybe it's a little bit of a stunt, but having one of the authors in space when it is submitted and published; that is one of those little signs that things are changing.

After reading the story, I do feel the wording of the headline is misleading.

One of the add-ons I use is "No-Script", and my experience suggests that a good many of the hassles, such as delays and hang-ups, come from the multiplicity of web-page scripts being thrown at me.

Fast release-cycles maybe do some things well, but, to use a TV-script term, sometimes I wonder if there's a story-arc. One of the outfits I deal with, in the USA, has a weekly release cycle, but has just announced that releases will slow down for the rest of this year, with staff taking leave for Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year and other seasonal stuff. So how do Mozilla expect to pull it off?

Short bursts is standard for any machine gun. Better control of ammo usage. Even a Vickers didn't fire a 250-round belt as one single burst. Though a 10-gun company of Vickers guns did fire a million rounds in 12 hours.

I doubt this particular infernal machine is up to that standard

Look it up, guys.

It used the W54 warhead, with a yield of 20 tons TNT. and there were two different launchers. with a maximum range of 2.5 miles. Using the short-range launcher would have been a tad hairy because the effects seems to have depended on the immediate radiation effects (it wasn't a neutron bomb, but the idea was similar).

It was about as small as you could make a nuke, and the scary thing seems to be that they were controlled by Sergeants. (Who probably have more maturity than the average 2nd Lieutenant, but they're still not officers.)

I'm sure, when I was looking at this subject earlier this year, that the ICO's advice was to handle IP addesses as though they were personal data, because you didn't know, as your server wrote it to a logfile, whether it was coming from an internet cafe or from a home. It was, I think, pointed out that it was a lot like a telephone number in that aspect.

It does look more practical than some of the other designs that were shortlisted.

They do talk about using better insulating materials, but 400 kV will be enough for a pretty long arc through the air, or along the insulator surface on a foggy day.

400 kV RMS to earth is more like 700 kV between phases as I recall. I think the electrical engineers will have something to say about these.

The big problem

Printing and distribution are quite a small part of the cover price of a book or magazine, and since the electronic version attracts VAT, there isn't much room to cut the price when you sell to a e-reader.

Do you want works of the same quality as now? Some of those freebies and ultra-cheap ebooks are of awful quality.

It's the speed of light in a vacuum that's the constant. Your recollection is correct. Relativity comes from a need to explain why the speed of light doesn't depend on the direction the observer is moving.

Strictly, faster than light gives mathematically valid results, but has other implications.

I wouldn't worry about this result until we get an outbreak of blue phone-boxes.

It's more the complexity, and the sometimes limited time to react to a problem. And I can see NASA having work for astronaut-trained test pilots. They could do basic astronaut training, then work as a test pilot (with time for refresher courses), and go back to full-time astronaut when they are assigned a mission.

That's possibly too simple. But doesn't the RAF and USAF have pilots spending time doing desk jobs? Not just paperwork on the Squadron.

DOS Batch Files fell wll short of Unix shell scripting, but they can be used to do some fancy stuff. Old-time Demon customers, who used the KA9Q-based DOS package, might recall the demon.bat file.

I don't recall any clear explanations of the overall processes in any MS-DOS manual, it wasn't even presented as a coherent set of commands, but there was a useful programming language there.

As for typing, there's nothing new in experienced people saying it should be properly taught in schools. My great-uncle Albert was saying much the same in the 1920s.

Tax dodging corporates

In the USA, mail-order has been able to avoid local sales taxes for many decades, and Amazon takes huge advantage of that.

They don't get away with it here so you need to add 20% VAT to the US price

I reckon the NHS is worth it.

Statistics & Survey Design

This is an old problem in designing a survey. Partly, you ask different questions than the obvious. Partly you try to convince the people you're asking that teachers or parents will not see the answers.

With the requirement to be "open" about how they manage traffic, I can see why some ISPs will squeal. I know it doesn't apply here in the UK, but I'm sure that everyone can recall instances of less than open advertising and management here. What does "unlimited" mean? Is it "open" to have usage limits or charges without having a tool to inform users of how much of the limit has been used?

My ISP, back in 2005, had such a tool, and a usage cap. Then they dropped both. They've had a quite large usage cap for a while now, but no accessible measurement tool.

As I said, not UK law. Not that strong. And things will have to be argued out in court. But a bit of honesty from the ISPs seems to be what the regulations are trying for. Only a bunch of crooks would squeal about these requirements.

I'm certainly getting sick and tired by the ease with which intrusive advertising phone calls can arrive here with no way of identifying where they came from.

"The Caller Withheld Their Number"

Gmail, I can tag an email as spam, and if enough people do that, it gets automatically tagged as from a spam source.

I'm not sure I want that for phone calls, but I'd like to be able to tell the telco that a caller has been abusing their system. They're ignoring so many of the protections we can have. They're outside OfCom rules. Why can't I press a number on my phone and tell the telco that I don't want further calls from this anonymous source?

Or the utility to load the disk image onto that shiny new drive...

It potentially kills a lot of legitimate system management tools used both by DIY enthusiasts and large commercial operations. Booting from a network image might be workable. Or does the software have to be signed by some central key authority? And is that Microsoft?

I'm looking at the timescales here, and wondering what you could have picked from. I suspect, for one thing, that if Windows was even involved, it was NT, and the reality was mostly some form of Unix.

And you wanted something that, as a programming environment, would be available for a long time.

The world looks a bit different now. I had a few megabytes of storage then. Now we talk in terabytes. I reckon they didn't so so badly, if they only found 40,000 bugs.

Different games, different math. But it is, after all, the Americans who introduced the double-zero to roulette wheels.

Poker is a game where it can be argued that skill plays an important part, maybe enough that in some places it is not, in law, a game of chance. Part of that skill is in calculating the odds of winning against what you have to bet, and the value of the pot. So math does matter, and a good Poker player is less of a gambler than you might think. But judging the reactions oif the other players is also part of the game, and that isn't the same on-line.

On the other hand, I know how a bookie works out the odds on a horse race. It reflects what is bet on which horse, not a horse's chance of winning. Blackjack, there's card counting which can beat the house advantage, but if they think you are doing it, they will invite you to leave the casino.

There are ways to come out ahead, but they depend on the system being honest. And that's where this outfit seems to have gone wrong. But how convenient for gambling operations in the USA that they were able to find out.

They do seem to be trying to push some very particular buttons, that's for sure. and they both look to be something of a cliche.

It all makes me wonder if the game is any good.

I'll note that the percentage difference in chamber pressure at sea level and at umpteen thousand metres might not be so much, once the motor is burning.

The SRB apparently ran at 900psi at liftoff, so the effects of losing the vacuum would be less than 2%. I don't expect you're using a motor achieving quite so much pressure, so the pressure difference might matter. On the other hand, it might mean that you don't need the vacuum for a useful ignition test.