gattr

You can use superscript Unicode characters on HN: km·h⁻¹.

A few decades from now, in the biohacker/modder community: "Recap your noggin with our reinforced-glass-ceramic dome!".

On the one hand, I'm pretty sure Zelenskyy has had similar exchanges with Biden and the members of his administration in the past few years. And I understand (I think) the realities here: the US isn't doing anything out of the goodness of its heart; Putin's idiotic "short victorious war" blunder presented a nice opportunity to weaken Russia via a proxy war, no decisive military/materiel support was given, just enough to keep Ukraine going, etc.

But FOR GOODNESS' SAKE, these dealings and bickering are supposed to happen behind closed doors! You give the public just the bland courtesies and assurances! The US president and vice president have come across as impulsive 4-year-olds throwing toys out of a sandbox.

I used to think that the novel "The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States" ([1]), which ridicules Donald Trump quite a bit, was overdoing it for humor. Now I'm not so sure.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_...

On a related (?) note, I was taken aback by the scene from "Kill Bill 2" ([1]), where Bill makes a sandwich for Bibi and... cuts off the crust. And it was the soft "toast" bread anyway. Doing this was not a thing when I was a kid; actually, eating the crunchy heel of a (Central-European style) loaf was a pleasure.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXXXIokuYGM

Good point, we don't have to exactly follow the "astronauts in a small tin can, where everything must work flawlessly" way. With Starship (or its future iteration/successor) we can:

- assemble a quite large interplanetary craft in orbit, with plenty of redundancy in HW and supplies

- drop 50 tons of cargo on Mars beforehand: food (and/or food-growing necessities - packaged soil, hydroponic equipment?), medical supplies, etc.; so that in case of problems, astronauts can survive on Mars for years if need be

Perhaps the whole situation will finally convince the "I don't mind, I have nothing to hide" crowd about the need to scrutinize & limit as much as reasonably possible the personal data collection and retention by government and other entities. What good are rules, statutes, checks & balances, passwords and ACLs, if at some point someone you don't like or trust can just come in "as a root" and circumvent everything?

Yes, but please observe SI rules [1]: it's millischwarzeneggers.

> This means that they should be typeset in the same character set as other common nouns (e.g. Latin alphabet in English, Cyrillic script in Russian, etc.), following the usual grammatical and orthographical rules of the context language. For example, in English and French, even when the unit is named after a person and its symbol begins with a capital letter, the unit name in running text should start with a lowercase letter (e.g., newton, hertz, pascal) and is capitalised only at the beginning of a sentence and in headings and publication titles.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units#...

Makes you wonder what will come first:

- energy-efficient, long-lasting, mechanically optimized robotic "birds"

- good-enough understanding of the avian brain connectome & operation, such that all you need is a bunch of fine wires stuck in it, and a small CPU sending commands (local and remote operation, etc.)

I wonder if Elon Musk is of the Red or the Green mindset.

On a related note: for a more realistic portrayal of VX-like-agent-in-a-terror-plot, see Michael Crichton's novel "Binary".

I like Inkscape very much and use it for all my (usually quite simple) vector drawing needs. From the get go, it was quite intuitive to use - my first vector editor experience was with CorelDRAW 3 in the early 90s.

Surely a 1.21-GW datacenter would suffice!

Similarly, you normally don't see any imperfections/dust specks on your cornea - but you will if you look into a very narrow (0.1-0.2 mm) beam of light (e.g., when using a telescope pushed to a very high magnification = very small exit pupil [1]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit_pupil

One could wear a paper mask/visor to only show the eyes. (Though the eye extraction feature might malfunction then?)

On a related note:

C. Limb, R. Limb, C. Limb, D. Limb "Nominative determinism in hospital medicine: Can our surnames influence our choice of career, and even specialty?"

https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1308/147363515X14...

I normally rebuild my workstation every ~4 years (recently more for fun than out of actual need for more processing power), might finally do it again (preferably a recent 8-/12-core Ryzen). My most recent major upgrade was in 2017 (Core i5 3570K -> Ryzen 7 1700X), with a minor fix in 2019 (Ryzen 7 2700, since 1700X was suffering from the random-segfaults-during-parallel-builds issue).

Wait, but in "Independence Day" they uploaded human-made computer virus into alien computer and it just worked™!

Also "Space Force" has an "Enhance!" scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVOydVwOO4M

That, and also, as pointed out in e.g [1], a "boomer" submarine can launch all its SLBMs in 60-90 s. Faster than it could be torpedoed. And even if you manage to disable it very quickly, just a few launched missiles mean multiple times that number of warheads (MIRV).

[1] Annie Jacobsen, "Nuclear War: A Scenario"

I've read someone mentioning that in the UK such matters often resolve themselves by means of an accidental fire.

But hey, at least we finally got the motorcycle chase (kind of) in "Jurassic World"! (It's my favourite entry in the series, BTW.)

It was SO annoying when it turned out Crysis 3 does not respect this setting in the VTOL-flying sections.

Related XKCD: "How close would you have to be to a supernova to get a lethal dose of neutrino radiation?"

https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/

I remember reading somewhere that the Tierra ecosystem/evolutionary simulation ([1]) readily produced such higher-order parasites of parasites.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tierra_(computer_simulation)

In Greg Bear's novel "Quantico" terrorists use inkjets to produce their biological weapon's deliverable particles.

I remember that! (On my uncle's 286+Hercules PC).

As already mentioned, bounds checks won't necessarily cause that much overhead. When I rewrote my small image processing library from C to Rust ([1]), I only had to use unchecked array access in one hot loop to get overall performance equivalent to C code.

[1] https://github.com/GreatAttractor/libskry_r

But, but, Your Honor, at the time I was traveling at 0.5 c and in my hyperplane of simultaneity transaction A happened after transaction B!

I have one as well, using btrfs+RAID1.

They still make a lot of noise.