msl

> But by definition, different types of spaces all have to look exactly the same when rendered as text.

Only in the sense that they look like nothing at all. They can, however differ in how much nothingness they represent [1] which I would argue can make them look quite different one another.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitespace_character#Unicode (Feel free to ignore tabs, line breaks and other characters that don't feel space-y enough. There should still be plenty left to choose from.)

I don't think the LM used wax for thermal management, but the Lunar Roving Vehicle did, as a "thermal capacitor" [1]. That is, heat was stored in a block of wax while driving, and then radiated away between uses.

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

> These parts of the regulations need to be true without electrical power.

How would you make that happen in a fly-by-wire airplane? In fact, how would you implement it at all in a digital fly-by-wire system without software?

If you feel that using software to control an airplane is perverse, you might want to avoid flying.

These are some of the only ads I see online these days (on Read the Docs, mostly). I don't use ad blockers, but I do use tracker blockers, and those block pretty much all ads, for obvious reasons. Not these ones, though. And that's how it's supposed to go.

It is unintuitive. There's a video [1] demonstrating just how difficult it is to get moving air to do any work when you have as little air to work with as you would on Mars.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYe3sIaNHVs ("How Strong is The Wind on Mars?" by Cody'sLab)

No you can't. Only a licensed photography studio can do it [1]. You can, however, submit a paper photograph taken by anyone.

[1] https://www.poliisi.fi/passport/passport_photo_instructions

Oh, don't worry: more options have been removed again: setting browser.urlbar.update1 = false no longer gives you back the old, unintrusive urlbar behavior. Mozilla UX people have once again shown that they know best and you won't need to worry about getting a bad user experience just because you mistakenly thought you liked it.

Edit: Changed 'disabled' to 'removed' in the first sentence, as it's probably clearer.

Adding more light fixtures might actually prove to be a very good thing: always having a light source that is (almost) exactly above you is really nice. The more light sources you have, the fewer shadows you'll have to contend with. This was a real revelation when I accidentally discovered it a few years ago.

My experience is the opposite: while there certainly was a time when I felt DDG actually respected my queries [1] that time is now gone. The results I get often have very little to do with what I typed in the search box. I find myself resorting to !g more often than ever before.

[1] I seem to have thought so in last December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18665232

Ken Shirriff used them in his Xerox Alto ethernet gateway [0] for bit banging a 3Mb/s ethernet signal.

[0] http://www.righto.com/2018/01/xerox-altos-3-mbs-ethernet-bui...

> Is the argument that it would be easy enough to build on Earth places to survive such events rather than going to Mars?

I'd say the argument is that Mars is currently a (much) less hospitable place for life as we know it than the Earth in any nuclear winter scenario that I know of.

That would be kind of pointless though, wouldn't it? The handshake only takes place after the cable has been physically connected to the port. You would need to manually guide the connector to where it needs to be and then keep it stationary until the handshake is ready (which might not be a very long time in human terms, of course).

> The cycle literally ends at that point.

Not quite. It turns out that even the ashes have their uses [1].

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

> NASA worked better when produced everything in-house.

I believe NASA has never produced everything in-house. They don't build (or even design, as far as I can tell) launch vehicles, spacecraft, EVA suits, computers etc. They come up with requirements and contract private companies to build hardware (and software, for that matter) meeting those requirements. For an example, see how the Apollo Lunar Module came to be [1].

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

Getting hit by a car can be a death penalty, and drunk driving greatly increases the risk of causing an accident [1].

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

> Why not simply add an `is_closed` flag and throw an error if it is?

That's a way of doing it at runtime. The article describes catching the error at compile time.

One nice thing about trains is that you don't need to just sit: there is a lot of room to move about. Also, the trains you use on the Trans-Siberian route stop all the time, often for half an hour or longer at a time, so you can get off the train for some proper exercise. Still, I would not recommend doing the trip on one go: 24 hours is just about long enough stretch to spend onboard any train. There are a lot of cities worth visiting along the way.

A suicide is certainly different from a homicide, but counting them in this context still makes sense, seeing how suicide incidence correlates with access to effective means [1][2].

[1] https://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/suicide/pestici...

[2] http://www.idph.state.il.us/about/chronic/Suicide-and-Access...

Satellites usually need to point their solar panels and high-gain antennas properly in order to stay powered to be able to communicate with ground stations, although this particular satellite seems to have been unable to use its high-gain antenna anyway and relied on an omnidirectional one anyway. Another issue would be thermal management as it is possible that not all parts of the satellite were designed to deal with direct sunlight. I would be more worried about all the sensors, though. The days of secondary electron conduction tubes [1] might be long over, but many instruments still prefer not to be pointed directly at the sun.

Speaking of those other sensors, spinning the satellite would mean pointing all of them away from where they are supposed to be looking – not necessarily a net win.

Finally, trying to spin the satellite at anything approaching 360 RPM might end up dramatically shortening the mission [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_12#EVAs

[2] https://youtu.be/AqeJzItldSQ?t=90

EDIT: In case you do not feel like watching the video, [2] shows a Little Joe II rocket (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Joe_II) breaking up due to an excessive roll rate (around 56 RPM) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-003).

One thing I have learned from reading (and occasionally taking part in) these discussions is that no, it is not. The US is different. It is too big, too small, too densely populated, too sparsely populated, too hot, too cold, too dry and too humid for anything to work. It does not matter if something appears to work most everywhere else. It will not work anywhere in the US.

Using Earth's magnetic field for attitude control is already a thing [1].

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

> Other countries, like europe, hide the VAT taxes, so it looks like you are not paying taxes at all.

That is not true at all. In all European countries that I can think of you get to see the whole price, including VAT so that, you know, you can actually tell how much the product is going to cost you. The composition of that price is then shown, often in smaller font. This is true of price stickers, receipts and invoices.

I do not find it the least bit misleading, and would be rather annoyed if a cashier told me to pay more money than the price sticker indicates.

The title is wrong: this is not a statement by Microsoft, but by a single individual, as explicitly pointed out by said individual.

What if they value all animals' (that is, including humans') lives equally? Would you rather save someone close to you or a stranger?

> You say this is a good thing, until you go to Europe and get treated terrible service.

Try Eastern Europe. You are expected to tip, and the service is usually atrociously slow (and not necessarily good in any other way either). Bad service culture is bad service culture. Where I live waiters are expected to perform their jobs properly just like everyone else.

I have found that DDG often gives me better answers than Google does. I attribute it to DDG not trying to read my mind, but the query string.

> [...] allowing children [...] to have unsupervised access to guns has a cost. It’s not a simple problem.

Does everyone else feel like the quoted statement is a perfectly normal thing to say? I am asking because I sure do not. The world is full of complex problems with no simple answers, but this one, in my opinion, is not one of them.

Drum memory [1] and hard disks [2] have been used in nuclear tipped missiles, which are supposed to operate in an environment where EMPs are expected. Both types use magnetism for storing data.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASC-15 (Titan II)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-17B (Minuteman I) (note that the hard drive was used as RAM)

That graph shows percent grow in pay, not the absolute pay. In fact, it notes that at the age of 22 men earn $40,800 while women earn $31,900 (median, in both cases). The difference in growth does not suffice to close that gap, let alone rise women's pay above that of men's.

I dug up the original article for some fact checking, and it seems my previous post has a few mistakes in it. There are "grams" of silver and gold (each or together? The article does not specify.) and "kilograms" of copper in a tonne of ashes. Other metals are also extracted, but their amount or value is not specified.

It further turns out that there is a monetary payment for the service, but it is low because of the valuable metals. The article also tells that the machine can sort around 100000 tonnes of ashes annually.