nullhole

RIP, thanks for the memories.

No sci fi effect has ever given me the same sense of wonder that I got from the shot of the camera slowly travelling over the gigantic ship in the Season 1/2 intro.

Btw: @dang : Grant was the co-creator, alongside Doug Naylor, who is still kicking

Related question, unanswerable except maybe as a rough estimate: how much will it cost, in accountant/bookkeeper time, to do all the administrivia required to process all these refunds?

Madoff as well

Can you give a reference for The Guardian blocking IA? I just checked with an article from today - already archived, and a manual re-archive worked.

> To be counted as proven reserve, you need to show that the mineral is economically extractable at market prices. Specifically, by starting to extract them.

You don't need to be actually mining the stuff for it to be considered a reserve, at least in the Canadian (CIM) definitions. You do need at least a pre-feasibility study, and details on market prices & contracts.

The general point is right though, "mineral resources" means there's metal in the ground, "mineral reserves" means there's metal in the ground that can be economically mined, with consideration of the mining methods, infrastructure, legal title, environmental impact, metallurgy, market contracts, etc.

Wired is doing pretty well on that front, too

EUR/USD increased ~13% in the past year

https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=EUR&to=USD&view=1Y

You're ignoring the speed they're travelling at.

For a given period of time, a single satellite will travel through a vastly larger volume of space than a single plane.

Where did you get the battery?

Lenovo no longer sells T480 batteries afaict, and 3rd party vendors are a (dangerous) crapshoot.

> he also died slowly and painfully of cancer

I guess he got the death that he wished, personally and seriously, upon some large fraction of the Earth's population

  I don't want anyone to misconstrue this post as satire or exaggeration. So I'll reiterate. If you have acted, or plan to act, in a way that keeps doctor-assisted suicide illegal, I see you as an accomplice in torturing my father, and perhaps me as well someday. I want you to die a painful death, and soon. And I'd be happy to tell you the same thing to your face.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131203003037/http://dilbert.co...

> The Mali trip was notable for random types firing weapons at our aircraft while we were running lines with 80m ground clearance - we had to armour the cockpit bellies and stuff the fuel tanks with mesh.

Datums can get dull fast but there's adventure inherent in surveying. You should write a book, or at least a chapter or two. "Nadir Point" has a nice ring to it...

It's also typically at a wavelength that has lower risk to human eyes (ie near infrared).

Laser eye safety risk is very measurable and well classified.

It really would be nice to have a convenient renderer for it though. It's genuinely surprising something like firefox doesn't have a markdown reader builtin already.

A linked article agrees:

  "... many European cars have the fuel door located on the passenger side, while many Japanese and American vehicles have the fuel door on the driver side. Both techniques have valid reasons. European automakers place the fuel filler on the passenger side for the sake of safety when a vehicle has run out of fuel and has pulled off onto the shoulder of the road to fill up from a canister. Meanwhile, American OEMs tend to place the fuel door on the driver side of the vehicle for convenience reasons, so that a driver doesn't have to walk around the vehicle when filling up at a gas station."[0]

Brings to mind the Dead Kennedys album name, "Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death"

[0] https://fordauthority.com/2020/08/ford-designer-credited-for...

As I understand it, hypersonics only got the focus they did in russia and china because US missile defence had evolved to the point where it was too much of a threat to existing ballistic missiles. No fundamental reason to think hypersonics won't in turn suffer the same fate.

The same, but for the year 2026: https://neatnik.net/calendar/?year=2026&layout=aligned-weekd...

Is there any generally agreed upon and reliable source for replacement batteries? Given the fire risk, I'm much less willing to take the risk of substandard aftermarket parts when it comes to batteries.

Lenovo stopped selling the batteries for the T480, so the only sources are various 3rd party manufacturers I've never heard of.

Less serious, but still related to the topic of numbers turning sideways:

https://pbfcomics.com/comics/big-numbers/

They built the project, the bomb hasn't gone boom yet though.

I used a similar setup to translate CEC user commands (volume/fwd/reverse/etc), that travelled from my TV remote to the TV to the CEC bus to a pi that was plugged into the TV via HDMI. The pi was running jukebox software (moode audio). Similar to the article, the pi had a shell script that reads all the loglines coming from cec-client and acted on them when appropriate, in my case translating a subset of the CEC user commands to moode commands.

Worked pretty well, was nice to CEC-ify a pi program and eliminate the need for special-purpose hw/sw to interact with the audio player.

The CEC spec has all of the user control codes on the 2nd last page[1], in table 27.

[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-archive-downloads...

"In the land of telescreens, the man with the soldering iron is king"

He's blogged for years, writing a number of short 1 or 2 sentence notes daily, on a very wide range of topics, taking positions on each of them from a lefty and analytical point of view, generally covering various political/environmental/economic/legal topics.

And, for what it's worth, he recanted the statement he made that was posted above.

That is the flight pattern used on calibration flights, which are used to generate the internal/external calibration values for the camera / laser installation.

Standard wide area ortho photo collection can be done with a series of parallel lines, as long as there's enough forelap/sidelap between photos. Same for standard wide area lidar collection.

Worth pointing out that headlights (and tail lights) aren't just for your ability to see things, they're also for the ability of other drives to see you.

So, headlights are still needed in the city, even if the streetlamps are good enough to see the road, and even during the day.

Running lights help, but it's still easier to identify a car with two (normal, non-blinding) headlights on than one with just running lights on, and much much easier when compared against a car with no lights on at all.

I had an idea for survey planes once. During calibration, they fly grid patterns, basically like a hashmark (#), to get overlapping data for comparison.

Doing that kind of flight at night (makes sense for lidar! not so much for photo..), against a clear sky with at least some stars, and stacking the resulting photos, would give you a grid pattern of green/red/white aircraft running lights in front of the heavens.

The bit in the article about the recovery procedure, which involves dumping info from the tape into '100-ish GB of RAM' and then using software to analyze it stuck out to me.

This video on the linked github page for the analysis software[1] is interesting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YoolSAHR5w&t=4200s

[1] https://github.com/LenShustek/readtape

What type of ship was it? And how was the experience, did you enjoy the trip & find enough to do to stay busy/not bored along the way?

They have a passenger service too!

€3200 for France <-> Baltimore, 13 day trip. But with that you get three meals a day, a decent looking cabin, private bathroom, private balcony, and internet service (though how solid the connection is / what surcharges there may be is a question).

~€250/d doesn't sound too bad, and you could get work done along the way. Kind of sounds nice...

https://www.voilasailcoop.fr/transatlantic/

https://www.voilasailcoop.fr/transatlantic/transatlantic-a-b...

Don't have much to add except to mention again that the magic number for TIF is 42, and it's 42 because of the meaning of 42:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210108174645/https://www.adobe...

  Bytes 2-3
  An arbitrary but carefully chosen number (42) that further identifies the file as a TIFF file

They also appear at a glance to use a lot less metal in their construction.