delibes

Somewhat inspired by the Japanese robots bouncing around on the Hayabusa2 mission ... I think it'd be nice to be able to 'push off' against the debris satellite, to both decelerate it whilst also gaining orbital velocity for the clean-up satellite to go hunt down another target.

Even stranger to see Eccles and Irlam mentioned by someone here - I grew up in those two places!

You mean the Bridgewater Mill by Patricroft bridge, right? If you're interested in Victorian era tech, there's also a Nasmyth steam hammer a little bit up Worsley Road.

https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/greater-manches...

I used to love the puzzle adventure things like Repton.

edit - and Castle Quest and Ravenskull.

Yep, I agree Scotland is fine for polar and sun-synchronous orbits.

On the plus side, it's remote.

But it's hard to get my satellite there, and the weather there doesn't seem ideal for launching rockets.

I'd expect the east of the UK to be better for both access and available launch dates. Perhaps air traffic corridors are a problem.

I think battery for commercial jet airliners might be a long way off, due to jet fuel's energy density. Small planes might manage.

One idea I recall from Virgin Airlines a while back was to have planes towed around the airport so they didn't have to burn fuel on the ground. Ah here we go (2006!) :

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6203636.stm

> So could we not "renew" some antibiotics by simply not using them for 5 to 10 years?

I'm fairly sure I've come across this idea before. Oh here's an example: https://www.quora.com/What-is-antibiotic-rotation

Seems like the problem is how long it takes to lose the resistance. Probably a few decades rather than a few years. And you'd need all the world to stop, which just isn't going to happen in Asia, Africa, South America where you can just buy a couple of pills from the local pharmacist if that's all you can afford. Not an easy problem to deal with sadly.

That licence is written in some very nice plain English. Congratulations to the people that did it.

> "It is clear Microsoft needs to do something to stimulate use of Edge, but the change is likely to be extremely unpopular with both testers and regular users"

I think if it has the side-effect of pushing users still using IE8-11 onto Chrome or Firefox (or even Edge), the testers will probably be happy.

Well his excellent write-up acknowledges the WDC 65816 which was you can still buy (IC or Verilog), so I guess somebody wants it?

https://wdc65xx.com/65xx-chips/w65c816s/16bit/MPU

I had a BBC Micro B (a very British computer for those that haven't heard of it) and really wish I'd had this. Sideways ROM/RAM banks just didn't cut it.

I'm the tech director/CTO/whatever in a team of 3 devs (me plus 2). We don't do 'performance appraisals'.

We often do code reviews. I sometimes do pair programming. Once in a while I have a private chat about something specific that's not code related.

And this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-B...

I occasionally boot up a PowerBook G4 running Leopard - I think the last version to support PPC. It's had a battery replacement and an SSD installed but is still quite slow (and hot after a while). But the screen and keyboard are nice and I think it'll last another 10+ years if I'm careful.

Still, somewhere it pops up in web analytics as an outlier :)

And yet we still can't heal damaged gums easily. When somebody figures that out, they'll be rich.

Was thinking the same, but more eyeballing also makes me think there's always a slowdown or even dip in Jan/Feb. That seems even stranger.

> For example a large attack by India towards Pakistan

That's 8th on the list in the movie Wargames :)

https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/24ujzq/for_fans_of_...

Is it that easy? If the USA declares 'no first use' do I believe it? How much more than UK, Russia, China, ... Israel, Pakistan, North Korea?

In fact, only America has ever actually used a nuclear bomb in a real war. On the balancing side, they've had a series of de-escalating disarmament treaties with the former USSR, so could be argued to be heading in the more peaceful direction than counties further down my list.

In the game Civilization I know that Gandhi will always, left to his own devices, eventually nuke me, because of a historical in-game joke. The real world is a lot less predictable.

My understanding is there is no grace period. It starts 25th May, and affects any existing data you have. So for example, if I have 1 million users today with a weaker form of consent agreement, I need to ask them all to re-affirm a much clearer consent statement before May 25th in order to carry on similar data processing.

I like it. You need a good slogan for the media. How about something like ... err ... "No taxation without representation" ?

Nah, it'll never work.

Ah, memories. Back in 2010 I whinged to colleagues who were using their fancy functional languages to solve problem 1 inefficiently in 2 lines of code...

" Project Euler problem 1 :-

It helps to know the sum of (1 .. x) is 0.5 * n * (n+1).

Multiples of 3 less than 1000 are (3 .. 999) == (1 .. 333) * 3 = 0.5 * 333 * 334 * 3 = 166833

Multiples of 5 less than 1000 are (5 .. 995) == (1 .. 199) * 5 = 0.5 * 199 * 200 * 5 = 99500

We must subtract common multiples (those of 15), so (15 .. 990) = (1 .. 66) * 15 = 0.5 * 66 * 67 * 15 = -33165

166833 + 99500 - 33165 = 233168

O(1) solution FTW :P Nice looking code is good, but a smart algorithm makes a big difference. "

OK, I was a smug arsehole, but there's a point to be made y'know?

Not sure if we'd be sun-transiting to them, but perhaps they can get a highly sensitive atmospheric spectral line chart.

Then they can start debating whether the CO2 level going from 0.03% to 0.04% indicates we're entering another extinction period. If they're within a few light-decades then the next century will be a very exciting time for their astro-xeno-biologists. Lucky them!

Thanks for reminding me. The Last Lecture is good. Since it's about 9 years ago, some younger HN readers may have missed it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo

Cancer sucks.

That's the fun science bit where we say "Oh that's odd" :)

Is there some matter along the path that interacts with the gamma ray burst and slows it by two seconds? Why is it two seconds? Does it tell us something about the source?

All very exciting.

I see what you're getting at with (B), since you've named the function which adds another 'thing' to think about. But I can anonymise it in modern Javascript:

  y = (x) => {return Math.max(2, x)}

To me that just looks nice, and it's clear how Math.max is being used. With the partial (A) I have to have some implicit knowledge of the function, where as in (B) or my version I can see how it's being used. Perhaps I'm a bit dis-functional.

Gas giants are a much less obvious place for native life to evolve, at least from our understanding of life. Enceladus appears to have liquid water, which makes it much more likely (still slim).

That said, Arthur C Clarke included giant city-sized lifeforms floating in the clouds of Jupiter in his 2001, 2010, 2061 series. And Isaac Asimov wrote "Victory Unintentional" in the robots series.

HMS, HMAS (Australia), HMCS (Canada) are fairly well understood and widely used in the press.

As a Brit, we generally understand that USS George H.W. Bush is a big ship, not a person. This seems to be the same case from the other side of the Atlantic.

A slightly more recent UK figure has it at less than 0.1%

https://blog.yell.com/2016/04/just-many-web-users-disable-co...

I like to avoid Javascript where possible just to build a nice clean fast page.

Pity they couldn't have the imagination to write a more positive headline then.

How about - "MP3 music tech finally freed from license limitations"

You might like this: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Abolishing-Performance-Appraisals-B...

Huh. His obituary says he retired from IC in 1986, but I _distinctly_ recall him giving an electric motors course in my first year in 1994! I'm doubting my own memory now, but have vivid recollections of a classmate talking about the patents he had, and his ideas for launching to space using a maglev track up the side of a mountain.

Love that "late" sign. Reminds me of H2G2 -

Slartibartfast: Come. Come now or you will be late.

Arthur: Late? What for?

Slartibartfast: What is your name, human?

Arthur: Dent. Arthur Dent.

Slartibartfast: Late as in the late Dentarthurdent. It's a sort of threat, you see. I've never been terribly good at them myself but I'm told they can be terribly effective.