InclinedPlane

It wasn't actually expected to last much longer than 90 days, that it did was essentially a miracle, not just good engineering.

At the time the MER vehicles were built we knew enough about Martian dust to know that it would be a severe limiting factor on solar powered vehicles, but we didn't have enough experience with long lived solar powered vehicles to know all the details. We didn't know about "cleaning events" which were too irregular to fully plan for anyway. Ultimately, we got lucky, and we were able to take advantage of that luck on the fly. For example, we found that even with heavy dust accumulation the rovers could survive with careful power management during Summer, and during Winter we could conveniently park them on a South facing incline to maximize power.

Nevertheless, it is telling that for both rovers the thing that did them in was the thing that was always expected to limit their longevity: solar power generation. Spirit had a wheel get stuck and then couldn't park at a good angle during winter, and the absence of cleaning events during that time resulted in power generation falling below a critical threshold at that time. Opportunity got done in by an epic planet wide dust storm, which blocked sunlight long enough for the batteries to run out and for the vehicle to get dangerously cold (likely resulting in critical equipment failures).

Before we had that experience we had no idea that these things were possible, and nobody in their right mind would have bet money that the rovers would have been able to survive for years on Mars.

I truly do not understand this mentality. Why not simply check / look up the word? You don't even have to try a dictionary these days, google will give you definitions if you just use a word as a search term.

Measles is incredibly bad. What people have found is that the introduction of measles vaccination in a country inevitably leads to a significant decrease in all cause mortality, which doesn't seem to be explained by a reduction in measles cases alone. It has long been known that those recovering from the measles are effectively in an immunocompromised state for several weeks, there is now increasing research pointing to the measles basically knocking out existing acquired immunity and resetting a person back into an immunologically naive state. This "immune shadow" then leaves individuals vulnerable to secondary infections (flu, rotavirus, etc.) which take their own toll and show up in different columns in the statistics down the road. Additionally, a very rare form of encephalitis can develop up to a decade after having the measles and is invariably fatal.

Get vaccinated.

Don't be flippant. Marijuana criminalization and the war on drugs causes a vast amount of harm to the entire country, including millions of lives ruined or cut short. Just recently a completely innocent couple were gunned down in their own home by the police executing a no knock raid based on completely bogus (or at best horribly mistaken) evidence.

Honestly? When my bosses were on extended leave and I had little oversight and could do whatever the hell I wanted. I got so much done.

Which only applies to some kinds of boats. Many other boats won't have the same issue.

Basically any multi-hull or deep keel boat should do fine.

By god! If that short term random fluctuation continued as a long term trend the Earth would continue cooling forever! You've cracked global warming, what an incredible accomplishment!

(Another another way of wording the headline would be to point out that global temperatures are now permanently in a regime which is significantly hotter than historical averages.)

Itanium represents a classic case of jumping architectures and committing too soon. Any mature system represents not just the sum of a huge amount of design work but also an untold number of hours (years really) of beta testing, bug fixing, and iterative refinement. A new system may be built on a better foundation but more often than not in its immature state it will still have shortcomings until it's been through a long period of "burn-in" and bug fixing.

The people who built the Alpha went on to work at AMD and built the Athlon. Most of the innovations in that platform ended up filtering into the Intel Core 2 and Core i7 architecture as well.

"Soy milk" as a term in the english language dates back to the late 1890s. It's a term that has been in common use for a very long period.

I drink unsweetened soy milk, it contains 1g of sugar per serving. Even the fully sweetened variant contains only about 2/3 the sugar content of regular milk.

Do you have one printed in a reputable peer reviewed journal?

Interesting, can you point to a paper outlining this theory and how it matches all of the extensive observations that otherwise have supported the theory of dark matter?

Question: would policing in the US be easier without the 4th amendment? Would it matter if the answer was yes?

I dunno, there's plenty of twitter that is just plain weird. Full of bizarre dadaist humor and all sorts of super referential jokes that require like a bibliography unless you are up to speed in the relevant sub-communities where the original jokes circulated.

You might be confusing buzzfeed with buzzfeed news. Buzzfeed news is a recognized legitimate journalistic organization that has been nominated for and won many prestigious journalism awards (they were finalists for the 2017 and 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in International Reporting, for example).

Technical people who are intrinsically motivated (typically the best and most productive people) often are the sort of people who find working with other high caliber people to be an important and highly valuable part of their work experience. When good people leave because the company isn't treating them well the result is a cascade effect, because every good person leaving makes the working environment worse. So more good people leave. Then for everyone left behind there's extra work and a struggle to reacquire lost institutional knowledge, and everybody finds that executing on projects is more difficult and results in less success.

Because of the nature of software development (no development cycle is ever really identical to the previous one) it can be difficult to conclusively or objectively say that the capabilities of the organization have been reduced, or that the working environment is poorer, because these things require subjective judgments. But many people have enough experience to make those judgments for themselves, to feel the organization getting worse and less capable, and this can create a kind of pressure for people to find other options elsewhere even if not everyone understands why on a conscious level.

Nobody needs to watch an Alex Jones video to have an opinion on the man. He is a garbage person who spreads lies and propaganda. This isn't an opinion, this is Jones' own admission in court of what his program represents.

Question: have you ever bought anything from a targeted ad?

Do you go out of your way to try to buy things from ads in the media you read? Do you feel bad if you don't make buy anything that was advertised to you in said media? Why or why not?

> But the company had discovered that more than 9 percent of the money it made from children was being clawed back by the credit card companies.

> In comparison, the average chargeback rate for businesses is 0.5 percent, according to the Merchant Risk Council, a nonprofit that helps businesses manage risk.

> A chargeback rate of 1 percent is considered high, and credit card companies such as Visa and Mastercard will put businesses on probation programs for rates consistently that high.

> The Federal Trade Commission said in an unrelated fraud case in 2016 that a 2 percent chargeback rate was a “red flag” of a “deceptive” business.

Nine percent chargeback rate. That's just absolutely nuts.

Unlike sane countries if the US government doesn't pass a budget in time then federal workers can go unpaid. Many federal workers are nevertheless still forced to work (via summons) despite not being paid. This particular shutdown is due to a disagreement about providing funding for a border wall between the US and Mexico (one of Trump's campaign promises, though he said "Mexico will pay for it").

Keep in mind that the shutdown began during the previous congress, when Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and the Presidency. It has extended to the current congress where the Democrats now control the house.

To break down some additional bits and pieces for folks about how the US government works:

A bill (such as a budget) needs to be passed by both the House of Congress and by the Senate and also approved by the President.

Senate rules make it possible to infinitely delay (effectively block) any bill without support of 60% of the Senate (so even a bill that would pass the Senate may not even be voted on if more than 40% of the Senate opposes it).

If the President vetos (doesn't sign) a bill the house and senate can only override that with a 2/3 majority vote in both.

Extreme cold is easier to deal with. Consider, for example, how many different kinds of heaters there are: wood stoves, gas stoves, gas or oil furnaces, heat pumps, steam radiators, etc. And some of them are centuries old technology. In contrast there isn't nearly the same diversity in cooling equipment of equivalent effectiveness.

There are automated systems that monitor the moon for impacts regularly, however they don't watch during a full moon because it's too bright (except during a lunar eclipse).

When the statistics back it up?

Yes, it's possible for the rich to get richer while the poor also get richer. It's also possible for the rich to get richer by taking all the economic gains for themselves, leaving the poor to stagnate or to get poorer.

Over the past 40 years the bottom half of the economy in the US has seen zero growth. This despite massive growth overall. This despite rising house prices, growing student loan debt, etc. The rich have gotten richer and the poor and the middle class have been edged out. It doesn't have to be this way, but it is.

Why? Because of wage suppression, union busting, wage theft, predatory and usurious student loans, corporate welfare, tax cuts for the wealthy, and on and on and on.

I think the OP meant "freaking out" as in "putting a universal sense of urgency behind our efforts at correction and remediation". There seems to be zero sense of urgency behind a lot of these issues today, especially at a policy level, even for issues that have a time horizon of just a few years. It's bizarre and frustrating. It looks very much as though if we were faced with the CFC/ozone problem today we would fail to meet the challenge as we did in the '80s/'90s. It's easy to forget that the ozone challenge required a tremendous amount of complication international diplomacy and required some real compromises.

There are plenty of good arguments against cars, this is not one of them, this is not even remotely intellectually honest.

> Being frugal, I still wanted to dabble with money-making opportunities at my disposal.

That... does not sound frugal to me. Frugal is working some part-time job during your time off, keeping your expenses low, and maintaining your savings, not gambling in the stock market.

Not to mention how much it cost in time to do all that work. Index funds don't incur any opportunity cost overhead in terms of your own time, they are fire and forget.

Most people I know have not bothered to learn any math beyond algebra, and try to forget what algebra they did learn, they still seem to be doing pretty well. You can always limit yourself and pretend that's "enough" but it can very well be self-limiting. You simply don't know what you don't know, and that includes not knowing all of the things you might miss out on by not studying. Set theory and abstract algebra has a huge range of applications, simply being able to earn a living without studying those things is an insufficient reason to avoid studying them.