p1t1o

What is a "genuine" astronaut? Do you have to actually fly the ship to be a "genuine astronaut"? Do you have to put on a spacesuit and leave the ship to be a "genuine astronaut"? If you've got the balls to strap yourself to hundreds of tons of explosive and to hope that the resulting explosion flings you into orbit, and then keep your head for long enough to provide payload related expertise, then yeah, I think you're a genuine astronaut

A complaint. So normally, the humorous trope is how irritating it is to be IT support for people less IT-savvy. Which we can all relate to, is humorous and is a recognised drawback of being IT support - sometimes you have to help stupid people and sometimes life just conspires to be difficult. ButI would like to shed light on the converse, here is a simulated reproduction of what I have sometimes experienced: Me:"Hi, please can you help me with this problem, I want to setup a conference call account to do A+B+C that my colleagues can do as a matter of routine. Here are some more details XYZ, this is what I need XYZ. If it is relevant here are three screenshots. This is what happens when I try XYZ (with screenshots). Please can you help me to do the thing I need? Let me know if you need ANY further information or clarity on this" IT: "7." Me: "Umm yeah, I cant see a 7" IT: "Try 42" Me: "Yeah, no 42 wont work because of XYZ as I explained" IT: "Zippity bop" Me: "Im not sure what that means or refers to" IT: "heres a link to a different question" Me: "Thanks but thats not...." IT: "You will have to log a ticket with the global helpdesk" Me: "Ok, will do, thanks for your "help" No Im not bashing all IT professionals or even my IT guy, but dang if this tiny problem isnt taking a lot of effort to solve. Prime complaint material.

Thats what I thought later on, at the time I was 17-18 and pretty green about things. But it was pretty old and a BMW, the value of the car could easily have been less than the cost of an official replacement (my folks are not mechanically minded enough to go unofficial) but we probably could have had it swapped out somewhere for a reasonable price. But again, it was pretty old, I think maybe 150,000 miles on it? Would have been nice to have fixed it up to last a couple more years though. It was an old company car that my Dad purchased, it got a lot of use. Next company car was a 330 touring, which was fast. We drove it to the Alps a couple of times, glorious. Unfortunately he left the company a couple years later so no more company cars and only drove my Mum's Ford Ka since then, up until now. It was the train mostly - £12 return train ticket plus 2x£1.50 on the bus, every day (season ticket for the train would have saved me...5%? but without any flexibility, ie: no savings if Im on holiday or if Im not working from the office). So about £15 a day, or about £300 a month. Car lease costs roughly £190 a month, insurance £80 and petrol about £80 a month too. So the total cost is a little more but then I use it for much more than just my work commute.

I think it might be highly dependant on hardware and software environment because I hear these reports about intrusive updates and updates that break things but I have had W10 for about a year and have seen an update dialogue only a handful of times and always as I am shutting down. I know my experience is not necessarily everyones, its what makes me think that hardware/software arrangements make the difference. For one thing, one of the first things I did was turn off Cortana - its her job to intrude and tell you stuff. My current machine is the least crashy setup I have owned so far...I mean it *does* have this thing where it crashes at total random about I dunno once every 50 hours or so? Totally random as far as I can tell. Oh and it sounds like....like if machines became a sentient race....it sounds like if you captured a sentient machine and subjected it to the worst torture imaginable. Like if you were executing a 1990's modem by electric chair, thats the sound it makes when it crashes. At full volume. So yeah, least crashy

Of my car? Sure, its a little grey Fiat Abarth 595, whom I have named "Beep-beep". Its a lease so not technically fully "mine" but its apparently the best way to own a car these days. It costs me the same monthly cost as the bus/train to/from work was costing me (shows the state of public transport in the UK). Its not my first time driving btw, been driving since about 1999 but this is *my* car not my Dad's Looks almost identical to this (No stripe on mine and my brake calibers are grey): The car I would call my "first" car, that I learned in and drove regularly would be my Dad's old 1989 BMW 320 which looked very similar to this: And this is big - I have literally just realised (because I was googling the picture and I remember the registration number to get the right year) that it was a decade old when I started driving it - I knew it was oldish but not THAT old! It ran like a dream! (until the head gasket blew whilst I was driving it, writing it off, so that explains that....) Learn something new every day! Oh and she was called Julie.

Does anyone know - can it actually harm your car if you run out of fuel whilst driving? I have my first car and I have...er..."tested" the fuel gauge a couple of times...first there a red light, then a second red light, then the needle is just stuck to zero...but I can apparently still get a few miles out.

I had to ban myself from twitter....its too much. With twitter you are able to disagree with anyone on earth and I found I just did not have the time. When I found myself trying to engage the literal president of the united states I was like "Ok something is off here...no good can come of this"

I believe that group has been mentioned before for being hostile. I'll say what I said back then - probably a reason they are hanging out on their own and not here. Some thing we are, for good reason, prevented from talking about in certain ways here: politics, race, hatred, violence, making personal attacks, encouraging criminal activity etc. That tells me something about the motivation for setting up a seperate group.

Did you remember to divert life support to propulsion? (turn off the AC )

The Schwarzchild radius is just the radius you need to squeeze the entire mass of the object into, in order for it to collapse into a black hole. For object like our Sun, the Schwarzchild radius is largely irrelevant, it doesnt do anything nor is the mass underneath it anything special. If you remove mass from an object, the Schwarzchild (Is there a shorter notation for that??) radius shrinks.

Wow thats a lot of antimatter, something big will happen...lemme just google some stuff real quick... Ok, so, Im going to assume 1 solar mass, just for simplicity, but you can scale it up without changing my point too much: 0.002 (0.1% antimatter + 0.1% matter) solar mass, converted to energy, is about 3.6e44J The sun's current power output is about 4e26W So even if you dribble the 0.1% antimatter into the star over a year, the resulting energy release will increase the energy output by 2-3billion times In other words, you will blow up the star. Or at least severely disrupt it probably to the point of complete dispersal, the biggest problem with this prediction is that the annihilation may not be complete as unreacted antimatter may be blown away. Matter-antimatter annihilation is powerful and we are talking about amounts measured in solar masses! I dunno what would happen if it was a neutron star, but its such a colossal energy release that I will still go with "blows up". There are ways in nature though, that a star can slowly lose its mass. There are examples in astronomy of binary pairs where one object is a neutron star or black hole - in close proximity to a more regular star, tidal effects from the intense gravity of the dense object can strip away mass from the normal star, eventually causing significant effects. Depending on various things, many things can happen, and a supernova is one of the possible outcomes.

Subjective! We cant make genetic supermen or grossly alter the genetic makeup of a living thing, but theres a ton of stuff that we are capable of even now, such as engineer bacteria to manufacture drugs for us, and I was working on that (in a quality control capacity) over a decade ago. The thing is, if you are actually performing it, MOST science, like 99% IS boring. 99 out of 100 discoveries *are* underwhelming and discovering them is even more mind numbing. Endlessly repeated experiments, piles and piles of documenting almost identical things, doing the same things over and over for a long time and maybe not even getting a result. That is most ALL science. But you are working towards expanding the sum total body of human knowledge and yes, boring things do lead to exciting discoveries once in a while, and even the underwhelming findings and results can be very illuminating. But to dub an entire field of science as boring above all others just shows ignorance, ignorance of the field and ignorance of science in general. (Or more generously, it was a throwaway comment that didnt mean anything.) You want a boring field? Get into regulatory affairs. Then come back and tell me that genetics is boring. And Im not even that particularly big a fan of genetics.

Its not Yusaku Maezawa's space tourist business though, right? The whole thing bothers me, and for that reason, Im out.

I know you wanted a discussion of the most "inspiring" artists, but honestly I cant get behind Elon's super-marketing. I have too low an opinion of Elon to contribute much more without being a total downer.

Short answer - Whilst water vapour does have a greenhouse effect, it also tends to condense and fall out of the sky. So rather than production of water vapour being a problem, it is the average temperature of the globe that affects the held water vapour content of the atmosphere, so in that regard, it is relevant to global climate change discussions, but more as a symptom rather than a cause. Increase water vapour production (with hydrogen cars) and all you do is increase rainfall. But if other persistent greenhouse gases cause a global temperature increase, the capacity of the atmosphere to hold water vapour increases, adding its greenhouse effect. Potential for a feedback loop here is the basis for a "runaway greenhouse effect". But that is worst-case scenario territory. Its also worth noting that hydrocarbon exhaust contains significant amounts of water vapour already but CO2 is still the main gas of concern.

To be honest....calling that constructed term for that protein a "word" is like saying that I dont live in a "house", I live in a brickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickDOORbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickWINDOWbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickANOTHERWINDOWbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrickbrick...... ....etc

I used to play the Portal ending song at parties

As it happens Im replaying through the remastered versions as i speak. EXCELLENT games. No the learning curve is not too bad, compared to KSP its a cinch. Its nothing like KSP at all, except its space-related. To be honest its not the most complicated game, but that doesnt make it boring. Actually quite a good game to introduce you to RTSs.

Worth noting that at the extreme nose, the Shkval has a flat plate and some other features to generate the supercavitation bubble, the fluid dynamics here are a whole other kettle of fish.

When some people say "AI" they mean a superintelligent entity with immense capability, near omnipotence, the ability to roam around the internet as if it were TRON etc. Me, I say AI could come in as many forms as there are different people. I say, Artificial Stupidity comes way before Artificial Intelligence. Do we think the first "true" AI will be nearer to the mind of a god, or a child? Ok so it wont be literally be like a child because it wont be a human baby, but i doubt very much it will have god-like abilities, for a long time. By then, hopefully we will have a better idea how to best go about it. Add to that the bunch of different definitions of "AI" and its a tricky question indeed. The first AI will likely be the stupidest AI to ever exist, that is for sure.

This statement is not correct, although it depends on what you mean by "pointy" and "rounded". Not all areas of fluid dynamics are equal, hence a 747 airliner has a rounded nose and the Concorde was super-pointy, both were designed to be optimal in different regimes. Hydrodynamics has its own rules so optimal shapes are different again. In the case of torpedos there are other consideration as well, such as optimising for transmission of sonar signals. Modern sonar use a phased array of transducers which prefer a flat plane: There is also a rumour that a flat nose profile can facilitate a cavitation effect which would reduce skin drag along the fuselage of the weapon. Not a dramatic supercavitation like with the "Shkval" but similar. And finally, different types of torpedos have different missions, some are faster and some slower, some for shallow/surface/antiship and some for deep-diving/antisub, long/short range, ship/sub/air launched/dropped, and some are multi-purpose, so there are a lot of design trade-offs. Here's some bedtime reading (note this is from 1972, it may not entirely cover modern torpedos): http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/744314.pdf (Torpedos are borderline strategic weapons, so i expect there is a fair amount of stuff that we wont see due to it being classified, eg: the drag coefficients of modern weapons etc.)

Man, can you believe its 13798654378 already? Seems like it was 13798654368 just yesterday

Dont worry, thats not what I mean at all, and acting is a different kettle of fish altogether, if you are acting, you are supposed to be pretending to be something you are not. The "logical conclusion" is not always a linear extrapolation to infinity. But...if you met an actor who played a soldier and he started telling you how he knows what it is like to serve in Afghanistan because he played a soldier in the new "transporter" movie, you might think he was being a bit of a butt, right? I don't know if you'd call that "cultural appropriation, but its something. I find it hard to express these things exactly so Imma quit before I really offend someone Rest assured, I am of the opinion that the vast majority of cultural crossover, sharing and expression is a good and healthy thing.

No? In my example, its not just that hes singing about something that he doesnt have a reference for, hes singing about something that he hasnt earned the right to sing about, which makes it disrespectful. What I dont mean, is that any white rapper is appropriating. Anyhoo, as i said, its a minefield, my previous schpiel was just how I see it Academic context does not always match the colloquial use, and one is often far more prevalent than the other. For instance, "cultural appropriation" in a social context is usually a negative, or an insult, but I can imagine using it in an academic context with none of those flags attached.