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Comment Microwaves vs flow-in diesel (Score 1) 38

Actually, power beamed from space would be incredibly useful to the U.S. military. They have spent truly enormous sums of money flying in fuel to power generators for field camps. And, that's when they have mostly uncontested airspace. IIRC, in Afghanistan they needed a lot of power for A/C to keep the troops cool enough to be combat effective. That said, you need literally acres of space for the power receiving antennas and I don't know how many theaters that would be feasible in.

Comment Not a chance (Score 1) 108

Russia isn't launching a new space station anytime soon and probably never will again.

They simply don't have anywhere near the capabilities they used to have. The most recent example is that they very recently launched Iran's "Khayyam" spy satellite and then announced that they were going to borrow it for a while. With a resolution of 1.2 meters or less, it's not even that great of a spy satellite and doesn't come close to what some commercial providers have. But, Russia needed it because they don't actually have a lot of spy satellites and many of the ones they do have aren't great either.

They do have a starter segment named NEM available for the new station. Sort of. They claim that it's been in development since 2016 and was originally intended for the ISS. But they just announced that it needs at least three more years of work and new funding. And, the design initially was targeting MIR before being re-purposed to ISS (and now re-purposed to yet another station).

And, then there's all the recent brain drain.

Is there anywhere I can bet money against this station ever existing?

Comment Re:"Learning about" blockchain (Score 2) 62

I'm "learning" about blockchain. I read articles about it on Slashdot and elsewhere. But I'm certainly not interested in developing blockchain technologies, especially not cryptocurrencies. My opinion is that cryptocurrencies are the latest kind of swindle.

So I would have answered the question about "learning" with "yes"...I am learning about it. But am I "interested" in it personally? Not at all.

There's no way that this was a *representative* sample. TFA (or the TFS) claims that one out of every six developers is "actively working on crypto-related projects" and that one out of every nine developers is "actively working on NFT technology". I call bull.

Comment Re:OTA (Score 1) 39

The FCC regulates what power the stations operate at. They can't just decide to lower their power.

Some stations are operating at a temporarily lower power (with authorization) because the FCC changed their broadcast frequency. This requires the station to do things like change the broadcast antenna. Since that is a very specific job, there aren't many people available to do it, which leads to delays in getting it done (sometimes quite lengthy delays). When they are using the wrong antenna, they must operate at lower power.

Stations can also have technical issues which require them to lower their power (again, only with authorization). A station I worked at in the 70s had an issue, and we reduced power to the point that basically the only antenna that could receive us was the local cable company. This was not good, as the cable company did not have to pay us at that time.

Also, the conversion to digital made it so some people could no longer receive the signal. You may be able to tolerate a snowy analog signal, digital can't. Again, no great conspiracy to force people to get cable.

Yes, I'd forgotten that the digital conversion was one of the reasons some people could no longer get a signal.

I read somewhere that stations used to often broadcast a higher than their minimum allowed level, but rarely do that anymore. I can't find any reference for or against that though.

Comment Re:OTA (Score 1) 39

Some posters above argue that OTA is becoming irrelevant.

Not quite. It's just that most of the content put out by these local stations ... isn't actually received OTA. OTA broadcasters charge cable companies and other providers two arms and two legs to carry their content. A lot of people still want to see their local stations. Partly for the local "news". Partly for sports (broadcast rights for college and pro sports are often hogtied in interesting ways to a small number of content sellers). So, there's plenty of money in the CBS, NBC, ABC, whatever broadcasting stations. And, they'll use local news or sports or whatever they can latch onto to maintain an income stream.

In the days before cable, there was social, political, and financial pressure to make sure as many people as possible could receive the nearest OTA broadcasts. Today, the local stations can put the minimum power required by regulations into their OTA transmissions and depend on there being more than enough cable subscribers to drive income via the re-broadcast fees. Supposedly, people are finding they can't get OTA in places they could have a few decades ago.

Comment OTA (Score 1) 39

Some posters above argue that OTA is becoming irrelevant.

Not quite. It's just that most of the content put out by these local stations ... isn't actually received OTA. OTA broadcasters charge cable companies and other providers two arms and two legs to carry their content. A lot of people still want to see their local stations. Partly for the local "news". Partly for sports (broadcast rights for college and pro sports are often hogtied in interesting ways to a small number of content sellers). So, there's plenty of money in the CBS, NBC, ABC, whatever broadcasting stations. And, they'll use local news or sports or whatever they can latch onto to maintain an income stream.

Comment Re:Looks like a roadmap for a do-over (Score 1) 39

Apparently the judge didn't think that "deployment" was covered under "maintaining and operating". It seems that it's OK to spend non-profit income to maintain servers and other equipment ... as long as you don't first spend to deploy them!

This was an overly literal interpretation of what congress wrote and doesn't fit the spirit or intent of the law.

Maybe someone will start a locast 2.0 that uses two different income streams with one stream for deployment and another income stream for operations.

Comment Re:We can't have free NFL ticket with this so (Score 1) 39

Maybe if the NFL weren't so greedy/stupid/insane with their broadcasting rights we wouldn't have issues like this. If the team you follow is out of your market, good luck. You need a combination of a broadcast receiver (in-market games), NFL Sunday Ticket (broadcast black-out games), ESPN (Monday games), and Prime Video/NFL Network (Thursday games). It's a ****ing joke.

This year, I've switched from NFL Sunday Ticket at $300 to NFL Game Pass at $100. NFL Sunday Ticket is only on DirecTV and is live. NFL Game Pass is available on Roku and other streaming platforms, but isn't available until just after a game is finished playing. We never watched live football anyway; we'd start watching no sooner than an hour after the game had started and by fast-forwarding though commercials and other downtime, we'd skip an hour of non-game.

Comment Re:For Pete's sake NASA (Score 2) 42

Just give it to SpaceX already. They'll have up there next week for you.

How? This is going to one of the earth/sun Lagrange points, not earth orbit. So, a falcon 9 won't do; you need a falcon 9 heavy. No problem there. But, this bird won't fit in the fairing of a falcon 9 or falcon 9 heavy. The SpaceX Starship isn't flying yet, so we can't use that. The JWST will fit in an Ariane 5. Because it was designed to do so. This observatory is so old that SpaceX, much less the falcon 9 didn't exist when the project started! Ariane 5 was a new upcoming rocket at the time. Now, the Ariane is about to be retired.

The JWST has sucked all the money out of alternative projects, so let's hope it works.

Comment Boss or Technician (Score 3, Insightful) 81

I've also bemoaned technologically incompetent bosses. And, when I did, I missed the point.

Does a boss have more than passing competence in the fields that his subordinates work in? Well, if you think the answer is "yes", it follows that every president or prime minister or other leader of an entire country has to be at least partially incompetent. Because a president's job covers so many areas that no one could be great or even good on all topics. And, there have been effective presidents and prime ministers and kings. So, thinking that subject matter expertise is required in a boss would be a wrong conclusion, so ... there must be something wrong with my premise that the boss has to know the work.

I'm almost 60 and I've had a lot of bosses while working mostly as a programmer or systems administrator. Good ones. Bad ones. Technical ones. Not so technical ones. And, you know what - there's been very little correlation between who has been a good boss and who has had technical chops! When a boss is both good at management and at technology, that's great. But, one of the worst bosses I've ever seen was a promoted techie. I was quite thankful to be a peer not his subordinate. I've had good bosses who weren't very knowledgeable in IT, but were good bosses.

It's almost as if management was a skill and that some people had technical skills and some people had management skills and some people had both. Let's not talk about those that had neither...

The technical boss can be a micro-manager and focus too much on his own experiences and capabilities. The non-technical boss might make decisions based on what peers or salesmen say. Or, either might be a great leader.

A good boss has to know how much to delegate, how much to listen to his people, how to chose which person to listen to, when to put his/her foot down, etc. etc. If they know how to "manage" their advisors, they can be quite effective while only having a very basic technical understanding.

TL;DR Ability to boss IT workers is poorly correlated with IT expertise.

That said, I want to think that an MBA might negatively correlate with *anything* useful, but that just might be personal prejudice. :-/

Submission + - SPAM: Take-Two Sues Enthusiasts Behind GTA Fan Projects re3, reVC

An anonymous reader writes: Take-Two Interactive has sued several programmers and enthusiasts said to be behind the popular re3 and reVC Grand Theft Auto fan projects. The lawsuit says that after the company filed a DMCA takedown notice to remove the projects from Github, the defendants filed a bad faith counter notice to have the content reinstated, thus triggering this copyright infringement lawsuit. “Defendants’ source code projects, known as re3 and reVC, purport to have created a set of software files (which Defendants claim they ‘reverse engineered’ from the original Game software) that allow members of the public to play the Games on various hardware devices, but with so-called ‘enhancements’ and ‘modifications’ added by Defendants,” the complaint reads. “Perhaps most notably, Defendants claim that their derivative GTA source code enables players to install and run the Games on multiple game platforms, including those on which the Games never have been released, such as the PlayStation Vita and Nintendo Switch.” According to Take-Two, the defendants’ conduct is willful and deliberate since they are well aware that they do not have the necessary rights to copy, adapt or distribute derivative GTA source code or the audiovisual elements of the games. The gaming giant adds that [defendant Angelo Papenhoff] publicly expressed concern that Take-Two would find out about the ‘re3’ and ‘reVC’ projects.
[...]
Take-Two says that by willfully and maliciously copying, adapting and distributing its source code and other content, all of the defendants have infringed its exclusive rights under copyright law. As a result, the company is entitled to damages in amounts to be determined at trial or, alternatively, a maximum statutory damages award of $150,000 for each infringed work. Additionally, the gaming company says that by submitting bad faith DMCA counternotices to have the projects restored to Github, three of the defendants made misrepresentations under U.S.C. 512(f). Finally, Take-Two is seeking temporary, preliminary, and permanent injunctive relief to restrain the defendants from continuing their allegedly infringing activities. The company wants all infringing source code and games removed from the Internet and wants the defendants to hand over all materials that infringe its rights. Take-Two also wants a full accounting of “any and all sales or downloads of products or services” that infringe its rights.

Link to Original Source

Submission + - SPAM: Perseverance Rover Successfully Cores Its First Rock On Mars

An anonymous reader writes: The Perseverance rover successfully drilled into a Martian rock on Thursday, creating an intact core sample that could one day be returned to Earth. But NASA wants better images to make sure the sample is safely in the tube before it's sealed up and stowed on the rover. So far, data sent back by the rover and initial images suggest an intact sample was inside the tube after Perseverance drilled into a rock selected by the mission's science team. After the initial images were taken, the rover vibrated the drill bit and tube for five one-second bursts to clear both of any residual material from outside of the tube. It's possible that this caused the sample to slide down further inside the tube.

The next images taken after this were "inconclusive due to poor sunlight conditions," according to the agency. Perseverance will use its cameras to take more images under better lighting conditions before conducting the next steps of the sampling process. The extra step of taking additional images before sealing and stowing the sample tube was added after Perseverance attempted to drill into another rock target on August 5. During that attempt, the rock crumbled and there was no sample present in the tube once it was stowed.

Perseverance is currently exploring the Citadelle location in Jezero Crater, which — billions of years ago — was once the site of an ancient lake. The rover's specific target was a rock called Rochette, which is about the size of a briefcase and is part of a half-mile ridgeline of rock outcrops and boulders. The mission team should receive more images of what's inside the sample tube by September 4. If images taken while the sun is at a better angle don't help the team determine whether a sample is present, the tube will be sealed and the rover will measure its volume. If Perseverance is able to successfully collect samples from Mars, they will be returned to Earth by future missions — and they could reveal if microbial life ever existed on Mars.

Link to Original Source

Submission + - Biological neurons are for more complex than we imagined 1

Artem S. Tashkinov writes: Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons — or, at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the 1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born. Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?

To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev and Michael London, all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological neuron. They showed that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single biological neuron. Even the authors did not anticipate such complexity. “I thought it would be simpler and smaller,” said Beniaguev. He expected that three or four layers would be enough to capture the computations performed within the cell.

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