Discarded corn cobs and pages from the Sears Roebuck catalog. At least in midwestern USA.

This comes up on every one of these articles. The astronauts are in no way stranded.

There’s a common sense operating rule on the station: every person on board ISS must have a dedicated seat in a ride home that is ready to undock and leave within 30 minutes notice.

Right now, the Starliner capsule is certified and ready for that role for the two test pilots. The crew dragon and soyuz are docked to handle the rest of the station crew.

Earlier today there was an emergency shelter event on the station when some debris got unusually close. In this type of event all crew evacuate to the escape spacecraft and close hatches. So if something does hit the station, it’s less likely someone gets hurt during a depressurization.

Starliner served as an emergency shelter for this exercise, because it is certified for emergency reentry, and the five identified helium leaks are not close to preventing it from returning safely.

To get from ISS to a landing site requires no more than 5 hours of RCS operation. There is plenty of margin in the helium system to cover 5 hours.

My understanding is that the second Distance campaign is mostly recycled Nitronic Rush levels.

When the gp’s book says that C is a third generation language: I would guess the first generation is Fortran and the second generation contains ALGOL and BCPL. C was heavily influenced by BCPL. (get it? C comes after B)

The deal with LLMs is that it’s very difficult to say which piece of training material went into which output. Everything gets chopped up and mixed, and it’s computationally difficult to run backwards.

My understanding of the image generators is that they operate one pixel at a time too, looking only at neighboring pixels. So in that sense, it’s not correct to say they understand the context of anything.

Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie

The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.

Could be if the extras were not originally billed as speaking parts, the threat was too not upgrade them to the pay grade for speaking parts.

I know in SAG-AFTRA productions there’s a limit to how many words you can speak on camera before you have to get a SAG card, that usually comes with an upgrade in pay and benefits.

Big Smoke, you make big mistake.

T stands for “terminal count”.

No, the spacecraft gets lumped in with the military business unit because the contracting structures are similar, and very different from how commercial aircraft development is financed.

To be clear: to get back to the ground safely, the spacecraft RCS has to operate for no more than about five hours.

As far as I know, this spacecraft is still certified for emergency reentry, and if they needed to, the crew can get in and leave at any time. And they have good confidence that the spacecraft will get them to earth safely.

These delays aimed at getting more data to justify certification as an operational vehicle instead of flight test. If it doesn’t work out, the worst case seems to be that a second test flight may be required.

Delays don’t really cost NASA anything either. There’s plenty of consumables on the station for the crew, and when the capsule is docked the RCS can be shut down so it doesn’t leak.

Fine? That sounds like a thirteenth amendment situation.

Edit: not US, no thirteenth amendment.

If you add the fat first, the mushrooms are going to release so much liquid that you just have to boil that off anyway.

I wonder how much of this is just the Minuteman replacement.

Especially talk to FSF if this “well known debugging tool” is a part of the GNU project, as FSF has the power and standing to enforce the copyrights on GNU software.

I think my mother played that star trek game on a time shared minicomputer.

Let us all remember that, at least back when it started, the establishment alternative to systemd was a product named after its original operating system, System V UNIX, which is a direct descendent of the original UNIX from AT&T. This sysvinit software used complicated shell scripts to manage daemons. Contrary to some opinions, these shell scripts were not “just working”; they were in fact a constant and major maintenance burden for Linux distributions. When I started on Linux at least, Debian had a suspiciously large fraction of bugs on init script breakages.

All this is to say that the new system, systemd, doesn’t have to be anywhere near perfect to be worth replacing sysvinit.

People argue that systemd is rejecting the “UNIX philosophy” of small tools that do one thing well. I argue that this UNIX philosophy is not some kind of universal good with no tradeoffs. It’s an engineering rule of thumb. There are always tradeoffs.

People argue that systemd is too much like Windows NT. I argue that Windows NT has at least a few good ideas in it. And if one of those ideas solves a problem that Linux has, Linux should use that idea.

I’ve met a lot of people who don’t seem to understand this important concept from epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowledge.

To demonstrate the concept of “non-falsifiability” I will now produce a short fictitious dialog between a made up Scientist, S, and a Religionist, R.

Topic: how old is the earth? Is it 6,000 years old or more than 4 billion years old?

S: The earth must be more than 4 billion years old, because I found these rocks. These rocks have isotopes in them and they definitely look like they’ve been around for more than 4 billion years. If the rocks are really old, then the earth must be really old too.

R: No. The is only 6,000 years old, because the holy Bible has a list of human descendants from Adam, the first man, to Jesus, who we know was born in 4 BC. If you count it all up, you can find the exact year that the earth was created, as described in Genesis 1, and it’s about 6,000 years.

S: But these rocks… They’re really old…

R: God must have created those rocks with the isotopes already set up in the correct ratios to look like they are 4 billion years old, when He separated the firmament from the heavens 6,000 years ago.

S: But how could God create rocks with different isotopes? When minerals solidify from molten lava, lead isotopes naturally form in this ratio. (I don’t actually know how initial lead composition was established for this)

R: God is omnipotent! Any miracle is within his grasp.

S: But why would God want to make the earth appear to be much older than it really is? What purpose does it serve?

R: I do not pretend to understand the ways of God.

Here’s my recollection from civics class:

1. Each state makes their own laws about whether and when a dead candidate can be replaced on the ballot. It’s entirely possible that citizens in some states would vote for dead candidates, while citizens in other states are voting for different candidates.

2. Remember you’re actually voting for the electors that are listed underneath each (now presumed dead) presidential candidate. States make their own laws on how strictly the electors actually have to vote for the guy they pledged to. In many states, there’s no penalty for being a “faithless” elector, and so in this scenario I would imagine that many electors in this situation would exercise their prerogative to vote for a living person who is eligible to hold the office. Perhaps even a re-nominee from their party.

3. Electors meet in their state capitols to sign and transmit the real ballots to Congress. However they decide to vote based on the above, I think it’s important to the constitution that this happens by a deadline (December 18?), and if that is missed, we may be in real constitutional crisis territory.

4. After meeting, swearing in new members, and electing a house speaker (I really hope they can elect a speaker), Congress meets in a joint session to count the real ballots from step 3. This process is in the constitution. This is the process that was interrupted by a mob on Jan. 6, 2021. Under the constitution, Congress can only go against what the ballots say if there’s a tie, in which case the house votes for president on a one state, one vote basis.

4a. As seen in 2021, Congress could conceivably engage in a deliberative process to determine whether ballots that are presented are real, legitimate ballots or not. The constitution doesn’t actually allow them to do this. This is a real weakness in the system. If Congress isn’t allowed to adjudicate ballot legitimacy, then who is? Apparently no one.

4b. There’s also no alternate process if the majority of elector ballots have elected a dead person. Presumably Congress is required to declare that person President.

5. Constitution also says the next president’s term starts on Jan. 20, 2025, at noon eastern, period. No ifs, ands, or buts. If Biden dies in office, his VP Kamala Harris will assume the duties. But that term ends on this date, and the fact that she ascended would have no direct bearing on whether she appears on any presidential ballot.

5a. This turnover deadline literally has no exceptions. If it is missed for any reason, we’re probably in real serious constitutional crisis territory.

5b. If, per 4b, Congress declared that a dead person was elected president, I imagine that person would have a hard time showing up to inauguration on Jan 20. In this case I think that once the turnover has occurred, the normal line succession, which is 17 people deep*, can be used to swear in the next president.

5b1. In this scenario, next up would be the vice president-elect from the elector ballots, probably sworn into the vice presidency first. Third in line is the speaker of the house (I really, really hope they can elect a speaker). Then President Pro Tempore of the senate (the longest serving senator), then cabinet secretaries.

*Most of the 17 are cabinet secretaries. These do not expire automatically when the presidential term expires on Jan. 20. This means that all of the old president’s secretaries are still in the line of succession (unless they foolishly submitted resignation letters) until a president is sworn in and either fires them or makes them resign.

**The presidential term starts at a precise date and time, but a president must swear the oath of office. Both things are in the constitution, so what happens when the time arrives, but the new president isn’t sworn in?

These are all general opinion statements. There aren’t any verifiable facts like, “on this date at a meeting with x we discussed how AI project y is myopic and non-user-centered.”