Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Should copy Virginia - Personalize! (Score 1) 186

It wasn't California who decided to base both houses on population. It was SCOTUS. They said that it violated equal protection to have geographical based representation that didn't spread the representatives equally based on population. They also said that you have to actually reapportion every ten years or so. Before then, a few southern states apportioned their representatives at the turn of the twentieth century and then didn't do it again because the old districts kept more black people from being represented than if they updated the boundaries. SCOTUS said that was BS, along with strictly geographical districts.

Comment Re: Aging population (Score 1) 181

A drink is a standard amount of alcohol. It's specifically defined as 1.5 fl. oz. of 80 proof liquor or the equivalent in any other form. This works out to 12 oz. for most American Lagers and 5 oz. for most wines. Mixed drinks typically have two shots of liquor and so are usually two drinks, but this can vary. Regardless of form, a drink contains 0.6 fl. oz. of ethanol dissolved in however much whatever.

Comment Re:RIP (Score 1) 181

Hey, totally off-topic but I'm going to respond to your sig. It's even worse than you make it out to be. The Slashdot source actually has Unicode support. It has for more than 20 years. The problem is that it wasn't very good, so when they turned it on, assholes got to work breaking things. Rather than actually fix it, they just turned it off and left it that way. What broke, you ask? Direction markers. If you put a right-to-left direction marker in your comment, then entire rest of the page would be interpreted right-to-left as well. Well, until someone else changed it back in a later comment. It was really, really annoying. Rather than forcing the text flow back to left-to-right after every comment, like literally every site that supports Unicode today does, they just said, "Fuck it. We're too dumb," and turned Unicode back off.

Comment Re:Still a throwaway booster in 2025 (Score 1) 26

You could have gone with the short answer: "no".

While it is true that there seem to be 11 launch capable countries, now, that has not been the case for decades. And certainly not the "China, India, Japan and a dozen other..." that you claimed.

Rocket science continues to be as hard as rocket science.

AI: "how many rocket launch failures have there been in the past year"
In 2024, there were 8 orbital launch failures out of 259 attempts. This resulted in a failure rate of 3%, which is lower than the previous year's 6%.

Pissing on a company whose first attempt was not a complete success says more about you than it does about that company.

Comment Re:Inferior to what? (Score 1) 183

You're not wrong except for a couple of assumptions:
* Satellites are not going to get smaller/more efficient - meaning less cost per satellite.
* They're going to keep launching on falcons

I'm pretty sure that the goal is to move to starship as a launch vehicle - which is supposed to be even more efficient.

Elon is a nutter. And this would be an obvious conflict of interest. But I don't think Starlink is financially unviable.

Comment Re:Musk'll Fix It! (Score 1) 246

With all the recent Mars talk, I decided to look up our bet:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fc...

I proposed not making it by 2027. You accepted "by the end of 2027." That's not what I said, but I'll tell you what: I'll double down on what you said.
$2 if SpaceX lands successfully on Mars by the end of 2027. I'm hoping to lose this bet, but I'm guessing I'll be $2 richer come 1/1/2028.

kurt@CircleW.org

Slashdot Top Deals

In practice, failures in system development, like unemployment in Russia, happens a lot despite official propaganda to the contrary. -- Paul Licker

Working...