pdonis

15 ms·

301.
by pdonis 6mo ago
> It's a profession where you intentionally kill people Not being an astronaut (or being a test pilot, for that matter). That's the context in which he was speaking.
302.
by pdonis 6mo ago
> the gif you saw makes it look that way. Makes it look what way? Watch the NASA video carefully. It's clear that, even before the "loop" begins, Artemis is slowed down and is soon going to reverse direction relative to
303.
by pdonis 6mo ago
> This is incorrect No, it's not. You aren't responding to what I actually said. See below. > the “free return” would have happened if they launched entirely in the wrong direction. But it would not have been a free re
304.
by pdonis 6mo ago
> The pull of the moon had very little effect. No, it had a very significant effect: it's what made possible the free return trajectory while observing the far side of the moon.
305.
by pdonis 6mo ago
My father, who flew combat missions for the Navy in Vietnam and then became a test pilot, told me after the loss of Columbia that if he had had a chance to make that flight and spend 7 days in Earth orbit, even knowing that he'd burn u
306.
by pdonis 6mo ago
The Smithsonian article on John Young that you linked to is a good one. The only John Young quote they didn't include that I wish they had was his response to the proposal to make STS-1 an on purpose RTLS abort: "Let's not pr
307.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> I am guessing that you believe that the "can he be trusted" is an editorialisation Yes. > that points towards him being untrustworthy. That points towards the article itself raising a question--which means the article
308.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> I genuinely think the way they did this was perfect. Evidently we disagree. I responded about that to another commenter downthread.
309.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> the article should just present information, ideally in a balanced way, without author's bias, so that you can decide for yourself. I get that this is the claimed ideal of journalism, at least for straight reporting. The problem
310.
by pdonis 7mo ago
Oh, I agree that's the correct answer. I just don't see the article actually ending up with that answer. I see it waffling. Basically, the article ends up saying that, well, we told you about all this dodgy stuff, but what he&#x27
311.
by pdonis 7mo ago
Does the article ever actually answer the title question?
312.
by pdonis 7mo ago
Because their strategy for getting their applications in front of everyone has always been to get Windows in front of everyone, and that meant having to support third party applications that they chose not to try to incorporate into their o
313.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> Office only came much later In the sense of being marketed as a single integrated package, yes, I agree. I was using the term loosely to refer to the apps themselves (Word & Excel were the first two, as you note, the others came
314.
by pdonis 7mo ago
MS has never been a software platform company. That's the fundamental reason behind the issue the article talks about. MS has always been a software application company. Windows was never anything more than a way to sell MS applicati
315.
by pdonis 7mo ago
The statement I made about acceleration due to gravity was with reference to an inertial frame centered on the Sun, in which there is no centrifugal force. The video you reference takes that viewpoint during its first part. The claim about
316.
by pdonis 7mo ago
The exact difference in clock rates is not constant, because the orbits are not perfectly circular and the Earth is not a perfect sphere. So both the altitude and speed of the satellite, and the Earth's gravitational potential, are var
317.
by pdonis 7mo ago
I think the clocks on board Orion are set to Houston time, which would be 5 hours behind UTC (because of Daylight Saving). But I'm not sure. I would expect the EXIF time to be in whatever time zone the spacecraft's clocks are set
318.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> It is the first time since 1972 that humans have travelled outside of the Earth's orbit. They mean outside of low Earth orbit (which basically means further away than the ISS). The phrasing is not ideal. > Earth's gravi
319.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> the light is coming from all the light sources in the universe, plus the moon And all the others are negligible by many orders of magnitude compared to the moon. So it's really just the moon as far as this photo is concerned (ex
320.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> Beyond cities in Iberia and along the coast of Africa, most of what we can see would be reflected light from the Moon? Yes, exactly.
321.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> If that user doesn't exist and the user who values it the least values it at $100 In a competitive market, which is the case being talked about in what you responded to, that's impossible. If the production cost is $1, more
322.
by pdonis 7mo ago
In other words, you agree with me that the tech companies don't know what their services are worth to users . They know what their ads are worth to advertisers , which is not the same thing. They also basically don't care what
323.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> In a competitive market the price only depends on the value to users in the sense that it's required to be lower than that to make any sales. That's a restatement of what I said: price equals marginal cost equals marginal v
324.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> Will non-monetized old school "forums" escape the wrath of "social media" bans for children? I haven't seen anyone trying to apply such bans to them. Have you? > Will HN? I guess we'd have to ask th
325.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> Was Facebook social media before it started adding ads or not? AFAIK it's had ads for practically its entire existence, and other than venture capital investments, ads have always been virtually its entire revenue.
326.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> there is discussion and a sense of community here That's been true of discussion forums for longer than the Internet has been available to the public. I was on discussion forums over dialup in the 1980s. The term "social me
327.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> What something is worth and what it costs are two different things. Yes, surplus is a thing, I agree. But that doesn't materially change what I said. The thing still has to be worth at least as much as it costs for users to be w
328.
by pdonis 7mo ago
I would say "social media" is a site that is trying to monetize your data, and using convenience as a lure to get you to give it your data to monetize. ("Data" here includes everything you post there.)
329.
by pdonis 7mo ago
> You do realize Hacker News is social media right? No, I don't. HN is a news and discussion site. It's not trying to monetize my data. > unscrupulous data crawlers have been mining HN's datasets for years They&#x27
330.
by pdonis 7mo ago
I think this is exactly what's been happening ever since the ad-supported business model for the Internet began to spread. None of the big tech companies know what their services are actually worth to their users. The only way to reall

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