martindevans

Is there a good place to start reading about all of these scaling proposals, and maybe keep up to date on new ones as they emerge? Failing that, got any good links to papers/blogposts about the ones you mentioned?

Is there any data available on how long BCH blocks take to propagate? It's testing big blocks out in the real world so we can see how much delay that introduces and whether that leads to a significant increase in centralisation.

Mine does not give me that number - do I need to do something to turn it on?

I couldn't agree more. Saying that it's impossible to backdoor encryption in a "secure" (so long as you trust the government holding the 3rd key) is a very dangerous stance to take. It just sends this message to people who might campaign against backdoors that we don't need to bother - after all it's impossible.

Space Engineers isn't made in Unity, it uses their Custom VRAGE engine.

Unity can do far better graphics than KSP has e.g. https://unity3d.com/pages/adam. The fact that there are numerous mods which vastly improve the graphics of KSP is pretty good evidence of this!

Where Unity can be blamed for KSP problems is the constant stutters due to GC - Unity uses an ancient garbage collector. Hopefully that's going to get better soon - apparently there was some licensing problem keeping Unity on an ancient version of Mono, now that MS own Xamarin that's probably not a problem.

Do we know which 16 are affected?

Google fiber and the spacex internet constellation are both ISPs

I don't think it's checking is quite right. It says 'yes' when I'm viewing the page on a Windows phone!

That presumes that the negative comments are always the ones derailing the discussion. For example:

"I think these questions at IAC are great, it's good that people get a chance to <self promote thing> at a technical conference"

"Wtf is with these stupid questions at IAC? They should be asking about <fascinating technical detail>"

"Waiting for everyone to reach their seats and get settled. Starting in 5 to 10." Elon said that about ~3 minutes ago on twitter.

Loading the payload also requires a load of work moving the vehicle about etc. If you want to be certain you didn't damage the vehicle in any way during all of that then you need to test again once the payload is attached.

Of course normally a failure during a test would be something like minor thrust fluctuations - not a complete loss of vehicle and payload!

Didn't he post a signed message denying that he was Dorian Nakamoto (proving he still has access to his keys), Or was that one a fake?

I don't think that's possible. The ISS is in an inclined orbit (iirc for easy access from certain launch sites that orbit passes over) and afaik is useless as a waypoint to anywhere (because an orbital plane change is very expensive).

Unity scripting is in C#, but the engine itself isn't necessarily written in C#. The physics are based on physx (which I assume vectorises things).

http://blogs.unity3d.com/2014/07/08/high-performance-physics...

SpaceX are working on a low orbit constellation to provide low latency satellite internet (for consumers). Presumably that could serve the purpose of an "Iridium 2"?

Ah I see. So it's nothing fundamental, just a limit on our current heat pump technology.

What's special about 255K (0F) in relation to heat pumps?

It looks like a falcon 9 can get payloads to TLI: http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/8511/how-will-the-f...

> It's a shame to see key words be killed off by internationalisation concerns [....] I hope further research here can develop better replacements for encoding short binary strings in i18n friendly ways

I rather like the urbit way of encoding numbers. I can't remember the exact details but it's something like: There are 256 unique three letter words (all nonsense, but deliberately picked to be possible to pronounce). Each word is mapped to a byte and then a blob of binary data becomes a nonsense word.

So for example "tasfyn-partyv" instead of "1242B24A".

I just tried this and really liked it. However the sign up process seems totally broken.

Each screen of the process asks 3 questions and seems to completely freeze up the entire browser tab (latest chrome) for about 30 seconds.

In addition to that the vehicle is extremely weak when lying on its side. I should think there's a good chance the tanks could be damaged by waves bending the vehicle.

Don't UNC paths solve this problem already (30000+ char limit)?

Roughly: LN allows you to transact instantly, but with a limited group of people (it takes one normal bitcoin transaction to setup your group, but then transactions are instant). Whereas bitcoin allows you to transact slowly (block confirmation time, i.e. ~10mins) with anyone.

Same for me. Full screen I'm consistently in the 21-25 range, but shrinking the window down to about 400x400 I'm consistently not human! This is with a powerful gaming computer too...

In the UK the police can demand encryption keys and, if you fail to supply them, throw you in prison for 10 years. So the punishment for having encrypted content which you do not have the key for could be far worse than actually having illegal content :(

I have quite a lot of open source projects, mostly just little utilities or interesting experiments. https://github.com/martindevans?tab=repositories

The one I'm most proud of is probably MumbleSharp (https://github.com/martindevans/MumbleSharp) which is a complete implementation of the mumble protocol in C#. It's actually getting fairly close to complete, it can handle all functions except sending voice.

I opened this up because I saw the title and thought, "hmm that's strange, isn't string just an alias for String"? I'm pretty sure every C# dev I know would say the same. Then again if I was asked a trick question like this in an interview I might scratch around for some/any difference I could think of!

My view is that if it were illegal then as soon as it became public knowledge then effort would have been made to stop it. I.e. It's a breakdown of the enforcing of the law but not a breakdown of the democratic process. Instead we've had a couple of years where the only thing any politician ever says is "well it's legal..." which is a breakdown of the democratic process (since the law in a democracy is meant to reflect the will of the people saying that something the people are protesting shouldn't be legal is ok because it's legal is clearly a non argument!)

"many dubious actions have been 'legal' but not necessarily right or just."

This.

It annoys me to no end when politicians insist that what the GCHQ is doing is legal, which just makes it worse - because it means it's not just a single agency overstepping its bounds and spying on us all, instead it's the entire system which is warped.

In a press conference earlier today that very same question was put to the team. The answer was that due to a variety of (largely political) reasons there's been almost no development of RTGs within Europe at all.