supernova87a

I remain convinced that the main successful business model in the satellite communications industry is to wait for the first incarnation of the satellite company to fail / go bankrupt / flounder, and then be part of the 2nd round of financing or ownership that comes in to buy it out and operate it... I don't know why this is the pattern but it seems to have played out several times over the last 2 decades that I've casually watched this syndrome.

You know that it was basically sold to be able to claim a more responsible budget that year? Basically selling off of an asset to record higher revenue. Like selling your building fire extinguishers to claim that you were able to pay off your credit card bill, and who cares what those were originally meant for.

I thought that the idea of roundabouts was that they lead to slightly more accidents than before, but they are of much lower severity than before (the 90 degree intersections they replace).

Thanks!

Has anyone come across a good semi-technical description of "how your node knows that its message got sent and reached its destination and can stop sending"? I'm interested in how this logic is executed when you can't be sure (I assume) that knowledge of the result will get back to you in a certain amount of time.

I am severely tempted to hop on a flight to go and see it, but wondering if it's such a "once in a lifetime" thing to go see? That, and if it'll peter out by the time I get there, and $500+ to just fly on a whim and stay overnight.

It seems to me an analogy that as a product is increasingly complex, the ultimate consumer/demander of it becomes more and more disconnected from maintenance, operations, etc. considerations and whether that system is well designed and serviceable.

Cars of a past generation were able to be owner-maintained (or understood), and therefore the owner had some interest in knowing that it was easy to maintain and would buy (at least partly) on that premise. Something that was a nightmare to maintain would not be so easily bought because the owners would soon realize how hard they were to fix.

Now, with a car that is so complicated, the owner is far distant from being the fixer of it until years later seeing a surprise repair bill. Even the maintainers are not even directly knowledgeable about the design and how to repair. And the information about its maintainability is a low factor on the buying considerations list. But by then you've already given the company the money and incentive to keep on building this way. And rarely (or extremely/too "laggily" does that information feed back).

It seems to me enterprise software systems have this problem as well.

I wonder how the incident was diagnosed? Does the FDR record low level errors that might've contributed to this? I thought that it only recorded certain input parameters and high-level flight metrics but I'm no expert.

If a radiation event caused some bit-flip, how would you realize that's what triggered an error? Or maybe the FDR does record when certain things go wrong? I'm thinking like, voting errors of the main flight computers?

Anyway, would be very interested to know!

I was surprised too at the 2nd sentence: "The project will have a heating power of 2MW and a thermal energy storage (TES) capacity of 250MW..."

and how a news outlet about energy could get such a fundamental unit wrong.

But given that later in the article it does revert to correct units (and the numbers are plausibly proportional), I assume it's just a typo. Strange that it hasn't been corrected even now.

"...It follows Polar Night Energy completing and putting a 1MW/100MWh Sand Battery TES project into commercial operations this summer..."

It is mind blowing to see the prices of the complex spiral distillation condensers at $5-10 each.

Today these are like $300 at least, and I'm guessing they cannot be made in the USA. (I would be glad to be wrong)

edit: ok with inflation from 1938 it's not so incomparable. But still.

I don't really care if you think people don't understand details of the job you do, or the system in which you operate. Your name is on the article and it's my expectation at this point that someone telling a story give me the original source when it's easily available. I don't need to know the complications or reasons why it isn't done, I want the right outcome.

If anything, you should be helping to cut through the BS layers and insisting that the original source link (or, even just the full name of the court case) be included with your reporting.

Hey, I heard about how utility pole inspecting helicopters are able to tell the good/rotten state of wooden telephone poles by the reverb pattern of sound waves coming off the poles from the rotors -- it seems to me the whole field of non-invasive sensing (and using existing/ambient emission sources) is getting pretty impressive.

Is it because journalists think of their special talent as talking to people to get information (which is a scarce and priviliged resource), versus reading and summarizing things that we all have access to?

So they rarely are forced to do anything but state the name of who they interviewed, and that's it. And puts them in the habit of not acknowledging what they read, as a source?

yup, I just saw that in reading the ruling in more detail.

You made me snort with laughter with how right you were. I in fact have 2 adblockers on, and I actively ignore and sanitize some of my history (like Youtube) to not get directed towards advertising or other rabbit holes I don't want to see, even though I never click a single ad.

But I do pay for quality journalism / news websites!

Is it not sad/telling that the reporter of the story couldn't summarize this in the story, but the bot here can? If there were an indicator of the future to come...

By the way, the worst laughable offenders of this idea are local TV news stations. As if to get the real insight on some world issue, I'm going to "stay up to date by going to KTVU.com for the latest on this breaking story!".

I guess they are unable to value the function that I am more likely to read and trust stories from their website if they give me the honest info about where their stories come from that I can further read (and rely on them to always point me to as a guide).

Why? Maybe stock price is just a reflection that whatever the penalty, even large, now there is legal certainty rather than unlimited risk.

By the way, a pet peeve of mine right now is that reporters covering court cases (and we have so many of public interest lately) never seem to simply paste the link to the online PDF decision/ruling for us all to read, right in the story. (and another user here kindly did that for us below: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.223... )

It seems such a simple step (they must have been using the ruling PDF to write the story) yet why is it always such a hassle for them to feel that they should link the original content? I would rather be able to see the probably dozens of pages ruling with the full details rather than hear it secondhand from a reporter at this point. It feels like they want to be the gatekeepers of information, and poor ones at that.

I think it should be adopted as standard journalistic practice in fact -- reporting on court rulings must come with the PDF.

Aside from that, it will be interesting to see on what grounds the judge decided that this particular data sharing remedy was the solution. Can anyone now simply claim they're a competitor and get access to Google's tons of data?

I am not too familiar with antitrust precedent, but to what extent does the judge rule on how specific the data sharing need to be (what types of data, for what time span, how anonymized, etc. etc.) or appoint a special master? Why is that up to the judge versus the FTC or whoever to propose?

Is the incorrectly shared mail piece addressed to someone with a quite similar address, or potentially someone who previously lived there?

Just having thought once in a while about how complicated addresses are, I can only imagine all the things that can go wrong. (both for the post office, and for example, credit cards/banks that have to use addresses in validation of purchases, etc)

Imagine an apartment building with many units. Think of how people differently specify on the address lines which unit they live in? What if they leave off their unit #? What about apartments that are numbered "345 1/2 Second Street"?

What about a new person with the same last name that appears at an address? What do you do about that? Is an address that differs by a very subtle letter a different household? E.g. "345b Second Street"? Should you ship a package there or approve a credit card, or is that likely to be an attempt to fraudulently divert mail to someone else who is nonexistent?

I'm sure it's endlessly complicated, and I have no idea. But I know it will be complicated.

Genuine question for debate: iPhone app store is a private club to which businesses can choose to belong, if they want to sell their product to certain customers. Membership in the club comes with the condition that you not talk about alternative ways to buy the same product, while selling via the club. Membership in the club is not a monopoly; there are many other channels through which to sell a company's products.

Why is is against the law?

Lights are out in the terminals at LHR. https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cly24zvvwxlt

Is it true, I have heard, that ACARS messages are like as expensive as sending data to Hubble, and airlines hate how expensive it is (hence it is not a viable method of transmitting more volumes of more desired data, like position data, regularly etc.) but have no great alternative that they can develop to replace it?

There is a handy rule of thumb called the "rule of 12ths", used in seamanship / ocean navigation / tidal calculations (maybe it is used elsewhere too, this just happens to be where I recognize it from). I think it can apply to solar, seasons, etc. -- well, anything sinusoidally cyclical -- as a useful mental model:

If you divide half the phase of a cycle (peak to trough) into 6 hours duration or whatever appropriate unit, like 6 months, i.e. x-axis --

then going down from the top of the peak (or up from trough), the amount of y-axis change in each unit/hour is:

Hour (or month #): amount of change vs. peak-trough total (i.e. total = 2*A)

1: 1/12

2: 2/12

3: 3/12

4: 3/12

5: 2/12

6: 1/12

For us, the peak / trough are: June 21 to December 21, and the x-axis is 1 month units. And assuming maybe a 2 hour peak-to-trough difference in daylight time y-axis (depends on latitude you live of course), then each 1/12th equals 10 minutes.

So these days (late March) we are in the middle of the fastest decrease part, and each month we gain 30 minutes of daylight. Or, each day we are seeing sunset get pushed by like 1 minute.

see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_twelfths, the diagram explains it better of course

Why have laws either? Honest people would have not needed them anyway, and people seeking to break the law will find ways around them.

Sorry, but I think that statement is an incorrect perception that you're falling victim to due to a statistical blip in high publicity aircraft incidents in the last ~2 months.

We live in the safest era of commercial airline travel in history. The rate of serious aircraft accidents is so low that safety researchers almost don't have real life incidents to study for new issues to fix. That is why the recent few incidents seem like such an anomaly.

Certain things still need to be improved of course, and the DCA crash brings to attention ATC staffing, etc. But to say that you're sick and tired of aircraft incidents like they're happening every month is a bit ridiculous.

I can see how when owning a building in a place like that, you might be tempted to say, "not even going to dig, don't want to know what we might find under there" that will cause your property to completely change value and control.

I wonder who takes the loss, in case suddenly your building can no longer be developed and is essentially state property (although owned by you).

The interesting question to me is, “does the bee know it’s going to die if it stings you?”

And therefore, acts judiciously in deciding when, if ever, to sting? So that it only does it when it’s life-threateningly mad at something?

If there's one thing to admire/observe about old advertisements or documents like this (aside from the cycling-specific content), it's how much in a previous age, people publicly put their names behind the content and claims. Company names, schedules, assertions of opinion/fact, signed with someone's actual name.

Not like some website where you hardly know what the name is supposed to mean, or who in virtual land you're submitting information and payment to.