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FAA fines SpaceX for launch license violations
  • I have at least a little sympathy for SpaceX's position that the regulations are unfit for purpose if they need a modification to their licence to use a different fuel tank, that seems totally immaterial to the flight

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    ‘Appalling And Indefensible’: Elon Musk Incites Rage Online After Claiming No One Is ‘Trying to Assassinate Biden/Kamala’
  • Actually, I suspect he's implying that nobody's trying to assassinate Harris because all the democracy-hating assassins are on her side, or she's the one setting them up, or something to that effect.

    It's still the sort of slander which in a reasonable world he'd be called on, but that seems unlikely

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    Boeing’s Starliner lands on Earth – without its astronauts
  • They certainly won't be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren't expected to be there

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    Remember: GNU/Linux and other UNIX systems can make files that are case-sensitive, Windows can't make files that are case-sensitive
  • No, I'm arguing that the extra complexity is something to avoid because it creates new attack surfaces, new opportunities for bugs, and is very unlikely to accurately deal with all of the edge cases.

    Especially when you consider that the behaviour we have was established way before there even was a unicode standard which could have been applied, and when the alternative you want isn't unambiguously better than what it does now.

    "What is language" is a far more insightful question than you clearly intended, because our collective best answer to that question right now is the unicode standard, and even that's not perfect. Making the very core of the filesystem have to deal with that is a can of worms which a competent engineer wouldn't open without very good reason, and at best I'm seeing a weak and subjective reason here.

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    Remember: GNU/Linux and other UNIX systems can make files that are case-sensitive, Windows can't make files that are case-sensitive
  • The reason, I suspect, is fundamentally because there's no relationship between the uppercase and lowercase characters unless someone goes out of their way to create it. That requires that the filesystem contain knowledge of the alphabet, which might work if all you wanted was to handle ASCII in American English, but isn't good for a system which needs to support the whole world.

    In fact, the UNIX filesystem isn't ASCII. It's also not unicode. UNIX uses arbitrary byte strings, with special significance given to a very small number of bytes (just '/' and '\0', I think). That means people are free to label files in whatever way they like, and their terminals or other applications are free to render them in whatever way seems appropriate, without the filesystem having to understand unicode.

    Adding case insensitivity would therefore actually be significant and unnecessary complexity to add to the filesystem drivers, and we'd probably take a big step backwards in support for other languages

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    Any arguments against separating identity from instance/platform? (single identity across the fediverse)
  • That's going to be a problem whatever solution you come up with, because of the federated nature of the lemmy system.

    There's no central authority to hand out usernames, so if two people sign up to different instances with the same username, any design which didn't attach instance name to each username would fail. The only way around it would be for each instance to contact every other instance which exists, including the ones which haven't federated yet, and negotiate ownership of the new username, and that's just not possible

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    Lula says Elon Musk’s wealth does not mean world must accept his ‘far-right free-for-all’
  • The assesment that he's the wealthiest person on earth is pretty dubious, actually. The analyses which list the worlds wealthiest people always are, because they have to decide what counts as wealth and how to count it.

    Normally that's fairly easy, but for very powerful people (who, as you point out, the people at the top of those lists are) it gets murky because of things like stocks and options which they could liquidate in theory, but which would crash in value if they tried to actually do so. Does it still count as wealth if it only exists so long as you don't spend it?

    There are also people who's wealth isn't held in any currency, or gold, or stocks. How do you measure the wealth or power of a sovereign king, or any other kind of dictator? You certainly can't neatly put it in a scale alongside people who just have a dragon's horde of cash somewhere, that wouldn't be comparing like for like

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    [CSI Starbase] How To Prevent Raptors From Destroying Superheavy Pt.2 [80 minutes]
  • I would describe it as being in free-fall whenever it's not in being held up by any interaction with a solid surface, even indirectly. I'm not sure everyone would agree with my definition, but it's not a term you'll see used much in serious engineering precisely because it is a bit vague.

    For example, an aircraft in flight isn't in free-fall because it's being held up by the air, which is in turn held up by the ground. An aircraft (or spacecraft) which has no wings is being slowed down by air resistance, but not actually held up and is therefore in free-fall.

    An ascending rocket is generating forces which hold it up, rather than transferring forces to something which won't move (like the ground), so I would consider it to be in free-fall

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    [CSI Starbase] How To Prevent Raptors From Destroying Superheavy Pt.2 [80 minutes]
  • No, even when the engines are firing it's in free-fall. The only forces on the booster or fuel (aside from internal ones like gyroscopic or centrifugal dynamics) are thrust, control thrusters, and depending on the phase of flight drag & aerodynamic control.

    Thrust always points roughly along the length of the booster, and drag always acts against the direction of travel, so the external forces acting on the fuel are almost 100% up or down during all phases of flight. The only exceptions are manoeuvres when the attitude control systems is rotating the vehicle, either by grid-fin or thrusters, so any redistribution of the fuel or snow will be entirely driven by those movements, and their own inertia

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    [CSI Starbase] How To Prevent Raptors From Destroying Superheavy Pt.2 [80 minutes]
  • Excellent video & analysis, as always.

    I was highly irritated by the erroneous claim that things would settle to the earth-facing side of the tank though. The damn thing's in free-fall, the direction of the gravity vector is entirely irrelevant! The conclusions mostly still work, but it has more to do with jostling and slosh causing the snow to move, not gravity

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    Trump Specifically Asks Republicans Not To Vote In 2024
  • While we can all agree Trump is an ass, I think you've misunderstood this statement.

    He's not saying "it's important that republicans don't vote if we fail to solve the election fraud", he's saying "it's important to solve the fraud, because otherwise next time republicans won't be allowed to vote".

    He's claiming that republican votes won't be counted, or that they won't be allowed to place a vote at all, because the democrats will have rigged the system and/or deprived them of the right to vote

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    NASA Decides to Bring Starliner Spacecraft Back to Earth Without Crew
  • That's apparently less risky than riding back on Starliner

    Not necessarily. The dangers involved in coming home packed like unsuited sardines in the back of a Dragon only come into play if they need to evacuated the ISS to begin with, so they're saying the odds of abandoning the ISS and the Dragon capsule loosing it's atmosphere are better than the odds of a catastrophic failure of the Starliner

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    Signed up for Equifax to freeze my credit, password can not be longer than 20 characters
  • The actual length of the password isn't the problem. If they were "doing stuff right" then it would make no difference to them whether the password was 20 characters or 200, because once it was hashed both would be stored in the same amount of space.

    The fact that they've specified a limit is strong evidence that they'renot doing it right

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    Starliner spacesuits not compatible with SpaceX Dragon
  • The crew of Apollo 13 weren't really stranded, as such. They were far from home and not sure if they had the means to get home before the supplies ran out, which is a different problem

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