Posts by Fursty Ferret

Agreed - and while they're at it they could link the account to iPlayer. It's utterly pathetic that they spend a fortune employing Capita goons in order to bully people who don't watch TV into paying, but at the same time the only way iPlayer content is secured is by asking "Do you have a TV licence?" every time you try to stream something.

Re: The mystery wrinkles

Solar flares don't really bother aircraft electronics, the impact is on radio transmissions mainly. The big cause of SEU is cosmic rays which come from outside the solar system, as they carry enough energy to make it a significant way through the atmosphere. In fact, high solar activity tends to reduce the amount of cosmic rays reaching lower levels.

Re: Caught with chopsticks

For much the same reasons your car wouldn't work afterward if you dropped it into the Atlantic from fifty feet with the engine running and then fished it out again.

Re: Intersatellite Links?

If you were a telecoms provider and the price was right, wouldn't you want to consider transferring your traffic to Starlink and cut down on your own overheads?

Re: AC/air supply?

APU tends to be used pretty much exclusively when passengers are on board. The fixed ground air system can just about keep an empty aircraft cool on a hot day but can't cope with a 200 people squished into a metal tube.

Re: Return Journey

Takes a LOT of radiation to give someone radiation sickness. Even more to kill them. They might not be very well but DNA has stunning proof-reading and correction built right in. I’d peg psychological issues as by far the biggest threat on a manned mission. After all, is someone who sets out knowing it’s almost certainly a one-way trip actually the best person for the job?

Re: Phone down

Doesn't matter who they are, how much they earn or how important they think they are. Anyone yelling and ranting like that at me down the phone is just getting the call ended straight away.

Damn straight. The one time I was sworn at by a colleague (needlessly, I might add) I walked off the job. Cost to the company? €126,000. The man that swore at me is no longer employed there.

Re: ships or decks never catch fire

The energy released in a lithium-ion battery fire is from the chemical make-up of the battery, not from the electrical energy stored within. A fully charged battery has a higher potential to start a fire, but equally a deep-discharged one is also more prone to ignition. Which comes down to the fact that manufacturers specify a defined charge level for shipping (20-50% on average).

>> Are you implying it's okay to run over children as long as you don't make a habit of it?

I'm pretty sure that was a mannequin of a child, not a real one.

Like everyone on the internet the producers of this video have a point to prove and will selectively select footage that supports their case. It's cool to hate Tesla and Tesla-drivers at the moment (and there are excellent reasons for doing so, mainly led by the Nazi manchild who's superficially running the company), hence the downvotes on a comment which suggested that maybe, just *maybe* it might be worth having a closer look at the footage.

Re: a quiet life

>> and it now supports dual-booting with a Bitlocker-encrypted copy of Windows.

Does it now? Be very careful and have a hard copy of your Bitlocker unlock key to hand. Microsoft has got this so tightly locked down that you need 2FA to login to Windows again after making changes to the UEFI partition layout, which may come as a bit of a surprise if you're on the road.

I'm disappointed that an install of Fedora with LUKS encryption is still a massive pain in the arse.

Re: Another good reason to stay with Windows 10 for now?

Yes, but Windowsifying Linux is just putting users in the uncanny valley of operating systems where it nearly, but not quite, works as expected, and is utterly impossible to troubleshoot over the phone.

I'm a big fan of Elementary OS for people who want to move away from Windows.

Interesting - my Volvo did a very similar thing to me a few years ago, applying a pretty violent steering input on a quiet motorway. It pulled the wheel straight through my hands and nearly took out a car two lanes away.

Re: "as it would pass through the rotating blades during flight"

You test, but the test stipulation is 13 small birds (starlings or similar). It’s much safer to fly through a flock of birds and continue to land than it is to try to avoid them or perform a go-around.

Re: Staying in your lane and maintaining speed of traffic

What is interesting is that how much of it is almost subliminal. Occasionally I find my Tesla refuses to pass a slower-moving vehicle in the next lane. Almost invariably when I've taken over to accelerate past them a quick glance across shows the driver on their phone. The slight drifting and weaving in the lane is almost unnoticeable to me, but is obviously triggering something in its tiny brain.

Re: Those were the days my friend, we thought they'd never end...

>> no onerous health and safety regulations

What do you think defined the modern idea of "health and safety"? In reality it was the structured and logical attitude towards risk developed during the Apollo missions.

What you're conflating it with is litigation fear which leads to the circumstances where anything deemed slightly risky is banned outright because people are too lazy or incompetent to do risk assessments, and so "elf an safety" gets the blame. As someone who works in an industry revolutionised by modern safety practices, this casual blaming is an insult to the people in whose blood our health and safety regulations are written in.

Not necessarily related to OpenAI, but I've noticed this too. People that are (superficially) intelligent are falling for major conspiracy theories. There are now countless people who believe that Covid vaccines are a population control tool, that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is perfectly reasonable, and that the world is being controlled by a shadowy business cartel. One of them captains long-haul passenger jets, although I didn't push the case as to whether he believed in chemtrails or not.

While I subscribe to the fact that if you believe in conspiracy theories you're a moron, it's concerning that people who have demonstrated flawed analysis and decision making processes are in a situation where they might need to use the same skills in a life-or-death situation.

Re: I don't care if it is "hands free"

Does it make sure your eyes are looking at the road out in front of you

Actually, yes. The eye tracking is surprisingly sensitive and will nag you if you glance away from the road for longer than it takes to change radio station or check the map.

Re: Bad timing for Musk...

Dunno. There are a couple of videos on Twitter which shows incredible dexterity, but debate is split over whether they're genuinely robotic or just CGI / human hands. Which is, I suppose, a sign of how far His Muskiness has fallen.

Re: Is there a better advertisement

>> rather than the "smart cruise control" it more closely resembles.

Having had a Tesla as a rental car recently even that's stretching it.

Re: Does this include Tesla?

Tesla drivers fund the Supercharger network via vehicle purchase. It's a totally different proposition. Should a random passerby have a guaranteed right to sleep in your spare room if they offer to pay towards the mortgage? No.

On the other hand the face that Jakub's personal website is utterly confusing and impossible to navigate says an awful lot about the current state of UI on Linux.

Re: Serif PagePlus...

I, on the other hand, am not so impressed with the Affinity model. You can keep using the older versions that you paid for, but once about half the people you work with have upgraded you've got no choice but to follow suit as the older versions won't so much as look at anything produced by the newer one.

On top of that I paid for the full package about 2 weeks before v3 was released, and Affinity's response to me asking for an upgrade (or even a discount code) was a big fat middle finger and ****-you via email. So now I pay for Adobe CC mainly out of spite.

Re: Completely uninformed about the legalities here

Awkward, but understandable. Massive marketing boon if your competitor accidentally drives over someone.

Re: Flip Side

Every so often I turn off my ad-blocker in response to one of the guilting "Do you want us to starve?" pop-ups, but swiftly turn it back on when I realise what I'm getting. Smaller sites are suffering because of the decisions taken by big content providers (lookin' at you, Future) to bury the actual interesting stuff in a mixture of ads and sponsored advertorials.

To be honest, having the option to make micropayments in order to browse ad-free is quite appealing, but only to the extent that I'd like to add exceptions to ensure the particularly shitty websites (see previous on Future, or Reach) stay clear of my wallet. And they would be the first to take advantage anyway, probably hiding a million pixel-sized individual ads.

Re: And then there's the engine inlet problem...

On Airbus that's no real problem, Airbus has automatic de-icing, so when ice is detected the de-icing is switched on and the cold wet air cools the inlets.

Just to clarify, the reason this doesn't affect Airbus aircraft is because they use a different inlet and a different version of the LEAP engine which won't melt if you fly with the engine anti-ice on in non-icing conditions.

Boeing can make working ice detection (ish, it mostly works on the Dreamliner but has a few bugs), they never fitted it to the 737.