kilo_bravo_3

India's moon mission budget ($145 million) was 11 cents per Indian person (1.353 billion).

It was 0.02% of a single year's expenditure ($725 billion) by the Indian federal government-- spread out over multiple years.

It amounted to approximately 0.005% of India's GDP ($2.7 trillion).

And the money spent didn't disappear it went into infrastructure, manufacturing, and other mostly domestic pockets.

The only money that disappeared from the economy was the value of the fuel burned and materials not returned to earth from space.

Those 11 cents per person (well, let's call it 10 because the value of the craft on the moon in pieces) are floating around the economy, ready to be spent on water supplies.

Coronavirus is a cold?

How many people die from a cold?

Coronavirus has disappeared because it is summer? The original article was published in early June and maybe written in late May?

May/June was a temporary lull. As of the first week of July cases are increasing again.

I really wish Professors Emeritus who have long been out of the game would stop pontificating and use their positions as they were intended to be used: advertising for the university.

Except to use your metaphor, software control of a webcam is like closing the blinds and putting a physical cover over the lens is like covering a window in aluminum foil in addition to closing the blinds.

Does that happen often?

We've been 100% Microsoft Teams since March so I'd say that in several hundred calls and conferences since then I've never activated the webcam without intent.

I've never understood physical covers, then again I am never in a compromising position in front of my laptop.

Any malware that can take pictures can record keystrokes. I want no cover so I can see the activity light because knowing the webcam is on is more important than it being on.

The (pennsylvania?) school district webcam spying scandal got kicked off because a boy noticed his webcam light coming on. If it had been covered would he have noticed?

No, the school district wouldn't have had pictures of him, but they still would have screengrabs, audio, and keystrokes and he likely never would have noticed.

Take all of the pictures of my double chin that you want.

I want to know that my webcam is coming on without my authorization so I can root out the spyware that is keylogging.

Passwords > Pics

If you're the type whose life will be ruined by pictures taken by your webcam, by all means cover it up. I'm too old and hairy to be blackmailed with nudie pics.

Having my passwords leak would seriously cramp my style, though.

And no, nobody is going to waste a zero-day that can reprogram a webcam controller to disable the light (if possible and often it is not) on a nudie-pics malware. They are going to use it to make actual money.

I've been using Riot to connect to Matrix.

Works very well and Riot is on: iOS, MacOS, Windows, Google Play, F-Droid, Linux, and has a very nice web application.

This is what got me started: https://matrix.org/blog/2020/04/06/running-your-own-secure-c...

You can call yourself a nation, but if the only reason you exist is the fact that the price of the fuel needed to ferry a police officer to your location and arrest you is more than what your country is worth, you're not a nation.

I enjoy Times Square.

I remember Times Square before it was "disneyfied".

Everyone bemoaning the loss of the "real and gritty" Times Square is either a:

* hypocrite,

* amnesiac, and/or

* idiot

The "real and raw" parts of the internet are only enjoyed by people whose lives are so pathetic that they have to fill the emptiness with conflict and bigotry.

Prohibiting hate speech against minorities, homosexuals, and transexuals (and for some reason it is always transexuals) is not "corporate approved" it is basic human decency. If advertisers dropping out is a necessary catalyst to spur the faux-libertarian techbros into action, so be it.

Like with codes of conduct in open source communities, the bigots can't stand when they are told that they have to act like human beings despite the fact that they are on the internet and think that the rules should be different and self-righteous (but ultimately futile) bitching will always accompany the implementation of standards on the internet that are already used in every other facet of life.

Why do SO MANY pretend-libertarian tech bros pretending to be libertarians and liberty-loving freedom fans think that free speech applies to private property?

And why have they let themselves be tricked into spewing the Section-230 nonsense that conservative hate-mongers are using to threaten online service providers?

Section 230 protection is irrelevant to service providers policing their site. It is very relevant to service providers who are being told by conservative hate-mongering politicians “hey we’ll strip your protections unless you allow our hateful content even though the protections are unrelated to our content and comments”.

You’re carrying water for malicious actors who don’t care about you.

By your own logic, not mine (I think it’s bullshit) YOURS if you downvote this comment to the point that it is hidden or automodded then you are infringing on my “FREEZE PEECH RAIGHTS” because you are “removing” constitutionally-protected freeze peach from the public sphere.

Nooooo!!!!

I am sustained by Apple hatred. It is an essential part of my balanced diet.

Every time someone complains about how expensive Apple is I grow a centimeter and every time someone bitches about their App Store policies I gain a month of lifespan.

I am now 40km tall and will live for 50,000 years but ultimately a lack of whining about Apple would see me wither away and die.

>I feel like HN as a whole want blogs to come back

Blogs never left— they may have withered to near-nothingness after the same exact people who claim to want them abandoned them, but they’re still here.

I may be wrong but I believe the people who claim to want blogs abandoned them for sites like Hacker News.

Anytime someone equates private control of a private platform with an abridging of “free speech” rights I automatically think they have suffered a head injury that has damaged their ability to think and makes them take nonsensical positions.

If I flood Hacker News with TIMECUBE truth and they delete my posts are they infringing on my free speech rights?

> I am a Knower of 4 corner

>simultaneous 24 hour Days

>that occur within a single

>4 corner rotation of Earth.

If you disagree with that TRUTH you are a COMMUNIST from COMMUNIST CHINA, you DIRTY COMMUNIST.

I snored so loudly that when I was in basic training that they made me sleep all of the way at the opposite end of the open-bay barracks we were in.

I was 18 and near the height of physical perfection.

As far back as 10 years old I remember feeling miserable every single morning even after getting a full night's sleep.

At age 35 I got a CPAP and finally fixed a quarter century of piss-poor sleep.

>It sickened me yesterday to see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president's visit outside St. John's Church. I have to date been reticent to speak out on issues surrounding President Trump's leadership, but we are at an inflection point, and the events of the past few weeks have made it impossible to remain silent.

Who in Lafayette Square was a rioter?

The disabled veterans, the people standing around doing nothing, or the elderly female Episcopalian ministers?

"Thug" does have a definition that is not racist.

So does "monkey".

Death cultists will claim that monkey is non-racist, when used by bigots, too.

"WUH WUH WUH ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT BRUH 1488 ISN'T RACIST IT'S JUST NUMBERS"

Virtue Signaling is made up bullshit and anyone using the term unironically is probably stupid.

Supply me with a definition that also does not apply to your comment and we'll talk.

Let's not play games here, we all know what Trump means when he uses the word "thug".

Then you’re saying that some speech is more free than others.

And they won’t pick c, at least not after the first round of lawsuits.

As far as highways go, I don’t follow the analogy. The government has to pay me for any land they take. Do you think that they’ll buy twitter just so conservative bigots can have somewhere to go and be bigoted?

Let’s say hacker news could be sued for me posting a comment threatening to kill you and refusing to remove it.

Because in many states (maybe all?) they can be.

Remember, websites are only given immunity if they fail to remove “sueable” content.

Will they (hacker news):

a. Prescreen all comments, like a publisher prescreens manuscripts, or

b. Just do away with user-submitted content, or

c. Let everyone say whatever they want in an orgy of freedom with no moderation whatsoever?

Privately owned media sites will never, ever be a public square just because people use them the same way my yard isn’t a public square because you can walk across it on the way to ring my doorbell so you can ask to put a campaign sign in my grass.

Is the President of the United States of America sharing a video calling for the death of his political opponents a “sue worthy” event? What if he gave a speech saying that? Or published a presidential decree calling for it?

Some people see bigots saying “whatever dude it was just a satire joke” for what it is: bullshit.

This is impossible. People who want this want the actual, literal, impossible.

And I don't understand it. Well, I do, mostly it's bigots wanting free reign to be bigots in someone else's house with a little bit of the ideologically inflexible thrown into the mix.

So I should say I don't understand the people who want this.

Not only that but if conservatives do what they are threatening to do, that will lead to an almost instant, complete, and full censoring of much of their content.

Which online service provider would want to be civilly liable for someone posting a video that says "the only good democrat is a dead democrat" if a nut job throws back a shot of hand sanitizer and goes on a shooting spree because "the president said so"?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/05/28/trump-ret...

In what way is it security theater?

It’s real and it works better than the technology it replaced.

The nudie-scanners have been gone for over six years and the current scanners are nothing more than (at a high level) low-resolution "difference" detectors.

The only way they'll invade your privacy is if your genitals are made out of metal. And no, genital piercings don't trigger them.

With ATR (automated target recognition) scanners it is literally, definitely, assuredly, irrefutably impossible to reconstruct any image or representation of the human body in any capacity approaching useful or attributable using 2020 scanners.

What are the privacy ramifications of 2020 airport scanners?

Not 2014 scanners. I do not care about something that does not used anymore.

I would assert that a patdown is an infinitely greater "erosion" of privacy than the post-feature and contour extraction comparison of phase history data to a generalized model of the human form.

>it’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Apple I once loved is moribund

If there is anything more pathetic than an adult expressing love for a publicly traded corporate entity regardless of what they make or where they're from or how cool their marketing is, I haven't found it.

edit: Never mind-- writing a 1600 word essay about the lover-who-must-file-10Qs who is disappointing you and then publishing it online is definitely more pathetic.

Compare and contrast:

1. it's increasingly obvious that the White Rock Beverage Company, Inc. I once loved is moribund (followed by a SIXTEEN HUNDRED WORD ESSAY about how they changed the recipe of Sioux City Root Beer and it sucks now)

2. it's increasingly obvious that the Apple, Inc. I once loved is moribund (followed by a SIXTEEN HUNDRED WORD ESSAY about how their laptops suck now)

It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction but generally speaking you do own the land under your house.

You (or a previous owner) can choose to sell or lease the minerals under your house.

It is so difficult to buy land without being informed of its mineral rights that it might actually be technically impossible to acquire land without knowing beforehand the status of those rights unless you specifically set out to do so as an experiment or something.

Like by covering your eyes, plugging your ears, and screaming "LA LA LA LA" as you initial the page of the contract describing mineral rights. Or not actually reading the results of a title search.

So you own the dirt, but people don't want dirt they want gold, oil, and other such things.

The only thing the judge said was that dinosaur bones aren't "minerals".

If they had found ancient pottery or buried gold coins those also aren't minerals. Yeah gold coins, even though gold is considered a "mineral" stamped coins are not for the purposes of mineral rights.

If a previous owner sold the rights to the minerals in the dirt under your house, that's on you for not paying attention during the sale-- assuming you wanted the rights to begin with.

>We’ve replaced true ambition with egalitarian goals, free of risks, secure and comfortable. We crush true originality and individualism because it may lead to unbridled success and happiness, bursting the bubble in which the rest of us can hide. We convince ourselves that this scaled homogeneity is happiness, but it’s little more than carefully packaged mass nihilism. We are the Nietzschean nightmare of the Last Men. If Vegas today is a prediction of America tomorrow, our future is Resorts World: a delusional and degraded service economy for China.

If you told me that this was written by a 13-year old who thinks Atlas Shrugged is non-fiction, I would have replied "Hmm. That's alright for a 13-year-old. Once he gets out of this phase he should be a pretty good writer."

Siri doesn't know that my front door is called "FRONT DOOR".

I only have one smart lock, which works perfectly, and it is called "FRONT DOOR" in HomeKit.

When I ask Siri about my FRONT DOOR she responds that she cannot find it.

When I ask Siri about the status of my DOOR, she responds with "The FRONT DOOR is locked/unlocked".

I'll then say 'Alright Siri you literally just used the phrase "FRONT DOOR" five seconds ago and the text transcript on the screen says "FRONT DOOR" hey Siri is my FRONT DOOR locked'

Siri: WTF are you talking about? You don't have a FRONT DOOR.

"Hey Siri is my door locked"

Siri: Your FRONT DOOR is locked.

Google and Alexa handle things flawlessly.

According to the video he paid $100k for the fuselage, and another article quoted him saying he paid an additional $120k to move and renovate and the square footage is 1,066.

$100,000 initial purchase + $120,000 moving and renovation expenses / 1,066 square feet = $207/sq. foot.

For our foreign friends that is $2200 per square meter.

That does not seem competitive.

And anywhere other than outside of Portland where the average high seems to be 72 (22C) and the average low 71 (21C) (this is only a little bit jokey) will require a great deal more insulation.

As a charming project for a quirky retired engineer I am a huge fan. I really like it. It is a charming project done by a quirky retired engineer that made me smile and I would really like to visit, and maybe one day when I'm a quirky retired engineer do the same.

It is nothing more.

> Rather they've all switched to extolling their inscrutable "holistic admissions process".

They switched to that in the 30s because, and these are not my words, "Jews were overrunning the campuses".

Now it is being used to keep, and these are not my words, "Asians from overrunning the campuses".

This has been known for decades: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/10/getting-in

That's why sitting in an empty room 30 minutes a week arguing about what to put on a poster as a "student government" officer weighs as much as an A+ in math during the admissions process.

It's affirmative action for a certain class of people, but not the one everyone seems to think it is for.

The Ivies (and nearly every organization for that matter) only cares about underrepresented classes enough to keep people off their backs, what they really want to do is preserve the "feel" of the institution and that means a different class of individual who may need a leg up because their grades ain't cutting it.

> The admissions committee viewed evidence of “manliness” with particular enthusiasm. One boy gained admission despite an academic prediction of 70 because “there was apparently something manly and distinctive about him that had won over both his alumni and staff interviewers.”

In other words, they want white frat guys with pastel polo shirts, khaki shorts, boat shoes and (most importantly) mommy and daddy's money who slacked off in school so now they have to weigh laxbro-ness heavily during admission to ram those types through the system.

The most deliciously ironic part of all of this is that the class of people that actually benefits from this form of affirmative action is the one most likely to believe in meritocracy, which has never, will never, and does not exist in any form anywhere: unless your employer interviewed every qualified human being on earth and you were indeed the most qualified of the lot, it wasn't a meritocratic hire.

You may have been the most qualified of those with the temporal, informational, or geographic attributes needed to self-select for the job, but that ain't a meritocracy.

>The Founding Fathers could not have predicted this.

The Founding Fathers used this to their advantage.

They colluded with the handful of major publishers of the time to orchestrate a rolling, synchronized release of the Federalist Papers, saturating the already-monopolized (due to the massive expense of presses and paper) media market with their ideas.

The authors of the Anti-Federalist Papers had no such deal. They had to print out their responses on their own and distribute them by hand.

The country probably would not have even gotten to the point of needing a debate about a constitution, one-sided as it was, if it hadn't been for publishers telling non-conforming opinions to fuck off.

And please, nobody chime in with "publisher v. platform": it is irrelevant, you're wrong.

I feed off people complaining about Apple's prices.

I actually crave it.

It's like blood to a vampire or candy and soda to a fat kid.

Thank you.

I participate in every email reply-all storm.

Because I'm not a soulless, joyless, curmudgeon who gets upset by receiving emails "oh noes my inboxzero!"

And it's funny.