mandevil

48 ms·

601.
by mandevil 4y ago
Yes, which is why, prior to the development of the FDIC and other deposit insurance systems, every 20 years or so a whole bunch of banks would fail, all at once, and destroy the country or even the world's (depending on exactly how man
602.
by mandevil 4y ago
I don't understand how this is possible, since it was definitely in the VHS release. Maybe he meant the original master of the scene was missing? Again, it was in the VHS release, and on the DVD release that we own, so it was not like
603.
by mandevil 4y ago
"When Love is Gone" was not in the version of the movie shown in theaters, it was ONLY on home releases (one or two of them only had it available as special features, the original VHS release had it in the right place in the movie
604.
by mandevil 4y ago
Harry Frankfurt (a philosopher) wrote a fascinating essay back in 2005 "On Bullshit" that defined Bullshit as different from a Lie. A lie knows its a lie, and knows that there is a truth out there, and that fundamentally, truth ma
605.
by mandevil 4y ago
There are more members of US military bands than there are State Department Foreign Service officers- the workaday diplomats who process visa applications, help US citizens abroad, and negotiate things like the International Whaling Commiss
606.
by mandevil 4y ago
Goddard was obsessed with secrecy: he was convinced that everyone on the planet was trying to steal his ideas. That meant that he only worked with a few workmen (most of whom were related to his wife) who he trusted, he gave them the plans
607.
by mandevil 4y ago
As everyone has already pointed out, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is as close as you can get to the Big Bang. But to the larger point, these galaxies were suspected before, based on Hubble work. You see, the COBE satellite from
608.
by mandevil 4y ago
Because the Audi doesn't charge users $10,000-20,000USD for "Full Self Driving," that's why we talk about it so much! If you throw it in as a safety feature in your deluxe package, and describe it as such, we aren't
609.
by mandevil 4y ago
There is a reason that blocked-off HOV lanes are used: research has shown that slugging[1] will form spontaneously- and achieve the goal of actually reducing total number of car trips- it seems to need a bunch of things[2], and one of them
610.
by mandevil 4y ago
So, not this data exactly but broadly similar data (Japanese publications of differential GPS corrections) have been used to spot North Korean missile launches in the open source world. https://www.armscontrolwonk.com/archiv
611.
by mandevil 4y ago
The most important bad decisions in the Boeing case were made in 2011-13, when they promised that the 737 Max would not require a new type certificate for someone with a 737 cert already, and that it would use the new, larger, and more effi
612.
by mandevil 4y ago
Until last year I worked for a financial services company which was so big it's owner ran for President. While I was there, they were doing a major project to move key, irreplaceable core components off of big iron Solaris and AIX mach
613.
by mandevil 4y ago
This is why there are so many leaks from Facebook. My sister is a reporter and she says that people leak when they feel they can't influence the decision of the org, that they are a Cassandra who is being ignored by the organization. T
614.
by mandevil 4y ago
The current interpretation of the 1st Amendment is that anything less than "Fighting Words" (something that will “produce a clear and present danger of a serious intolerable evil that rises above mere inconvenience or annoyance”)
615.
by mandevil 4y ago
The actual error message in DOS or the back page of PC Magazine?
616.
by mandevil 4y ago
Oil changes for a Stratofortress in flight would be a real trick. You could do what the Keys Brothers did and build a catwalk for wingwalking out to the engines- not recommended!- or you could do more like what the Hacienda did and run oil
617.
by mandevil 4y ago
Two decades earlier, a previous record holder, the Curtis Robin Ole Miss, stayed in the air for 27 days using real aerial refueling: https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/curtiss-robin-... Fred and Al Key, brot
618.
by mandevil 4y ago
Yeah, to some extent- how much I'm not sure- Moore's Law became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Because everyone knew that transistor count was about to double, everyone- including the Wall Street investors- agreed that you needed to
619.
by mandevil 4y ago
I recall reading that modern chips use argon-neon-flourine lasers, (roughly 75% of the world's neon goes into the semiconductor industry) and ~50% of the world's neon comes from Ukraine. This is because the Haber process, necessar
620.
by mandevil 4y ago
Mir and ISS were up at the same time, but not manned at the same time. The last mission to Mir, Soyuz TM-30, came home on June 16, 2000, and Expedition 1 to the ISS launched on November 1st, 2000. The first component of the ISS, the Zarya,
621.
by mandevil 4y ago
The first time that Soviet and American spacemen were in space at the same time was Skylab SL-4 (space station) and the Soviet Soyuz 13, which never docked with a space station. This was the final flight to Skylab, and that crew left before
622.
by mandevil 4y ago
While there are simple US weapons that have been provided (things like TOW missiles, M777 howitzers, etc.) and a small handful of complex ones (the famous HIMARS) many of the weapons provided have actually been of Soviet manufacture- since
623.
by mandevil 4y ago
A lot of the teams support advertisers (the actual customer, not the users). They would be either a) keeping conversations such that advertisers want to have their brands next to them b) keeping relationships with advertisers or c) running
624.
by mandevil 4y ago
For two decades defaulting on your bonds was not be a big deal- witness Argentina. So a rando local politician thought it wouldn't be a big deal, because that's been most of his political career. And the way the bond market is now
625.
by mandevil 4y ago
I think the key is that most politicians (and honestly, just about everyone still of working age) haven't been in an economic environment like this one- not since the early 1980's four decades ago. Everyone today grew up in a low-
626.
by mandevil 4y ago
The ultimate reason is that security bug fixes are an absolute requirement, and unless someone is paying, most OSS providers aren't interested in doing multiple sets of bug fixes. That is the promise- and entire business model, honestl
627.
by mandevil 4y ago
The SEC definitely targets sudden, surprising stock moves, and looks for people who profited off them. (This is why one of Matt Levine's tongue-in-cheek 'rules for insider trading- this is not legal advice!' is never do it in
628.
by mandevil 4y ago
They aren't really in the business of fixing up a home, as other people have already said. The analogy for what they are trying to do is more like high-frequency trading (as the amazing and invaluable Matt Levine has pointed out for ye
629.
by mandevil 4y ago
Agreed that software development outsourcing rarely works!
630.
by mandevil 4y ago
Here is where the outsourcing happening in this story comes back to bite, though. It's basically impossible to write a good contract for an Agile development process. (The only time I've seen it at all is in gov't work, where

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