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cuboidGoaton Moon Is Stepping Stone, Not Alternative to Mars, NASA Chief Says

And when you are up there, you will want to stay up if you can, as each dip into the well costs you a ton of money.

cuboidGoaton How to Brexit? – Explore the (im)possibilities of the different Brexit scenarios

I'd love to see that result, purely for the hilarity of watching the people I share a house with, who voted for Brexit, explode at the idea of the UK government not policing an external border.

The only reason they voted for Brexit was because they think it means they can get rid of all the migrants, they tell me this quite regularly.

One of them moved here from Bahrain, though apparently this means their family were ex-pats, not migrants. The other is from a long line of Christian overseas missionaries.

If they thought for a second that Brexit would mean leaving the border with Northern Ireland wide open, they would be screaming blue murder.

cuboidGoaton How to Brexit? – Explore the (im)possibilities of the different Brexit scenarios

like Republic of Ireland joining the United Kingdom.

Or Arthur rising and reinstating Camelot in England's hour of need.

Or Nessie being discovered, then rampaging south to destroy London in a Gozilla inspired attack, wiping out the entirety of the Square Mile.

Or the entire human population suddenly realising that the borders were only in their heads all along and finally living together in peace and harmony.

cuboidGoaton How to Brexit? – Explore the (im)possibilities of the different Brexit scenarios

>a good and not entirely unpopular solution

Where and for whom?

cuboidGoaton Tokyo researchers created the strongest controllable magnetic field in history

Depends on how the field moves relative to the iron. If it expands then contracts, which seems highly likely, the overall effect on magnetizing the iron could be surprisingly low, as far as I am aware. Though I could be wrong on this.

edit - ahh, reading through you mean during the experiment, rather than it being left magnetized afterward.

During the test it should focus field lines within it. The overall strength of the field will remain the same, but field lines will be concentrated on the cage, meaning it does not propagate as far.

Though there should be people on here that will be able to explain this better than I can. And correct me if I am talking rubbish. I am solidly an amateur on this, and there are definitely some professionals floating about.

cuboidGoaton Tokyo researchers created the strongest controllable magnetic field in history

Vice really needs to hire some proofreaders.

cuboidGoaton Tokyo researchers created the strongest controllable magnetic field in history

The magnetic field will tend to concentrate in the iron, meaning it shouldn't propagate as far.

Same as using Mu metal for magnetic shielding - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu-metal

cuboidGoaton Drone Hobbyists Angered by Congress Ending the Aerial Wild West

The USA has high punishments for murder but less then 50% of murder investigations are solved.

Germany has much lower punishments for murder, but around 90% of murder investigations are solved.

Which of these do you think is the greater deterrence?

cuboidGoaton Drone Hobbyists Angered by Congress Ending the Aerial Wild West

Hey, numbers and letters are hard. FCC, FAA, 100 reports per month, 100 complaints per day. Same thing, surely. Besides drones are bad, so exaggerating and misrepresenting is morally justified, as it will save the lives of billions that would otherwise have died from the flying evil.

cuboidGoaton Drone Hobbyists Angered by Congress Ending the Aerial Wild West

>The growing possibility of midairs with drones is more significant than bird strikes

That seems amazingly unlikely.

cuboidGoaton Drone Hobbyists Angered by Congress Ending the Aerial Wild West

>“Each month, the FAA receives more than 100 reports of drone sightings by pilots, citizens, and law enforcement,”

Drones interfering with manned aircraft or emergency services is already illegal.

And these things are transmitting radio in both directions, putting money into tracking and prosecuting people interfering with flights is completely achievable, without any change in law.

I suspect that this is more about protecting the interests of the commercial businesses by introducing licensing as a barrier to entry.

>The bill is supported by the Commercial Drone Alliance, a Washington-based advocacy group representing Alphabet’s Wing as well as other drone businesses.

cuboidGoaton Bracing for the Vanilla Boom

I love the concept behind the chameleon pasted with money.

Though I do feel a bit sorry for the chameleon. It probably wasn't too impressed.

cuboidGoaton Moon Is Stepping Stone, Not Alternative to Mars, NASA Chief Says

I think there will be two things. One is economics, fetching asteroids could be very big business, and the other is political, space will be viewed as freedom of a sort, given the kind of restrictions that may be in place on Earth by then, with the climate transforming alongside having a lot more people than we do today, even if growth slows down, which is far from certain. We could easily be in the age of what Bruce Sterling refers to as the Khaki Greens, aka, militarised enforcement of ecological protection.

cuboidGoaton Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

>That clearly didn't work in that case, did it?

If you don't think that they were actually putting forward a tale to be believed in the first place, but were signalling that they don't have to bother, then it just doesn't even apply.

>Neither is a logical argument, both are abductive heuristics

Occam's razor is a logical position to take in an absence of further information, although sometimes wrong, especially in biology. Hanlon setting up malice and stupidity as an exclusive or gate, is not. Nor was it ever meant to be taken as such.

>Which is why nobody is willing to bet on making such stupid and dangerous mistakes on purpose as exposing your agents, exposing your leader's lies and making your country suffer retribution for assassination on foreign soil. And for what? To laugh the whole world in the face? That's insane.

Putin has been exposing his own lies for years on TV, usually with a smile. This is the guy who goes on his third ever scuba dive on the news and brings back museum quality amphorae. Lying barefacedly, with the audience knowing it is all lies, is a large part of his public persona. It is meant to both be funny and set an example that he doesn't need to bother with little things such as truth.

>The PM put on a diving suit and dived deep into the Taman Bay where, to everyone’s utter surprise, he managed to find two ancient amphorae dating back to the 6th century AD.

>Putin also told journalists that the Taman dive was his third-ever attempt at scuba diving.

https://www.rt.com/news/putin-amphorae-dive-archeology/

cuboidGoaton Moon Is Stepping Stone, Not Alternative to Mars, NASA Chief Says

It is economic to move massive stuff about in open space, which is what you need for an economy to attract people. The gravity well is a huge cost. You can make a profit by sending down the gravity well but going back up tends to be a huge expense.

cuboidGoaton Moon Is Stepping Stone, Not Alternative to Mars, NASA Chief Says

By the end of this century I suspect there will be more than a million people living off earth, with the majority in orbitals.

In about 200 years or so, I wouldn't be at all surprised if there were more people off earth than on it.

cuboidGoaton Are Delivery Drones Commercially Viable? Iceland Is About to Find Out

Why not?

cuboidGoaton Are Delivery Drones Commercially Viable? Iceland Is About to Find Out

The pizza delivery driver probably wants their job more than a stack of pizza and often provides their own vehicle. And robbing armored bank trucks involves attacking people, there isn't the same moral guideline when it comes to robots. Flying pizza robots will be considered 'fair game' by a lot of people.

cuboidGoaton Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

That does not work very well in politics, or indeed many other areas of life.

People are very good at acting dumb to avoid blame.

Hanlon's razor is a method of being polite, rather than a robust logical position.

Malicious compliance, being one example of this behaviour, even has it's own popular group on reddit.

Edit - for anything that consists of an established bureaucracy, you would actually do better to invert Hanlon's razor in most cases.

Edit2 - also, the entire premise is logically inconsistent, as it places idiocy and maliciousness as being mutually exclusive options, which they clearly are not.

In the first place, Robert J. Hanlon submitted the aphorism for the joke book collection "Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong". And, according to wikipedia, probably stole it from a Heinlein short story, so I suspect you might be taking it a little more seriously than Hanlon did.

cuboidGoaton Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

Part of the reason they are slow-walking Trump's pronouncements on trans people in the military, is that after getting rid of 'don't ask don't tell', the military will have wanted to know about people's sexual preferences, especially in key roles, so as to guard against cases of blackmail.

I guarantee that they will have key people who have told them all their kinks, that they are really trying hard not to get rid of.

cuboidGoaton Are Delivery Drones Commercially Viable? Iceland Is About to Find Out

I was just working from the principle that lightweight ground drones containing pizza will get nicked and flying pizza will get shot down and nicked, but it isn't fair to use weaponry just to defend a pizza and a drone, so the best approach is to make it heavy enough not to get nicked, at which point you might as well put the oven in there too.

cuboidGoaton Are Delivery Drones Commercially Viable? Iceland Is About to Find Out

I thought about how to design pizza delivery drones and came to the conclusion that perhaps the best approach would be to make a very heavy armored tank, with a pizza oven built in.

cuboidGoaton Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

Sounds similar in meaning to the Yiddish word 'chutzpah', which was once defined by Leo Rosten as;

"that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan"

cuboidGoaton Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive. There is then the audience that knows it is all bollocks from the start, many of whom treat it as a massive in-joke that they can take part in, rather than an actual attempt at lying, which wouldn't be the case if the lying was any good.

cuboidGoaton Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

>That would be way too subtle for the common folk.

Are you channeling H. L. Menken?

I think Putin is a comedian and two things I have noticed about Russian humour are firstly, always be deadpanning, and secondly, it isn't really funny unless someone ends up nearly dead.

I also think he is a good tactician but a lousy strategist and I don't think he is in charge of as much of the CCCP as is made out. He is the front man for a conglomerate of interests, many of which operate largely autonomously, and would cause him no end of internal problems should he try and reign them in.

This explains the sharp disconnect between the relative professionalism in the seizing of Crimea, while at the same time lending out SAM systems to idiots.

I'd also say there is a very good chance that Putin did not order this operation in the first place and is playing cleanup.

---

edit - I think there could also be a lot of "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?" going on.

It not being directly ordered is an alternative reason why someone so high up was doing this rather than a subordinate.

This could well have been showing off to curry favour, knowing that the target was in the regime's bad books already.

Being paraded on TV in the manner that they were after being uncovered, I think lends weight to this hypothesis.

cuboidGoaton Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

It makes them look like they do not care about putting on a good show, because they do not feel they need to and they find it funnier to present an obvious circus.

It also might be doubling as a public punishment for the spies for being sloppy. Putting them on TV like that is directly telling them that their careers are over.

If lucky, they might be transformed into celebrities, just for the annoyance value to the UK.

Is the international politics equivalent of telling someone to stop hitting themselves, after grabbing their wrist and whacking them in the face with their own hand.

cuboidGoaton Skripal Suspect Boshirov Identified as GRU Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga

To anyone who has paid attention to any of the history of Russian/UK spy scandals, the idea that homosexuality would prevent someone from being a GRU officer, is frankly almost as hilarious as some of the Russian buzzfeed style sites posting articles about how Salisbury is the center of UK gay nightlife.

cuboidGoaton Mmm, Pi-hole

>2. I'm yet to find a site that takes my subscription and turns off ads and invasive tracking. Just ads. Still not an equitable deal.

As it currently stands, a large chunk of the newspaper industry in the states is willing to block the whole of the EU, when it could offer it that model, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

A source at Tronc says not only have most of the chain's papers blocked EU visitors because of GDPR, but Tronc "currently has no plans to support the EU" because doing so is seen as not economically viable

https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1001571559679582209?lang=...

cuboidGoaton Automakers working to transform data from cars into secondary revenue streams

This modern tracking stuff will get used for a genocide before we ban it, I guarantee. Previous totalitarian states couldn't have even dreamed of this kind of shit.

cuboidGoaton WWII Bombe operator Ruth Bourne: I'd never heard of Enigma until after the war

I find the opposite is often the case.