Viewing profile — russss

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 …

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 charitabl…

> 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 …

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 privat…

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…

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 str…

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.

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 …

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 produ…

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…

> 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…

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, wh…

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...

Right. It's technically correct but it's misleading.

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 a…

> 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.wiki…

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 wi…

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/7…

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…

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 t…

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 c…

GKBO appears to be a genuine Google initiative - its domain is registered to Google and served from their nameservers: http://www.kbo.co.ke/

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 w…