I read that as "landing *system* failure". If a plane's engines die it can glide; if its landing gear fails to deploy it can still perform a controlled belly landing; if it's approaching at a bad trajectory it can take another go-around.

Starship has redundant landing engines (at least one prototype landing test failure was because it wasn't prepared to *use* the redundant engines; lesson learned...), but unless they're keeping better ideas secret, the current backup plan if a trajectory goes bad is "fall in the ocean, tip over uncontrolled, and hope not to explode", and the backup plan if a tower catch fails (they're basically putting the landing gear on the *ground* rather than on the vehicle!) is "try again until a slim propellant margin runs dry, then fall onto concrete".

If Starship works at all, this shouldn't be a long-term problem, I think. They'll have loads of opportunities to iteratively improve the system once they're flying it unmanned every week. They may never get to 1-in-a-hundred-billion commercial aircraft risk levels, but they'll be under the 1-in-250 levels that astronauts tolerate in no time.

It's time to sell the company to Elon and retire.

Just be remembered for Facebook and amihotornot, as opposed to a dystopic VR system with Nintendo 64 graphics, and retire with your reputation as intact as it will ever be.

This guy helped me write all the code I ever stole from Stackoverflow.

I remember reading about an experiment where they had servers behave (at random) either happy and cheerful, or abrupt, rushed and unfirendly. In both cases they performed their job the same. The result was that the "friendly and cheerful" staff were tipped less on average. The theory was that people perceived the cheerful and friendly staff as being less deserving of a tip because they were clearly enjoying their job, or were having to work less hard.

It is akin to the locksmith paradox. If you have a newly trained guy turn up and take an hour to get into your house/car, you feel like he's worked hard and deserves his $100. If he has 10 years experience and does the job in 5 minutes because he knows exactly what to do, many will feel cheated when they hand over the same fee, despite getting an objectively better service, because they perceive that he didn't work so hard.

You should acquaint yourself with the basic facts of the story instead of relying on Reason Magazine. The "learn to code" shit was included in a barrage of death threats from 4chan users. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nbcnews.com%2Ftech%2Ft...

No, there are things the Americans don't do.

The Russian government requires all software companies there to include whatever code they give them. You should never run closed-source software on your machine if a Russian company was involved.

Finally, a good reason to have an existential crisis.

Unless Windows 10 arrives and sends your laptop into an infinite boot loop.

I think he means turning CO2 into methane and then releasing the methane.

Somehow I don't think the greatest threat to Amazon is not being able to identify unproductive warehouse workers in time who are earning $15 per hour. That's the type of problem you have with engineers.

Netflix has a lot of cash. They'll usually stop by your local ISP and offer them a big DVR along with money to pay for the electricity.

They don't need to doctor the images to make the Earth look spherical!
They built the cameras using tiny black holes instead of glass lenses, in order to focus the light in a way that makes flat things look round.

Kim's strategy here is obvious. Start by offering to give up North Korea's supply of depleted uranium, and see where it goes from there.

We're replacing it with a power source that doesn't make environmental conditions fluctuate, moron.

Any polyatomic gas is a greenhouse gas. If it's airborne and has three or more atoms, it qualifies.

Low energy infrared photons (like those emitted by a body at 300K) can cause bonds to bend side to side in a flapping motion.

Oxygen and nitrogen are diatomic molecules. They can stretch, but there's no way they can bend because there are only two atoms. So they're transparent to IR emitted from the ground and are not greenhouse gases. Molecules that can bend need three atoms or more, like carbon dioxide, which gets hit by an infrared photon and moves like a bird flapping its wings before reemitting it. H2O is also a greenhouse gas but its long term atmospheric concentration is stable over the long term and doesn't rise year over year. Methane is a potent gas because it's tetrahedral and its single bonds are easier to flex than e.g. the double bonds in CO2.

HFCs and CFCs also have tetrahedral shapes with single bonds, but they're more potent greenhouse gases than methane, because the fluorine and chlorine atoms distort the charge concentration and give the molecule a dipole moment that makes it better at scattering photons. They also provide it with more possible bending motions.

I'm not sure why this article is talking about illegal fluorotrichloromethane being a greenhouse gas. It's illegal because it destroys stratospheric ozone. Gram for gram, sarin is an extremely potent greenhouse gas, but that's not why it's illegal.