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Comment Microbes ? (Score 0) 37

I would like as much as anybody to find life elsewhere than on Earth, but Mars is not the place for this. Mars is cold and dead. Extremophiles live deep down the ocean ridges because there are hydrothermal vents that provide them energy and heat. Europa is a good candidate for life because there is liquid water under its crust, but also because there is a lot of energy transferred to it by Jupiter through tidal forces. There is nothing like this on Mars, it is seismically inert.

Comment Re:Because America is 30 years behind everyone els (Score 1) 136

Europe does have tap and pay, but they did not raise the limit to hundreds of euros (although it depends on the country, most of them have a 50 euro limit). And they introduced last year tap + PIN for higher amounts (it is being deployed in most of the countries right now).

Comment Re:There is a problem with the MOSFETs (Score 4, Informative) 70

They did comprehensive risk mitigation actions since last may :
- They tested every MOSFET lot identified at risk (International Rectifier n-MOSFETs generation 5, 6 and 7), in application conditions. They actually asked every subcontractor for every instrument and equipment on the spacecraft to send them remaining parts in their inventory.
- Because of temperature dependent effects and time dependent effects (mainly concerning annealing of total ionizing dose damage), they could only test up to the mission baseline total ionizing dose constraint. They found the tested parts were to be suitable for the mission, however since they only had a limited number of parts, they do not know the real margin they have, especially if the temperature conditions differ significantly from the baseline.
- So in order to monitor the parts degradation during the actual flight, they designed this summer what they call a "canary box": an equipment with the most sensitive lots of MOSFET onboard, with telemetry to actually measure the main electrical parameters that will degrade with total ionizing dose (mainly the gate-to-source voltage threshold).
- If they measure a higher than expected degradation on the canary box, they will implement mitigation actions (such as shutting down some instruments to limit their total ionizing dose degradation or heating them up to increase annealing)
In conclusion, they feel pretty safe to me...

Comment Re:They are ALL software defined. (Score 1) 53

Fly-by-wire works well on aircraft... but the systems are built with comprehensive redundancy strategies, taking into account both random hardware failure and systematic failures (software bugs, design errors, etc). If cars manufacturers go that way instead of going for the cheapest possible design, then I do not see why drive-by-wire couldn't work safely.

Comment Re:Appity app app (Score 1) 52

Not at all actually. The players themselves index, fetch the files (on the local network), decode them and play them or access the internet to stream the music from it. There is no media player involved and actually on most of the Sonos product until the most recent ones, you cannot directly "stream" from a media player. This is what is so surprising about this whole fiasco : the app is nothing but a fancy front-end sending calls on the network, while the most of the real work is done on the speakers firmware (which is still mostly unchanged). Actually the API calls have been published or reverse-engineered for a while, you can find alternative apps or open-source frameworks to control the speakers, and they still work well. Of course there are still fancy functions coded into the app that may not be so easy to replicate (multi room audio, discovery of devices, etc...)

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