The only problem with this is you have to go stand in the sunlight to charge it.

I sat in the cube at MCI (later MCI Worldcom... later defunct and sold for scraps) next to the lead guy doing Y2K auditing of critical infrastructure code that had been "fixed."

Even after the first pass, he caught dozens of errors that would have shut down the phone and data backbone for days or weeks at Y2K, and MCI controlled 85% of the North American backbone at the time.

Several times, I helped him walk through the code, and we found bugs that would have effectively shut down vast sections of the network and made it nearly impossible to patch. Without the routing of the network, it would have isolated the very machines that needed updated software. When people tell me that Y2K was a non-event, I get visibly angry because we worked our backsides off to make sure it was a non-event, and in return, we get told there was never a problem to begin with.

It makes me almost wish we'd have let it all come crashing down because we could have leveraged that for the next ten years of over-priced salaries instead of what did happen, which was five years of some of the leanest and most brutal job markets ever.

That was our reward for a job well done: layoffs and salary cuts.

This Leigh Claire La Berge and her story aren't worth the "cow dirt" that the guy took up shoveling after his retirement (he raised cattle).

These types of draconian laws will ruin the internet if they are ratified.

Itâ(TM)s easy to switch the search default in Firefox to whatever you want. I use duckduckgo, personally.

Reddit used to have principles that aligned with the open source model. Now they are removing mods that protested their API pricing. They have changed and that is how they are killing the goose that lays golden eggs. Everyone was cheering for them to succeed. Not anymore. The good will people had towards reddit is gone. They killed it.

It's going to cost $20mil a year to run Apollo with the current API pricing. It's not sustainable. Reddit is killing themselves like Digg did.

And they're not funded by fossil fuel money, except at two or three steps removed. GWPF is still not receiving funding from oil companies. They are receiving money from people who might ALSO be invested in fossil fuels or who might have vested interests in the results that the GWPF puts out. The larger question would be whether they received those funds before or after their first published white papers. In other words, did they write the white papers because of the money, or did they get more funding because of the content of the white papers?

But it was clearly the point I was trying to make about how you can claim 2nd and 3rd hand funding for both sides that **WHOOSH** went right over your head.

Many Climate Change Think Tanks receive funds from individuals with vested interests in Carbon Trading companies, alternative energy sources, and solar power. Some donations even came from institutions or individuals that receive GRANTS to do Climate Change studies! One person who inherited money from their great grandfather even donated sums while working at a SOLAR PANEL company!

Look, I can write this click-bait with either side of the debate!

Next, you'll tell me that people donate money to the causes they agree with! WHAT A SCANDAL!

The problem of corrosion was figured out at the MSRE at ORNL in the 60's using Hatealloy piping for the salt flow.

The real issue with not building them in the U.S. has been the utter fear-mongering around the word "nuclear" and the fact that molten salt reactors can't breed plutonium for nuclear weapons.

They were testing gimbal control, for one thing, to show that the rocket and the flight controller could adjust to engine-out conditions. Secondly, their TFR did not include a super-sonic tag, meaning that they would have been heavily fined if the booster created a sonic boom, so they had to shut down the engines as the starship got lighter, and the air got thinner, or they would have accelerated past Mach 1.

Also, by shutting down one engine and adjusting thrust through the center of gravity, the rocket tips slightly, moving it off shore in case of any need to terminate the flight. Remember that SN4 exploded *after* the engine shut down from the static fire. Yes, SN4 was due to a ground service equipment leak, but still, there's no proof that Raptors don't have hard shutdowns. Even Elon said he was happy they made it to apogee without blowing up, so its clear that they're still not 100% confident in the Raptors.

Finally, the engines relit at touchdown (well, at least two of them did) so it's not like there was an actual fatal problem with the engine as it wouldn't have restarted.

I admit, that when I saw the first raptor cut out, I had a moment of, "oh no," but it rapidly passed when I realized what they must be doing to both manage acceleration and to direct the Starship out over the water.

You do know that, barring a lucky accident tracking down the software bug that caused them to fail to get into orbit, they discovered another software bug that would have resulted in the catastrophic loss of the vehicle on reentry?

Between no end-to-end test of the software, no unified test of the systems, loss of communication because of poorly located and designed antennas, burn out of at least one RCS cluster, reading the wrong clock when initializing the system, burning nearly all of their consumables in the first fifty minutes of flight, and a potentially fatal collision avoided only by uploading a software patch less than 60 minutes before reentry, I don't know how you consider this anything but a near complete failure on the part of Boeing.

This was meant to be a "final dress rehearsal" before NASA put crew on board. If the crew had been on board, as they kept saying during the post-launch briefing, it's likely they would have compensated for the incorrect mission clock, which means Boeing would never have debugged the software, and they would never have caught the second software error and it's very likely that we would have had a Soyuz 1 scenario with three dead astronauts. The fact that NASA even considered not making Boeing do an OFT-2 shows that Boeing's inclusion in the commercial crew program, even after blackmailing NASA into paying an additional $600M above their "fixed price contract" that was already double what SpaceX was paid, was purely politically motivated.

Actually, for two years I rode the #30 bus through downtown Milwaukee. Several times, I was next to or across from a guy who later turned out to be Jeffery Dahmer. So, at least in my case, Elon Musk is right.

Technically, you pay to turn on the headlights, on every car.

I'll show myself out.

So how's your lawn doing, this summer? Mine's great, the neighborhood kids all grew up, and taught their own children to respect other people's lawns.

Yes, but if the eyewitness reports of animal handlers coated in bat urine, blood, and feces are correct, then cross-contamination becomes highly likely. We keep hearing that this is a "world-class" institution, but at the same time the U.S. State Department is sending urgent memos back to Washington about the poor conditions and improper safety precautions going on there. If you read the article, you'll find out that multiple special teams were sent to the lab to try to force them to take better precautions for the last two years.

That's not what I'd call, "world-class."