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Comment Re:Repeat after me (and others) (Score 2) 319

by tomhath (#53779971) Attached to: GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

If you have not successfully tested a restore and you do not have a completely offline copy, you do not have a backup.

And don't trust someone else who says they made and tested the backup. Our DBAs had proof that the sysadmins told them the disk backups worked. But the DBAs never did a practice restore of their own. You can guess what happened when a failed update trashed the database.

Submission + - Oxygen From Earth's Atmosphere May Be Traveling To the Moon's Surface (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: New research shows that oxygen from Earth could be journeying all the way out to the Moon, where it then gets lodged inside the lunar soil. It’s a process that’s likely been happening for 2.4 billion years, ever since oxygen formed around our planet, meaning the Moon’s soil may contain trapped particles from Earth’s ancient atmosphere. This oxygen exchange, detailed in a study published today in Nature Astronomy, supposedly occurs for just a few days during the Moon’s 27-day orbit. Most of the time, the Moon is constantly being blasted with solar wind — fast streams of charged particles emanating from the Sun. But for five days of every lunar orbit, the Moon passes into Earth’s magnetotail, the portion of the planet’s magnetic field that stretches outward away from the Sun. This tail shields the Moon from the solar wind, and allows charged oxygen ions from Earth to travel to the lunar surface, according to the study. That means the Moon — a dead rock incapable of supporting life — is being showered with the byproducts of life here on Earth. In fact, the source of most of the oxygen in our atmosphere is biological, created by plants during photosynthesis. It’s a process that experts have suspected for a while but haven’t been able to confirm until today. Researchers have also suggested that other atmospheric components, such as nitrogen and noble gases, are getting to the Moon this way based on lunar soil samples.

Submission + - Scientists Find 'Oldest Human Ancestor' (bbc.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Researchers have discovered the earliest known ancestor of humans — along with a vast range of other species. They say that fossilized traces of the 540-million-year-old creature are "exquisitely well preserved." The microscopic sea animal is the earliest known step on the evolutionary path that led to fish and — eventually — to humans. Details of the discovery from central China appear in Nature journal. The research team says that Saccorhytus is the most primitive example of a category of animals called "deuterostomes" which are common ancestors of a broad range of species, including vertebrates (backboned animals). Saccorhytus was about a millimeter in size, and is thought to have lived between grains of sand on the sea bed. The researchers were unable to find any evidence that the animal had an anus, which suggests that it consumed food and excreted from the same orifice. The study was carried out by an international team of researchers, from the UK, China and Germany. Among them was Prof Simon Conway Morris, from the University of Cambridge. The study suggests that its body was symmetrical, which is a characteristic inherited by many of its evolutionary descendants, including humans. Saccorhytus was also covered with a thin, relatively flexible skin and muscles, leading the researchers to conclude that it moved by contracting its muscles and got around by wriggling. The researchers say that its most striking feature is its large mouth, relative to the rest of its body. They say that it probably ate by engulfing food particles, or even other creatures. Also interesting are the conical structures on its body. These, the scientists suggest, might have allowed the water that it swallowed to escape and so might have been a very early version of gills.

Submission + - Anonymous Cowards and Trolls (slashdot.org) 2

Submitted by tomhath
tomhath writes: Trolls have always been an annoyance here at slashdot. Recently the amount of racist, sexual, and political noise has gotten really annoying.

Here are a couple of simple changes I suggest slashdot can make:

1) Only allow posts and replies from logged in users
2) Continue to allow AC posts, but only after logging in
3) Posts start out with a rating based on the user's karma
4) Moderation is always applied to a user's karma, whether the post was made AC or not

Anyone else have a suggestion on how to improve the signal to noise ratio here?

Comment It's even more misleading than that (Score 3, Insightful) 361

by tomhath (#53755341) Attached to: Solar Energy Now Employs More Americans Than Oil, Coal and Gas Combined
Read the actual report and you'll see that only about 2/3's of the quoted figure actually works more than half-time in solar.

Just under 374,000 individuals work, in whole or in part, for solar firms, with more than 260,000 of those employees spending the majority of their time on solar

But it gets worse.

Also included in the employment totals are any firms engaged in facility construction, turbine and other generation equipment manufacturing, as well as wholesale parts distribution of all electric generation technologies.

So manufacturing and distributing solar panels also counts as "generation"?

Comment Re:Today Marks 50th Anniversary of Fatal Apollo 1 (Score 1) 87

by tomhath (#53754365) Attached to: Today Marks 50th Anniversary of Fatal Apollo 1 Disaster

I once had a conversation with someone who worked there when this happened.

NASA still gloss' over the circumstances of the men's death. Usually in a fire, the smoke or super-heated air causes you to lose conscientiousness pretty quickly. But these guys had their helmets on, which supplied fresh air. Grissom's open microphone picked up their screams as they were burned. Death didn't come quickly for them.

Submission + - Fifty years ago today: the Apollo 1 launchpad fire (nasaspaceflight.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes:

Fifty years ago Friday, the first – but sadly not the last – fatal spaceflight accident struck NASA when a fire claimed the lives of Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Roger Chaffee, and Ed White during a training exercise at Launch Complex 34. The accident, a major setback for the struggling Apollo program, ushered in the first understanding of the “bad day” effects of schedule pressure for spaceflight and brought with it words and reminders that still echo today.

The article provides a very detailed and accurate look at the history and causes of the accident, as well as its consequences, which even today influence American space engineering.

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