This. Would upvote if I had mod points.

And it's not just thousands (or 100s of thousands) of attackers, it's all those attackers running bots to simultaneously try thousands of keys in thousands of locks (to continue your analogy).

The planet hasn't forgotten it, but 60-plus years down the line, it is, without continued follow-on, irrelevant.

As the saying goes, "yeah, but what have you done for me lately?"

> The fact that they didn't validate the drives operation on earth and immediately proceed to shooting it into space (where there is less opportunity to actually test it) should be a big red flag.

Um, according to TFA (I know, I know, nobody reads that), they DID validate the operation on Earth, as best they could. Now they're proceeding to shoot it into space.

Yeah, crew mission numbers are zero-indexed. ;)

Have you tried asking ChatGPT?

A guy I used to work with -- and this goes back some years now -- had hacked his dishwasher to work off an old PC when its (the dishwasher's) circuit board died. It didn't have all the fancy bells and whistles the original control system had, but then he never used those anyway.

These days probably an Arduino or Raspberry Pi would suffice, but wouldn't look as cool (for certain nerd values of cool) as having an old desktop PC on the kitchen counter with a cable running to the appliance. ;)

> So you have to only permit banks willing to cooperate swiftly to be allowed to receive or send wires at all.

I see what you did there. ;)

Actually, it's not impossible at all. The UK grid needs about 3 times the amount of wind and much more solar and 2 terawatts of underground hydrogen storage.

There's enough salt caverns around the UK that can give it that storage, and the hydrogen can be manufactured via electrolysis when the wind and solar is producing too much. It's not very efficient, but renewables are cheap.

It CAN be done.

The Australian grid is rather different, it's a LOT closer to the equator and their renewables are a lot more consistent, so they need a lot less storage in percentage terms.

Not really, but the grid operator is basically the government for the grid, and they're highly incentivized to not fuck up. They're the ones that sent out the request for quotes.

FYI as of 2021 the UK had 1.3 GW(h) of battery storage on the grid:

https://www.solarpowerportal.c...

I'm not sure what the total storage is now, it's going to be over 1.5 GW(h) with this installation, and probably a lot more. Note that large batteries aren't needed, it's the total battery storage that's important.

The UK grid operator was particularly keen on getting batteries on it, because the HVDC interconnectors to the continent have been unreliable, and they tend to suddenly break with no warning. That has meant that the grid needs to have a couple of gigawatt of spinning reserve instead, particularly spinning overnight, but with enough batteries they can shut most of that down into hot standby.

The last outage the grid had, due to a lightning strike, they didn't quite have enough battery, and that meant they had to do load shedding and that caused chaos. They should have enough battery now to keep it up long enough if there's a repeat to get backup power running and avoid any load shedding.

The other thing these batteries can do is help smooth out the production curve. If we had enough batteries to smooth out the evening power demand, the CCGT gas turbines would be much more efficient. When they first start up they use about twice as much fuel per kWh until the second cycle kicks in. If they start up less, costs should go down. But we'd need a lot more batteries to make that work.

> Also, didn't Musk's Tesla "capsule" make it beyond the orbit of Mars, or doesn't that count because it's not officially an airtight capsule?

Indeed it did, and although the Roadster was open top, the occupant was wearing a spacesuit. So, furthest distance from Earth for a spacesuited mannikin?

> Sticking to specifications which are wrong is the biggest nightmare error of them all

Emphasis added, because that is key.

I once spent the better part of a year "debugging the specifications" for a major product development effort (not helped by the fact that we had three different customers for the product, all telcos). It wasn't so much that the specs were wrong, per se, as that vague wording of some requirement in one section could contradict the vague wording of a requirement in some other section.

By the time it was all sorted out, the code almost wrote itself. (Well, not really, but it did mean we could actually deliver the product.)

I never met the man, but his work (which I was fortunate enough to have read early, his book came out while I was in college) had a significant influence on my career.

More than just his eponymous law, his advocacy of "software surgical teams" and later paper "No Silver Bullet" did a lot for helping avoid some of the pitfalls that too many projects still fall into.

One of the best managers I ever worked with (indirectly, he was a client) had a case of "Mythical Man-Month" books, he would hand them out to anyone involved on his projects.

> I reckon if they get 12 guys to carry the coffin...

Will they bury him face down, 9-edge in?