Esa says it will be a one-shot opportunity. Events will be taking place so far away that real-time radio control will be impossible.
What amazes me is that the lander has no RCS - it's launched at the comet, and if it bounces off or something there is no second go. I kinda expected the lander to have some RCS so it could automatically correct for unexpected troubles.
And who the hell plans on running a data center hard drive indefinitely?
ISTR that the big datacentres, such as Google, run drives until they fail - the systems are redundent enough to cope with a failure with no problems and they have so many drives that it's more cost effective to have a resilliant system and just run the drives into the ground than it is to preemptively retire them (and still have to cope with unexpected premature failures).
It's actually FTTC, and the last feet done via coaxial cable.
Yeah, thought as much - I was surprised to see someone saying that Virgin were doing FTTP. They certainly do FTTP for commercial installs, but I've never heard of it for residential.
The proportion of people who regularly watch hour long HD streaming video channels is probably pretty low.
Maybe that's because their ISP is providing inadequate service so they know better than to attempt it.
Or maybe its because they just aren't interested and therefore don't want to pay for a faster connection...
TFS mentions high quality video. You're not streaming high quality video with 10 or even 20Mbps.
Netflix recommends 5Mbps for HD streaming, so you are wrong.
HD on the internet is definitely not the same as HD broadcast TV. When it was first launched, the BBC HD DVB-S channel was doing H.264 at a little over 20Mbps. I think they've reduced that a bit on the HD channels now but certainly nowhere close to 5Mbps. A quick look at a 35 minute programme recorded on my MythTV system from BBC One HD shows 2.6GB, which is a little over 10Mbps - the BBC transponders use statistical multiplexing though, so if you're watching something with more fast action then you can probably expect a higher bit rate than that though. I think BSkyB do around 8Mbps for their HD transponders (and people complain about the quality of BSkyB's HD channels).
The fact that Netflix skimp on the bandwidth a bit shouldn't really be news anyway...
That said, 4Mbps *is* enough for a lot of people - a very high proportion of people use their internet connection for a bit of web surfing and email. The proportion of people who regularly watch hour long HD streaming video channels is probably pretty low. Remember that Slashdot users aren't exactly the "typical" home internet user. (I say this having moved from a 6Mbps ADSL connection to a 40Mbps VDSL connection - for the vast majority of uses the 6Mbps connection was absolutely fine and the only real reason I upgraded was because switching ISP actually worked out cheaper than sticking with the old 6Mbps connection)
This is Virgin Broadband using fiberoptic to the home.
Umm, when did Virgin start doing residential FTTP?
Actually, the link does not apply since the unfortunate victim in that case jumped off an 80ft cliff into a quarry. I am not aware of any account where the original challenge, a bucket of cold water to the head, actually caused the participant to expire and go to meet his maker.
The link I posted does mention some idiot woman who decided to chuck a bucket of water over herself while sitting on a horse. The expected thing happened - the horse bolted and the woman was killed.
Well, its still less stupid than throwing a bucket of ice water over your head and then posting it on Facebook.
No, not really. Which one is more likely to get you killed?
Exactly what I came here to post. We had the demonstration of what happens when you immerse something in liquid nitrogen vs what happens when you pour it over the top. Even if you didn't get to play with liquid nitrogen in school, there are lots of videos of this.
Although I was under the impression that the Leidenfrost effect only worked well on bare skin, so I'm surprised he didn't get frost burns to his scalp and clothed parts.
Too many companies continue to take their product, fiddle / fuck with it for the sake of change (keeping UI designers in a job I suspect) and then antagonise their users. Google maps is a prime example, the new google maps is AWFUL compared to the existing one, lacking several key features. Please, stop fiddling and changing things.
In this case, I believe that it was a deliberate change forced on their users because it will directly benefit Facebook.
It's one of the (great many) reasons why using web apps for business frequently sounds nuts to me.
How often over the years have we heard stuff like "we can't switch from Office to OpenOffice because of the costs involved in retraining everyone to use a different UI"? Well with a "cloud app" you have *exactly* this problem, coupled with the fact that you usually get no notice that it's going to happen - you just log in one day and everything's moved around.
Flashblock, surely?
Makes me think: is auto-playing HTML5 video a possibility? If so, can this easily be disabled in browsers' settings?
Flashblock will block HTML5 videos too.
Oh yeah, I'll also point out that the original poster's numbers stuck out like a sore thumb before I even looked up the figures: Petrol is lighter than water, so its immediately obvious that 4.75 tons is going to be over 4750 litres (at current forecourt prices, about £6000) and I know I don't buy anywhere close to that amount of petrol each year. Doncha just love the metric system for making such things so obvious.
The numerator above seems off: what is 6445 ?
4.75 tons of petrol is 6445 litres. Since petrol is 85% carbon, we can divide the 6445 litres by 0.85 and we get 7582 litres of petrol containing 4.75 tons of carbon.
For the weight of a big tub of petroleum containing 4.75t carbon, I think you'd have:
4.75 tons of carbon /
Your answer is wrong: 4750 Kg of carbon / 0.85 = 5588 Kg of petrol. It looks like you divided by 0.80 instead of 0.85?
5588 Kg of petrol / 0.737 = 7582 litres of petrol.
Secondly why would anybody pay for broadband internet, and only use it like ISDN or DSL?
Ok, I have a home connection that does 40Mbps down and 20Mbps up. It is capped to 100GB/month during the day (no cap at night, and this is when I run off-site backups and such). I never come close to exceeding that cap - the speed is useful for downloading the odd film, watching streaming HDTV, uploading photos, etc. for short periods. If I need to download a new Linux distro or something, I can do it in 10 minutes - doing this stuff over ISDN would be either very painful (requiring planning a download a long time in advance of actually needing it) or just plain impossible impossible. ADSL, again, would be rather a pain for the occasional large download.
On the other hand, if I were running bittorrent 24/7 I would be able to blow through 15TB of bandwidth in a month, were it not for the cap. But I'm not interested in doing this, so I don't understand why those people who are interested in shifting 2-3 orders of magnitude more data than me should expect me to pay more in order to subsidise the build-out cost of the ISP upgrading their network to support them.
The bittorrent crowd would characterise my 100GB monthly cap as terrible because, at full speed, I could blow through it in 5 hours. The thing that they completely fail to understand is that I never have any interest in blowing through it - I like a fast connection because it lets me do things quickly, not because I can download lots.
single average-sized car puts out 4.75 metric TONS of carbon every year
That sounds an unreasonably high figure.
Petrol weighs about 737g / l, so 4750Kg of petrol is 6445 litres.
Wikipedia says the carbon content of petrol is up to about 85%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
So 6445/0.85 = 7582 litres of petrol contain 4.75t of carbon.
Wikipedia suggests average fuel economy is somewhere around 5l / 100Km: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
7582*100/5 = 151640Km - I'm pretty sure that the average car doesn't travel 152Mm/year!
Lets assume you're talking about tons of CO2 rather than tons of carbon.
Apparently we multiply litres of petrol by 2.331 to get Kg of CO2 emitted: http://www.carbontrust.com/res...
So 4750/2.331 = 2038 litres. At 5l / 100Km, this gives us 2038*100/5 = 40760Km - ok, a vaguely more reasonable figure.
Apparently the average company car does around 30,000Km/year and the average private car does about 12,000Km: http://www.racfoundation.org/m...
So the average is going to be well under 41Mm and around an order of magnitude less than the 152Mm you claimed!
I'm certainly not saying that climate change is nothing to worry about - I think it's a big problem and whether or not you think it's man made, dumping vast amounts of crap into the atmosphere can't possibly be a bright idea. But I really wish people wouldn't just invent bogus "facts" to back up their arguments - the arguments should stand up for themselves, if you need bogus data to prop them up then you've got something really badly wrong somewhere.
If you have a procedure with 10 parameters, you probably missed some.
