Nuke

id not be too surprised if one or both astronauts dont file a lawsuit with boeing the day they get home. and really they aren't allowed to use the station facilities? and im not going to blame sx for boeings worthless tin can not working.

i was talking to a girl online about alaska. just answering her questions you know. subjects of philosophy and religion come up. i get the feeling she is of a new age sort (i dated a witch once before so i know) and was wondering what she was doing chatting with a conventional old goat like me. getting tired of the email format she suggested we try a phone call, but me being the anti smartphone type suggested voip instead. so we agree on an app and just as i was about to set up a time, she emails back about here feelings and an ultimatum. anyway somehow over the subsequent 24 hours we managed to end up in a long range relationship and then break up (i do that with a long and brutal telling of truth). that was well outside of the scope of the conversation i thought we were having. something that came across ltt recently, if you search for the video with bing, it will play without ads. i havent tested it because i dont have ads, but you might try it.

*eventually.

its a very dirty drive. not sure if dirtier than orion or not. dont fly near habitable worlds.

something about new dune has been bugging me. the heighliners, what shape are they? because supposedly they are in 2 places at once. if you were to suit up and walk along the hull from the tail end(im assuming for now that there is only the one portal, and not one at the tail end) down to the front, around the lip, and into the portal, and continue walking you will end up at the tail in but in a different star system. the path would be a loop with an elongated loop in the middle. one continuous surface from the tail in one system and the tail in the other. that would seem to indicate a hyperdimensional structure. i also dont think they are proper stargates that link up. i think its one contiguous hull, because there is no threshold, no break in the hull when looking down the maw. no distortion to indicate a wormhole. its simply in one mouth and out the other. in the literature its a proper ship that folds space. which would indicate that the ship is capable of entering its own wormhole. in which the ship would have to completely fold itself inside out. probibly at both sides simultaneously. its a shame they never showed the thing moving from one location to another. perhaps the loop in the middle is just space warping and the ship is actually just a long contiguous cylinder with no openings at all, parked inside a wormhole, and that the mouth is really just an illusion of the ship being folded around itself and the ship is a cylindrical rather than tubular. now my brain is starting to feel like that ship. now im starting to wonder if i posted this line of thought elsewhere before.

mine was back on the 5th but i dropped out that week due to one of my presents. nothing i can talk about here.

they said the same thing about the tokamak during the cold war. that the soviets knew would be a bottomless money pit, which it is.

with air travel the smaller planes turned out to be more viable than the jumbos. the only reason 747s are still flying is they were easily retrofitted for cargo. a380s are not really all that great because they were designed with a second passenger deck which is not something that was designed to be removed. they might still be useful but i have a feeling the operating cost per kg is not as good. they wont be handling bulky cargo though. you can also make room for a few guppies and dreamlifters, and an occasional an225 (if you can avoid shooting at it) but not many. i worry the heavier rockets might get relegated to this kind of niche market with the small and medium launchers being the primary method. ride share certainly is a useful approach though in that you can aggregate payloads with similar mission profiles. though we might have everything from small systems that can put up a cubesat (eg spinlaunch and airlaunch) to utter behemoths for the big stuff in the end. a few clear workhorses will do most of the work. i like having a large reusable booster or suborbital spaceplane with multiple 2nd+ stage options in both reusable and disposable flavors.

absolutely not. frankly you are preaching to the choir. im not in the eu so i cant sign. i have my own ways of dealing with the issue. usually at the detriment of rights holders. surely there is a win-win solution to this problem, then i can spend my vpn money on games and movies and avoid the inevitable plank walking. i have a lot of respect for companies that offer drm free digital and physical copies, i often reward them with a purchase. there just arent many of them anymore and they are in decline. also the aristocats was better.

i would rather have drm free digital copy. physical media takes up a lot of space, and would rather it all reside on my nas. i can watch/listen to anything on that server from any screen in the house. i was a very reluctant steam adopter. point im getting at is that if the rightsholders do not make available physical media, there will be no physical media beyond pirated copies. quake 4 was the last game i bought that could be installed from the disc and didnt depend on an external app store, and that was some time ago. also many retail stores are opting out of sales of physical media. so access to legal physical media simply will not be a thing. and if we are talking new legislation towards bringing back physical media, i dont see why we just cant apply the same rules to app/media stores.

physical media is fine and all but... you can still get games on disc though it usually just includes an old version of steam and a redeem key. towards the end of brick and mortar game stores, that was what was going on. no real modern successor to blue ray/dvd. with the size of games these days, i dont think people want to go back to flipping discs. id like to see something with 256+ gig capacity. either a modern solid state rom chip with a usb interface. or maybe a new optical disc format, preferably in a small format and not manufactured by an entertainment company. im wary about using flash for archival storage otherwise we could just do everything as a thumb drive. companies dont want to give up the control that putting everything in a cloud gives them. nor do they want to support physical media. requesting replacement media used to be a thing. with professional software all going subscription based, games aren't far behind. f2p is really a defacto subscription with human npcs being the free players (they pay for their access by giving the paying customers someone to shoot at). from a security stand point, it is better to get an up to date copy off of steam or whatever than have an old version with known exploits that can be co-opted by malware at install time. this is better for things that do not change after purchase like movies and music (though with the way entertainment companies like to edit their movies based on ephemeral standards of political correctness at the time, this is a good thing). the above leads to game devs actually having to do their own in house testing and have a solid product at launch rather than having the customers do it. so costs go up. we do need to do something about the liberties copyright hoarders are taking with their customers. if you can hold a copyright for 100 years you should have to provide people who purchased a license/digital copy of that product access for 100 years. this would also require that license/copy to transfer if the rights get transferred. also since the estate of a rights holder can be inherited, so to should license/copy. also the ability to migrate my license/copy to another store would be nice to have (id even be willing to pay a small transfer fee for this convenience and to compensate the target store for their datacenter requirements). duration of a software/game license terms need not be 100 years. that's not really practical with software. but the duration needs to be disclosed up front and not subject to change without reimbursement.

i dont think ive played a racing game since carmageddon 2. also contrary to popular belief, the 2070 super is a great card. mine even paid for itself and half my current built back when gpu mining was still a thing.

the attack surface problem is bigger than i thought. the cable modem broadcasts an ssid i never intend to use. if they crack the random angry keyboard spam password im in trouble. there is no way to control the router over the usual browser interface, they force you to use a phone app. im glued to the bloody magnifier and my neck hurts.

today i performed mouse surgery on my g604. i prepared myself by watching several teardown and repair videos some weeks ago. i ordered some high end microswitches with an 80 million cycle mtbf. logitech will sell you a mouse that costs a small fortune with a lot more parts than a conventional design and still use the same crappy fail prone switches as on their low end mouse offerings. im not sure if the unnecessarily complex internals really add anything into the product. how about you use the good switches, and i give you the extra four bucks. it works. i can use the minecraft inventory again. the only caveat is i lost the springs for the center click return. i knew about them, couldnt remember where they were in the disassembler process. both popped out and went flying when i removed the wheel assembly. i actually managed to recover both of them. then when i went to install the second one, it disappeared when i tried to pick it up. after spending a good two hours looking for it using magnets and the like. they are so tiny i could barely see them. fortunately i keep a number of surplus springs. trimming a couple flit springs salvaged from lighters worked, but they are significantly more stiff and now it takes considerable force to use scroll click. i never use that button anyway and the other 8 work fine. im calling it a win, and for the second time vow to never buy another logitech product ever again.

the world of alaskan bear pistols is actually kind of interesting. we got the two largest species of bears in this state. both require significant stopping power. often huge calibur (.45 magnum at the small end) in a small package. mean little wrist breakers. bears are usually elusive and when you run into them its usually in too close quarters to draw a rifle. unfortunately no bayonets (would be cool if it popped out automatically after firing your last round). ive only ever seen blackbear down here (there were four bear in trash reports this week, two on my street).

the important thing is the bottom of the hole is wet.

damn it, i thought we learned about o-rings by now. also disappointed by a lack of sea sausages.

you might have silo type habs that are domed over for agricultural use for that colony. this ultimately caps its population, some fraction of which tends to crops and hab maintenance. you thus reduce the number you have for additional construction, mining and science activities. having a large bread basket region can allow for more specialized colonies. of course a low sunken dome has other benefits, like not having to deal with a pressure difference. it might be less of a dome and more of a frame for mylar panels, ultimately an oxygen catch. the low position allows piping of water from ice fields.

lots of crust. do a massive excavation several km deep. idea is simple. dig until the surface pressure and temperature is habitable. the bottom of valles marineris is close, about 7k down, and that is a good place to start. but we must go deeper. im not sure how far down you have to go. lets make our target 10 km, or 3km below the mariner valley. the fact that it goes east to west is convenient as it clears out sun blocking terrain by default. i suppose the smart place to start is begin setting up road infrastructure. find a boring location to dump your dirt. if this location also has an ore processing capabilities to strip the soil of anything useful. especially any water ice it finds, metals, useful minerals. might as well take scientific samples as well. the remains will need to be dumped somewhere (the south end looks boring and needs a big pile of dirt). you want the road to be able to get down to the floor of the valley. so you put in switchbacks. these will be expanded and eventually you will need to widen the valley and reinforce the walls to support the 3km dig. how do we do that. well really big excavators, dumptrucks, and bull dozers. the biggest we have. some examples are provided, but scale those up or bring a lot of them. they wont work on mars as is so you will need to retrofit them, with nuclear reactors. nuclear powered construction machinery, what could go wrong. i suppose you could spaceify a diesel to run on bi-propellant. but that depends on whether or not you built a methane plant yet. you might actually start with some smaller machinery, that you can use to start processing material, and then make the steel in situ to build the required bucket excavators and ore haulers. human crew is preferable as conducting what is effectively a dirt mining operation remotely would suck a lot. good thing you have lots of dirt to bury the hab. from here on out its a massive open pit mine 3 km deep. running your nuclear powered mars retrofit bagger 293 back and fourth from top to bottom on the northern and southern valley walls. several layers deep. to shallow the grade minimize the number of reinforcement piles you need to drive to prevent massive landslides. hopefully we have some kind of marscrete production going on. the dump yard would have a gravel processing operation going on by now. once the surface material is mostly removed, exposing bedrock, does mars have bedrock? idk. this actually simplifies things somewhat when you hit rock, convincing spacex to handle a shipment of high explosives will probibly not go down very well and would likely be the hard part. maybe you could find a local nitrogen source. you will also be able to start quarrying stone for future use. ultimately what you are trying to build here is a bread basket. several kilometers of farmland that can be worked in shirt sleeves with just a breather unit. enough to feed a wider mars habitation. a number of large superconducting solenoids can be used to deflect all the nasty charged particles from space. meanwhile, at ye olde pile'o'dirt you can start removing the perchlorates from some of the more choice material. not anything from the first few layers, but the less radioactive stuff further down that got less space weather. manufacturing of live soil will either need to take place in a large pressurized surface structure, or in the pit. by this time, many decades in, there should be a lot of human waste and other organic wastes available. perfect mulch. maybe a starship full of earthworms. oh wait, co2. so either genetically engineered marsworms or put in some domes (hopefully by now reinforced marscrete is a thing) to maintain o2 in the structure. i dont think the atmosphere would ever be breathable unless you replace the co2 with nitrogen. mars really is a dirt movers paradise. and industrializing a dead world that shows no signs of reanimating itself sounds a lot better than replacing all the trees with holograms of trees.

i guess the gnat that landed on the form was mistaken for a decimal place. i like to write 0. so i know its not a gnat. do they get gnats in texas, idk. we have skeeters the size of helicopters but the gnats are worse.

i somehow dont think people in congress are playing angry burds. they are too busy buying stonks of companies who wrote the laws for them to give said companies an unfair competitive advantage. why cant we make politicians take a vow of poverty before they are allowed to take office. or check your pones at the door at least. its good enough for public schools its good enough for congress.

cable company finally gave me an ultimatum about my cable modem. upgrade or die. so i give in and they send me this monstrosity of a cable modem. 3x the size of the original. with built in wifi and hard coded credentials. thank you for adding a new attack surface to my network, i really appreciate it. but the thing no doubt falls short of my existing router. looking to see if i can connect the two and just shut the wifi off on the cable modem, if it lets me. now i got the specs and am comparing them to those of my own router. i hate consumer networking manuals, because they dont tell you anything about the hardware. they are both wifi6, have 2.5 gig ports, mine has usb which i need, and theirs doesn't (and id rather not break my nas shares). its got 3 gigabit ports as well (will probibly aggregate those if i can, then i can have 2x 2.5 gig ports which will certainly speed up pxe boots). the instructions they gave me dont match the equipment either. they send me a box and what i think may be a range extender (great another security hole). the instructions do not acknowledge it at all. the rest is pretty much the basic plug thing in here, plug thing in there, install mobile app (on what exactly) and do acts of voodoo behind a clean simple interface. fortunately i found a datasheet. the specs aren't terrible (barring the missing usb ports for my external drives). its capable but i cant retire my existing router. they didn't even give me a modem only option they just sent me this box of crap. i dont want a 3rd party looking at my router settings. how about we reach an understanding, everything on my side of the wan port is mine and everything on your side is yours. keep your grubby fingers off my side of the infrastructure. thats nothing, my sister's ex husbands family used to ride around the roads like the beverly hillbillies. dogs, kids, the elderly, me, a deer carcass. like on rough unpaved single lane dirt roads. one time my grandma came up to visit, we went out to the bush. me and my sister started racing (no cops till moose season, no license, no cops, no problem) and i almost threw grandma out the tailgate. seconds later my sister's tire blew up and i had to break pretty aggressively which caused grandma to slide back to the window. some people shouldn't drive, and im one of them.

you could probibly rig the station up with ion thrusters, use the power from the solar array to power them. a couple kegs-o-xenon and you got yourselves a tourist attraction. after some significant burn time anyway. you would have to depopulate and shut down all unessential kit. more power for whatever the state of the art hall thruster you plan on using. also de-bulk to remove superfluous mass, remove everything you dont need from the internal spaces to maximize acceleration.

and then the door falls off.

no i dont think so, that would require neutron activation and heavy elements to be activated. alpha and beta radiation dont have much penetration capability. ionizing radiation can just strip electrons and have no effect on the nucleus. cosmic rays might do something. its not like its corium though.