The historian Hubertus Knabe made the horrifying observation of the film "The Lives of Others" that "There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler", i.e. that in the whole history of the DDR they didn't in fact have a Stasi officer turning against the system from a crisis of conscience, as Wiesler does in the film. To prevent such long wolves they took the simple expedient of always having two officers performing the surveillance, so not just the target but also the Stasi men on the case were monitored.
Asimov is right to think that the costs were ruinous, as was the area of agricultural land sacrificed to the restricted zone near the border wall. But it was very much a price they were willing to pay.
Indeed, this is such a central point that it's made clear in the first chapter:
The
telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston
made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it,
moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal
plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course
no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How
often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all
the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted
to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in
darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Absolutely! I'd read LotR many times before I first read it aloud as a bedtime story season and was abashed to find how much I'd been skipping over, mostly parenthetical details of geography and world-building, while hastening in pursuit of the plot, like the holder of a big box of bonbons gorging target than savouring.
Both Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with it) so even when Earth is further from them than the sun there's 35 degrees of separation.
Searching for the tech angle... "the police had used a helicopter with a heat-seeking camera, and could see that some of the waste was indeed starting to decompose." - a less exciting but cheaper and more informative option could have been donning overalls and rubber boots and taking a spade and a probe thermometer across it
They'll add a footnote explaining that the term "flight" should be understood as a non-refundable ticket in a transport lottery. Similarly to how most sales of entertainment now are providing you with a revokable license to access it, rather than a reusable copy in your possession.
But unless you have a way of slowing down again you'll never see anything of your destination, just the briefest of flares of light as you sail past. And if you do have a way that involves anything like physics that we recognise, you've brought along a huge rest mass that then got accelerated to near light speed. Probably your civilization needs to be approaching Kardashev Level 2 to pull this off.
The article notes that this data would reveal abortions or miscarriages, and that in some states this information is used as input for criminal prosecution.
And it starts with the all-too-familiar "Chesterton's Fence" arrogance of the domain expert who sees something done wrong and presumes that this is due to the ignorance or laziness of the doers, only to learn that there are sensible decisions made by sensible people behind it.
The only reason that the subsurface rock is cooler than magma is being able to conduct heat through to a cooler surface. When that surface becomes exterminatingly hot and remains so for a while the subsurface will be heating up too. Since the sun is estimated to remain a red giant for about one Gy it will become hotter than the surface.
Perhaps I'd become effortlessly fluent in Aramaic if I had to read enough articles in it, but absent some substantial benefit I'd prefer to keep with standard English.
Because x8 is simply shifting 3 bits left so it's "free" (fixed-sized shifts are very simple to implement), whereas generating the x7 would require the additional circuitry, which additionally will be more expensive than the x3 was (since it's another shift+add beyond what x3 required)
At Symbian defects were classified from P1-P4, with the inevitable shit-fights about adding magic runes to the title so everyone knows that your P1 is more important than theirs.
The day came when, after prolonged hand wringing and with stern observations about great power and great responsibility, the priority could be set to P0. But like any bunch of junkies we came off this new high all too quickly and the P-1 classification arrived, the showstopper of showstoppers.
In hindsight what I most regret is that we stuck with an integer field; we were denied the expressive power of fractionally critical issues.
Planned range for the Boom Overture is 4900 miles, so only a little better than the 4500 miles of Concorde, which occasionally had to make a refueling stop going westward over the Atlantic. So it won't have the capability for transpolar or Trans-Pacific flights.
Slash-Dot chortled at that mail but I yearned to work for a software company where the CEO would spend their after-hours time actually eating some dog food & providing feedback (at the time I worked for a mobile phone company and all the mails from the C-suite to the world at large ended with "sent from my (competitor device)" because they preferred to use them and seemingly didn't care to drive improvements to their own products.)
That's too bitter. Speaking as a westerner married into an East German family, what people seem to crave more than anything is stability, which the dead hand of The Party delivered. When I talk to them about the comforts and freedoms of their post-1990 life there's a long list of details but behind it there's a ground state of "Ostalgie", gentle yearning for a time when if tomorrow wouldn't bring especial wonders nor would it bring calamity. And crucially this would be true for everyone in your community: with far less latitude for personal decisions of consequence nobody was far ahead or behind.
That description of heavy lead shielding of a power plant on Mir surprises me since photos show it as having solar arrays. Wikipedia also gives the power source as solar with no mention of lead components. Can you add further details of this?
After the external auditors resigned saying that the financials couldn't be trusted the fact that an internal report run from the board of the directors clears them mightn't be as generally reassuring as you seem to find it.
Those others are effectively asphyxiants: they'll kill you by displacing oxygen, leading to you collapsing and dying if not rescued, eg by being dragged clear or having ventilation improved. Ammonia is a caustic: airway constriction and oedema will get you at modest concentrations, weeping eyes may hamper your escape, and if rescued you may have lasting damage.
Apparently the acronym can now be read as the blander "ExTended OPerationS", or according to the ICAO all such flights can be referred to as EDTO (Extended Diversion Time Operations", which is less fun to say out loud and loses the joke definition "Engines Turn Or People Swim")
I periodically suffer the delusion that some of the nonsense-adjacent people may benefit from seeing that sensible answers can be found. Of course there's effectively no chance of reaching the proudly loudly ignorant, wearing their refusal of any good-faith discussion as a shibboleth, but perhaps their recruitment can be stayed.
Which is exactly why one of the perks of working in modestly-scaled corporate IT is getting to destroy the storage devices before they get taken for recycling. Wiping keys is quick and effective, but can't match a sledge hammer for unadulterated joy.
Or his original: I asked her to take it to the dump, she said 'too busy, do it yourself', meanwhile I remembered I wanted to double check which drive I'd thrown out but she'd had a change of heart and taken it already.
The article says that it was known at the time to be likely to be within a 2000m^2 block, narrowing beyond that will be harder since the rubbish is distributed across it (bulldozers keeping it somewhat level as dumping proceeds, rather than keeping it date-sorted). At the time that he first understood his loss the prospective value was $7.5 million: far from negligible but not a slam-dunk proposition for sifting through 10,000 tonnes of mixed bulk waste while continuing to operate the landfill.
They'd need to provide sufficient confidence that they were going to continue to operate the landfill in accordance with all regulations, not just declare bankruptcy when the hunt is over and leave an unsafe mess and a financial black hole. Possibly the set intersection of treasure hunters with that character AND optimism that the drive remains useful is rather small.
It's a general purpose landfill for a town of 150,000 people and according to the original article he only understood his loss three months after disposal, in which time a further 10,000 tonnes of rubbish had been deposited. That small HDD will be surrounded by much larger items: not just whatever can be crammed into a wheelie bin but also possibly larger special items such as bedframes, furniture, etc. That "goblin" will have to be able to tunnel through compacted masses of steel and concrete while being delicate enough not to destroy the target, and definitely needs to avoid breaching the landfill lining. Probably best not to count on the stability of the tunnel it's making, so it will need autonomous power. Probably easier to go for the moon landing X-prize.
But to what end? Backup everything in case the owner comes looking later? The contents of a drive won't in general become the property of the recycling facility, since much of it will be constrained by licences or copyright.