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Comment This is the part I don't get... (Score 5, Insightful) 32

>The meeting said something on my system was out of date. I installed the missing item as I presumed it was something to do with Teams, and this was the remote access Trojan,

Why on earth aren't you downloading this from a MS Teams page, if something is out of date? It certainly wasn't a popup from Teams itself that showed you this.

If I get an official looking message in email, I don't go about clicking on the links in it - I go directly to the website, log in, and see what's up.

Comment The mass Pike tried this, (Score 1) 176

When they went from tickets with only the exit ID on them, to tickets that were time and date stamped. Somebody at the turnpike authority decided it would be a good idea to figure out the time between getting the ticket and paying, and considering at a speed violation if the time was too short. That idea did not last long.

Comment baffling (Score 1) 136

It baffles the mind that Microsoftware - known for decades for being unreliable shit - is allowed on space missions at all, no matter how uncritical the role. The potential for malware alone is ludicrous. "Hey, pay us 2500 bitcoins if you want your space capsule back".

Then again, I figure the days when NASA did the right stuff are long past.

Comment Clean room is a legal strategy, not a requirement (Score 1) 125

Clean room design is a legal strategy, but it is not a legal requirement. There are other methods that can be used for creating works not considered to being a derivative work.

Also a reminder, words used in law don't have the same meaning in language. The law usually narrows the meaning explicitly, or implicitly via case law.

GNU has used this to their advantage to clone most of the shell runtime utilities, so why shouldn't the same be used to replace GNU licensed code?

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 1) 70

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 3, Insightful) 70

People forget that the primary concerns about Kessler Syndrome were about geosynchronous orbit, which used to be where all the most important satellites went (many of course still go there, but not the megaconstellations). It takes a long, long time for debris to leave GEO. But LEO is a very different beast.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 4, Informative) 70

Yeah. In particular:

with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks

LEO FTW. Kessler Syndrome is primarily a risk if you put too much stuff with too poor of an end-of-life disposal rate in GEO. End-of-life without proper disposal rates have declined exponentially since Kessler Syndrome was first proposed (manufacturers both understand the importance more, and do a better job, of decreasing the rate of failures before deorbit - in the past, sometimes there wasn't even attempts to dispose of a craft at end-of-life). And now we're increasingly putting stuff in LEO, where debris falls out of orbit relatively quickly. It's not impossible in LEO, esp. with higher LEO orbits - but it's much more difficult.

Or to put it another way: fragments can't build up to hit other things if they're gone after just a couple weeks.

And this trend is likely to continue - a lower percentage of premature failures, and decreasing altitudes / reentry times. Concerning ever-decreasing altitudes, we've already been doing this via use of ion engines to provide more reboost (with mission lifespans designed for only several years before running out of propellant, instead of decades like the giant GEO ones), but there's an increasing interest in "sky skimming" satellites that function in a way somewhat reminiscent of a ramjet - instead of krypton or xenon as the propellant for an ion engine, the sparse atmospheric air itself is the propellant, so the craft can in effect fly indefinitely until it fails, wherein it quite rapidly enters the denser atmosphere and burns up.

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