plugger

No offense, but I find this comment ignorant at best and purposefully misleading at worst.

I've visited emergency multiple times over the 20+ years I've been living in Australia. The first time I left with crutches, a casted ankle, and a whole slew of scans indicating it was just a serious sprain, not a bone break or tissue tear. I was almost out of emergency before I turned around and uncomfortably announced that I was leaving and yet hadn't paid for anything. A doctor came directly over, pressed the button for the automatic doors, and said "It's ok, this isn't America. You're free to leave, and you don't owe us any payment. Your taxes cover this."

I have severe spinal stenosis. On Tuesday I had an EOS scan. $0. Last year I had both an MRI and CT scan. Both cost me nothing and were covered by the public health system. If I had these 3 scans done in the US without private health care I'd be out of pocket $10k or more.

ITAR

Look, did they use industry to help them with things like xraying their motor grains to check to confirm they had no voids? possibly. But this team has been at this for nearly 20 years and made their first spaceshot attempt over a decade ago (Traveler I). All of their in house designed and built GPS and radio triangulation electronics failed. It was the COTS stuff that gave them good data. I would think if private industry was doing any heavy lifting for them that wouldn't have occurred. They've blown up a lot of their motors in testing to get to their R class motor they used here. I also doubt that would have been the case if they were getting private sector assistance.

Good advisor, yes. But knowledge retention is critical. They've been at it for nearly 20 years, not 5.

Actually, they have a team bio on their site. They look quite young to me.

https://www.uscrpl.com/the-team

Unless they turn faculty I kinda doubt it. Not to sully your robot team, but I expect many of these students to want to progress to bigger and better things in the commercial space launch sector which they can't do at USC. Also, money.

But I'll ask them now, and get a real answer.

> I think college student teams strike a combo of time, talent and resource that would be surprisingly hard to come by in the larger “civilian world.”

The flip-side of this that you have a bunch of very smart young people absolutely dripping with theory knowledge and close to zero relevant real world experience in anything applicable in this space. The ability of college university teams to make exceptionally bone headed f ups is very well known. I've mentored a couple of university rocket teams for over 5 years now and I can tell you it's often an exercise in 'unknown unknowns'.

USC RPL has been at this for almost 20 years now. Their main competitive advantage (besides in-house cf cased motors) is documentation and knowledge transfer. As I'm sure you can imagine there are probably no founding team members actively involved today. I was at Balls in 2013 (IIRC it was 13) when they launched their first Traveler rocket, which was their first space shot attempt. They didn't actually reach that goal until April 2019.

The biggest hurdle (besides knowledge) in an endeavor like this is cost. Those sponsors aren't providing technical expertise. The main 'competitive advantage' USC RPL has developed that enabled this space shot is their in house filament wound carbon fibre cased ammonium perchlorate motors. By swapping comparatively heavy/over engineered aluminum motor casings that are reusable they make single use cf cased motors. I'm pretty sure Boeing and SpaceX aren't the places you go for solid motors.

Nothing. The FAA in the US is pretty good about these things and as long as you stay below 490,000 ft AGL and are flying a sounding rocket (eg not trying to make orbit). With that said, well-resourced doesn't matter too much, it's more knowledge and experience. CSXT attempts were done by a team of aerospace engineers experienced in these types of things in their day jobs. They reached space (above 100km AGL) twice. USCRPL has been doing this for well over a decade, and have also reached space twice. And they've had heaps of failures along the way.

TLDR; Going Mach 5 in fairly thick atmosphere is exceptionally hard to do without encountering a rapid unscheduled disassembly. Flying a two stage to space is more efficient and less rough on the rocket, but no one has done that yet as it's quite a bit harder that a relatively dumb 4fnc rocket.

While I'm happy for you, I feel it's worth mentioning that you can be a moral and contributing member to society without participating in a church/organised religion.

Wo-we's AMD A9 miniPC is $79 USD new, has 8GB RAM, a 128GB M.2, and a Win10 license. I've been running one as a geostationary satellite ground station for close to a year now and it's great! It also doesn't have the heating issues that the Raspberry Pi 3+ I replaced it with did. https://www.wo-we.com/collections/mini-pc

Can confirm. My last good finding was a unauthed and blind SQLi.

While this is true, the Flipper Zero doesn't have wifi radios or an SDR that can transmit in the wifi frequency ranges. OOB it's impossible to jam wifi with with the Flipper.

I was diagnosed with severe spinal stenosis last year and I've found a combination of walking daily and working at a sit/stand desk in the standing position has helped me immensely. Our backs are designed to be under load and if you sit all day it will only make things worse.

They can do right. The X-37B is still on orbit, and from an unclassified perspective it looks like a huge success.

6 days ago here in Australia a local army lawyer (David McBride) was given a 5 year 8 month stint for leaking classified documents. The documentation was around Australian SAS soldiers committing war crimes in Afghanistan. Given they're all still free and the conventional wisdom here is that McBride was made an example of to ensure the US didn't think Australia was soft on leakers; I don't think Assange's chances of freedom are good.

> the corporation's human capital management software

How's my fellow human capital stock going today?

Given the somewhat flaky nature of RPi's in terms of heat/load issues, and combined with the fact that they're quite slow I completely bypass them these days for cheap AMD miniPCs (x64). The Wo-We AMD Excavator A9-9400 unit has 8GB DDR4, a 128GB M2 drive, wifi, USB3, etc for $98USD. Despite how ugly it is it's still very good performance wise. https://www.wo-we.com/collections/mini-pc/products/mini-pc-a...

Basically Australia has balanced national security via FVEY/US backing with a huge economic upswing delivered off the back of China's rise globally for a couple decades now. Australia is effectively a parasitic passenger on the back of China from an economic growth perspective.

When ScoMo called for the Covid investigation back in 2020, China responded with a raft of tariffs which seemed designed to incur maximum political pain for domestic Australian politicians. And while some industries found new markets for their products, others were left holding the bag domestically. Wine and rock lobsters are good examples of this.*

AFR report on rock lobster woes from last year https://www.afr.com/companies/agriculture/lobster-will-be-ch...

The Guardian article on the Australian wine glut from Sept this year https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/18/austr...

And while I do acknowledge that the relationships have been damaged, I also recognise these specific industries have been taking an absolute bath financially from this now gone export market. Australian businesses have bore the financial brunt of these decisions, not the Chinese.

Australians have experience logistically with the Chinese market, contacts on the ground, and the desire to move product that historically has sold very well into that market. And when faced with continued financial pain due to a lack new markets being developed (come to find out that's quite hard for some things like wine and lobster) I suspect these industries will welcome the return of exports to China with open arms, primarily as they're probably on life support as I type this and desperately need those free cash flows for solvency.

* I live in Perth, Western Australia, safe to say "we've" been talking about this issue pretty much since the tariffs were announced

The Optus outage was in the order of 8-9 hours and was a core network fault off the back of a bodged upgrade rolled out in the middle of the night. It's completely unrelated to China, the United States, or geopolitics in general. Optus has laid off a lot of engineers since Covid and those decisions are starting to have knock on effects.

In that research did you watch this video?

https://www.abc.net.au/news/programs/the-business/2023-11-06...

I kinda think if you want honest appraisals of the Australia/China relationship you'd probably want to look at domestic Australia sources when compared to the wsj.

> ...and expected Australian imports to come flooding back in but almost nobody bit that hook due to the amount of time and money export companies had spent arranging relationships with other countries instead of China in the wake of the ban.

Do you have a source for this? I feel it's very generalised and doesn't take into account the individual industries.

Take Australian red wine for instance, domestic producers haven't found a new export market to take the volume China did. It's negatively impacted the industry significantly and I'm quite certain once Australian wine producers can gain non-tariffed access to the Chinese market again the oceans of red will once again flow.

If people are going to listen to a famous actor advertising bs on tv as valid investment advice that's on them, and Matt. I wouldn't put that on Ben M.

probably both

I just ordered a Bosgame Ryzen 3 Mini PC (U32) with 8GB DDR4 RAM and a 256GB M.2 drive for $160 USD. And it comes with Windows 11. I'm blown away by how much you can get for so little these days.

A HAB won't even approach space; you'd be lucky to get roughly 1/3 of the way there before the balloon burst.

thinking on this a bit more I suspect they would have been seeing iridium flares. that network operates from 1610-1626.5MHz and iridium flares are quite visually spectacular.

Technically it's closer to 1.7GHz, but most Geostationary birds transmitting on L band are slightly below that. GOES is at 1.68GHz (roughly) while Polar orbiting satellites (think NOAA 15-19) are just above 1.7GHz.

I can't speak to FileVault, but Bitlocker and TPM can be quite easily defeated through sniffing the bitlocker key as it's transmitted from the TPM chip to the CPU to decrypt the drive on boot over the LPC, I2C, or SPI bus. Unless you enable TPM+pin for preboot auth you can't easily protect the data on a Windows PC, even with FDE.

I agree. As an expat yank I've seen both sides. I was raised in a gun heavy household and had a loaded Sig P229 and MAK-90 in my bedroom at 18.

Moving to Australia and realising I didn't like to live life with 'my head on a swivel' was quite a revelation. And the laws around proportional use of force down here are a refreshing change to the 'shoot the person and drag them in your house to claim self defense' American mentality. You'd end up being charged with murder doing that here, and rightfully so imho.