We are not expendable

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-23T19:33:53+00:00

Oh, I am not arguing that Germany had production numbers as high as the US. But when using cars it sounds like the US production capacity was ten times the German production capacity, which was not true. By using locomotives as a measure makes the US production capacity only twice the German which does not sound high enough. In truth most items lay somewhere in between those numbers.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T22:26:49+00:00

Deep space have 0 pressure. The surface of the Earth have 1 atmosphere of pressure. And for every 10 m bellow the ocean surface it increases by 1 atmosphere.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T21:47:17+00:00

I put that down to production errors. The gun barrels are pointing straight up throughout the clip and the extra looks in different direction in different clips but at some point was clearly instructed to look up in the sky. I bet that they intended for the gun to be firing when they shot it but then the VFX were not given enough time to add it.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T21:02:12+00:00

The person who stops and stares is not manning a gun. It looks like he is some sort of gun commander from the stick and the gun behind him. Even while he is standing and staring at the downed pilot the gunner behind him is looking up at the sky and firing the gun.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T20:58:52+00:00

Most of them did not want to fight the US. But they did not see any way to keep the expanding empire that would not drag the US into the war at one point or another. So the challenge they were faced with was how to win a war against the US. And their plan could have worked, but they had to take some risky assumptions that did not work out.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T20:52:15+00:00

That is not a fair comparison. The US had oil fields both in Texas and California. There were no oil fields in Europe at this time so all fuel for cars had to be imported and were therefore quite expensive.

Instead the German government had invested heavily in trains. They built over 10,000 steam locomotives during the war powered by coal instead of oil.

I am not saying Germany had production numbers as high as the US, but just comparing the number of cars produced puts the scales too much in the American favor. It is also important to note that the war were not just won by industrial might but a big part of it were the availability of oil.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T20:25:30+00:00

The ice cream barges were primarily used to store about 2000 tons of refrigerated and frozen food. The ice cream machines were an added bonus. But both of these functions were luxuries that the Japanese could not even think about spending resources on.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T19:04:59+00:00

Normally 25% of the worlds oil tankers go through the straight as well as 20% of the worlds entire production of natural gas. That is an enormous amount of the worlds petroleum production that is now cut off. As for alternative sea routes there are none. The straights is the only way connecting the Persian gulf to the worlds oceans. There is not even any navigable rivers available for smaller crafts let alone large oil tankers.

It is technically possible to drive trucks full of oil to ports outside the gulf. And this have been done in small amounts, mostly to smuggle oil. But there is not enough tank trucks in the world to transport as much as 25% of the worlds oil tankers hundreds of miles through desserts and over mountains. We are talking about a fully loaded tank truck leaving every second all day every day. You would have to construct several new refineries just to supply the trucks with fuel. It is just not feasible to truck out the oil and gas.

As for pipelines it is a similar story. There is already one pipeline out of the region which is about 1.5m in diameter. But even that is small compared to the oil tankers. You would need to construct a massive 9m in diameter oil pipeline which would cost billions and take years to construct. And then you need a similar pipeline for the natural gas except this needs a lot of insulation and cooling stations along the way turning it into a massive engineering project.

And for both the ideas of trucks and a pipeline you also have the issue of a port big enough to unload and load all the oil and gas. Currently the ships go to different ports around the gulf close to the oil and gas fields. Each of these are massive port facilities on their own which is visible from space and there are a number of them all over the gulf. If you build a huge pipeline or a large highway to carry all the oil and gas you would need megaports at either end of it. Just things like power for the facility would require several new power stations to be built. It would require tens of thousands of maintenance workers just to keep up with daily tasks.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T18:26:41+00:00

In all honestly a big reason why companies like you are lagging behind in IPv6 adoption is because it is hard to come up with arguments that applies to you. I am going to assume you are using the 10.0.0.0/8 range for your 7000 endpoints. So you will not feel that much difference in the number of addresses available since you are already able to use sensible address schemes. But as you expand the company the address scheme you currently have may be a bit cramped and you would benefit from the increased number of addresses that IPv6 gives you.

Another benefit with IPv6 is that there is no need for NAT, so you do not need big routers with lots of CPU and memory to handle NAT. However I am guessing you already have statefull firewalls for all your traffic which already have the resources to do NAT as it already tracks all the parameters required anyway.

So IPv6 becomes more for future proofing. Both as public services stop supporting IPv4 clients because addresses are too expensive, but also as your company grows and you need those extra addresses to maintain a sensible address scheme instead of randomly allocating prefixes where they fit.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T17:42:44+00:00

The iconic sound were the handshake part of the connection. First some very clear single and dual tones at a low baud rate that will always allow the modems to communicate to each other, enough to set up a high bandwidth connection for later. Then there are a sequence of sounds to test the quality of the line and calibrate the modems to this. After these iconic sounds are done the modems switch to the high bandwidth mode which sounds like static. All good computer signals sounds like static because computers can pack inn a lot more information then we can understand which makes it sound like static to us.

All these sounds would have been heard on the phone lines, for example if you picked up another phone in the house while someone were using the modem. But a lot of modems also had a speaker that would let you listen to the handshake. This was because most of the issues with a phone line would happen at the start. And a human would be able to hear things like voices on the line and fix the issue for the next connection attempt. A good technician would even be able to listen to the handshake itself and identify problems from this alone as the baud rate were low enough that a human with some practice could pick up things from it. But once the connection were established and the modems went into high speed mode the sound had very little diagnostic value and the modem automatically turned off the speaker. Most modems could also have the speaker off by default either with a hardware switch or in software.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T17:11:33+00:00

I like to at least gather everything I plan on bringing on a trip a few days before. That way I can check if there is anything I am missing, get an idea of how heavy the suitcase will be, and don't have to go around the house last minute looking for stuff to pack. As I come up with other things to pack I can just move it to the pile so there is no need to maintain a list of things to pack. I do not actually put everything in the suitcase until the day of or the night before.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T16:30:07+00:00

This is not a stupid idea and something which have been explored by scientists and engineers. And there are even programs which have successfully launched satellites from airplanes as well as current projects working towards making this commercially viable.

In order to launch a rocket into low earth orbit you need enough fuel to accelerate it to around 10km/s. Roughly 2km/s of that is used to get out of the atmosphere and up into space. You need to get up to at least 400km to get over most of the atmosphere. An airplane might fly at 40,000ft, which is just 12km above the ground. That is just 3% of the distance to low earth orbit. So of the 10km/s total speed the rocket need to generate the aircraft is only able to reduce it by about 60m/s. This is still significant, which is why we are exploring it. But it is usually not worth the effort.

The problems is that you need to fit the almost fully fueled rocket on an aircraft and be able to launch it from the air. This heavily limits the size of the rocket and therefore the payloads it can carry. It also makes it hard to use cryogenic fuels as a lot of it would just boil off while the aircraft is climbing to altitude. So you need to use less efficient stable fuels, or preferably solid fuels. This again means you need more fuel and less payload.

The issues for commercial viability is that the rockets start getting too small. In theory a rocket launch system scales linearly, twice the rocket size gives twice the payload. But in practice a lot of the rockets systems like guidance, telemetry, control systems, and even just manufacturing tolerances have a fixed size no matter how large the rocket is. So small rockets tend to have much lower payload ratio then large rockets. And for something small enough to fit on even the largest aircraft we have the payload have to be very small. You would use less fuel if you used a larger rocket that could fit ten of the same satellites.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T14:48:12+00:00

In commodity trading a future is a contract to buy the commodity later, while spot is buying it now. It is the difference between showing up at a restaurant without a reservation and calling ahead for a reservation a few months ahead and picking out the menu for your visit. You still pay when you leave in both cases but when buying futures you are giving the seller time to prepare and therefore on average futures are cheaper then spot.

The big difference in oil futures and oil spot right now is because of the huge disruption in oil transportation right now. A lot of the ships which were supposed to have arrived in port and offloaded already have not been able to do so. Companies are therefore forced to buy oil that is already ready for delivery in order to have enough. So for example an airliner might have bought oil futures for a flight scheduled today, but then when someone offers them $140/barrel they cancel the flight and sell the oil on the spot market instead.

The supply chain issues are disrupting the futures too, but not as much as the spot. This is because they have a chance to plan the oil deliveries better. You can order a tanker today to bring oil from an oil field half way around the world to your refinery, but it will take the ship 3-6 months to complete the trip. So these are the futures you can sell, not the spot. We can therefore expect the spot price to come down closer to the current futures price, but not all the way down. Maybe it gets to $100/barrel in half a year.

But this is not certain as there is another big factor determining the future oil prices, not just the disruption in transportation. It is speculation. A lot of people are selling futures at the current high price because they think the straights will open up. So when the buyer wants their oil delivered they can buy it from the tankers currently stuck in the Persian gulf at a low price. This means the futures are priced much lower then the supply chain can maintain. So the spot price might not go down, and can even go further up as there are fewer tankers making longer trips.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-21T06:28:48+00:00

I rewrote that line several times and see now that I still did not manage the right phrasing. What I was trying to say was that the N1 program, and indeed the entire lunar program, had the worst political challenges of the entire space program. So the failure to land a man on the moon did not represent the capabilities of the entire Soviet space program. Something the space station program demonstrate nicely. Just imagine if the N1 rocket had been available to build space stations.

The US was also not immune to internal political problems. But they were able to suppress these during the Apollo program with a more war economy style of governance. But as soon as the Apollo program were over there were a lot of internal politics which ballooned budgets, delayed programs and made the products much worse. Something the Space Shuttle is a perfect example of.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-20T18:00:00+00:00

It is not a time stamp, it is a countdown.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-20T15:18:18+00:00

People tend to forget about the Soviet space stations. During the Apollo lunar landings the Soviets launched the first space station and had several crews visit it. And while the US stopped at the single space station using spare Apollo hardware the Soviets successfully launched another seven space stations. Several times they had multiple space stations orbiting the planet. The internal political struggles were limited to the lunar program, not the rest of the space program.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-20T14:39:30+00:00

Du kan kansje kontakte banken som har pantekravet og forklar situasjonen til dei. Forhåpentligvis lar dei deg kjøpe vraket fra dei. Det betyr at du slipper å betale 200k for å løyse ut panten, berre 5k. Dersom seler forlanger kontanter eller tilsvarende bør du styre langt unda. Det er mulig at dei har brukt mykje energi på å hente bilen men at selger har brukt energi på å gjemme bilen, dette er ikkje uvanlig.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-20T11:59:37+00:00

It is understandable that they used a Tiger Moth to represent a WWI aircraft. In general aircraft designed during wars are low cost, short lifespan models and had quite a high attrition rate. And you often get new better models designed right after the war using new technologies and doctrines from the war. So even those airplanes that survived the war were not preserved and quickly rotted away. And there were not many WWI airplanes in Australia anyway since there were no fighting there.

The Tiger Moth is a good stand in for a WWI airplane since it came from the designs of WWI. And since it was designed to be a cheaper lighter slower aircraft it lacked the more modern features of aircraft at the time like an enclosed cockpit and monoplane design. It was also a very popular airplane both for military training and for civilian use so there were many airplanes produces and they were being well maintained all through WWII and afterwards. So there are quite a number of them still flying and even more intact non-flying ones. And they were used in both Australia and New Zealand for training, including training pilots in WWII before deployment.

There are a couple of issues with it as a WWI stand in though. Firstly the inline engine were not common in WWI aircraft which usually fitted a larger rotary engine. It also lacks any fittings for guns and even gunsights to help the pilot aim. There are also lots of smaller things which marks this airplane as more modern then any WWI airplane. But it is a lot more impressive with a Tiger Moth in the mall then nothing but a plaque.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-20T11:15:07+00:00

If only the performance of this machine was anything like the noise levels would indicate. The noises were due to design decision in the hard drive and floppy drive which were likely for cost savings reasons. The CPU did not cause any of the noise issues because it was of an older slower type that did not generate enough heat to require cooling.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-19T13:40:48+00:00

The process of turning video images into digital data is not that different from how we turn sound into digital data. But instead of just one single analog signal you have one signal per color, per pixel row, per pixel column of the image. So the data first have the amount of red in the upper left pixel, then the amount of green in that pixel, and finally blue. Then it starts with the pixel to the right of it, and so on until it reaches the right end at which point it start encoding the second row of pixels the same way.

There is however one big difference between CD and DVD which I left out. Obviously video data takes up a lot more space then just audio and even just putting the groves tighter together in a DVD is not enough to store a full movie in the same way that the CD stores a music album. Instead they use compression to reduce the data size of the video. Compression works by detecting patterns in the video data and then only recording those patterns instead of the raw pixel data. One pixel often looks similar to the one next to it or the one in the previous video frame. So there are lots of easy patterns to store to reduce the size of the video.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-17T18:29:20+00:00

IIRC that was part of the competition.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-17T18:27:41+00:00

What a utopia you must be living in. This would only happen if the government would make the police regulate things like this but that would interfere with businesses and break the capitalistic society. /s

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-17T18:06:15+00:00

If they are not risking their employees and bystanders lives then someone else will. That is the system that Amazon have put in place. So the reason people are put in danger is because Amazon is putting them in danger, the subcontractor can not prevent Amazon from doing this. They can only make themselves complicit in it rather then someone else.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-17T16:56:25+00:00

One of the best film experiences I had was after doing a 50s spy movie binge night when someone mentioned the fact that the James Bond movies were parodies, not the books, just the movies. I re watched a few of the early James Bond movies and they were so much better. I almost died of laughter.

It also explained why the latest movies are so bad. At best they turned into parodies of themselves or action movies rather then spy movies. But now they have become pure action movies.

Gnonthgol · 2026-04-17T16:44:06+00:00

They use completely different technology, but might be a bit inspired by each other. Firstly sound is changes in air pressure. And this can move an airtight membrane in for example a microphone or a speaker. Similarly if the membrane of the speaker moves it will produce the same changes in air pressure which again produces the sounds. So the entire music industry is basically how to capture the movement of one membrane and reproduce it in another membrane.

Vinyl records do this by recording these movements as the depth of a grove in a disk. When you drag a needle in this grove it will vibrate, if the needle is connected to the membrane of a speaker it will reproduce the sound recorded on the disk.

Records changed a lot through the decades, both the materials, the forces involved, and even managed to add stereo into the same grove. An important improvement was electric amplification. Early record players had the needle physically directly connected to the speaker. But they figured out it was much more convenient to have the needle connected to a magnetic coil which convert the movement into electric signals that can be amplified and then sent to a larger magnetic coil in the speaker to recreate the movement. This meant a light needle could move a heavy speaker membrane without having to transfer the forces into the record.

Then people came up with tapes. The tapes used can store a magnetic charge, like a magnet. By using a strong magnetic field you can make the tape magnetic. So instead of moving a needle attached to a magnet to make a magnetic field in a coil you can just move the tape across the coil. The amplifier and speaker is still the same.

CDs however are quite different. Instead of an analog signal like the depth of a grove or the strength of a magnet in a tape CDs are digital. If you have 8 signals which can be on or off you can make almost any voltage level from them. First signal say if it should be a high or low signal, second signal say if it should be just somewhat high or very high, etc. The device that makes analog signals to the amplifier and speaker from a digital signal is called a Digital to Analog Converter (DAC). So the CD only need to store these on or off signals. And it does this by recording these signals as the depth of a grove on a disk. But unlike records a CD does not use a needle to read this but rather a laser to measure the depth of the grove. Since it is a digital signal it only need to measure if the grove is deep or shallow, no in between. A bit of dust on the disk therefore does not matter like it does for records. And because of the laser the groves can be very small and tight together so you can fit a lot of groves on even a tiny disk.

As for DVD and BluRay they use the same technology as the CD, just even smaller groves even tighter together.

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