Let's say they've got two X chromosomes AND a Y chromosome. I don't recall offhand if that genotype results in that physiology, but XXY chromosomes are surprisingly common.
Easy peasy.....we're talking a VERY small minority of people in the world that have these issues.....why should the majority get all bent out of shape for this insignificant number of people outside the norm?
You underestimate the number of people with such "issues". And why care about sex-segregated bathrooms at all? They're not even a fixture of classical Western society - they were mostly introduced post-Civil Rights era to keep the "good, noble" white women from being even potentially contaminated by contact with "black savages". Why not just have unisex bathrooms?
I really don't care what an adult does, or two consenting adults do....in private, but don't force the masses to cow-tow to them...there should not be special treatment for acting outside the norms. You shouldn't be persecuted for it, but you also shouldn't expect special and protected treatment in every day life either.
People are getting upset because this is a blatant prelude to an assault on people's freedom to do what they want in private. Pence in particular has been completely clear that the end-goal is to force everyone to behave in accordance with the gender norms that match their sex, and those noncompliant will be deemed sexual assaulters or pedophiles, and treated as criminals.
Nobody is asking for special protected treatment - they're asking for some kind of guarantee they won't be abducted and shipped away to a torture camp. Which yes, happens - overly-religious parents that see their children acting "faggy", find out about "outdoor programs" using "conversion therapy" to treat them. But rather than a fun summer camp, it consists more of forced marches, sleep deprivation and just general "make them suffer until they'll do anything to make it stop"... this has more than once resulted in deaths.
Our current Vice President describes himself as a firm advocate of these programs. If that doesn't sound faintly terrifying, I have no idea what more I can say.
I get it. You see yourself as an open-minded person, with strong libertarian ideals. You see a group that you would never really consider persecuting, out there making demands. And the only big mistake you're making is assuming that, because you would never consider persecuting someone for something like that, that nobody would - and so their demand for explicit protection comes across as a demand for special attention, which naturally rankles your minimal-government ethos.
a) That's sex, not gender. Sex is biological, gender is a social construct. Consider the "third gender" seen in some Southeast Asian cultures. It was only "really easy" a decade ago if you ignored anything except traditional post-medieval Western gender norms.
b) Sex is a bimodal distribution, not a boolean. You can get all kinds of weird things - XX phenotypes that are morphologically male, for instance. Or a whole spectrum of intersex types - how would you classify someone with a semi-functional penis, no testes, and ovaries?
The fact that it makes bookkeeping easier doesn't mean it's an accurate model of reality. Otherwise, we'd all be using 64-bit unsigned integers instead of names.
Of all the small-launch newspace companies, I could most believe that Rocket Lab is the one that's actually genuine about focusing on the small-launch market. Mostly because I don't think their engine design can scale up much past where it is - I think this is about the limit for battery-cycle rocket engines with current technology.
All rocket-launch markets are semi-protected. Nobody wants to launch a spy satellite on someone else's rocket - so there's a market that Landspace only has to compete with other Chinese startups and the Chinese state rocket corporations, and not SpaceX, Roscosmos, Arianespace or ULA. (Not that ULA can really compete with anyone these days). And every government tends to prefer flying their own payloads on home-grown rockets when possible, China certainly not less than others.
Blue Origin is very much not in stealth mode. They just aren't in Elon-Musk-crazy-stunts PR mode. You hear about them fairly regularly in the rocket press, just not the mainstream, same as with ULA or Arianespace.
Blue Origin's New Shepard (the suborbital tourist one) is still gearing up for crewed test flights - they're supposed to happen this year, not sure if that's officially slipped yet or not. They're also supplying the BE-4 engine to ULA for their upcoming Vulcan rocket, intended to replace Atlas V and Delta IV - and they beat out Aerojet Rocketdyne to do so. They've also secured at least eight civilian launch contracts and an Air Force grant for New Glenn, their heavy-lift rocket.
I see many, many space startups trying to build a very small, cheap launcher for very small satellites, or even cubesats. They are all bullshitting their investors - the market just does not exist.
All of them *want* to be in the full satellite launch business. Stuff in the grade of Atlas V, Soyuz, or Falcon 9. 2 to 4 tons of payload to LEO is about the smallest you can do cost-effectively, and 8 to 12 tons is the bulk of the market, and there's demand for larger still.
Everyone is copying SpaceX's business plan. Use initial funds to build a small orbital launcher (like Falcon 1), and then once you've proven you can put something into space, use that to secure funding to build an actual usable rocket (note that, as soon as they got funding for Falcon 9, they never flew Falcon 1 again, even though it shared parts with early Falcon 9s). Even Blue Origin built a suborbital tourist rocket before transitioning to their heavy-lift New Glenn - granted, Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX so they can't exactly be copying them.
This is not exclusive to China - Firefly (US) has their Alpha and Beta, OneSpace (China) has their OS-M1 upgraded sounding rocket, ExPace (China) has a whopping three rockets in their planned Kuaizhou series, Interstellar (Japan) has their Zero, LinkSpace (China) has New Line 1 which clearly implies a NL-2, Orbex (UK) has their Prime, and Rocket Lab (US) has Electron. All of them are competing for a market that just doesn't exist.
LandSpace is barely disguising their intentions. Zhuque-1 is a 300kg-to-LEO firecracker. All solid motors, which is just a terrible way to build an orbital rocket, but I expect they're using off-the-shelf parts (what's the Chinese counterpart to the GEM series?). Zhuque-2 is a much more reasonable 4000kg-to-LEO, methalox rocket. So the chemistry is different, the plumbing is different, the structure is different, even the launchpad is going to have to be different... what can they reuse from Zhuque-1, the avionics?
There is demand for a tiny-sat launcher. That much isn't a lie. But it's demand for a very, very low-cost launcher. Nobody's going to shell out a couple million bucks for a cubesat launch. Get the price down to $100K, sure, you'll be doing business, but all the newspace tiny-sat launchers I've seen are in the ballpark of $5M. Well, Falcon 9 is $50M a pop, and can do 20 tons worth of payload. There's a launch next month specifically for tiny satellites - specifically, 64 different satellites, mostly cubesats. Average price? Just under that $1M apiece figure.
So who would book a super-small launcher? Someone who doesn't need much in the way of payload - a small satellite, not requiring much power or designed to last all that long, but either going into a very strange orbit that no rideshare would go to, or needing to launch at very short notice. As far as I can tell, such customers just don't exist.
It's almost like the dotcom bubble - tons of companies burning through investor cash on a scheme to raise more investor cash. At least their planned second rockets are something that could actually be profitable. Going to be rough to compete with the oldspace companies, many of which are government-sponsored (ULA, Ariane), as well as the first-gen newspace companies (SpaceX, Blue Origin), who have a big lead on the technology. I doubt they'll all be successful... but I think one or two will make it. Which ones, I don't know.
"Trained, uniformed police officers cannot be trusted with guns, therefore citizens should have access to guns with minimal limit or control". Textbook non sequitur - your conclusion does not follow your premise. Well, maybe it does if you also assume that a counter-government revolution is inevitable in the near future, but that's one HELL of a premise to smuggle in as an assumption.
Part of the problem is that police have to assume everyone they interact with is potentially armed. They have to show up to the scene ready for someone to burst out the door with a technically-not-an-assault-rifle and fire a dozen rounds before the police would have any chance to respond. Every interaction between armed parties has a risk of devolving into a fight - and that risk persists even if one side is only potentially armed, because the other side can't know that.
There is a lot of blame that should be placed on police departments. The departments, the institutions, mind, not the individuals - the problem is that the system does not purge itself of bad cops when they are shown to be bad, either incompetent (trigger-happy, ignorant of laws, careless) or malicious. Police need to hold themselves to a higher standard, not defend every bad cop in the name of the thin blue line.
But even with ideal institutions, an environment where cops have to be ready for a shootout at a second's notice is an inherently dangerous one, one where small mistakes rapidly turn into big ones, with fatal consequences. And so it would further reduce casualties if we had some simple, robust gun control - because that means police, in turn, could reduce their own armaments and level of combat readiness to something less than "just shy of military" and "hair-trigger", respectively.
I do believe it logically follows that if all parties are less armed, there are wider margins for recovery from errors before things get deadly.
My personal opinion as someone firmly on the "dismantle ICE" side:
Controlling immigration and the borders is a legitimate action and responsibility of the government. I am not in favor of open borders with Mexico or other Central/South American countries. (Open borders with Canada would be a different story - though still not unlimited immigration, just visa-free travel for Canadian citizens to the US, and vice versa).
However, the immigration enforcement currently being done is vastly more harmful than the benefit it brings. ICE has become more about discouraging illegal immigration through violent punitive action than about enforcing the laws. It's about making illegal immigrants suffer. For fuck's sake, they've built concentration camps in the Texas desert. They're separating children from parents. What is the point of that beyond making people suffer? How is that not an intrinsically evil act?
There's also the consideration on the rights of citizens. As part of the general push towards stricter border enforcement, the Fourth Amendment no longer applies within 100 miles of a border or coast. ICE (and Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard) no longer require a warrant or probable cause to search anyone they suspect of violating immigration or customs laws. That is a pretty big fucking deal! For that to be even remotely worth it, illegal immigration would have to be causing absolutely devastating damage to the US.
But it is not. Every study I've seen has concluded that illegal immigrant communities have lower crime rates (both general and violent crime) than comparable native-born communities. They typically pay taxes but rarely utilize public services - which stands to reason, since their goal is to remain low-profile. While they have a depressing effect on wages, at least within the region and industry, they have a broadly neutral effect on employment - they provide workers, but also supply demand that creates about as many jobs as they take. That is enough to justify having controlled immigration (rather than unlimited), and to enforce those laws in the same manner as other nonviolent crime. Treating unlawful immigration as a crime comparable to, say, tax evasion, is perfectly reasonable. Treating it as though it were an act of war, not so much - and yet that's what we're currently doing.
That's how he was when I started watching. After a while, it started drifting more towards a product review. It wasn't "this drill does something nifty in how it works, let's figure it out" so much as it was "here's all the places they cheaped out on it, don't buy this". That's around when I stopped watching. Maybe he's changed back, I don't know, that's why I had that parenthetical qualifier in my first post.
If AvE is trying to be educational, he's kind of failing. Most of his videos (at least, as of when I quit watching him, maybe he's changed) are just product teardowns and reviews... that might count as consumer education but I don't think it's what most people consider an educational video.
Odd, having read the comments here, I was going to say almost the exact same thing, just from the other direction. It seems like having a CoC, even an empty one that does nothing, should be a very useful way to weed out idiots who don't want to learn how to interact with other humans in a mature, professional manner.
The interpretation, in this case, is ultimately up to Linus. The guy who is notoriously blunt and unwilling to put up with bullshit. Your drivers suck? Fuck you, fix it. You broke userspace? Fuck you, fix it. Yeah, I'm having a real hard time imagining him kicking someone off the kernel team because they didn't properly conjugate some personal pronoun invented two weeks ago.
Humans, and human society, do not work well with absolute, precise rules. That's why even our actual laws are subject to the interpretation and flexibility of judges and juries - the real world is full of complications that no fixed rules can handle, so sometimes we need a human who can decide what best fits the intended spirit of the rules. I know, as a computer person, we want everything to be completely logical and predictable, but a code of conduct that could encompass all the foibles and nuance of human interaction would be a bigger project than Linux itself.
That's why so much of the Code of Conduct is about defining what it's trying to accomplish, rather than what it forbids and allows. It recognizes the reality is "the people running the project decide who can and cannot work with them".
Also, the code of conduct says nothing about merit because code quality already has its own rules. If your code sucks, the patch gets rejected, doesn't matter how politely you ask. A code of conduct is, quite logically, about conduct - how you conduct business among other developers. It even explicitly states that it only affects conduct done for or in the name of the project, so whatever antisocial shit you get up to in your free time is up to you, as long as you don't bring it to work with you.
Have you actually read a code of conduct? It's not "walking on eggshells", it's "be a decent, professional human being".
Let's look at the Linux one you're so upset about. What does it prohibit? * Sexualized language, imagery, and unwelcome advances * Trolling * Insults and personal attacks * Harassment * Doxing * "Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting"
What are the consequences? Not being allowed to contribute to the codebase. That's it. You can still access the code, mod it, fork it, use it, whatever you want. They just won't be accepting your patches and will be blocking your emails.
In other words, this CoC says "any shit that would get you fired from a 'real' job will get you fired from an open-source job". Which seems fair to me. Linux might not be a for-profit business, but it's a large enough, and important enough, project that it needs people who are professionals, not assholes.
The tainted variables concept only works if you have functions that can actually clean them. AIUI, the old mysql_ API does not have that, and in fact cannot have that without breaking compatibility with old (MySQL 4.x) servers. The actual C-level API for MySQL changed, as did the network protocol. So they split it - mysql_ was kept around for compatibility, and mysqli_ was made to take advantage of the new features, like bound parameters which ACTUALLY solve the problem of tainted data by separating data and logic in the API. No sanitizing necessary - the API itself is aware of what is SQL code and what is data, and so it never even considers the data for execution. If you still want to do it by escaping user input and concatenating it into a query, you can do so, but the only sane reason to do so it when porting old code.
By "OOM", do you mean that it's object-oriented? Because that's also wrong - mysqli_ has object-oriented and procedural versions of everything. Look at the docs sometime, it's almost a drop-in replacement, other than needing to explicitly pass the connection in. But even the object-oriented stuff isn't spaghetti code unless you write it that way - it's straightforward calling of methods on objects, one after the other. Read the examples, they roll straight down, only stopping on error.
The old MySQL library (the one whose functions start with "mysql_" instead of "mysqli_", which dates back all the way to PHP2) was fundamentally broken. An API-compatible replacement could not be protected from SQL injection. For that reason, mysql_ was deprecated for the entire 5.x block - issuing increasingly dire warnings with every point release. Finally, PHP7 threw it out because it was the only way to force people to fix their broken insecure code.
In order to have that problem while upgrading, you'd either have to be porting code that went back to PHP4 and hadn't been maintained, or code that was written in a well-known wrong way. Which sure, happens - I cleaned up some mysql_ functions myself while porting code that fell under the former. Took maybe an hour to get it running, although I took some more time to fix the pile of SQL injection flaws still hiding around (PDO lets you protect yourself... nothing will protect you if you're concatenating user input into a query without even escaping it).
Anyone who is willing to let the dropping of the mysql_ API stop them from updating, isn't secure anyways.
PHP 6's main feature was better Unicode support... via UTF-16, which it turns out is an awful idea. It's still variable-length, so you get all that complexity just like UTF-8, but it's hugely wasteful in comparison to UTF-8 on stuff like HTML (outputting is literally the main purpose of PHP), and it adds some byte-endianness problems. After realizing it was going to tank performance and just cause more and more problems to develop, the other features were stripped out and ported back to PHP5. PHP7 was a separate project, focused on a new engine for much better performance (though it also added some much-needed syntax like typed parameters and null coalescing). They decided to just skip PHP6 because there was so much published material talking about it, but the main feature of it never appeared (PHP7 internally uses UTF-8 for strings).
Currently active NASA probes: Luna: ARTEMIS P1 and P2 (former Earth observers), LRO Sol: Parker Mars: Odyssey, MRO, MAVEN, Curiosity, Opportunity (contact lost), InSight (en route) Jupiter: Juno Asteroid Belt: Dawn (en transit), OSIRIS-REx (en route) Kuiper Belt: New Horizons
Currently active non-NASA probes: Mercury: BepiColombo (ESA+JAXA, en route) Venus: Akatsuki (JAXA) Mars: Mars Express (ESA), Trace Gas Orbiter (ESA), Mangalyaan (ISRO) Asteroid Belt: Hayabusa 2 (JAXA), Chang'e 2 (CNSA, also former lunar probe)
So NASA has more non-lunar, non-martian probes in operation than every other organization combined. And there's no sign of this stopping - there's a Europa mission planned for the early 2020s. Nor is this particularly new - NASA is the only one to have sent probes to every planet, and Pluto. We aren't sending anything to Mercury because we've already been there.
Also: NASA is fully responsible for supplying NASA operations on the ISS. That this is done by contract and not NASA internal personnel is irrelevant to the question of "can NASA send supplies to the ISS?" - it's more about accounting than actual policy, since NASA had very close oversight and design control (also, Roscosmos is technically a state-owned corporation, not a federal agency). NASA even has the most robust resupply capability - while Russia relies solely on Soyuz-Progress, Japan relies solely on HTV, and Europe retired their ATV, America has access to both Falcon-Dragon, and Antares-Cygnus. When a Falcon blew up, we kept flying Antares while we sorted that out; when an Antares blew up, we kept flying Falcon, and even stuck a Cygnus on an Atlas V, because we have so many options and we wanted to give OSC all the time they needed to redesign Antares. Meanwhile, Russia just lost a Soyuz booster, grounding their entire operation (including unmanned Progress launches) for at least a few months, and you can bet they'll be rushing their fixes so they can start flying again ASAP. It's almost a race to see who will fly people next to the ISS - Roscosmos, SpaceX or Boeing. My money's only on Russia because they're way more willing to cut corners than NASA.
Is there too much focus on a return to the Moon? Yeah, I can agree with that. Is a crewed Mars mission unrealistic? With current/planned NASA tech, yeah, SLS is completely insufficient for more than a Mars flyby, and that's *post* upgrade. But hey, BFR is clearly up for the job, using good old American brute force. If it works, it works. And if it doesn't, it's not like anyone else has a plan, besides maybe Blue Origin.
I disagree. The problem is not that people are being falsely accused of being bots for holding contrary opinions - the problem is that, on social media, everyone looks and talks like a bot.
The format of most social media (Facebook and Twitter especially) pushes people towards bot-like behavior. The brevity pushes you to skip any supporting information, just blindly assert your position as correct. It tends to erode nuance - you don't say "evidence suggests that X probably causes Y", you just say "they proved X causes Y", if not just "X therefore Y". The rapid-fire structure of comment threads, and general lack of a good bio, makes it hard to look at someone's account and tell what they're really all about. And both tend to expose you to a massive wall of people who are shouting their opinions into the void, rather than any sort of community, especially when you choose to look at "trending" or "what's happening now".
And, on top of that, there are so many obvious bots, that having to consider whether every single person you're talking to is a bot or not is rational. Every single Elon Musk tweet, for something like a year now, gets swarmed by bots pretending to be Elon giving away some cryptocurrency, if only you download this sketchy app - and this is after Twitter put special protections in place to prevent just anyone from setting their name to "Elon Musk". The people running social media clearly don't care about keeping bots-impersonating-humans out, so it falls on each user instead to worry about it. We're not given enough information to decide accurately, so it's just inevitable that some people end up falsely accused.
And then, yes, there's the organized campaigns, of which the Russians are merely the most prolific. The "Internet Research Agency" (the one hit with Mueller indictments) didn't merely try to manipulate election news, they tried to stir up chaos. They'd organize two protests for opposing sides at the same place and time, hoping it would turn violent. They spread anti-vax stuff, just to erode trust in authorities. They've spread disaster hoaxes and fake hate crimes, just to get people to panic. And, as I mentioned, Russia isn't the only one. Remember the Chinese "50 Cent Party"? Or America's own "Operation: Earnest Voice"?
As always, there's an XKCD for it. You don't even need bots, per se - just a decent budget and enough people who will work for cheap, and anyone can manufacture not just a consensus, but a culture. Shout enough into a crowd, and some of them will take root, and now you've got another person shouting alongside you. It's not like it's a new phenomenon - how often, back in the day, did you or I accuse someone of being a Microsoft shill, or astroturfing for some corporation or another? A lot of those may have been true, but I'm sure many of them were not.
But what does it matter, whether someone is a machine or a human, when the opinion they shout is not their own? That is the real problem - social media has allowed too much pollution of the discourse. It's no longer about debate, building a logical case to support your position and poking flaws in your opponent's reasoning, but about who can state their position loudest and longest. It's about endurance, not smarts - forcing your opponents to waste so much time responding to a never-ending stream of lies and bullshit that they eventually give up.
I don't know if there's a solution. I used to think Slashdot's system protected it, but after seeing a spree of explicitly anti-democratic posts here in the past few weeks, I'm starting to think it just delayed it by a few years. Perhaps something that gave users the information they need to more accurately spot the bots and troll farms, coupled with a strict moderation team to purge them when spotted and confirmed. Or maybe it's just inevitable that any sufficiently-large social network site has a collapse of trust, and the solution is to fracture into smaller communities. I still use a bunch of old web forums, and they don't seem to have fallen victim, yet.
Does not appear so - per Wikipedia, five-year survival rate is 71%, lower than that for Hodgkin's Lymphoma, 86%. The "beaten" cancers are prostate and thyroid, both above 98% five-year survival.
Soyuz has had two prior aborts prior to reaching orbit. Soyuz T-10A, in September 1983, caught fire during fueling. The LES motor fired, carrying the crew to safety shortly before the rocket exploded. Soyuz 18A, in April 1975, was a pretty close match for this event: stages 2 and 3 failed to fully separate before stage 3 ignition, the ensuing strain as the engine blew the second stage away caused the craft to veer off course, triggering an automated abort.
The crew of Soyuz 18A had a particularly nasty time of it. The abort triggered while the craft was already pointing downward, so it accelerated its downward fall - they went through about 20G of deceleration when they hit the atmosphere. The craft landed on a hill and started rolling, narrowly avoiding falling off a cliff before the still-attached parachutes snagged on trees. The terrain and heavy snow kept the rescue team from reaching them for a day, forcing the crew to camp overnight. And they were initially unsure of their position, and thought they might be in China - who was rather hostile at the time.
Not really? Like, older games, sure, single-threaded all the way, although they obviously don't push modern hardware much. But the current console generation runs eight wimpy cores - you just can't make a demanding single-threaded game and have a console release. And PCs have been multicore for even longer, so even PC-only games are multithreaded if they're at all pushing the hardware (lots of indie games just aren't pushing enough to *need* multithreading, but they also don't demand top-notch performance anyways). So what games are there that need a powerful modern system to run, but are still heavily single-threaded?
Single-threaded benchmarks put Zen and *Lake at the same IPC. AMD wins some benchmarks, Intel wins some. That's why Intel had to shit out these high-clock parts - while first-gen Ryzen had a pretty low clock ceiling, second-gen Ryzen matched the contemporary eighth-gen Core series. These chips here are only faster than Ryzen in single-threaded performance because they're clocked to the absolute limit.
And across the entire spectrum, AMD is matching or winning on core count, and treats SMT as a near-standard feature (only excluded on the bottom-end R3s) instead of a top-end halo feature (now present only on i9s).
Slashdot Mirror
Let's say they've got two X chromosomes AND a Y chromosome. I don't recall offhand if that genotype results in that physiology, but XXY chromosomes are surprisingly common.
Easy peasy.....we're talking a VERY small minority of people in the world that have these issues.....why should the majority get all bent out of shape for this insignificant number of people outside the norm?
You underestimate the number of people with such "issues". And why care about sex-segregated bathrooms at all? They're not even a fixture of classical Western society - they were mostly introduced post-Civil Rights era to keep the "good, noble" white women from being even potentially contaminated by contact with "black savages". Why not just have unisex bathrooms?
I really don't care what an adult does, or two consenting adults do....in private, but don't force the masses to cow-tow to them...there should not be special treatment for acting outside the norms. You shouldn't be persecuted for it, but you also shouldn't expect special and protected treatment in every day life either.
People are getting upset because this is a blatant prelude to an assault on people's freedom to do what they want in private. Pence in particular has been completely clear that the end-goal is to force everyone to behave in accordance with the gender norms that match their sex, and those noncompliant will be deemed sexual assaulters or pedophiles, and treated as criminals.
Nobody is asking for special protected treatment - they're asking for some kind of guarantee they won't be abducted and shipped away to a torture camp. Which yes, happens - overly-religious parents that see their children acting "faggy", find out about "outdoor programs" using "conversion therapy" to treat them. But rather than a fun summer camp, it consists more of forced marches, sleep deprivation and just general "make them suffer until they'll do anything to make it stop"... this has more than once resulted in deaths.
Our current Vice President describes himself as a firm advocate of these programs. If that doesn't sound faintly terrifying, I have no idea what more I can say.
I get it. You see yourself as an open-minded person, with strong libertarian ideals. You see a group that you would never really consider persecuting, out there making demands. And the only big mistake you're making is assuming that, because you would never consider persecuting someone for something like that, that nobody would - and so their demand for explicit protection comes across as a demand for special attention, which naturally rankles your minimal-government ethos.
a) That's sex, not gender. Sex is biological, gender is a social construct. Consider the "third gender" seen in some Southeast Asian cultures. It was only "really easy" a decade ago if you ignored anything except traditional post-medieval Western gender norms.
b) Sex is a bimodal distribution, not a boolean. You can get all kinds of weird things - XX phenotypes that are morphologically male, for instance. Or a whole spectrum of intersex types - how would you classify someone with a semi-functional penis, no testes, and ovaries?
The fact that it makes bookkeeping easier doesn't mean it's an accurate model of reality. Otherwise, we'd all be using 64-bit unsigned integers instead of names.
Of all the small-launch newspace companies, I could most believe that Rocket Lab is the one that's actually genuine about focusing on the small-launch market. Mostly because I don't think their engine design can scale up much past where it is - I think this is about the limit for battery-cycle rocket engines with current technology.
All rocket-launch markets are semi-protected. Nobody wants to launch a spy satellite on someone else's rocket - so there's a market that Landspace only has to compete with other Chinese startups and the Chinese state rocket corporations, and not SpaceX, Roscosmos, Arianespace or ULA. (Not that ULA can really compete with anyone these days). And every government tends to prefer flying their own payloads on home-grown rockets when possible, China certainly not less than others.
Blue Origin is very much not in stealth mode. They just aren't in Elon-Musk-crazy-stunts PR mode. You hear about them fairly regularly in the rocket press, just not the mainstream, same as with ULA or Arianespace.
Blue Origin's New Shepard (the suborbital tourist one) is still gearing up for crewed test flights - they're supposed to happen this year, not sure if that's officially slipped yet or not. They're also supplying the BE-4 engine to ULA for their upcoming Vulcan rocket, intended to replace Atlas V and Delta IV - and they beat out Aerojet Rocketdyne to do so. They've also secured at least eight civilian launch contracts and an Air Force grant for New Glenn, their heavy-lift rocket.
I see many, many space startups trying to build a very small, cheap launcher for very small satellites, or even cubesats. They are all bullshitting their investors - the market just does not exist.
All of them *want* to be in the full satellite launch business. Stuff in the grade of Atlas V, Soyuz, or Falcon 9. 2 to 4 tons of payload to LEO is about the smallest you can do cost-effectively, and 8 to 12 tons is the bulk of the market, and there's demand for larger still.
Everyone is copying SpaceX's business plan. Use initial funds to build a small orbital launcher (like Falcon 1), and then once you've proven you can put something into space, use that to secure funding to build an actual usable rocket (note that, as soon as they got funding for Falcon 9, they never flew Falcon 1 again, even though it shared parts with early Falcon 9s). Even Blue Origin built a suborbital tourist rocket before transitioning to their heavy-lift New Glenn - granted, Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX so they can't exactly be copying them.
This is not exclusive to China - Firefly (US) has their Alpha and Beta, OneSpace (China) has their OS-M1 upgraded sounding rocket, ExPace (China) has a whopping three rockets in their planned Kuaizhou series, Interstellar (Japan) has their Zero, LinkSpace (China) has New Line 1 which clearly implies a NL-2, Orbex (UK) has their Prime, and Rocket Lab (US) has Electron. All of them are competing for a market that just doesn't exist.
LandSpace is barely disguising their intentions. Zhuque-1 is a 300kg-to-LEO firecracker. All solid motors, which is just a terrible way to build an orbital rocket, but I expect they're using off-the-shelf parts (what's the Chinese counterpart to the GEM series?). Zhuque-2 is a much more reasonable 4000kg-to-LEO, methalox rocket. So the chemistry is different, the plumbing is different, the structure is different, even the launchpad is going to have to be different... what can they reuse from Zhuque-1, the avionics?
There is demand for a tiny-sat launcher. That much isn't a lie. But it's demand for a very, very low-cost launcher. Nobody's going to shell out a couple million bucks for a cubesat launch. Get the price down to $100K, sure, you'll be doing business, but all the newspace tiny-sat launchers I've seen are in the ballpark of $5M. Well, Falcon 9 is $50M a pop, and can do 20 tons worth of payload. There's a launch next month specifically for tiny satellites - specifically, 64 different satellites, mostly cubesats. Average price? Just under that $1M apiece figure.
So who would book a super-small launcher? Someone who doesn't need much in the way of payload - a small satellite, not requiring much power or designed to last all that long, but either going into a very strange orbit that no rideshare would go to, or needing to launch at very short notice. As far as I can tell, such customers just don't exist.
It's almost like the dotcom bubble - tons of companies burning through investor cash on a scheme to raise more investor cash. At least their planned second rockets are something that could actually be profitable. Going to be rough to compete with the oldspace companies, many of which are government-sponsored (ULA, Ariane), as well as the first-gen newspace companies (SpaceX, Blue Origin), who have a big lead on the technology. I doubt they'll all be successful... but I think one or two will make it. Which ones, I don't know.
"Trained, uniformed police officers cannot be trusted with guns, therefore citizens should have access to guns with minimal limit or control". Textbook non sequitur - your conclusion does not follow your premise. Well, maybe it does if you also assume that a counter-government revolution is inevitable in the near future, but that's one HELL of a premise to smuggle in as an assumption.
Part of the problem is that police have to assume everyone they interact with is potentially armed. They have to show up to the scene ready for someone to burst out the door with a technically-not-an-assault-rifle and fire a dozen rounds before the police would have any chance to respond. Every interaction between armed parties has a risk of devolving into a fight - and that risk persists even if one side is only potentially armed, because the other side can't know that.
There is a lot of blame that should be placed on police departments. The departments, the institutions, mind, not the individuals - the problem is that the system does not purge itself of bad cops when they are shown to be bad, either incompetent (trigger-happy, ignorant of laws, careless) or malicious. Police need to hold themselves to a higher standard, not defend every bad cop in the name of the thin blue line.
But even with ideal institutions, an environment where cops have to be ready for a shootout at a second's notice is an inherently dangerous one, one where small mistakes rapidly turn into big ones, with fatal consequences. And so it would further reduce casualties if we had some simple, robust gun control - because that means police, in turn, could reduce their own armaments and level of combat readiness to something less than "just shy of military" and "hair-trigger", respectively.
I do believe it logically follows that if all parties are less armed, there are wider margins for recovery from errors before things get deadly.
No, just only within your own rank. Date a coworker? Sure. Date your boss or your underling? Nope.
Claiming to not be convinced by overwhelming evidence is not a particularly effective way to prove that evidence wrong.
Every single little inane thought that runs through Trump's head ends up on his Twitter feed as fast as his little fingers can type it.
My personal opinion as someone firmly on the "dismantle ICE" side:
Controlling immigration and the borders is a legitimate action and responsibility of the government. I am not in favor of open borders with Mexico or other Central/South American countries. (Open borders with Canada would be a different story - though still not unlimited immigration, just visa-free travel for Canadian citizens to the US, and vice versa).
However, the immigration enforcement currently being done is vastly more harmful than the benefit it brings. ICE has become more about discouraging illegal immigration through violent punitive action than about enforcing the laws. It's about making illegal immigrants suffer. For fuck's sake, they've built concentration camps in the Texas desert. They're separating children from parents. What is the point of that beyond making people suffer? How is that not an intrinsically evil act?
There's also the consideration on the rights of citizens. As part of the general push towards stricter border enforcement, the Fourth Amendment no longer applies within 100 miles of a border or coast. ICE (and Border Patrol, and the Coast Guard) no longer require a warrant or probable cause to search anyone they suspect of violating immigration or customs laws. That is a pretty big fucking deal! For that to be even remotely worth it, illegal immigration would have to be causing absolutely devastating damage to the US.
But it is not. Every study I've seen has concluded that illegal immigrant communities have lower crime rates (both general and violent crime) than comparable native-born communities. They typically pay taxes but rarely utilize public services - which stands to reason, since their goal is to remain low-profile. While they have a depressing effect on wages, at least within the region and industry, they have a broadly neutral effect on employment - they provide workers, but also supply demand that creates about as many jobs as they take. That is enough to justify having controlled immigration (rather than unlimited), and to enforce those laws in the same manner as other nonviolent crime. Treating unlawful immigration as a crime comparable to, say, tax evasion, is perfectly reasonable. Treating it as though it were an act of war, not so much - and yet that's what we're currently doing.
That's how he was when I started watching. After a while, it started drifting more towards a product review. It wasn't "this drill does something nifty in how it works, let's figure it out" so much as it was "here's all the places they cheaped out on it, don't buy this". That's around when I stopped watching. Maybe he's changed back, I don't know, that's why I had that parenthetical qualifier in my first post.
If AvE is trying to be educational, he's kind of failing. Most of his videos (at least, as of when I quit watching him, maybe he's changed) are just product teardowns and reviews... that might count as consumer education but I don't think it's what most people consider an educational video.
Odd, having read the comments here, I was going to say almost the exact same thing, just from the other direction. It seems like having a CoC, even an empty one that does nothing, should be a very useful way to weed out idiots who don't want to learn how to interact with other humans in a mature, professional manner.
The interpretation, in this case, is ultimately up to Linus. The guy who is notoriously blunt and unwilling to put up with bullshit. Your drivers suck? Fuck you, fix it. You broke userspace? Fuck you, fix it. Yeah, I'm having a real hard time imagining him kicking someone off the kernel team because they didn't properly conjugate some personal pronoun invented two weeks ago.
Humans, and human society, do not work well with absolute, precise rules. That's why even our actual laws are subject to the interpretation and flexibility of judges and juries - the real world is full of complications that no fixed rules can handle, so sometimes we need a human who can decide what best fits the intended spirit of the rules. I know, as a computer person, we want everything to be completely logical and predictable, but a code of conduct that could encompass all the foibles and nuance of human interaction would be a bigger project than Linux itself.
That's why so much of the Code of Conduct is about defining what it's trying to accomplish, rather than what it forbids and allows. It recognizes the reality is "the people running the project decide who can and cannot work with them".
Also, the code of conduct says nothing about merit because code quality already has its own rules. If your code sucks, the patch gets rejected, doesn't matter how politely you ask. A code of conduct is, quite logically, about conduct - how you conduct business among other developers. It even explicitly states that it only affects conduct done for or in the name of the project, so whatever antisocial shit you get up to in your free time is up to you, as long as you don't bring it to work with you.
Have you actually read a code of conduct? It's not "walking on eggshells", it's "be a decent, professional human being".
Let's look at the Linux one you're so upset about. What does it prohibit?
* Sexualized language, imagery, and unwelcome advances
* Trolling
* Insults and personal attacks
* Harassment
* Doxing
* "Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting"
What are the consequences? Not being allowed to contribute to the codebase. That's it. You can still access the code, mod it, fork it, use it, whatever you want. They just won't be accepting your patches and will be blocking your emails.
In other words, this CoC says "any shit that would get you fired from a 'real' job will get you fired from an open-source job". Which seems fair to me. Linux might not be a for-profit business, but it's a large enough, and important enough, project that it needs people who are professionals, not assholes.
The tainted variables concept only works if you have functions that can actually clean them. AIUI, the old mysql_ API does not have that, and in fact cannot have that without breaking compatibility with old (MySQL 4.x) servers. The actual C-level API for MySQL changed, as did the network protocol. So they split it - mysql_ was kept around for compatibility, and mysqli_ was made to take advantage of the new features, like bound parameters which ACTUALLY solve the problem of tainted data by separating data and logic in the API. No sanitizing necessary - the API itself is aware of what is SQL code and what is data, and so it never even considers the data for execution. If you still want to do it by escaping user input and concatenating it into a query, you can do so, but the only sane reason to do so it when porting old code.
By "OOM", do you mean that it's object-oriented? Because that's also wrong - mysqli_ has object-oriented and procedural versions of everything. Look at the docs sometime, it's almost a drop-in replacement, other than needing to explicitly pass the connection in. But even the object-oriented stuff isn't spaghetti code unless you write it that way - it's straightforward calling of methods on objects, one after the other. Read the examples, they roll straight down, only stopping on error.
The old MySQL library (the one whose functions start with "mysql_" instead of "mysqli_", which dates back all the way to PHP2) was fundamentally broken. An API-compatible replacement could not be protected from SQL injection. For that reason, mysql_ was deprecated for the entire 5.x block - issuing increasingly dire warnings with every point release. Finally, PHP7 threw it out because it was the only way to force people to fix their broken insecure code.
In order to have that problem while upgrading, you'd either have to be porting code that went back to PHP4 and hadn't been maintained, or code that was written in a well-known wrong way. Which sure, happens - I cleaned up some mysql_ functions myself while porting code that fell under the former. Took maybe an hour to get it running, although I took some more time to fix the pile of SQL injection flaws still hiding around (PDO lets you protect yourself... nothing will protect you if you're concatenating user input into a query without even escaping it).
Anyone who is willing to let the dropping of the mysql_ API stop them from updating, isn't secure anyways.
PHP 6 was never actually released.
PHP 6's main feature was better Unicode support... via UTF-16, which it turns out is an awful idea. It's still variable-length, so you get all that complexity just like UTF-8, but it's hugely wasteful in comparison to UTF-8 on stuff like HTML (outputting is literally the main purpose of PHP), and it adds some byte-endianness problems. After realizing it was going to tank performance and just cause more and more problems to develop, the other features were stripped out and ported back to PHP5. PHP7 was a separate project, focused on a new engine for much better performance (though it also added some much-needed syntax like typed parameters and null coalescing). They decided to just skip PHP6 because there was so much published material talking about it, but the main feature of it never appeared (PHP7 internally uses UTF-8 for strings).
Currently active NASA probes:
Luna: ARTEMIS P1 and P2 (former Earth observers), LRO
Sol: Parker
Mars: Odyssey, MRO, MAVEN, Curiosity, Opportunity (contact lost), InSight (en route)
Jupiter: Juno
Asteroid Belt: Dawn (en transit), OSIRIS-REx (en route)
Kuiper Belt: New Horizons
Currently active non-NASA probes:
Mercury: BepiColombo (ESA+JAXA, en route)
Venus: Akatsuki (JAXA)
Mars: Mars Express (ESA), Trace Gas Orbiter (ESA), Mangalyaan (ISRO)
Asteroid Belt: Hayabusa 2 (JAXA), Chang'e 2 (CNSA, also former lunar probe)
So NASA has more non-lunar, non-martian probes in operation than every other organization combined. And there's no sign of this stopping - there's a Europa mission planned for the early 2020s. Nor is this particularly new - NASA is the only one to have sent probes to every planet, and Pluto. We aren't sending anything to Mercury because we've already been there.
Also: NASA is fully responsible for supplying NASA operations on the ISS. That this is done by contract and not NASA internal personnel is irrelevant to the question of "can NASA send supplies to the ISS?" - it's more about accounting than actual policy, since NASA had very close oversight and design control (also, Roscosmos is technically a state-owned corporation, not a federal agency). NASA even has the most robust resupply capability - while Russia relies solely on Soyuz-Progress, Japan relies solely on HTV, and Europe retired their ATV, America has access to both Falcon-Dragon, and Antares-Cygnus. When a Falcon blew up, we kept flying Antares while we sorted that out; when an Antares blew up, we kept flying Falcon, and even stuck a Cygnus on an Atlas V, because we have so many options and we wanted to give OSC all the time they needed to redesign Antares. Meanwhile, Russia just lost a Soyuz booster, grounding their entire operation (including unmanned Progress launches) for at least a few months, and you can bet they'll be rushing their fixes so they can start flying again ASAP. It's almost a race to see who will fly people next to the ISS - Roscosmos, SpaceX or Boeing. My money's only on Russia because they're way more willing to cut corners than NASA.
Is there too much focus on a return to the Moon? Yeah, I can agree with that. Is a crewed Mars mission unrealistic? With current/planned NASA tech, yeah, SLS is completely insufficient for more than a Mars flyby, and that's *post* upgrade. But hey, BFR is clearly up for the job, using good old American brute force. If it works, it works. And if it doesn't, it's not like anyone else has a plan, besides maybe Blue Origin.
I disagree. The problem is not that people are being falsely accused of being bots for holding contrary opinions - the problem is that, on social media, everyone looks and talks like a bot.
The format of most social media (Facebook and Twitter especially) pushes people towards bot-like behavior. The brevity pushes you to skip any supporting information, just blindly assert your position as correct. It tends to erode nuance - you don't say "evidence suggests that X probably causes Y", you just say "they proved X causes Y", if not just "X therefore Y". The rapid-fire structure of comment threads, and general lack of a good bio, makes it hard to look at someone's account and tell what they're really all about. And both tend to expose you to a massive wall of people who are shouting their opinions into the void, rather than any sort of community, especially when you choose to look at "trending" or "what's happening now".
And, on top of that, there are so many obvious bots, that having to consider whether every single person you're talking to is a bot or not is rational. Every single Elon Musk tweet, for something like a year now, gets swarmed by bots pretending to be Elon giving away some cryptocurrency, if only you download this sketchy app - and this is after Twitter put special protections in place to prevent just anyone from setting their name to "Elon Musk". The people running social media clearly don't care about keeping bots-impersonating-humans out, so it falls on each user instead to worry about it. We're not given enough information to decide accurately, so it's just inevitable that some people end up falsely accused.
And then, yes, there's the organized campaigns, of which the Russians are merely the most prolific. The "Internet Research Agency" (the one hit with Mueller indictments) didn't merely try to manipulate election news, they tried to stir up chaos. They'd organize two protests for opposing sides at the same place and time, hoping it would turn violent. They spread anti-vax stuff, just to erode trust in authorities. They've spread disaster hoaxes and fake hate crimes, just to get people to panic. And, as I mentioned, Russia isn't the only one. Remember the Chinese "50 Cent Party"? Or America's own "Operation: Earnest Voice"?
As always, there's an XKCD for it. You don't even need bots, per se - just a decent budget and enough people who will work for cheap, and anyone can manufacture not just a consensus, but a culture. Shout enough into a crowd, and some of them will take root, and now you've got another person shouting alongside you. It's not like it's a new phenomenon - how often, back in the day, did you or I accuse someone of being a Microsoft shill, or astroturfing for some corporation or another? A lot of those may have been true, but I'm sure many of them were not.
But what does it matter, whether someone is a machine or a human, when the opinion they shout is not their own? That is the real problem - social media has allowed too much pollution of the discourse. It's no longer about debate, building a logical case to support your position and poking flaws in your opponent's reasoning, but about who can state their position loudest and longest. It's about endurance, not smarts - forcing your opponents to waste so much time responding to a never-ending stream of lies and bullshit that they eventually give up.
I don't know if there's a solution. I used to think Slashdot's system protected it, but after seeing a spree of explicitly anti-democratic posts here in the past few weeks, I'm starting to think it just delayed it by a few years. Perhaps something that gave users the information they need to more accurately spot the bots and troll farms, coupled with a strict moderation team to purge them when spotted and confirmed. Or maybe it's just inevitable that any sufficiently-large social network site has a collapse of trust, and the solution is to fracture into smaller communities. I still use a bunch of old web forums, and they don't seem to have fallen victim, yet.
Does not appear so - per Wikipedia, five-year survival rate is 71%, lower than that for Hodgkin's Lymphoma, 86%. The "beaten" cancers are prostate and thyroid, both above 98% five-year survival.
Soyuz has had two prior aborts prior to reaching orbit. Soyuz T-10A, in September 1983, caught fire during fueling. The LES motor fired, carrying the crew to safety shortly before the rocket exploded. Soyuz 18A, in April 1975, was a pretty close match for this event: stages 2 and 3 failed to fully separate before stage 3 ignition, the ensuing strain as the engine blew the second stage away caused the craft to veer off course, triggering an automated abort.
The crew of Soyuz 18A had a particularly nasty time of it. The abort triggered while the craft was already pointing downward, so it accelerated its downward fall - they went through about 20G of deceleration when they hit the atmosphere. The craft landed on a hill and started rolling, narrowly avoiding falling off a cliff before the still-attached parachutes snagged on trees. The terrain and heavy snow kept the rescue team from reaching them for a day, forcing the crew to camp overnight. And they were initially unsure of their position, and thought they might be in China - who was rather hostile at the time.
Not really? Like, older games, sure, single-threaded all the way, although they obviously don't push modern hardware much. But the current console generation runs eight wimpy cores - you just can't make a demanding single-threaded game and have a console release. And PCs have been multicore for even longer, so even PC-only games are multithreaded if they're at all pushing the hardware (lots of indie games just aren't pushing enough to *need* multithreading, but they also don't demand top-notch performance anyways). So what games are there that need a powerful modern system to run, but are still heavily single-threaded?
Single-threaded benchmarks put Zen and *Lake at the same IPC. AMD wins some benchmarks, Intel wins some. That's why Intel had to shit out these high-clock parts - while first-gen Ryzen had a pretty low clock ceiling, second-gen Ryzen matched the contemporary eighth-gen Core series. These chips here are only faster than Ryzen in single-threaded performance because they're clocked to the absolute limit.
And across the entire spectrum, AMD is matching or winning on core count, and treats SMT as a near-standard feature (only excluded on the bottom-end R3s) instead of a top-end halo feature (now present only on i9s).