russss

5 ms·

1.
by russss 8mo ago
Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period. It's a weirdly common misconception that the UK is unique in
2.
by russss 5y ago
A CIO is more onerous than a CLG because a CIO is a charity, and comes with the charitable reporting requirements (and also the tax benefits). A pure CLG doesn't have the charitable tax benefits but it's still a non-profit gover
3.
by russss 5y ago
> It seems to me like this is a shortcoming of the English (and American) legal system, where non-profit organizations and such can only be founded as "regular" companies and then tax-exempted. This means they are still subject
4.
by russss 13y ago
I don't think there are any UK health insurance companies which allow you to claim for NHS doctor's appointments. Presumably if you have a health insurance plan which covers private doctor's appointments, they get a copy of t
5.
by russss 14y ago
London, UK - Smarkets Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team.
6.
by russss 14y ago
It's probably because modern tweet IDs are larger than a 32-bit integer. Presumably some JSON parsers aren't too hot on parsing bigints, so they give you the option of having a string instead.
7.
by russss 14y ago
The liquid nitrogen is just used for the ground tests. On the Skylon itself, this cooling capacity will come from boiling the liquid hydrogen fuel.
8.
by russss 14y ago
It's European Circuits: http://www.european-circuits.co.uk/ We really should have mentioned them in the blog post as they're sponsoring us. It's obviously a big plus to have these being fabricated in the UK instead of China due to our rea
9.
by russss 14y ago
They are starting with engines. The rest of their ideas are simply concepts at this stage. It's a small company. The problem is that plenty of people have tried and failed to produce a successful air-breathing rocket engine. Nobody wants
10.
by russss 14y ago
It's not a conventional jet engine - it has an intake turbine, but it's powered by the same helium cycle used by the precooler, and not by combustion byproducts. The compressed air (or liquid oxygen when in rocket mode) and hydrogen is then
11.
by russss 14y ago
> Here incomming air is highly compressed -- and thus heated up -- due to impacting plane parts at hypersonic velocities. The problem is that at high mach numbers, the incoming air is too hot to successfully combust. They have to chil
12.
by russss 14y ago
Well, this is their secret sauce, which they claim will make the SABRE engine work where other scramjets have failed. The tests they're currently running are of the pre-coolers, which have a proprietary design to prevent icing. If it works,
13.
by russss 14y ago
Most of this is code is available in machine-readable form in the VirtualAGC Google Code repository: http://code.google.com/p/virtualagc/source/browse/#svn%2Ftru...
14.
by russss 14y ago
Right. It's technically correct but it's misleading.
15.
by russss 14y ago
I don't think NASA holds shares in SpaceX - the word "invested" is wrong here. I think what the article meant to say is NASA has awarded SpaceX $381m in contracts and development awards (through the COTS and CCDev programs).
16.
by russss 14y ago
> How do SpaceX communicate with the Dragon in orbit? Have they built their own global tracking/control network? No, they're using the US government's TDRSS system ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracking_and_Data_Relay_Satelli... ), and
17.
by russss 15y ago
We used MarkMonitor at Last.fm. It's probably best to think of them as an abstraction layer above the registrar level which handles any residual pain that might generate: * They will register all TLDs. A lot of more obscure ccTLDs (e.g. N
18.
by russss 15y ago
The reason for that is there's a an important satellite ground station on Svalbard - it's in an ideal place to communicate with polar-orbiting satellites: http://www.ksat.no/node/77 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Undersea_Cable_Sy
19.
by russss 15y ago
As mentioned in that man page, the /etc/lsb-release file only contains details on what version of the LSB the distribution conforms to (if the distribution isn't LSB-compliant, the file shouldn't exist). It doesn't have the version of the d
20.
by russss 15y ago
Yes. At Last.fm, Germany was the first country we had to censor our content in. If you try and view content which is deemed inappropriate by the German government (fun fact: even the list of inappropriate content is restricted), you get som
21.
by russss 15y ago
WHOIS is generally very reliable - there are identity checks when you register for IP space (especially with ARIN, which is who provides Google's IP space). One other way you can check is by looking at the organisation handle in the WHOIS -
22.
by russss 15y ago
GKBO appears to be a genuine Google initiative - its domain is registered to Google and served from their nameservers: http://www.kbo.co.ke/
23.
by russss 15y ago
That Sprint problem was caused by Sprint "borrowing" DoD addresses to use in their internal NATed mobile network. This wouldn't be an issue with a standard web site like Mocality which is directly connected to the Internet, instead of via N
24.
by russss 15y ago
People do use hydrogen, but most balloons still use helium because it does provide a slight safety advantage when launching. (It's also sometimes an insurance requirement.) I expect to see an increase in the number of hydrogen-filled balloo
25.
by russss 15y ago
This is known as a "Duress Code" and it's sometimes found in alarm systems as a code which will disarm the alarm and still call the police. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duress_code
26.
by russss 15y ago
To elaborate, this manual refers to the Soyuz rocket , not the spacecraft which is flown to the ISS. Specifically, it's the interface documentation for attaching your payload to it. (The Russians/Soviets have a long history of naming the
27.
by russss 15y ago
"This post is largely taken from a proposed redesign I sent out last year."
28.
by russss 15y ago
Yep (I'm organising it!)
29.
by russss 15y ago
The issue at Fukushima isn't criticality, though. All the reactors were safely shut down seconds after the earthquake hit, and no new fission has occurred since then. The problem is that even a shut-down reactor core generates significant h
30.
by russss 16y ago
My bad - it's been a while since I touched Rails and my memory was rusty.

More ›