Galacta7

I'm curious, how does a flight crew not notice a window entirely missing?!? I get that most of the passengers were near the middle of the craft, but wouldn't it still have been fairly noticeable as the flight attendants were walking down the aisle? Or immediately upon takeoff? Why did it take them reaching 13,000 before it was obvious a window was not there? TFA doesn't really say.

My only guess is that the shades pulled down on most of the windows, not making the situation apparent. But even then, it one would imagine a substantial rattle from wind. Even cracking the window of my car at high speed is incredibly noisy, and my car can only go the fraction of the speed of an airplane. This whole thing is confusing.

Aren't there already mechanical tree shakers that harvest olives fairly efficiently?

Extra virgin olive oil is for the truly elite. The merely 10% only get the standard slutty olive oil.

I used to work for a temp agency (clerical, not in tech) and I remember once seeing what my agency was getting paid for me on an hourly basis. Iirc, it was something like 3-4x what I was getting paid hourly. It was kind of sickening tbh. Plus many agencies forbid temps from being hired away without paying an outrageously hire fee to do so.

It felt like being an indentured servant in many ways. The only upside was that if you hated the place you worked, you could always ask to be reassigned someplace else. But that's the only major plus I can think of.

I would love to get Verizon 5G Home Internet for my mom, who is currently getting gouged by Verizon with DSL (and slow barely better than dial-up DSL). Unfortunately, she's not eligible, as Verizon apparently limits the number of 5G customers they offer in a given area -- due to bandwidth limitations. So it's great for folks who can get it, but pretty limited in terms of how many people can actually sign-up for service.

One of my favorite McSweeney's articles. It only gets more hilarious towards the end. Very funny satirical take on some of the more bizarre (but very real) traditions in academia.

Thinking about it, it seems questions generally allow for some flexibility of interpretation reducing potential cause for offense, where statements allow far less latitude. The problem is that some questions require foundational understandings that may be offensive, or can really only be understood with malintent. "When did you stop beating your wife?" comes to mind. The question doesn't even allow for the possibility that you don't beat your wife.

Similarly, "Can I sleep with your wife" implies that the asker thinks it's a possibility worth inquiring about. So I basically agree with you on a practical level -- most people would not respond well to the underlying assumption. The question is a veiled statement ("I think you might be open to letting me sleep with your wife, so here I am asking"). In that sense, the question and the statement aren't very different, as you noted.

Hmm, I see a problem with this analogy in that the person selling the stamp is at an unfair disadvantage due to that information asymmetry. It's actually unethical and sometimes even illegal to do this in the stock market, especially if the knowledge wasn't publicly available.

I think askers sometimes feel put off by guessers, because you can't inherently know what the other person thinks is a fair request -- unless you're in a high context environment (which most askers won't be as familiar with). So from their perspective, guessers are doing a bit of insider trading ... only they know what's of value to them. It's frustrating from the askers POV because the counterparty seems less than transparent about their true intentions.

Of course, from the other side of the coin, the asker is ignoring a million cues that are obvious to the guesser but meaningless to the asker who doesn't even know to notice them.

Sounds like he lost his Persian sense of Tarof, lol. https://youtu.be/XAvzW1WZsN4

(Or more likely) Live audience: "Ohmmmmmm!"

Having read the article, I'm still confused ... are they saying Death Valley in particular had the hottest midnight on record? Or that it was the hottest midnight ever recorded on the planet? The article doesn't make this clear. Both interpretations are bad, but one is more frightening than the other.

I was just thinking of Tantacrul and his amazing videos. I can't wait to see his update on Musescore 4.1.

Iirc, that was also the reason Earth plunged into a new ice age in Snowpiercer.

I can see that... :P

This reminds me of the Excel scoring error by NASA that impacted where the Space Shuttles would be retired. Basically costing the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force an orbiter (though the NASA Administrator says it wouldn't have made a difference in the end). It was a bad enough screwup that Congress complained and NASA's OIG filed a report on the incident. It's a pretty interesting read: https://oig.nasa.gov/docs/Review_NASAs_Selection_Display_Loc...

I think they prefer the term Synthetic Persons.

This is genuinely exciting. I was a big B5 fan, and disappointed that the live action reboot never happened. This feels like the next best thing, and in some ways may be even better, since we won't need to rationalize why the actors appears so much older.

I am however curious to know who they will get to replace the talents of Andreas Katsulas, Richard Biggs, Stephen Furst and others who have sadly passed on. Still, I'm stoked that most of the original cast is returning, under the original showrunner.

That's the way I remember it too, so you may be right. I remember being shaken by the first time she realizes she can't feel her own pulse in the simulation, then starts to panic and have an existential crisis on the realization of what she was. It was kind of horrifying but also humanizing too.

I actually enjoyed Caprica more than BSG, since the worldbuilding was so much richer and more interesting to me. Particularly the roots of the conflicts between the colonies and the eventual rise of the Cylons. It felt like it was a better paced show overall, again imo. Though I did enjoy BSG, too!

This was also the premise of the Battlestar Galactica prequel "Caprica." The father of A.I. created a digital copy of his recently deceased daughter based on her digital trail from life. The copy struggles with her existence in an artificial environment, initially being unaware she was in one. It was interesting how they tied her existence into the eventual rise of religious monotheism and the emergence of the Cylons. Underrated show.

It's interesting that this shared allegiance to the Constitution was still strained to the breaking point 160+ years ago. I wonder how U.S. military leaders must have felt when huge swaths of the military (and military leaders) decided that bond was no longer strong enough for them to maintain their loyalty to it.

Indeed, my understanding is that the British Army was created by and legally answerable to Parliament, unlike the other armed forces. As you mentioned, a remain of mistrust after the monarch was restored to the throne after the civil war (though the navy did remain under the monarch's control). Also, there are royal units within the Army, but the whole of the army is not regimented in this way.

Never thought I'd see a Ben-Hur reference in the wild, but I love it. One of my favorite scenes.

> For now, a moon mission runs on the time of the country that is operating the spacecraft.

Even more confusing since most spacefaring nations span across multiple time zones. Getting a lunar time zone that everyone can theoretically follow seems like a practical idea. It'll be interesting to see how this works on Mars, which would need to have its own planetary time zones (if there aren't already).

It seems like that's literally true for Ally bank, which started its life as the finance arm of GMAC, and still technically is despite being a full-fledged bank in its own right. I don't think they're owned by General Motors anymore, though.

I possibly could see a free market compromise existing. Perhaps one where automakers charge a higher base price for vehicles without the ability to repossess themselves. Or where one's insurance premium goes up if you opt-out of this feature, since it's likely you'd also miss an insurance payment as well. I could see people going with the default save money, but for those who are worried about their car driving off, paying extra to have the feature turned off might be worthwhile.

Also the saying, "The baker's children are the last to have bread."