Crito

44 ms·

361.
by Crito 12y ago
> "WTF is, generally, acceptable as not excessively vulgar in social contexts" Which social contexts? Social contexts where people don't know what "WTF" expands to? It's not even a "minced oath&quot
362.
by Crito 12y ago
Other fuels are possible, however Plutonium 238 is preferred for these purposes for a number of reasons: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_gen...
363.
by Crito 12y ago
Are they reclusive monks, or are they in hiding from genocidal tyrants?
364.
by Crito 12y ago
Descriptions of the past are not nuts. History, the legitimate peer-reviewed study of history , does the same. Evolutionary biology tells us much about the past, as does much of physics. None of that is problematic. ID was nuts because
365.
by Crito 12y ago
> "You would think that, no matter what your goals for the roles of gender (or sex) in society are, you would achieve these goals best by deliberately seeking out and investigating the properties of the underlying biology (and cult
366.
by Crito 12y ago
Yeah, I took it as a very topical jab. That stuff has been in the news a lot recently.
367.
by Crito 12y ago
A solar-powered sea-plane would be pretty awesome. Probably not enough range to cross an ocean in one go, but you just land, do some fishing, then take off again the next day.
368.
by Crito 12y ago
Whether you want to call it mental illness or insanity (I am neither a doctor nor a lawyer, do I don't have any preference for either term..) , I cannot fathom how the second possibility that you list does not qualify. People who are
369.
by Crito 12y ago
Those movies in particular are notorious for being a mess in that regard. It's not just you. Look for action movies where the actors are able to do their own stunts, particularly when they are famed for it or are even athletes. Those
370.
by Crito 12y ago
The range safety officer has a button that they can press. I'm not sure if the rocket can do it on its own as well. Somewhat amusingly, the Russians do not use these systems. They launch from the desert in Kazakhstan, so they just le
371.
by Crito 12y ago
> "Even BP didn't get that big of a fine when they polluted half of the Atlantic Ocean." BP was not fined as much as they should have been, therefore the EU should go easy on all other companies from now on? How does th
372.
by Crito 12y ago
> "Is it an insult or a plea for reasoning?" The former. Possibly also the later, but definitely the former.
373.
by Crito 12y ago
Merlin 1C Vacuum had a regeneratively cooled combustion chamber but radiatively cooled expansion nozzle. I'm not sure if Merlin 1D Vacuum differs from this though.
374.
by Crito 12y ago
Just have to put those legs on struts sticking out the sides to give it a wider base!
375.
by Crito 12y ago
Maybe so. The paper mentions that they then used the CD-ROM The Way Things Work 2.0 to give their test subjects a more accurate view of how these things work. I actually gave one of my nephews a book from that series ( The New Way Thing
376.
by Crito 12y ago
> "Rozenblit and Keil (2002) have demonstrated that people tend to be overconfident in how well they understand how everyday objects, such as toilets [...]" I'd be really interested to see what misconceptions people had
377.
by Crito 12y ago
> "Gravitational assists can help, but they can also help you get other places." Without gravitational assists, you need ~30km/s to drop into the sun, and far less to go other places. With gravitational assists both can
378.
by Crito 12y ago
> "If it was difficult to hit things with large gravitational forces we wouldn't see very many comets in the night sky..." The difficulty does not come from the mass of the Sun. It comes from Earth's velocity aroun
379.
by Crito 12y ago
I don't think he is seriously suggesting that we blast nuclear waste out into space, only pointing out that it would be easier to do than throwing it into the sun. This emphasizes why "throw it into the sun" isn't a ver
380.
by Crito 12y ago
The ~30km/s figure is what you'd need to drop it straight into the sun, no spiraling involved. Gravitational assists can help, but they can also help you get other places. Getting to the sun would still be ridiculously hard compa
381.
by Crito 12y ago
"Why can't we launch waste into the sun?" doesn't really signal irrationality. If they prefaced it with "I believe the earth is 6000 years old and I wonder..." then maybe you'd have a point.
382.
by Crito 12y ago
That reminds me of the rock-paper-scissors robot from a while ago that always "wins" by watching the human hand to see what sign they are throwing, then throwing the countersign faster. It is so fast that unless you are watching
383.
by Crito 12y ago
> "Propaganda is by definition a lie." Not even close to true. Propaganda can be lies. It can also be half-truths, carefully selected truths, or even full truths (should those truths put the organization issuing the propa
384.
by Crito 12y ago
> "they will get jobs servicing each other as doctors, teachers, nurses" Are those robots going to create increased demand for doctors, teachers, and nurses, by virtue of automating away a welding job? Is your typical factor
385.
by Crito 12y ago
Ultimately better education isn't going to be good enough. 100 workers replaced by a robot won't all get 100 jobs fixing or making that robot. Buggy-whip factory workers may have found new jobs in car factories, but it would be
386.
by Crito 12y ago
A speech was even written for that possibility: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/08/26/160077053/the-e... I've heard it described as the "greatest speech that was never given&qu
387.
by Crito 12y ago
It is interesting that in western society (and perhaps society in general, I don't claim to know) cannibalism is considered one of the most horrifying things you can do... except in cases where it is necessary to stay alive. Pretty
388.
by Crito 12y ago
That's a bit cynical. I think at least a large portion of it is that people tend to believe that whatever skill sets they have are important. So a plumber thinks that basic plumbing knowledge is something everyone should have. Chef
389.
by Crito 12y ago
I wager so. Many commercial video games have plaintext script files buried in their installations. I am not in the habit of reading licenses very carefully, but I suspect more than a few of those do not lay out the right to view or modify
390.
by Crito 12y ago
> "his GNU software license is one of the most restrictive licenses out there." Of "open source" licenses perhaps. In the grand scheme of software licenses, it is pretty fucking permissive. Most software license

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