Vulch

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• Commented on In the pulp
  >-- not accessible by vehicle -- I hate to ask the stupid question, but doesn't this cause problems for the postal service? For the Royal Mail, Post Office != Sorting Office in many cases. A Post Office is mostly retail...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Accelerando
  Greg: Just click on the image on the XKCD page and you get taken to http://xkcd.com/980/huge/ which has zoom controls at the top left....
• Commented on Crib sheet: Accelerando
  I believe the current thinking for controlled fusion is that in 200 years time it'll be a fortnight away......
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  a BBC mini-series of Horatio Hornblower A number of short series made by ITV, not the BBC, featuring characters with the same names as those in the books by C S Forester. Any other resemblance to the books (or history)...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  ...an out of context problem. While the spotting helicopter circles overhead.... (Too wet for gardening and my vacuum cleaner threshold seems very low today)...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  I suspect that a wooden ship won't do too well against an unarmed ice-breaker. A bow designed to force its way through a few feet of ice isn't going to have much problem with an oak hull, and will also...
• Commented on "We're going to need book covers. Lots of book covers!"
  Implanted lasers? Given the mermaids I'd expect them to be genetically modified to grow their own lasers....
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  The density is the most important factor, or more accurately the mass per unit area of heatshield. Curiosity and the sky crane were inside a big aerodynamic shell to get a lower mass/area value because neither had much empty space...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  What would it be like to land a 40-ton spacecraft on the surface? "Interesting"? One way involves three landings in all. First you send a Curiosity type rover carrying 3 or 4 radio beacons. It surveys the landing area,...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  But what's the point in dumping stuff that makes perfectly good radiation shielding to "gain a little extra payload" if that means you have to install multiple times that mass of dedicated shielding? You'll land up using considerably more manoeuvering...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  Presuming they want to actually stop once they get back to Earth they will have to run the engine(s) to decelerate into orbit Nope, they'll do exactly the same as Apollo did coming back from the moon and let the...
• Commented on Mo' holding pattern
  be better to toss the solid ahem, "residues" as that would reduce the mass of the ship when it comes to deceleration or acceleration Except this is a free return trajectory fly-by so once it's left Earth that's it on...
• Commented on Dragged kicking and screaming into the 19th century
  About 100 years ago, China stopped being ruled by an Emperor Although from one point of view it's just changed dynasty a bit more often than usual....
• Commented on Wow
  Speaking of big bangs on Mars... Could a Comet Hit Mars in 2014? (via /.)...
• Commented on Wow
  Blowing the atmosphere of any planet away isn't that easy, even on Mars. The explosion may have made a small contribution but a slow trickle fits the areology as currently understood. The Martian magnetic field has been gone for much...
• Commented on If this had happened 30 years ago today, we would all have died
  > The nice thing about asteroids is that they don't come out of nowhere Actually they do. 2008 TC3 was discovered 11 hours before hitting Sudan, 2009 VA first spotted 15 hours before it passed 8700 miles out. There have...
• Commented on New Guest Blogger: Ian Tregillis
  I kept getting kicked out of "Declare" by Tim Powers, which you'd recommended for a similar audience, by the lead character not being convincingly British. It didn't help that for some reason I had a US version with the consequent...
• Commented on Where's Charlie?
  It's the "near" bit of "near fatal" is the important bit of Nicoll-stories. Anyone else would need to be Captain Scarlet to be able to tell them....
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  Nojay, the very same Downing Street I and any other member of the public could (and did) walk along in the early 1980s at the height of the IRA bombings. The one mortar attack was conducted by means of a...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  El@56 Armed response units are an unfortunate necessity, but the way they operate needs to be different to military units. A journalist colleague at an ITV company used to tell of a conversation he'd had with two police on the...
• Commented on Happy Christmas! Here is a flame war in a can
  is there anyone reading who can not live with "the right to arm law enforcement officers To add a bit of petrol to the conflagration, why would a civilised nation think it needed routinely armed law enforcement officers?...
• Commented on Things that keep me awake at night #1: The end of telephony
  I didn't miss that point, in fact it's what I addressed. Just because the origin of the call is outside the local jurisdiction doesn't exempt the caller from the requirements of the regulations. They are still committing an offence under...
• Commented on Things that keep me awake at night #1: The end of telephony
  paws4thot: The various regulations and directives underlying the TPS apply to calls made to UK numbers. The last version I worked with made no reference to the source of a call. The problem is in the enforcement. It's worth getting...
• Commented on 2512
  You get tin from Dartmoor in Devon right down to the tip of Cornwall and probably beyond. You also get copper in the same region, no need to go to North Wales for it, but it's not quite as easy...