Poul-Henning Kamp

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »Making vacuum tube electronics is one thing, but making them with million year MTBFs is...challenging. « I would say that it is physically impossible. The closest we have come are probably the "6P12" vacuum tubes designed for the first transatlantic...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »Okay, here's the math.« I wouldn't trust any our our cosmology to apply to the Laundryverse, and least of our measurements on this universe and rickety theorizing that follows about how the universe was packed in it's original shipping carton....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »So I should probably re-read as much Penrose as my brain can handle« In the Laundryverse it is surely not accidental that the famous aperiodic "Penrose" tiling has a five-fold rotational symmetry....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »CASE NIGHTMARE-class civilizations with billions of human-class minds aren't grass. They're much rarer, both in earth's history (parallel earths) and out in Fermi Paradox land« Sorry, does not follow: The Elder Gods is sufficient to explain away the postulated "Fermi...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  »Any other options? (Exorcism not being feasible.)« Is Pete convinced about that ?...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  All things I cannot imagine that the person Angelton were before Teapot happened to him, would not try to leave a helpful note to his eventual successor in the job. I would look in places like the mandatory "Annual Civil...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  »Would have been just as effective if Putin had his minions act while Prigozhin was in Africa or after he returned to Belarus.« There's one aspect here which I'm not sure how works: Prigozhin was a member of the same...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  According to my prof in such matters, many years ago: The absolute worst case would have been a glancing blow across one of the poles: That would have removed a LOT of water from the biosphere and directly and indirectly...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  »Half-agree: "the West" fucked-up after the CCCP's implosion, no doubt about it« May I cordially remind you that at the time, CCCP had god knows how many nuclear weapons ready to go, in a rapid alert network nobody in the...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Re: MilSF I made the mistake of picking up the book "Hunt for Red October" and having read it, I have nothing but the deepest admiration for the people who made such a good movie out of such a terrible...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  »but novels consisting purely of comedy ... no, not so much: don't think I can actually do that.« Comedy requires a solid background to be funny against, and of the top of my head I can't recall a single novel...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »On the Federal side, Jack Smith is pushing for an early trial date - Jan 2, 2024 (Jan 6 is a Saturday) - in DC and is saying the trial can be completed before the Super Tuesday Primary.« I have...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »is the un normally keen on areas of countries which don't want to be part of the country they're in any more voting to leave and set up shop elsewhere?« There is one precedent for these kinds of problems which...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »even if the "superconducting" part was as easy as "semiconducting" is.« That is actually one of the most interesting bits of the theoretical analyses on the new material: Depending on which Pb atom you substitute with Cu, you either get...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »There's a fuck-tonne of phosphate-bearing rock« ... and most of them suffer from a comparatively high uranium content. During the cold war, mining phosphates with a side-stream of uranium was very profitable. In Florida the spoilstacks from phosphate mining causes...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  As Colin Powell asked when the wall fell: What do you do, when you have lost your best enemy ?...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »It's worth contemplating the idea that NATO wants to use Ukraine to "pull a Vietnam war" on Russia« Are you confusing NATO with the weapons industry ?...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  Scandinavia and the World - https://satwcomic.com/...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »Trump's "win" in 2016 was a fluke.« Nope. It was the predictable (and yes, I did predict he would win!), result of giving a lot of voters in USA a very unpalatable choice: Either Trump or a woman as president...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »0x2d or not 0x2d. Aaargh.« You mean "0x2b || 0xd4" ?...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »XIIIIIIYIIIIIZ vs XIIIIIYIIIIIZ vs XIIIIIYIIIIIIZ Not to say HIHIHIHIHlHlHIHIBHIH« How many times have I told you to stop writing programs in INTERCAL ?!...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »But, as I said originally, you can't display two 160 character wide windows on a FHD screen EVEN with your minimal font. 320 x 6 = 1920, which leaves no room for the frame. Running frameless (a) adds legibility problems...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »You did notice that C14 can be used? Half life 5,700 years.« One interesting factoid about synthetic diamonds is that they are not "forever", precisely because C14 is radioactive....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »Hence the second nuclear criticality accident at Tokaimura in 1999.« LANL and Sandia has both published extensively on criticality accidents over the years in very accessible form, because they want everybody and the cleaning lady to understand it. One of...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »but by his left hand acting as part of the apparatus (which hadn't been in their calculations).« There were not many calculations at that stage, which is pretty much precisely why he was doing that experiment in the first place....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »And something that escapes even many computer scientists « Something which seems to escape everybody is that given enough time "evolutionary programming" will explore the entire reachable solution space. In other words, if there is a way to "GOTO" you...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »The reason I remember hearing about a lot for the GPO not allowing people to connect Stuff to the phone lines was isolation. They didn't trust anyone's insulation,« And rightly so: In the days/countries of pole-lines, the longitudinal lightning currents...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »But for a while you could order a T1 line (1 to 23 or 24 dedicated circuits) and the phone company would convert it to packet switching in the box at your office then back again at the other end...
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »acoustic couplers were in common use in UK academia and research, and damn the legality.« Acoustic couplers were 100% legal, as were any number of other contraptions which interfaced acoustically to the telephone network....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  »But what about the economic impact of their decision to stop insuring certain parts of the U.S.?« Who knows? Maybe California and Florida will see less idiotic "development" in the future ? It's not like The Framers put a right...