And it's a good thing only the police had weapons in this situation. The photographer went through the legal process and won. If he had started a gun battle, he would have been shot dead and never vindicated.
It is very unlikely that the police officer was armed. UK police are rarely armed, and there's almost no reason why a policeman, such as in this case and in this location, would be carrying a gun.
In general, there is no sole arbiter of what words, grammar or syntax is English. English is largely defined by common usage.
The Oxford English Dictionary, and other popular dictionaries or encyclopedia may well be used as supporting evidence for how we use English, but I certainly don't look to the Associated Press, as reported by ABC News, as a strong basis for what I should be doing with my speech and writing.
I thought that in old CPUs, like 6502 the processor would not listen to interupts anymore....
The original 6502 certainly had no HALT instruction (or similar variant). I don't believe there's any way to stop it listening for an NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt), although obviously a "normal" maskable interrupt is trivially blocked by setting the IRQ disable bit in the status register.
Not to mention you'd also destroy pretty much every non-military (ie very seriously rad-hardened) satellite which didn't have the Earth between it and the nuclear device.
So, a large area of Earth based elecronics destroyed, and even if you've managed to avoid that, no communications or Earth observation satellites to aid in recovery.
(...and yes, most satellites are built with rad-hard components, but they're not designed to withstand an EMP, which requires substantially more shielding).
Across town could be 20 miles away in London. On the other side of the Thames is very likely to have it's power and data coming from completely independent systems, even a different power station and over a different part of the national grid.
Since BT was historically the only telecoms provider, even now they are plenty big enough to easily be in a position to have multiple independent data feeds, and if they all fail, nothing else in the capital is working anyway, so a DC's survival would be a minor issue.
A six hour drive from London going North would almost put you in Scotland, and in the other direction, you would have run out of land, and be well on your way to Paris if you crossed the Channel.
gmack said: Actually the quote from Ecclesiastes is "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." The missing word is quite significant. For some reason it's one of the most often misquoted scriptures.
...and is apparently often misattributed as well, since that quote comes from Timothy 6:10, not Ecclesiastes.
RzUpAnmsCwrds (262647) wrote Do consider TOSLINK instead, however. TOSLINK uses fiber-optics, so your audio equipment and PC are electrically isolated. This reduces the chance of creating a ground loop or introducing RF noise into your reciever/amp. Moreover, it protects your equipment in the event of an electrical mishap.
One slight clarification, TOSLINK normally does carry SPDIF. TOSLINK is primarily just detailing the physical medium, the data is still encoded as SPDIF (which can also be carried on wire). The original author didn't specify how he was intending to use SPDIF, it may have been over either medium.
Unless space travel gets REALLY cheap, I don't think anyone but the wealthy will be able to actually go into space.
You may have noticed a little project called SpaceShipOne, and Richard Branson's company Virgin Galactic. They got quite a bit of coverage a few months back (and in the real press as well, not just on here).
There intent (at least in part) is to make it really cheap.
There are plans to terminate the interstellar missions Voyager 1 and 2 and the solar mission Ulysses in October to save money.
A minor point, by Ulysses isn't actually a NASA mission, it's operated jointly by ESA and NASA, and ESA actually built the spacecraft. I'm not sure the USA actually has any right to terminate it, although it almost certainly does rely on the DSN for some, if not all, communications, so this could be seriously curtailed.
At a minimum this would piss off ESA big times, and historically NASA/USA behaviour in regards to this mission hasn't exactly been brilliant. There were meant to be two spacecraft in the original mission, one built by ESA, the other by NASA, but the US one got scrapped and ESA got left with only half the mission.
NASA has remained involved, since it was launched with the Shuttle, and they provided the RTG, and the DSN, but sometimes it really seems like they are taking the mick.:(
We short out outlets at work all the time... the outlets in the cubes are mounted sideways so that the hot leg is on top... as a result, if a plug is loose in the outlet (sticking out 1/2" or so) and you kick the metal panel trim panel off (very easy to do), it falls on the hot leg. Since the metal panel is grounded it trips the breaker.
This can't really happen with UK plugs, by the time any metalwork of the Live conductor (or Neutral for that matter) is exposed, the pins will no longer be in contact with the matching contacts in the socket. Even with older plugs which tend to expose the live and neutral pins more, by the time you could easily make contact, the plug is probably about to fall out of the socket due to lack of grip from the contacts.
Because countries varied between 220v and 240v (& when you factor in local power fluctuations, some places may have dip as low as 200v) This made it tough to transfer power between countries; the grids were out of sync and all sorts of problem arose. So as part of the Common Market, power supply was standardised onto 230v and everyone synced. This made trading power between EU member states much easier.
Hardly, no states exchange power at 230v, electrical grids in all countries run at much higher potentials. However, having a consistent supply voltage does mean that a device built for one country will work in all the others (ignoring the fact that several different plug designs are used).
...We had to explain to her about the Communist's "Great Firewall of China" and how they block/inspect/proxy damn near everything.
I've heard this a lot, but personally when I've been in China I've found only one web site which I couldn't get to, BBC News. I found I could get to many other sites which I half expected not to be able to get to, including the rest of the BBCs site, CNN, NYTimes, and many others. Why they choose to block some sites, whilst leaving many others which you might reasonably expect to be blocked for similar reasons is beyond me.
Even these blocks didn't stop me, I just tunneled anything I wanted to access over SSH (which I was using heavily to access our servers anyway).
Not a very effective great firewall as far as I could see.
I'd be suprised if the main copy is in EEPROM. More than likely the main code is in a PROM, it may possibly be copied into EEPROM (or RAM) and executed from there, then it can be easily patched. There is probably a mechanism to reboot cold from PROM, or to reprogram the EEPROMs automatically (without needing operation of the main CPU).
PROM is way more reliable than an EEPROM for long term storage in a hostile environment.
This is kind of a continuation of an earlier post in a different thread, but I wonder who owns these probes? When we eventually send colonists to Mars, are they free to pick apart these things, lug them back to base as decorations, etc. I am guessing the "possession is 9/10ths of the law" fits pretty well here, even though I would bet NASA would throw a hissy fit if some other country took one of the rovers back to base to use as a boot scraper.
I don't know what the general answer to this question is, but I do know that ownership of the Viking 1 lander was transferred to the Smithsonian from NASA. This does imply that NASA believes itself to still be the owner of these landers, presumably they consider them to be just waiting collection, and not abandoned.
...Maybe they should be running qnx or a form of realtime linux/bsd? Something to think about for future missions perhaps.
Quite a lot has been thought about it, for a starter see Flight Linux, but this is an extremely non-trivial question. When building flight hardware, the designs tend to be extremely conservative. VxWorks has been used successfully on previous missions, so it is a known quantity. As far as I know, the same can't be said for Linux, and certainly standard Linux is not a RT OS. Getting one of the RT versions of Linux up to a standard that could be used in flight will take a susbstantial effort by someone, and this has to be done to, and documented in line with the appropriate methods, not something that any space agency is likely to allow amateurs to do in the near future.
...The beagle is EU's first real robotic mission...
Erm, Beagle may be the first European lander but certainly not the first robotic mission (addmitedly depending on your definition of robotic). Additionally, Huygens was launched long before Beagle 2. So whilst Beagle 2 may be the first ESA lander to actually land, it certainly wasn't the first to be launched.
(and anyway, most of these missions have substantial elements from other countries, both ESA member statues, the US, and other countries. I hardly think that ESA and NASA seriously think that they are competing with each other.)
...<snip>...), 2 USB, video out, PS2 keyboard jack, and a TV output. mouse would have to be via USB.
Actually, it looks like the connector that you think is a PS2 keyboard port is actually an S-Video connector (vs composite video from the Phono above).
The process has to be served. If the plaintiff cannot give the court instructions on how to serve you with the suit, the court must throw the case out.
A good example of this is a case a few years back of somebody who filed a suit against the devil, but had it thrown out because they could not give the court the devil's address.
Whilst you can normally find any number of screwdrivers, pliers, left handed widget drivers, it's impossible to find a torch, with working batteries, when you need to hunt around on the floor in the back of the server room with bugger all light.
I've got a small LED torch permanently on my work keyring, it's invaluable, even if its just for rooting around the back of PCs, trying to read serial numbers and plug mice back in.
Why did they choose Mercury? Don't get me wrong, I think it's pretty cool, but why not some of the other planets in our system? Scientists are fascinated with Mars because of the possibility of life. There's fascination about Saturn and it having a bazillion moons. Jupiter with it's nutty red spot (man that's a hell of a storm).
Well, at the moment, ESA has a mission going to Mars (Mars Express), Venus shortly (Venus Express), Saturn is covered by Huygens (in combination with Cassini).
Nothing is going to Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto at the moment, but most of those are real buggers to get to easily.
Mercury is the only planet in the inner solar system which ESA hasn't sent anything to yet (or is about to). Add to that the fact that so little is known about it, Mariner 10 left many questions unanswered, and it's about time we had a look.
Even though they don't mention the name, this sounds likes they are talking about BepiColombo which has been in the works for several years now.
One of the more exciting bit about the mission is the lander (or impactor, depending) which is one of the things which distinguishes it from the US Messenger. Unfortunately, this is also one of the elements most likely to be removed, due to cost and complexity.
It looks like the Solid State Mass Memory (essentially a modern replacement for the tape recorders found on older spacecraft) had a problem and to avoid writing over the data in the memory, they are delaying tests on Beagle. It's not really a Beagle problem, and it doesn't even look like a biggee for Mars Express. It's probably either a SEU (Single Event Upset) caused by some radiation whizzing through part of the electronics, or some sort of odd software bug (probably fixable with some patching).
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Frank Burly (4247955), said:
And it's a good thing only the police had weapons in this situation. The photographer went through the legal process and won. If he had started a gun battle, he would have been shot dead and never vindicated.
It is very unlikely that the police officer was armed. UK police are rarely armed, and there's almost no reason why a policeman, such as in this case and in this location, would be carrying a gun.
In general, there is no sole arbiter of what words, grammar or syntax is English. English is largely defined by common usage.
The Oxford English Dictionary, and other popular dictionaries or encyclopedia may well be used as supporting evidence for how we use English, but I certainly don't look to the Associated Press, as reported by ABC News, as a strong basis for what I should be doing with my speech and writing.
I thought that in old CPUs, like 6502 the processor would not listen to interupts anymore. ...
The original 6502 certainly had no HALT instruction (or similar variant). I don't believe there's any way to stop it listening for an NMI (Non-Maskable Interrupt), although obviously a "normal" maskable interrupt is trivially blocked by setting the IRQ disable bit in the status register.
Not to mention you'd also destroy pretty much every non-military (ie very seriously rad-hardened) satellite which didn't have the Earth between it and the nuclear device.
So, a large area of Earth based elecronics destroyed, and even if you've managed to avoid that, no communications or Earth observation satellites to aid in recovery.
(...and yes, most satellites are built with rad-hard components, but they're not designed to withstand an EMP, which requires substantially more shielding).
Across town could be 20 miles away in London. On the other side of the Thames is very likely to have it's power and data coming from completely independent systems, even a different power station and over a different part of the national grid.
Since BT was historically the only telecoms provider, even now they are plenty big enough to easily be in a position to have multiple independent data feeds, and if they all fail, nothing else in the capital is working anyway, so a DC's survival would be a minor issue.
A six hour drive from London going North would almost put you in Scotland, and in the other direction, you would have run out of land, and be well on your way to Paris if you crossed the Channel.
gmack said:
Actually the quote from Ecclesiastes is "The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." The missing word is quite significant. For some reason it's one of the most often misquoted scriptures.
...and is apparently often misattributed as well, since that quote comes from Timothy 6:10, not Ecclesiastes.
RzUpAnmsCwrds (262647) wrote
Do consider TOSLINK instead, however. TOSLINK uses fiber-optics, so your audio equipment and PC are electrically isolated. This reduces the chance of creating a ground loop or introducing RF noise into your reciever/amp. Moreover, it protects your equipment in the event of an electrical mishap.
One slight clarification, TOSLINK normally does carry SPDIF. TOSLINK is primarily just detailing the physical medium, the data is still encoded as SPDIF (which can also be carried on wire). The original author didn't specify how he was intending to use SPDIF, it may have been over either medium.
Unless space travel gets REALLY cheap, I don't think anyone but the wealthy will be able to actually go into space.
You may have noticed a little project called SpaceShipOne, and Richard Branson's company Virgin Galactic. They got quite a bit of coverage a few months back (and in the real press as well, not just on here).
There intent (at least in part) is to make it really cheap.
There are plans to terminate the interstellar missions Voyager 1 and 2 and the solar mission Ulysses in October to save money.
A minor point, by Ulysses isn't actually a NASA mission, it's operated jointly by ESA and NASA, and ESA actually built the spacecraft. I'm not sure the USA actually has any right to terminate it, although it almost certainly does rely on the DSN for some, if not all, communications, so this could be seriously curtailed.
At a minimum this would piss off ESA big times, and historically NASA/USA behaviour in regards to this mission hasn't exactly been brilliant. There were meant to be two spacecraft in the original mission, one built by ESA, the other by NASA, but the US one got scrapped and ESA got left with only half the mission.
NASA has remained involved, since it was launched with the Shuttle, and they provided the RTG, and the DSN, but sometimes it really seems like they are taking the mick. :(
We short out outlets at work all the time... the outlets in the cubes are mounted sideways so that the hot leg is on top... as a result, if a plug is loose in the outlet (sticking out 1/2" or so) and you kick the metal panel trim panel off (very easy to do), it falls on the hot leg. Since the metal panel is grounded it trips the breaker.
This can't really happen with UK plugs, by the time any metalwork of the Live conductor (or Neutral for that matter) is exposed, the pins will no longer be in contact with the matching contacts in the socket. Even with older plugs which tend to expose the live and neutral pins more, by the time you could easily make contact, the plug is probably about to fall out of the socket due to lack of grip from the contacts.
Because countries varied between 220v and 240v (& when you factor in local power fluctuations, some places may have dip as low as 200v) This made it tough to transfer power between countries; the grids were out of sync and all sorts of problem arose. So as part of the Common Market, power supply was standardised onto 230v and everyone synced. This made trading power between EU member states much easier.
Hardly, no states exchange power at 230v, electrical grids in all countries run at much higher potentials. However, having a consistent supply voltage does mean that a device built for one country will work in all the others (ignoring the fact that several different plug designs are used).
...We had to explain to her about the Communist's "Great Firewall of China" and how they block/inspect/proxy damn near everything.
I've heard this a lot, but personally when I've been in China I've found only one web site which I couldn't get to, BBC News. I found I could get to many other sites which I half expected not to be able to get to, including the rest of the BBCs site, CNN, NYTimes, and many others. Why they choose to block some sites, whilst leaving many others which you might reasonably expect to be blocked for similar reasons is beyond me.
Even these blocks didn't stop me, I just tunneled anything I wanted to access over SSH (which I was using heavily to access our servers anyway).
Not a very effective great firewall as far as I could see.
The OS is in the EEPROMS.
I'd be suprised if the main copy is in EEPROM. More than likely the main code is in a PROM, it may possibly be copied into EEPROM (or RAM) and executed from there, then it can be easily patched. There is probably a mechanism to reboot cold from PROM, or to reprogram the EEPROMs automatically (without needing operation of the main CPU).
PROM is way more reliable than an EEPROM for long term storage in a hostile environment.
This is kind of a continuation of an earlier post in a different thread, but I wonder who owns these probes? When we eventually send colonists to Mars, are they free to pick apart these things, lug them back to base as decorations, etc. I am guessing the "possession is 9/10ths of the law" fits pretty well here, even though I would bet NASA would throw a hissy fit if some other country took one of the rovers back to base to use as a boot scraper.
I don't know what the general answer to this question is, but I do know that ownership of the Viking 1 lander was transferred to the Smithsonian from NASA. This does imply that NASA believes itself to still be the owner of these landers, presumably they consider them to be just waiting collection, and not abandoned.
...Maybe they should be running qnx or a form of realtime linux/bsd? Something to think about for future missions perhaps.
Quite a lot has been thought about it, for a starter see Flight Linux, but this is an extremely non-trivial question. When building flight hardware, the designs tend to be extremely conservative. VxWorks has been used successfully on previous missions, so it is a known quantity. As far as I know, the same can't be said for Linux, and certainly standard Linux is not a RT OS. Getting one of the RT versions of Linux up to a standard that could be used in flight will take a susbstantial effort by someone, and this has to be done to, and documented in line with the appropriate methods, not something that any space agency is likely to allow amateurs to do in the near future.
...The beagle is EU's first real robotic mission...
Erm, Beagle may be the first European lander but certainly not the first robotic mission (addmitedly depending on your definition of robotic). Additionally, Huygens was launched long before Beagle 2. So whilst Beagle 2 may be the first ESA lander to actually land, it certainly wasn't the first to be launched.
(and anyway, most of these missions have substantial elements from other countries, both ESA member statues, the US, and other countries. I hardly think that ESA and NASA seriously think that they are competing with each other.)
RoundSparrow (341175) said:
...
1 02/04/01 X20.0
Did these guys sleep through Y2K? Is that 1901 or 2001?
There was a hint in the quoted documents title "Large Solar Flares Since 1976".
...<snip>...), 2 USB, video out, PS2 keyboard jack, and a TV output. mouse would have to be via USB.
Actually, it looks like the connector that you think is a PS2 keyboard port is actually an S-Video connector (vs composite video from the Phono above).
So, you'ld probably need a USB Keyboard as well.
leviramsey said:
The process has to be served. If the plaintiff cannot give the court instructions on how to serve you with the suit, the court must throw the case out.
A good example of this is a case a few years back of somebody who filed a suit against the devil, but had it thrown out because they could not give the court the devil's address.
I suspect you mean this.
Whilst you can normally find any number of screwdrivers, pliers, left handed widget drivers, it's impossible to find a torch, with working batteries, when you need to hunt around on the floor in the back of the server room with bugger all light.
I've got a small LED torch permanently on my work keyring, it's invaluable, even if its just for rooting around the back of PCs, trying to read serial numbers and plug mice back in.
Why did they choose Mercury? Don't get me wrong, I think it's pretty cool, but why not some of the other planets in our system? Scientists are fascinated with Mars because of the possibility of life. There's fascination about Saturn and it having a bazillion moons. Jupiter with it's nutty red spot (man that's a hell of a storm).
Well, at the moment, ESA has a mission going to Mars (Mars Express), Venus shortly (Venus Express), Saturn is covered by Huygens (in combination with Cassini).
Nothing is going to Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto at the moment, but most of those are real buggers to get to easily.
Mercury is the only planet in the inner solar system which ESA hasn't sent anything to yet (or is about to). Add to that the fact that so little is known about it, Mariner 10 left many questions unanswered, and it's about time we had a look.
Even though they don't mention the name, this sounds likes they are talking about BepiColombo which has been in the works for several years now.
One of the more exciting bit about the mission is the lander (or impactor, depending) which is one of the things which distinguishes it from the US Messenger. Unfortunately, this is also one of the elements most likely to be removed, due to cost and complexity.
Look at Rescheduling of some Beagle 2 'cruise check-out' tests for a slightly more informative document.
It looks like the Solid State Mass Memory (essentially a modern replacement for the tape recorders found on older spacecraft) had a problem and to avoid writing over the data in the memory, they are delaying tests on Beagle. It's not really a Beagle problem, and it doesn't even look like a biggee for Mars Express. It's probably either a SEU (Single Event Upset) caused by some radiation whizzing through part of the electronics, or some sort of odd software bug (probably fixable with some patching).
Nothing much to see, move along here.
If you want any info on the Sun, other stars, satellites, planets, Iridium Flares, etc ...
Heavens Above is a good place to start.
And once you've looked up that film and decided you want to buy it on DVD, look at Rewind to see which region produces the best version.