"Digital Native" means you're obsessed with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Opentable, selfies, etc.
Weird, I'm a 90's kid and: I haven't touched my Facebook account in years My Twitter is mostly subscriptions, generally to things that are actually interesting (eg. @RealTimeWWII not @kanye) I have no Instagram I've never actually heard of Opentable I've taken one selfie in my life, and it was a joke at my sister's wedding
I also used MS-DOS (via Windows 95, sure, but it still counts), think Perl is a more useful language than Ruby or any other fad-language-of-the-week, and I can read assembler if given enough time and a table of opcodes.
Valve and Bethesda made numerous mistakes with this implementation, but I still consider it a good idea. I'm definitely planning to allow paid mods in my own games, if I ever get one ready for retail. But here's where they went wrong.
1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all. Give supply and demand a free hand to set prices, and I think most average-sized mods would have been priced around $0.20. Some might have been able to sell at a much higher rate, but not many.
2) They didn't protect from fraud. As soon as the announcement hit, people started uploading mods they didn't make - there was already a massive corpus of free mods, after all, and basically no protection against this. The least they could have done is give a decent warning period, for mod authors to decide whether to start selling their mods or not, and to search for fake versions being uploaded without their consent. They didn't do that, and they definitely didn't do any sort of technical measures, like comparing uploaded mods' checksums against those already uploaded. All of that is easily foreseeable because I actually foresaw it - I've been planning how to do this in my own games, and all of that was on my list before they even announced their feature.
3) They didn't share the profit well. Valve was taking a 30% cut, which is already more than they do for full games, and then Zenimax was taking another 40%. I can see that, because the base game does a non-trivial amount of work for the mod, that they do deserve some compensation (although I'd say increased sales are the true payment to the publisher). But a cumulative 70% is just ridiculous. I'd argue that no less than 50% should go to the modder. For my own games with paid mods, I'm thinking more in the 75:25 or 90:10 range, or even 100% to the modder (because, after all, a vibrant modding community brings about more sales, so the marginal loss on hosting is more than recovered).
4) They launched it suddenly, with no notice. Nobody had any inkling it was coming, least of all the modders who would be most affected by it. Valve and Zenimax should have given at least the big-name modders some heads-up, so they could think and have time to rationally decide whether to start selling, and for how much, and to work out any licensing issues in multi-person teams. And perhaps if gamers had been able to see it coming, they could have realized it was a good thing, instead of letting the knee-jerk reaction control the debate.
They did, however, do one thing surprisingly right, which deserves recognition: they gave full, automatic refunds within 24 hours of purchase on any mod you didn't like. That's definitely something necessary, and something very surprising to see from Valve.
Hopefully they can sort out these issues with the next game they try this on, instead of giving up on what is an excellent idea.
The point is to make the account cost more than the expected value gained via scamming.
Scams, in general, have a poor success rate. There may be a sucker born every minute, but there's 250 people born a minute. Even if a successful scam nets a large gain, losing $5 on each attempt makes it a losing proposition.
I've started drifting away from using Google/Bing/whatever, in favor of loading a bunch of site-specific search engines into my search bar.
So if I'm looking for, say, a specific Magic card, I don't let Google search the entire net, and find everything that happens to say "elvish mystic", giving me a ton of irrelevant stuff (even searches like "mtg elvish mystic" bring up pages to buy one instead, which usually don't have the info I'm really looking for). Instead I click an extra button to go straight to Wizard's own database page for it.
Repeat that idea for about twelve different gaming wikis, plus Wikipedia for general knowledge, and you'll have the contents of my search bar. If I were into different hobbies, I might have similar search engines for those.
A single search engine that can figure out the context of the search, then go straight to the experts for that context, would be one way to do better than Google.
Uh, the SSME engines ran off the same propellant as the rocket - LH2 and LOX. It's a staged-combustion rocket - some of the fuel and oxidizer flow was diverted to a preburner, which partially combusted them (the mixture was fuel-rich, limited by oxygen), ran the fuel-rich exhaust through turbines for the fuel and oxidizer pumps, then exhausted into the main combustion chamber where it was mixed with the remaining oxygen to complete combustion.
A better example for a separate propellant would have have been the V2 rocket, which burned ethanol and LOX, and had a pump powered by hydrogen peroxide.
Not true. Measures of rocket efficiency almost always count losses to the pumps.
That's why gas-generator-pumped rockets (like the F-1, at 263s, or the Merlin 1D at 310s) are listed as less efficient than staged-combustion rockets (like the NK-33, at 331s). The rockets are measured as a full system, not at just the combustion chamber and nozzle.
This one, I would expect, has higher fuel efficiency per kg and lower thrust per kg. Not having to burn any fuel for non-propulsive purposes will undoubtedly help its fuel efficiency, but the heavy batteries will lower the thrust efficiency. That's just an educated guess though.
Big rocket engines use big propellant pumps. The pump on the F-1 (used on the Saturn V) ran about 55,000 horsepower.
Electric motors won't do that cheaper. And they'll sap the weight of the rocket, since even a dead battery is heavy. Fundamentally, a big rocket will be better served by a gas-generator or staged-combustion cycle.
That's fine for this rocket because it's so small. The payload is 110kg. For comparable rockets, turn to Iran's unflown Simorgh, Israel's Shavit, or North Korea's Unha, all in the 100-160kg range.
To put those numbers in comparison, let's look at SpaceX. The single-engined Falcon 1 put 670kg into orbit. A Falcon 9 runs 10,000-13,000kg. And the Falcon Heavy is supposed to lift 53,000kg.
Or for an older comparison, Sputnik 1 weighed 80kg, and Sputnik 2 weighed 500kg. So they're building a rocket that couldn't even lift the second satellite to ever fly. I'm not particularly impressed.
Maybe there's a niche for small payloads like this, but in all honesty, I expect you could fly several such payloads on one bigger rocket, or just hitchhike on the spare capacity on a big satellite launch. Still, worth a shot. Just don't pretend to be playing in the big leagues.
"unlike Intel's new NVMe solution, the Kingston drive will work in all legacy platforms as well, not just Z97 and X99 boards with a compatible UEFI BIOS."
So it uses AHCI instead of NVMe, and tries to spin this off as a benefit over Intel's drive.
Bull.
Fucking.
SHIT.
AHCI dates back to 2006. It was an improvement over IDE, but it was still designed for spinning rust. No parallel queues, a paltry limit of 32 queued commands, and a design that puts a pretty substantial load on the CPU for each command used. It's something like 14,000 cycles spent in just the driver code for an AHCI command - compare 10,000 for the entire OS stack from fread() to actual bits going over the line for NVMe.
Now, it is true that NVMe isn't fully supported on older motherboards. But that's only boot support - an NVMe drive will work as a data drive on anything running a current OS (Linux 3.3+, Windows 7+). And guess what? Most motherboards that have an M.2 slot* to begin with... are NVMe-compatible. So if you're buying an M.2 drive, you can probably use the NVMe drive. And if you're building a new computer, you'll be getting one that works with NVMe.
Backwards compatibility is important. I'm not saying to discontinue SATA SSDs. But making an M.2 drive that still uses AHCI, then claiming the backwards compatibility as a benefit, is just pure marketing bullshit.
* M.2 is a weird physical interface that can be connected to up to three different interfaces - PCIe, SATA and USB. The USB is only really used for wireless cards, so that leaves PCIe and SATA. Unfortunately motherboards don't have to wire both up to the slot. You can find some cheap motherboards with an M.2 slot that only works with SATA drives. I personally refuse to count those as full M.2 slots. And both Intel's 750 (the NVMe one) and Kingston's drive being advertized here would not work in such a drive, so my point about "if you can put this drive in your computer, you can put a 750 in there and have it work" stands.
Horizontal velocity would still need to be killed. If it has too much sideways momentum at touchdown, it'll just drag and tip over, no matter how big the landing area.
SpaceX is, unsurprisingly, doing things the right way. The hard way, to be sure, but when they finally get it working by proper engineering, rather than overkill, it will be well worth it.
Wow, even when you're putting words in my mouth, you can't win the argument. That's honestly an impressive amount of non-skill, like a lumberjack slicing off all four limbs with one swing of the axe.
"We found a way to reframe the debate from 'Republicans vs. Freedom' to 'Republicans vs. Big Government', so we're going to do that both to hammer home that 'Democrats are Dictators' meme and because we're getting fat stacks of cash from the people who stand to profit from it".
That makes sense, and I recall that this is the most heavily-loaded Dragon yet, so less dV for orbital maneuvers would make for a shorter launch window.
And I did seem to be remembering things wrong - every previous CRS flight I could find a launch window for had an instantaneous launch window. I must have been thinking of the non-CRS flights.
I've seen short launch windows before, but not for ISS-bound launches. I remember previous Dragon launches having significantly longer windows to launch. Am I remembering wrong, or is there something about this launch that requires a shorter window?
That rant is a pretty fair (if harsh) criticism of Esperanto, but it doesn't really point out any irregularities in Esperanto itself. Many of the flaws it points out are actually cases where the language is too regular, where it mandates something everywhere instead of making it optional where possible.
The only grammatical irregularity in Esperanto I can think of is how -A affix can be used for female names, instead of the -O used for all other nouns. Other than that, everything is regular and self-consistent.
There are two types of flying: instrument flight rules, and visual flight rules.
IFR is used at night, when the weather restricts visibility to under a certain amount (thick cloud cover can do this, no precipitation needed), on flights long enough that you can't guarantee VFR conditions at your destination, and just whenever you feel like it.
VFR is generally only used for beginning pilots or quick flights. It's sometimes seen as a relic of earlier times. Sure, you get taught how to fly this way, get taught some basic dead reckoning techniques, but nobody really flies this way, most of the time.
But instruments fail. Autopilots fail. Engines fail. When everything fails, you want someone in the cockpit who can look out the window, navigate by landmarks, and if necessary put the plane down on the straight sections of highway Eisenhower built to accommodate bombers returning from the Soviet Union.
When things go wrong, you want something smart and adaptable in control. There are procedures for damn near everything in aviation, but there's still things you can't pre-plan for. Until we get a general strong AI working, the only thing smart and adaptable enough is a human.
Now, that doesn't mean we can't have fully computer-controlled aircraft. It just means there shouldn't be people on board those computer-controlled planes. Drones are fine - even if it's a cargo-laden drone version of a 747, the loss of life it can accidentally cause is miniscule, compared to even a small passenger plane.
Space exploration? Hardly. They haven't done any exploration since the Berlin Wall fell. NASA's putting probes on every planet they can, the ESA and JAXA are launching their own probes, even China and India are doing more exploration than Russia. The only real active area of research for Russia is on the ISS.
Russia's just a cheap source of rockets - and that has more to do with their low cost of labor and massive subsidies than the actual cost-effectiveness of their rockets. The fact that they're currently the only way to the ISS has more to do with the political failings of NASA than any redeeming quality they have.
PS: Russia's economy is still failing. It's not in the near-freefall it was in the 90s, but it still looks more like a big second-world country than a developed nation.
Your TFH is on a bit tight, but your real problem is lack of knowledge.
Computers are not "in control" of Airbus aircraft, any more than computers are in control of Ford cars. There is absolutely a manual - it just isn't a physical link, because we've moved beyond wires and pulleys, or even hydraulics.
Large aircraft are designed for skilled pilots - ones who can respond to the often unusual disasters that strike when in the air. There's an override for everything, because you never know when you might need to do something unusual in response to some other failure. Want to engage the thrust reversers while in-flight? Sure - normally that would be catastrophic, but that might be the only way to prevent an overspeed in a steep dive. Want to land without lowering the gear? It'll yell at you but it won't stop you.
In fact, very few things even require an override. The normal thing for an aircraft to do when it thinks the pilot is making a mistake is to yell at them, not stop them. And in this case, we have on the cockpit voice recording the sounds of the alarm saying "PULL UP. PULL UP. PULL UP."
But the aircraft didn't stop him, because there are easily dozens of situations where stopping him would have been even worse. For example, an all-engines out emergency landing. Or a GPS malfunction, and there's no mountain there. Or... you get the picture.
There are no aircraft that don't have a mode that acts like manual. There are a few military aircraft where, even in manual, the flight computers will make constant control movements to keep it stable, but even in a B-2, if you slam the stick forward, it'll dive right into the ground.
I know how suspension bridges work. I probably could build a small one, but any lengthy span would be well beyond me.
I know how internal combustion engines work. It would take a year of training on the tools before I'd be able to make one that even sorta worked, and then it would be at 1900s-level functionality.
I know how nuclear weapons work. Several types, in fact. But I cannot make them. 1) I could build a gun-type weapon, given the material (200lbs of 90% pure U-235, a 76mm artillery barrel, and some regular explosives), but I could not create the equipment to refine uranium. 2) I could probably build a reactor to generate plutonium, with massive effort and a significant risk of poisoning myself, but I could not build a working implosion bomb with it. It would take a year's training in explosives just to be able to build an existing design, and those designs are tightly secured. 3) With the materials, I might be able to upgrade an unboosted fission weapon into a boosted one. Maybe. 4) A fusion weapon is completely beyond me. You could stick me in Lawrence Livermore with all the parts in front of me, and without some Ikea-like instructions you aren't going to get anything.
We are protected from homemade gun-type weapons by the scarcity of uranium and the immense difficulty in refining it. Remember, this is something that was beyond the capabilities of most nations a scant 70 years ago. A dedicated nation-state or perhaps certain multinational corporations could pull it off, but not without detection.
We are protected against homemade implosion-type weapons by the complex engineering necessary, the esoteric nature of the specific engineering knowledge needed (nuclear physics and shaped explosives are not a common dual-major), and by the absolute need for testing before use. The former prevents fringe groups from succeeding; the latter prevents the non-suicidal from trying.
We are not protected by lack of general knowledge on nukes, because no such lack of knowledge exists. I learned half of this stuff from school textbooks, and the other half from Wikipedia. Anyone driven to find more can easily do so.
The key point this misses is that the Bechdel test is about the work itself, not who wrote it. This test is thus susceptible to certain flaws. In particular, it will flag numerous single-developer projects as "sexist" due to simple chance.
This would fail at least 50% of all single-developer projects, even if there were no sexism anywhere. Other small projects would be unfairly penalized, and projects with tiered architectures and tiered development would be especially susceptible.
This is obviously contrary to the goal of the "test", and in fact bears only superficial similarity to the Bechdel test (the point of which, by the way, is not to determine which works are sexist or not (after all, Debbie Does Dallas passes), but to show how endemic weak female characters are by the sheer number that fail).
Compute might use it. The Titan was traditionally both the top-tier graphics card, as well as the entry-level compute card. They've slashed FP64 performance with this iteration, but FP32 performance is still sky-high, and they're pushing situations like that for using this as a compute card.
Slashdot Mirror
"Digital Native" means you're obsessed with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Opentable, selfies, etc.
Weird, I'm a 90's kid and:
I haven't touched my Facebook account in years
My Twitter is mostly subscriptions, generally to things that are actually interesting (eg. @RealTimeWWII not @kanye)
I have no Instagram
I've never actually heard of Opentable
I've taken one selfie in my life, and it was a joke at my sister's wedding
I also used MS-DOS (via Windows 95, sure, but it still counts), think Perl is a more useful language than Ruby or any other fad-language-of-the-week, and I can read assembler if given enough time and a table of opcodes.
Do I still qualify as a Digital Native?
I was thinking just that - creating a USB device that takes input from one port, and simulates a mouse on the other, is pretty trivial.
Valve and Bethesda made numerous mistakes with this implementation, but I still consider it a good idea. I'm definitely planning to allow paid mods in my own games, if I ever get one ready for retail. But here's where they went wrong.
1) They set a minimum price far too high. Relatively few mods are worth a dollar, even the ones that are worth buying at all. Give supply and demand a free hand to set prices, and I think most average-sized mods would have been priced around $0.20. Some might have been able to sell at a much higher rate, but not many.
2) They didn't protect from fraud. As soon as the announcement hit, people started uploading mods they didn't make - there was already a massive corpus of free mods, after all, and basically no protection against this. The least they could have done is give a decent warning period, for mod authors to decide whether to start selling their mods or not, and to search for fake versions being uploaded without their consent. They didn't do that, and they definitely didn't do any sort of technical measures, like comparing uploaded mods' checksums against those already uploaded. All of that is easily foreseeable because I actually foresaw it - I've been planning how to do this in my own games, and all of that was on my list before they even announced their feature.
3) They didn't share the profit well. Valve was taking a 30% cut, which is already more than they do for full games, and then Zenimax was taking another 40%. I can see that, because the base game does a non-trivial amount of work for the mod, that they do deserve some compensation (although I'd say increased sales are the true payment to the publisher). But a cumulative 70% is just ridiculous. I'd argue that no less than 50% should go to the modder. For my own games with paid mods, I'm thinking more in the 75:25 or 90:10 range, or even 100% to the modder (because, after all, a vibrant modding community brings about more sales, so the marginal loss on hosting is more than recovered).
4) They launched it suddenly, with no notice. Nobody had any inkling it was coming, least of all the modders who would be most affected by it. Valve and Zenimax should have given at least the big-name modders some heads-up, so they could think and have time to rationally decide whether to start selling, and for how much, and to work out any licensing issues in multi-person teams. And perhaps if gamers had been able to see it coming, they could have realized it was a good thing, instead of letting the knee-jerk reaction control the debate.
They did, however, do one thing surprisingly right, which deserves recognition: they gave full, automatic refunds within 24 hours of purchase on any mod you didn't like. That's definitely something necessary, and something very surprising to see from Valve.
Hopefully they can sort out these issues with the next game they try this on, instead of giving up on what is an excellent idea.
The point is to make the account cost more than the expected value gained via scamming.
Scams, in general, have a poor success rate. There may be a sucker born every minute, but there's 250 people born a minute. Even if a successful scam nets a large gain, losing $5 on each attempt makes it a losing proposition.
Uh, you sure you were searching for the Intel 750? Because Amazon lists it for $471 for the 400GB model, or $1200 for the 1200GB model. Which is quite a bit inflated from NewEgg's pricing but not exactly the $2400 you listed.
Oh wait, I should have read the rest of your post first. You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about, do you?
I've started drifting away from using Google/Bing/whatever, in favor of loading a bunch of site-specific search engines into my search bar.
So if I'm looking for, say, a specific Magic card, I don't let Google search the entire net, and find everything that happens to say "elvish mystic", giving me a ton of irrelevant stuff (even searches like "mtg elvish mystic" bring up pages to buy one instead, which usually don't have the info I'm really looking for). Instead I click an extra button to go straight to Wizard's own database page for it.
Repeat that idea for about twelve different gaming wikis, plus Wikipedia for general knowledge, and you'll have the contents of my search bar. If I were into different hobbies, I might have similar search engines for those.
A single search engine that can figure out the context of the search, then go straight to the experts for that context, would be one way to do better than Google.
Uh, the SSME engines ran off the same propellant as the rocket - LH2 and LOX. It's a staged-combustion rocket - some of the fuel and oxidizer flow was diverted to a preburner, which partially combusted them (the mixture was fuel-rich, limited by oxygen), ran the fuel-rich exhaust through turbines for the fuel and oxidizer pumps, then exhausted into the main combustion chamber where it was mixed with the remaining oxygen to complete combustion.
A better example for a separate propellant would have have been the V2 rocket, which burned ethanol and LOX, and had a pump powered by hydrogen peroxide.
Right on all other points, though.
Not true. Measures of rocket efficiency almost always count losses to the pumps.
That's why gas-generator-pumped rockets (like the F-1, at 263s, or the Merlin 1D at 310s) are listed as less efficient than staged-combustion rockets (like the NK-33, at 331s). The rockets are measured as a full system, not at just the combustion chamber and nozzle.
This one, I would expect, has higher fuel efficiency per kg and lower thrust per kg. Not having to burn any fuel for non-propulsive purposes will undoubtedly help its fuel efficiency, but the heavy batteries will lower the thrust efficiency. That's just an educated guess though.
Big rocket engines use big propellant pumps. The pump on the F-1 (used on the Saturn V) ran about 55,000 horsepower.
Electric motors won't do that cheaper. And they'll sap the weight of the rocket, since even a dead battery is heavy. Fundamentally, a big rocket will be better served by a gas-generator or staged-combustion cycle.
That's fine for this rocket because it's so small. The payload is 110kg. For comparable rockets, turn to Iran's unflown Simorgh, Israel's Shavit, or North Korea's Unha, all in the 100-160kg range.
To put those numbers in comparison, let's look at SpaceX. The single-engined Falcon 1 put 670kg into orbit. A Falcon 9 runs 10,000-13,000kg. And the Falcon Heavy is supposed to lift 53,000kg.
Or for an older comparison, Sputnik 1 weighed 80kg, and Sputnik 2 weighed 500kg. So they're building a rocket that couldn't even lift the second satellite to ever fly. I'm not particularly impressed.
Maybe there's a niche for small payloads like this, but in all honesty, I expect you could fly several such payloads on one bigger rocket, or just hitchhike on the spare capacity on a big satellite launch. Still, worth a shot. Just don't pretend to be playing in the big leagues.
"unlike Intel's new NVMe solution, the Kingston drive will work in all legacy platforms as well, not just Z97 and X99 boards with a compatible UEFI BIOS."
So it uses AHCI instead of NVMe, and tries to spin this off as a benefit over Intel's drive.
Bull.
Fucking.
SHIT.
AHCI dates back to 2006. It was an improvement over IDE, but it was still designed for spinning rust. No parallel queues, a paltry limit of 32 queued commands, and a design that puts a pretty substantial load on the CPU for each command used. It's something like 14,000 cycles spent in just the driver code for an AHCI command - compare 10,000 for the entire OS stack from fread() to actual bits going over the line for NVMe.
Now, it is true that NVMe isn't fully supported on older motherboards. But that's only boot support - an NVMe drive will work as a data drive on anything running a current OS (Linux 3.3+, Windows 7+). And guess what? Most motherboards that have an M.2 slot* to begin with... are NVMe-compatible. So if you're buying an M.2 drive, you can probably use the NVMe drive. And if you're building a new computer, you'll be getting one that works with NVMe.
Backwards compatibility is important. I'm not saying to discontinue SATA SSDs. But making an M.2 drive that still uses AHCI, then claiming the backwards compatibility as a benefit, is just pure marketing bullshit.
* M.2 is a weird physical interface that can be connected to up to three different interfaces - PCIe, SATA and USB. The USB is only really used for wireless cards, so that leaves PCIe and SATA. Unfortunately motherboards don't have to wire both up to the slot. You can find some cheap motherboards with an M.2 slot that only works with SATA drives. I personally refuse to count those as full M.2 slots. And both Intel's 750 (the NVMe one) and Kingston's drive being advertized here would not work in such a drive, so my point about "if you can put this drive in your computer, you can put a 750 in there and have it work" stands.
Horizontal velocity would still need to be killed. If it has too much sideways momentum at touchdown, it'll just drag and tip over, no matter how big the landing area.
SpaceX is, unsurprisingly, doing things the right way. The hard way, to be sure, but when they finally get it working by proper engineering, rather than overkill, it will be well worth it.
Wow, even when you're putting words in my mouth, you can't win the argument. That's honestly an impressive amount of non-skill, like a lumberjack slicing off all four limbs with one swing of the axe.
"We found a way to reframe the debate from 'Republicans vs. Freedom' to 'Republicans vs. Big Government', so we're going to do that both to hammer home that 'Democrats are Dictators' meme and because we're getting fat stacks of cash from the people who stand to profit from it".
That makes sense, and I recall that this is the most heavily-loaded Dragon yet, so less dV for orbital maneuvers would make for a shorter launch window.
And I did seem to be remembering things wrong - every previous CRS flight I could find a launch window for had an instantaneous launch window. I must have been thinking of the non-CRS flights.
I've seen short launch windows before, but not for ISS-bound launches. I remember previous Dragon launches having significantly longer windows to launch. Am I remembering wrong, or is there something about this launch that requires a shorter window?
That rant is a pretty fair (if harsh) criticism of Esperanto, but it doesn't really point out any irregularities in Esperanto itself. Many of the flaws it points out are actually cases where the language is too regular, where it mandates something everywhere instead of making it optional where possible.
The only grammatical irregularity in Esperanto I can think of is how -A affix can be used for female names, instead of the -O used for all other nouns. Other than that, everything is regular and self-consistent.
There are two types of flying: instrument flight rules, and visual flight rules.
IFR is used at night, when the weather restricts visibility to under a certain amount (thick cloud cover can do this, no precipitation needed), on flights long enough that you can't guarantee VFR conditions at your destination, and just whenever you feel like it.
VFR is generally only used for beginning pilots or quick flights. It's sometimes seen as a relic of earlier times. Sure, you get taught how to fly this way, get taught some basic dead reckoning techniques, but nobody really flies this way, most of the time.
But instruments fail. Autopilots fail. Engines fail. When everything fails, you want someone in the cockpit who can look out the window, navigate by landmarks, and if necessary put the plane down on the straight sections of highway Eisenhower built to accommodate bombers returning from the Soviet Union.
When things go wrong, you want something smart and adaptable in control. There are procedures for damn near everything in aviation, but there's still things you can't pre-plan for. Until we get a general strong AI working, the only thing smart and adaptable enough is a human.
Now, that doesn't mean we can't have fully computer-controlled aircraft. It just means there shouldn't be people on board those computer-controlled planes. Drones are fine - even if it's a cargo-laden drone version of a 747, the loss of life it can accidentally cause is miniscule, compared to even a small passenger plane.
And the key remains private.
Sure, just make sure the security on it is lock-tight. Bad things happen when you let enemies suborn your orbital mirrors (although in that case they were to counter global warming, not for power).
Space exploration? Hardly. They haven't done any exploration since the Berlin Wall fell. NASA's putting probes on every planet they can, the ESA and JAXA are launching their own probes, even China and India are doing more exploration than Russia. The only real active area of research for Russia is on the ISS.
Russia's just a cheap source of rockets - and that has more to do with their low cost of labor and massive subsidies than the actual cost-effectiveness of their rockets. The fact that they're currently the only way to the ISS has more to do with the political failings of NASA than any redeeming quality they have.
PS: Russia's economy is still failing. It's not in the near-freefall it was in the 90s, but it still looks more like a big second-world country than a developed nation.
Your TFH is on a bit tight, but your real problem is lack of knowledge.
Computers are not "in control" of Airbus aircraft, any more than computers are in control of Ford cars. There is absolutely a manual - it just isn't a physical link, because we've moved beyond wires and pulleys, or even hydraulics.
Large aircraft are designed for skilled pilots - ones who can respond to the often unusual disasters that strike when in the air. There's an override for everything, because you never know when you might need to do something unusual in response to some other failure. Want to engage the thrust reversers while in-flight? Sure - normally that would be catastrophic, but that might be the only way to prevent an overspeed in a steep dive. Want to land without lowering the gear? It'll yell at you but it won't stop you.
In fact, very few things even require an override. The normal thing for an aircraft to do when it thinks the pilot is making a mistake is to yell at them, not stop them. And in this case, we have on the cockpit voice recording the sounds of the alarm saying "PULL UP. PULL UP. PULL UP."
But the aircraft didn't stop him, because there are easily dozens of situations where stopping him would have been even worse. For example, an all-engines out emergency landing. Or a GPS malfunction, and there's no mountain there. Or... you get the picture.
There are no aircraft that don't have a mode that acts like manual. There are a few military aircraft where, even in manual, the flight computers will make constant control movements to keep it stable, but even in a B-2, if you slam the stick forward, it'll dive right into the ground.
Now if only someone could create a combination crowbar and towel. Keep one of those on you, and you'll be set for anything.
I know how suspension bridges work. I probably could build a small one, but any lengthy span would be well beyond me.
I know how internal combustion engines work. It would take a year of training on the tools before I'd be able to make one that even sorta worked, and then it would be at 1900s-level functionality.
I know how nuclear weapons work. Several types, in fact. But I cannot make them.
1) I could build a gun-type weapon, given the material (200lbs of 90% pure U-235, a 76mm artillery barrel, and some regular explosives), but I could not create the equipment to refine uranium.
2) I could probably build a reactor to generate plutonium, with massive effort and a significant risk of poisoning myself, but I could not build a working implosion bomb with it. It would take a year's training in explosives just to be able to build an existing design, and those designs are tightly secured.
3) With the materials, I might be able to upgrade an unboosted fission weapon into a boosted one. Maybe.
4) A fusion weapon is completely beyond me. You could stick me in Lawrence Livermore with all the parts in front of me, and without some Ikea-like instructions you aren't going to get anything.
We are protected from homemade gun-type weapons by the scarcity of uranium and the immense difficulty in refining it. Remember, this is something that was beyond the capabilities of most nations a scant 70 years ago. A dedicated nation-state or perhaps certain multinational corporations could pull it off, but not without detection.
We are protected against homemade implosion-type weapons by the complex engineering necessary, the esoteric nature of the specific engineering knowledge needed (nuclear physics and shaped explosives are not a common dual-major), and by the absolute need for testing before use. The former prevents fringe groups from succeeding; the latter prevents the non-suicidal from trying.
We are not protected by lack of general knowledge on nukes, because no such lack of knowledge exists. I learned half of this stuff from school textbooks, and the other half from Wikipedia. Anyone driven to find more can easily do so.
The key point this misses is that the Bechdel test is about the work itself, not who wrote it. This test is thus susceptible to certain flaws. In particular, it will flag numerous single-developer projects as "sexist" due to simple chance.
This would fail at least 50% of all single-developer projects, even if there were no sexism anywhere. Other small projects would be unfairly penalized, and projects with tiered architectures and tiered development would be especially susceptible.
This is obviously contrary to the goal of the "test", and in fact bears only superficial similarity to the Bechdel test (the point of which, by the way, is not to determine which works are sexist or not (after all, Debbie Does Dallas passes), but to show how endemic weak female characters are by the sheer number that fail).
Compute might use it. The Titan was traditionally both the top-tier graphics card, as well as the entry-level compute card. They've slashed FP64 performance with this iteration, but FP32 performance is still sky-high, and they're pushing situations like that for using this as a compute card.