GreyEyedGhost

Maybe the guy who thought a dictatorship would happily hand over power to the people was wrong two times?

I’m not saying you’re wrong, but the people who have enough money to travel to the States, but not so much money that they wouldn’t travel elsewhere are doing a lot less traveling to the States. That segment of the population has been very vocal with their travel dollars that they don’t approve of the political stance or America right now. No, they probably aren’t a majority, but they aren’t insignificant, either, and they are making their opinions heard in a very clear manner. Likewise store purchases. I don’t buy Tostitos/Lays anymore. I barely buy Pringles. My go-to for chips is Old Dutch (which has an American parent company but is produced in Canada with at least partly Canadian ingredients) or other Canadian brands. Enough people are doing it that it’s impacting display decisions at grocers (some of which is to basically lie to us and make us think things are more Canadian than they really are). Both of those are signs that it’s more than just some angry minority being vocal, there is a quiet segment of the population that simply puts in varying amounts of effort to not send money to America.

Until the last 10 years, fusion barely got any funding in America, and similar levels elsewhere. Here’s a budget projection from decades back that should give some perspective on the inevitable outcome, and why optimism has been so high lately.

As a regular consumer of caffeine, let me assure you it is not. As someone else said, he had the equivalent of a cup of coffee. I personally don’t start suffering any significant withdrawal symptoms until I have more than 100 mg per day, and fairly significant withdrawal symptoms if I regularly have over 400 mg per day. But even as a single dose of caffeine, 150 mg is pretty typical. That said, caffeine can give a temporary boost to cognitive function, even for dementia patients.

“Microsoft Edge. You will never be satisfied, guaranteed.”

“Google Chrome. Only the thinnest veneer of quality.”

I like how in the vast majority of pictures, Kash looks like he’s about to say, “Oh, shit!”

Goddammit!

✌️ I’m not a gate. ✌️

Not every conspiracy has to end with gate.

#TheSlothIsOutThere

This picture is worth at least 4 words.

And one isn’t even relevant in this case.

That’s not really how orbits work. Unless there is a stabilizing burn or very unusual conditions the debris will have an eccentric orbit, going both lower and higher than the impact point. And passing below the orbits of the starlink satellites will expose them to even more atmosphere than they will be at the starlink orbit, so their orbits will decay faster than their apogee would suggest. Sure, some will experience the right conditions to put them in an orbit such that the perigee is at the altitude of the starlink orbits or even higher, but the vast majority will not.

This does not preclude carelessness or malice causing impacts, the launch in question being the former and China’s satellite destruction previously being the latter. Do you think Starlink isn’t releasing their orbital paths to other launch organizations? And that net is generally very predictable. Any deviation from the existing orbit is done at the expense of the lifespan of the satellite and while there are a lot of those satellites, there’s far more empty space between them. The kind of planning that rocket launches normally get is more than enough to hit those windows, along with the other windows rocket launches normally have to hit.

That’s a great point, and has almost nothing to do with Kessler Syndrome. But what can I say? I live near a city where the leaders of a few nations decided it would be fun to test the effects of fallout by releasing radioactive dust over it. Aluminum oxide is pretty benign, comparatively.

Certainly, the consequences of our actions need to be considered, but let’s stick to the legitimate ones, such as what you listed, and not the highly improbable ones such as Kessler Syndrome.

Debris from a collision can be flung in all directions, including higher orbits.

Possible, but not at all likely. The joy of orbits are they’re pretty predictable because after the energy is applied the object just keeps following a path. To get a higher circular orbit would require deceleration at the right point to stabilize it. If this doesn’t happen, and it doesn’t in a collision, you will have a new orbit that will more or less pass through the altitude of the impact. So while it may have a higher apogee, it will have a lower perigee, which means it will suffer more drag due to more atmosphere. So the vast majority of debris from the collision of a LEO satellite collision will naturally deorbit, possibly faster than if the satellite hadn’t just become inert in its orbit.

The low orbits that need to be constantly maintained or they naturally deorbit are the exact opposite of Kessler Syndrome. If every Starlink satellite was to disintegrate right now, the majority of the debris would be gone in 5 years.

Does that make the drone an avatar?

Biblically accurate angel.

Seriously, am I wrong?

There was a story about a researcher using evolving algorithms to build more efficient systems on FPGAs. One of the weird shortcuts was some system that normally used a clock circuit, but none was available, and it made a dead-end circuit the would give a electric pulse when used, giving it a makeshift clock circuit. The big problem was that better efficiency often used quirks of the specific board, and his next step was to start testing the results on multiple FPGAs and using the overall fitness to get past that quirk/shortcut.

Pretty sure this was before 2010. Found a possible link from 2001.

One of the more memorable lines from “Whoes Line Is It Anyway”, for me as least, was when one of them said, “How’s it hanging, Tes-ti-cles?”

So, “nuclear test und an uninhibited island” next?

Un inhabited?

Edit: apparently you can’t have partial words italicized.

99% of the time I drive, my car insurance has no bearing on the outcome of my trip, but I really appreciate it that 1% of the time it does.