msl

It is already being done. Dealing with old piles of trash is somewhat dangerous (all sorts of volatile gasses build up there) but once you get around this you can burn the thrash (releasing quite a bit of energy) and go through the ashes later. The ash can be used for various purposes, such as construction, but needs to be sorted by grain size first. While going through the ashes you do indeed encounter precious metals. I recently read about a company that performs this sorting as a service. They are not paid for the work directly, but get to keep the gold (and possibly other metals?) they find. Apparently you can expect to find a gram or two of gold in a tonne of ash.

It appears that the eventual objective is to be able to use any GNSS. The page on telemetry decoder blocks[1] seems to indicate that GPS, GLONASS and Galileo signals are currently supported.

[1] https://gnss-sdr.org/docs/sp-blocks/telemetry-decoder/

> The alternative is that they keep XUL

I do not believe that was the only alternative. I have spent a lot of time reading bug reports / feature requests relating to this functionality, and it certainly seems that much of it could be enabled, but apparently never will. The developers seem to think that giving extensions "too much power" would be dangerous, and thus it is best not to let anybody choose power over safety guarantees.

It seems a little too harsh to bring up Linus Torvald's "If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it" quote, but it tends to come to my mind whenever I read the abovementioned discussions.

> With utf-16 you can get O(1) string operations at a cost of doing them on code points rather than graphemes.

No you cannot. UTF-16 is a variable-length encoding (up to two 16-bit code units per code point).

> I think a lot of people totally discount the enormous cost that Latin-1 users are paying for CJK (etc) support they don’t use.

If we limit ourselves to Latin 1, UTF-16 requires 100% more memory than UTF-8. How often do you need to randomly access a long string anyway?

You might also like Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine [1] written in 1989 by Daniel Hillis.

[1] http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine...

> Pretty incredible that such world changing code fits on one page.

What code are you looking at? I see "Microsoft BASIC for 6502 Original Source Code" which runs for 6955 lines. By my reasoning that is more than a hundred pages.

The F-117 was retrofitted with the ability to fly a computer generated flight plan, which would not avoid radar sites but also adjust the plane's attitude in order to minimize the radar cross section. [1]

[1] Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed by Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos (page 101 on my copy)

The relevant Wikipedia article also mentions the system, but in less detail: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-117_Nighthawk#Avion...

Have you read what the directive actually says? It exempts pretty much all reasonable cookies: you don't need to inform your users about login cookies, session cookies or user settings cookies [1]. There are other types on the list too. Check it out, it should not take you more than a couple of minutes. The only missing type of cookie that I can imagine is one designed to track people in the long term (longer than a session) without their knowledge. Does it really sound that stupid?

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm

One JPL-related source [1] indicates that the second copy can generally be obtained for 15% of the price of the first one. The primary source is "Interview with Gentry Lee, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, June 1, 1984." I doubt things have changed very much since.

[1] https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Ch6-3.html

The SpaceX's FCC application[1] for their broadband satellite constellation came up in a recent discussion here. Page 65 has tables describing the parts of the satellites that are expected to survive all the way to the surface. These are very different kind of satellites compared to Zuma, but the tables (and the text they accompany) might give some idea of what kind of components might survive (until impact, anyway).

[1] https://licensing.fcc.gov/myibfs/download.do?attachment_key=...

Submarine cables have actually been tapped in the past, so cutting them should not be much of a challenge. Blind Man's Bluff [1] is a book about this kind of thing (and all sorts of weird things that involve intelligence operations performed with submarines). It is one of those books that would not work if it were fiction: too unrealistic.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42343.Blind_Man_s_Bluff

It seems to me that people are actually more likely to take unreasonable risks when they have to make these calls on the spot. We often overestimate our ability to handle difficult situations and are prone to valuing "getting there in time" more than playing it safe.

NASA is known to define a set of strict and absolute mission rules before the beginning of a mission for just this reason. See for example the rules defined for various Apollo missions [1]. Note how those rules define all sorts of limits and abort triggering conditions. This is done because there is always a desire accomplish the mission even when something has gone wrong.

[1] https://www.hq.nasa.gov/alsj/alsj-MissionRules.html

KDE5 really was terrible for a long time. I tried it multiple times after it was launched, but always quickly downgraded until my distro dropped support for KDE4. At first it did not even handle multiple displays properly. In fact, some areas, such as locale support are still much inferior to KDE4 [1].

[1] https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=340982

That is not particulary far-fetched either: the ISS already reorients its solar panels when not illuminated by the sun. They call it the "night glider mode" [1].

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

The officials "represent" different different parties. They keep eye on one another, so anyone keeping a personal list of voters would probably be caught quite easily. Besides, the last time I voted, the ballots were handed out at the entrance - long before anyone wanted to know who I am.

That is certainly true. I considered mentioning it, but decided to sort of include it in the "not bothering" category, as I think it might be better to cast an empty (or otherwise invalid) vote to make sure your message is interpreted as such. A mistake, in hindsight.

So take the picture, dispose of the ballot and get a new one from the election officials. Fill the new one with your own choice, get it stamped and put it into the ballot box. A bit of a hassle to be sure, but it does not exactly derail democracy.

In Finland there is a period of time, before the election day, during which you can vote at all sorts of locations that have been set up in libraries, supermarkets and other locations people often visit. Pretty much the only reason not to vote is that you could not be bothered to, and I doubt online voting would help much with that.

We are, and there is even some supporting evidence [1]. The evidence is not quite conclusive, however.

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

> We could have replicated the time spent on the ISS with a series of Apollo programs

I doubt an Apollo CSM [1] could support astronauts for a full year (although Mir could [2]). It has proven very handy to have a space station within reach of resupply missions and with enough space to house some gym equipment and a whole bunch of medical equipment. You might also have trouble finding people willing to spend much time beyond the Van Allen radiation belts [3] in an Apollo era space craft [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Command/Service_Module

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir_EO-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_TM-18

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt

[4] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/stereo_astron...

> In this case, copy cats of Jack the Ripper were trying to emulate his (her?) ideolect. So one expects the entire exercise to be hopeless and the conclusion holds no predictive value.

The letters in question were sent before the first letter was published. How would a copycat know what to emulate before the first letter's publication? It was also found that the latter letters were not very good at copying the original author's style. This is all in the article.

I am fairly sure that "US 6116545 A" [1] is the patent in question.

[1] https://www.google.com/patents/US6116545

You used to be able (maybe still are?) to "rm" the files on a mounted efivarfs. See the relevant systemd issue ([1]).

[1] https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/2402

One problem here would probably be turbopumps [1] running dry. These things run very close to their limits when fully stressed and would presumably run higher still if they no longer needed to pressurize anything.

The fuel is also used as a coolant [2] so you would not want to run out of fuel in the plumbing before you run out of propellants in the combustion chamber.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merlin_(rocket_engine_family) (search "regeneratively cooled")

The Apollo Guidance Computer used core rope memory [1] as ROM and magnetic-core memory as RAM. Both are non-volatile.

The command module did not have a redundant computer or memory, but the lunar module came with a second computer [2] of a different type and running different software.

What you remember is probably the Gemini Guidance Computer's tape drive system, which consisted of three identical tape drives that were connected to the computer through a voter circuity.

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

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Abort_Guidance_System

You might want to consider trying another manufacturer's disks next. None of the SSDs tested by The Tech Report failed anywhere near that early [1].

[1] http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim...

According to Wikipedia [1], it's more like 8 glasses (2,5 dl/ 1 cup per glass) of orange juice. That's 2 liters. The apple/grape juice carton I have handy gives a very similiar number. What kind of juice (or portion size) are you thinking of?

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

I feel the article is not quite fair in its coverage of Hackers. Sure, the movie gets many things absurdly wrong, but it also depicts social engineering (calling a security guard and tricking him into telling the hacker a modem's phone number), dumpster diving in hopes of finding interesting documents and guessing passwords. These could be straight from Kevin Mitnick's memoirs, Ghost in the Wires (which came out years later). I think the movie might actually get more things right than it gets wrong.

I suppose there is no point in trying to find rich ore deposits either? After all, the ore has to be refined anyway.

Sure, the processor will want to seperate, say, aluminum from iron, and remove any glass from either stream, but I am fairly sure that these tasks become significantly easier if the stream does not also include diapers, orange peels and wet cardboard

> Centralized trash sorting seems like a much more efficient solution

How is this supposed to work? Sorting trash into many containers takes me a little more time and effort and pretty much exactly as much energy as putting it all in one place. It also keeps the materials from mixing (that is, becoming dirty). How would it help to first mix it all, compress it together (which is pretty much required to keep transport efficient) and then sort it again?

Even if you want to use a sorting machine, would it not be better to have presorted ("richer", in mining lingo) input material streams?