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tridentlead

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While Boeing totally screwed the pooch on this one, and I won't be choosing to fly on one if I can, the public having more confidence in a system than its creators/domain experts isn't exactly uncommon. Would you trust your medical record privacy to Windows XP running AVG?

Well if the goal is to fund everyone, the pressures that ensure it “ requires years of post-secondary education, has long, shitty hours, and pays peanuts” will likely reduce.

Not true. It is much, much more energy intensive to run an RF link up to a tower or WiFi than to sum 2000 rows of 10 column wide data. RF works by emitting energy into free space, and there is absolutely no way it is cheaper for this type of thing (especially if it takes the transmitter out of sleep mode, like if you’re really out there and in airplane mode).

Ben Franklin once said that the best argument against democracy was a discussion with the average voter. But I think there is an equal risk there of members of a society being unwilling to read what experts put out, and evaluate it themselves as well. Once people start saying I don't know anything about this and I can't make any determinations, democracy starts to make a lot less sense. At the end of the day science is basically critical reasoning backed by fact collection. If you can go read up on the facts, you can reason based on them. If someone can explain to you why you are wrong that may be one thing, but simply assuming you can never reason anything out is very dangerous.

To add to this, Phillips screws are designed to cause the screwdriver to cam out. This is done so you can’t over torque the screw hole. This also makes them really annoying sometimes.

Blog Anonymously 6 years ago

Freedom of speech has to do with freedom from government control over speech. However, what people who only talk about enshrined rights forget about is the American spirit. It is not in the spirit of America to destroy a life because of the least charitable interpretation of what they said. Much as the rules of Hackernews include engaging with the most charitable interpretation of someones post, so is common etiquette. We don't want to focus so much on the law that we forget who we are and how we should act. When you walk into an interview and call everyone "cunts" there isn't a charitable way to take that. When someone makes an OK symbol, there definitely is. Its true that you don't have to associate with anyone you don't want to, and I personally thing that should actually be a stronger right than it is currently interpreted as, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to work with people you don't like. If they say they want to kill you, re-evaluate, but if they don't like your political candidate, maybe take a step back and realize we're all Americans and all working together in the big picture.

I suppose that’s pretty reasonable, but from what I have seen causing trouble from people, I really don’t believe that your view is shared by the majority of people causing the outlast against these symbols. I think either already, or in the near future, when someone makes an innocuous OK symbol, it will simply be interpreted as a symbol they are an even worse and more blatant racist, how dare they.

This is materially false. Throughout history capital has been used to stop competitors. Capital is not necessarily money in a practical sense. Regardless, money has decided these things for hundreds of years as well. Whether nation states rose or fell depended on whether they could pay mercenaries to fight for them. The largest brick castle in the world, Malbork fell when the Teutonic order was besieged and could no longer pay the castles defenders. They were then “bought out” by a Polish general. This doesn’t just apply to mercenary armies, or war, by the way. This isn’t just some product of “modern capitalism”.

The idea is that as long as the downloaded source file matches the hash all inputs are deterministic and so is the build overall.

Constructing a spacecraft capable of sustaining a human being for multiple years, landing them with all necessary support equipment, building an ISRU plant for which solid designs do not currently exist, and for which even the principles are still very much the subject of research, launching and returning is much, much more complicated than sending an unmanned spacecraft or two to recover a sample. This is really not too far off from what JAXA is already doing with Hayabusa 2.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayabusa2