larkeith

In the long term, they're pretty much the most important missions possible - even absent disasters, Earth only has so many resources, so designing and testing the technology for extraterrestrial habitation is rather essential.

Admittedly, there are alternatives to manned colonialization (e.g. seeding), but it seems rather worth exploring multiple options, considering the stakes.

> You can't opt out of competition any more than you can opt out of gravity.

Perhaps not as an individual, but I wonder about as a society - I don't know how we would get to this point, but imagine the sheer potential we as a culture could unlock by moving to a more cooperative model; consider the billions upon billions of person-hours wasted on things like stock trading, internal politicking, and marketing/advertising: all the things that provide no value to the race, but "required" to facilitate interpersonal competition.

Of course, none of that is against your primary point, which is that hard work is still, on the whole, required. It just irritates me to see competition equated to a law of nature; we're not animals, we can choose whether and how competition applies.

> "Water is blue because it mirrors the sky."

Seeing that people believe this was quite unexpected, at first - it's such an obvious phenomenon looking down into any slightly deep body of water. But on reflection, it makes sense: many (most?) people in the world might live most or all of their lives without going beyond the shorelines of a sea, ocean, or larger lake/river.

It's a good reminder to always be critical of the assumptions you make, and how much they depend on your own context.

(If you ever get the opportunity, visit Crater Lake. The drop from blue to midnight to pitch is beautiful.)

Personally, I much prefer the manual ones, where I can trivially tweak the settings without having to think about it or look away from the road. But that's in part because I usually have the windows down, so constant adjustment is needed to compensate for speed, outside temp, wind speed/direction, etc. - at this point, changing it is second nature. With a touchscreen, even if I could get used to the lack of tactile feedback, it's impossible to know if the right screen is up without looking away from the road (the same issue arises with radio settings).

This demonstrates the amazing savings of crowdsourcing appeals.

It only took 2-3 hours for Apple to assess the PR cost of banning the app and decide it's not worth the income increase.

Throw enough nukes around and Europa might start to look a pleasant alternative.

And that's in the best case. In reality, consumers don't get anywhere near a local maximum, as they are neither well-informed nor entirely rational.

Well, IIRC no BD-10 ever actually went supersonic.

Or the rest of Y2020, for that matter.

You can do some of that with uBO (see "hard" blocking mode), but my understanding is that uMatrix gives you more granular control. I need to learn more about using uMatrix to confirm, though.

`datetime.fromisoformat()`, as of 3.7 :D

Though `dateutil` is still recommended for most cases.

You can also disable JS via uBlock Origin by default, and enable it on a site-by-site basis.

IIRC you can mitigate this by lowering network.http.redirection-limit

$5m by 1985, with another $3.5m earmarked [1]. Accounting generously for inflation, that's $25m today [2]. It would be interesting to know what the price would look like if they tried the same thing today.

[1] https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1985/11/4/the-pentagon-f...

[2] https://www.inflationtool.com/us-dollar/1981-to-present-valu...

It's very much not an ideal solution, but uBlock Origin lets you block large media elements (and reenable them temporarily or on a site-by-site basis), which might help.

Less than you would expect for Powell's, since they have an excellent online store for their books.

It's not really hyperbolic - quote from the article:

> "We still don't know," he says. "I'm still kind of baffled."

Science doesn't yet know which motive mechanism these use (they might even use something novel), and that's really cool.

Disable Javascript and the modal goes away. As does most tracking and other irritations. I strongly recommend doing so for most news sites.

Seems to be okay on Firefox on my S5 (though it takes a minute to load), in case you want to view it.

I'll have to try that out, somehow I'd not considered that.

Disabling Javascript by default avoids most of this, though it breaks some sites.

> Do you really want to pay substantially more for heating/cool, gas, and almost every good?

Until carbon taxes become ubiquitous, this seems like the only viable option to combat climate change. The current model is functionally subsidizing goods and energy at the cost of future and current environmental damage. While I certainly agree that government solutions (carbon taxes, subsidies for clean energy) are optimal, they are not currently in place - that they may someday does not excuse inaction (or actively damaging action) in the present day.

Improving alternatives and choosing not to support fossil fuel companies are not mutually exclusive.

Solar watt-hours are not converted to BTUs at a rate > 1, however, the device effectively uses each watt-hour multiple times, as some of the energy is recovered after each cycle. Needless to say, if the goal were to produce energy, this would be impossible, but much like with heat pumps (which can exceed 100% efficiency by moving heat instead of converting electricity), the device is not producing energy from solar power. The baseline 100% efficiency they are comparing against is that of convertible the water to steam, i.e. the maximum efficiency of a solar desalinator that does not reuse any waste heat.

As a reminder, "Be kind. Don't be snarky." [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I have the same monitor, use it with my laptop for developing, and it's really nice - I can keep Slack, documentation, and sometimes a terminal open on the 29" while I use my laptop screen for VSCode. Definitely improves my efficiency.

We badly need a good replacement - ICANN has recently been making it abundantly clear how poor a choice it is to rely on an opaque, unaccountable centralized entity for something as crucial as DNS.

Whether or not you agree with their decision, this whole saga fails to inspire confidence in their processes and long-term neutrality.

A particularly concerning quote:

"Those PICs were published months later but ICANN went out of its way to make sure they weren’t noticed: it published them on a sub-site that requires people to register to access information, instead of using its normal public comment process, and it made no public announcement about the publication, despite promising to do so."

Note that because the Earth is tilted, this region of space is pretty much useless - there's very few (if any) useful orbits beyond a geostationary, and any spacecraft heading into interplanetary space is going to be aligned with the plane of the solar system (ecliptic), and won't pass through GEO or graveyard orbits. So while you do get shrapnel, it's spread across a very large region through which nobody travels.

This should really be the linked article, much more informative. The charts at the bottom are particularly helpful for understanding the sequence of events (and seeing the conflict between standard departure and go around routes).

It will be interesting to see the investigation for this, as a layman I don't know if such conflicting routes are standard, and how ATC is supposed to respond to such a situation (presumably not by leaving it to the pilot to avoid, like in this case, however).

One plane landing shortly after another departs is standard procedure, provided they have sufficient separation [0]. However, the separation in this case became too tight after the previous landing had vacated the runway, so ATC issued a go-around - but the missed approach procedure and standard departure route for that runway coincided, resulting in the close approach [1].

Note that not enough separation in this case (for the landing) is probably about a mile.

[0] http://tfmlearning.faa.gov/Publications/atpubs/ATC/atc0310.h...

[1] http://avherald.com/h?article=4cb85fbe&opt=0

Not really - either you send the ids unencrypted and they're trivial to falsify, or you send them securely, in which case it takes a lot more power to decrypt each request for filtering than it does for the attacker to send each new request.

DDoS protection is surprisingly challenging - usually it's relegated to a CDN provider, but that would be more difficult when the actual consumers are the same people most likely to be hosting botnets.

Hmmm... It might be worth making a Slack-style interface for Matrix. It already supports replies, these could be flavoured as threads instead.