Except the “emergency capsule” is all of them, including Starliner. Because Starliner is perfectly capable of returning to earth safely.

Because every thruster that has shut down has hot fired okay, and the known helium leaks still leave enough margin to cover several multiples of the 5 hours or so of RCS operation that you need to get to landing.

Discarded corn cobs and pages from the Sears Roebuck catalog. At least in midwestern USA.

My understanding is that the second Distance campaign is mostly recycled Nitronic Rush levels.

When the gp’s book says that C is a third generation language: I would guess the first generation is Fortran and the second generation contains ALGOL and BCPL. C was heavily influenced by BCPL. (get it? C comes after B)

The deal with LLMs is that it’s very difficult to say which piece of training material went into which output. Everything gets chopped up and mixed, and it’s computationally difficult to run backwards.

My understanding of the image generators is that they operate one pixel at a time too, looking only at neighboring pixels. So in that sense, it’s not correct to say they understand the context of anything.

Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie

The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.

In fact this spacecraft is still the designated emergency reentry vehicle for the crew.

T stands for “terminal count”.

Dude, all the work is in the maps, and they generally sell them proportional to the amount of map content. There are two benefits:

1. Studio doesn’t have to staff up to do all the content at once, but they still get paid periodically for what they do produce. This keeps the staff employed longer in a more stable position.

2. You can pick and choose which areas you want to get. If you want a big bundle, those still show up on Steam too at various levels of discount. But you’re not locked into having to deal with Ohio too.

If you add the fat first, the mushrooms are going to release so much liquid that you just have to boil that off anyway.

To be fair to Airbus,

1. They probably chose the language for that call-out way before 2009. Airplanes can live for thirty years, and type designs can keep going several decades longer

2. The designers were also likely to be French, but they selected English call-outs. This seems to me like a case where they picked a word that’s technically in the OED l, but is actually much more common in French.

The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force is still active, so in one sense, we’ve been in a forever war for the last 23 years.

“Writ of habeas corpus” is a court order to a government law enforcement organization to bring the (hopefully still alive) body of a prisoner into the court room, so the court can determine whether the prisoner is rightfully detained. It is one mechanism that prevents the United States from holding political prisoners with no charges or hearings.

Corpus delicti is the murder thing.

The right of habeas corpus refers generally to the right of the law courts to supervise the detention of prisoners. And by extension to right of citizens to petition the courts to release an improperly detained prisoner.

Habeas corpus is explicitly written into the Constitution, so you can’t just repeal it by legislation like how this knucklehead is suggesting. You can suspend habeas corpus during war; that’s a specific exception in the Constitution that’s actually happened at various times in various wars.

They’re basically rewriting the software, and if it goes horribly wrong, the probe will just stop talking forever. So no one was in a big rush to push this into production.

These are also used by competitive weightlifters.

Especially talk to FSF if this “well known debugging tool” is a part of the GNU project, as FSF has the power and standing to enforce the copyrights on GNU software.

I think my mother played that star trek game on a time shared minicomputer.

Let us all remember that, at least back when it started, the establishment alternative to systemd was a product named after its original operating system, System V UNIX, which is a direct descendent of the original UNIX from AT&T. This sysvinit software used complicated shell scripts to manage daemons. Contrary to some opinions, these shell scripts were not “just working”; they were in fact a constant and major maintenance burden for Linux distributions. When I started on Linux at least, Debian had a suspiciously large fraction of bugs on init script breakages.

All this is to say that the new system, systemd, doesn’t have to be anywhere near perfect to be worth replacing sysvinit.

People argue that systemd is rejecting the “UNIX philosophy” of small tools that do one thing well. I argue that this UNIX philosophy is not some kind of universal good with no tradeoffs. It’s an engineering rule of thumb. There are always tradeoffs.

People argue that systemd is too much like Windows NT. I argue that Windows NT has at least a few good ideas in it. And if one of those ideas solves a problem that Linux has, Linux should use that idea.

I’ve met a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this important concept from epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowledge.

To demonstrate the concept of “non-falsifiability” I will now produce a short fictitious dialog between a made up Scientist, S, and a Religionist, R.

Topic: how old is the earth? Is it 6,000 years old or more than 4 billion years old?

S: The earth must be more than 4 billion years old, because I found these rocks. These rocks have isotopes in them and they definitely look like they’ve been around for more than 4 billion years. If the rocks are really old, then the earth must be really old too.

R: No. The is only 6,000 years old, because the holy Bible has a list of human descendants from Adam, the first man, to Jesus, who we know was born in 4 BC. If you count it all up, you can find the exact year that the earth was created, as described in Genesis 1, and it’s about 6,000 years.

S: But these rocks… They’re really old…

R: God must have created those rocks with the isotopes already set up in the correct ratios to look like they are 4 billion years old, when He separated the firmament from the heavens 6,000 years ago.

S: But how could God create rocks with different isotopes? When minerals solidify from molten lava, lead isotopes naturally form in this ratio. (I don’t actually know how initial lead composition was established for this)

R: God is omnipotent! Any miracle is within his grasp.

S: But why would God want to make the earth appear to be much older than it really is? What purpose does it serve?

R: I do not pretend to understand the ways of God.

A great landing is one where you can still use the airplane afterwards.