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mkwt , to Not The Onion in Trump Suggests Planes Can’t Fly When It’s Not Sunny

For a while the only electric aircraft around in the news was that solar flyer. Things are a bit different now.

mkwt , to Technology in NASA and Boeing say Starliner astronauts ‘are not stranded,’ but will be on the ISS for a few more weeks

Except the "emergency capsule" is all of them, including Starliner. Because Starliner is perfectly capable of returning to earth safely.

Because every thruster that has shut down has hot fired okay, and the known helium leaks still leave enough margin to cover several multiples of the 5 hours or so of RCS operation that you need to get to landing.

mkwt , to Not The Onion in Boeing says its space mission is 'going well' as astronauts stranded

This comes up on every one of these articles. The astronauts are in no way stranded.

There's a common sense operating rule on the station: every person on board ISS must have a dedicated seat in a ride home that is ready to undock and leave within 30 minutes notice.

Right now, the Starliner capsule is certified and ready for that role for the two test pilots. The crew dragon and soyuz are docked to handle the rest of the station crew.

Earlier today there was an emergency shelter event on the station when some debris got unusually close. In this type of event all crew evacuate to the escape spacecraft and close hatches. So if something does hit the station, it's less likely someone gets hurt during a depressurization.

Starliner served as an emergency shelter for this exercise, because it is certified for emergency reentry, and the five identified helium leaks are not close to preventing it from returning safely.

To get from ISS to a landing site requires no more than 5 hours of RCS operation. There is plenty of margin in the helium system to cover 5 hours.

mkwt , to Games in Sci-fi racing platformer Distance gets a surprise update with Steam Deck improvements

My understanding is that the second Distance campaign is mostly recycled Nitronic Rush levels.

mkwt , to Programmer Humor in It's called attaining divinity

When the gp's book says that C is a third generation language: I would guess the first generation is Fortran and the second generation contains ALGOL and BCPL. C was heavily influenced by BCPL. (get it? C comes after B)

mkwt , to No Stupid Questions in How does generative AI create convincing lighting in images?

The deal with LLMs is that it's very difficult to say which piece of training material went into which output. Everything gets chopped up and mixed, and it's computationally difficult to run backwards.

My understanding of the image generators is that they operate one pixel at a time too, looking only at neighboring pixels. So in that sense, it's not correct to say they understand the context of anything.

mkwt , to No Stupid Questions in Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed?

Like, there's lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn't mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie

The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.

mkwt , to World News in Putin warns South Korea: Sending killer weapons to Ukraine would be a ‘big mistake’

Big Smoke, you make big mistake.

mkwt , to Privacy in [USA] Appeals court rules that cops can physically make you unlock your phone

The wrinkle in this case is that the thumb print giver was in parole. The conditions of parole stated that failure to divulge phone pass codes on phones could result in arrest and phone seizure "pending further investigation". The parole conditions didn't say anything about forcible thumb print taking.

So the logic here seems to be:

  • If he had agreed to unlock the phone then the result would be the same.
  • If he refused to unlock the phone, that is a legitimate grounds for arrest. Fingerprinting is a routine part of being arrested, so there's really no harm if it's done on a phone in a patrol car. Either way, the result would end up about the same.
mkwt , to World News in Woman gets fine for owing maid 3 years’ salary in ‘safekeeping’ arrangement - TODAY

Fine? That sounds like a thirteenth amendment situation.

Edit: not US, no thirteenth amendment.

mkwt , to No Stupid Questions in How do you get people to wash their vegetables when you're at their house and you don't wanna seem rude?

If you add the fat first, the mushrooms are going to release so much liquid that you just have to boil that off anyway.

mkwt , to Movies in New ‘Lord of the Rings’ Movie Planned: Here is What We Know About 'The Hunt for Gollum'

I believe the story is that the original three Lord of The Rings films were licensed under an old film option deal (as in the option predated Peter Jackson working on the project). That deal was made when the Tolkien estate was under different management or something. And the current regime is not doing any film licensing for Silmarillion or anything else.

I think this is also related to the Rings of Power Amazon series. I think they sublicensed the rights to the LOTR appendices from the same movie option that the Peter Jackson films were made from, but they couldn't get access to a Silmarillion.

mkwt , to memes in Don't like the sound of that

The eastern front was a lot more dynamic and had fewer trenches.

mkwt , to Not The Onion in Trump demands drug test for Biden ahead of first debate

These are both old men... They both take a lot of drugs. This is America. Have you seen an older person who doesn't have weekly pill organizer?

mkwt , to World News in Slovakia’s Prime Minister Fico in life-threatening condition after being shot multiple times | CNN

A big part of WWI is that the web of treaties and alliances were all secret, as in classified information by each country.

NATO is not a secret. The membership roster and terms and conditions are known to all, including potential adversaries like Mr. Putin. This has a major effect on stabilizing international relations because nobody has to guess what NATO would do.

Despite his rhetoric, we know that Putin understands how NATO works, because he has been pulling materiel out of Kaliningrad. This leaves the Russian exclave extremely vulnerable to an invasion from NATO territory. But Putin is not worried about that, probably because he actually trusts NATO to follow the NATO charter.

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