freshair

> To the extent that high value workers knew that they were treasure to be looted they might have decided that the US was a least worse option.

Yes, that lines up with von Braun's account of his motivations.

> We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.

I'm not particularly convinced by this man's praise of America and talk of Christianity, I think he was brown-nosing just a little bit... but it does seem clear he preferred America to the Soviets.

Here are some quick links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Group#1991_Soviet_coup_d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat...

The gist of it is in August of 1991, hardline Soviet leaders, opposed to political reform, attempted a coup. As part of this coup, the elimination of Yeltsin was planned. Yeltsin was inside the Russian White House, which was surrounded by a very large crowd of civilians who opposed the coup. KGB chairman and leader of the coup, Vladimir Kryuchkov, ordered the KGB's spetzna (Alfa) to fight their way through the crowd of civilians into the Russian White House to eliminate Yeltsin. Alfa showed up to do the job, but upon seeing and mingling with the crowd of civilians, decided against slaughter.

Incidentally, Alfa is also the group that in 1979 stormed the Tajbeg Palace in Kabul and assassinated Hafizullah Amin, starting the Soviet-Afghan War.

"were taken" suggests they had no say in the matter, which is not true at least in the case of many.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...

von Braun and his team specifically sought out Americans to surrender to. Characterizing a surrender as "theft" (as though people are property?!) is truly bizarre.

What is this whitewashing? The Soviet Union never stopped assassinating people, and the practice clearly continued into present day Russia. Boris Yeltsin was one whim away from being assassinated in 1991 on orders from the KGB; the only reason it didn't happen is because the Alfa group commanders decided not to be bloodthirsty that day.

Just how many $5/mo subscriptions do you expect people buy, and how much does that all add up to per year?

The privilege here is real.

General anesthesia is fraught with peril. Every time somebody is put under they're dicing with death.

> Shouldn’t they have a paper-based/offline downtime procedure for this?

If they did, I would expect their employees to be out of practice with such methods since they weren't working that way day-to-day. Unless they're running regular "all computers are down"-drills to keep their employees sharp, downtime was probably inevitable.

Does it really make a difference, with respect to whether they should be kicked off HackerOne? Incompetence and disorganization is no excuse for what is essentially (if not literally) wage theft.

Exactly right. The American government considers associations inferred from this "metadata" to be sufficient evidence to execute people via drone.

Depleted uranium has indeed been used in airplanes. Some models of 747 have a ton or so of depleted uranium, though I believe this practice was phased out in later models.

It's not just planes though. Some sailboats have been made with DU keels. Usually lead is used, but DU would presumably allow for a smaller (thinner?) keel.

> Also, slightly unrelated but Cloudflare protected websites are almost impossible to access via tor, the captcha never succeeds.

Yes, I've never understood why it's seemingly so important to CAPTCHA me before serving me less than 100kb of read only plain jane HTML. What sort of "attack" is this stopping? I'm pretty sure the CAPTCHA itself is bigger than half the sites it blocks me from reading.

I did some more research and it seems I am substantially correct; paying a ransom to a terrorist organization is illegal.

Is this the reason Hydrogen is grouped with the alkali metals on the periodic table?

Yeah, that's a bizarre headline. I'm not sure it's wrong, but it's quite strange.

Edit: I'm not sure actually right either. It was not the act of eating that transported the bodies; rather the bodies were brought there so they could be eaten.

"Hyenas dragged 9 Neanderthals to a cave to eat them."

If the mugger isn't bluffing, then he'll get your money one way or the other. This makes it different from paying ransoms.

Furthermore, a corporation's bottom line is not truly comparable to a human life. However it is my understanding that paying ransoms to save human lives is technically illegal to. If paying a ransom to save your family member's life is illegal, then corporations paying ransoms to protect their finances should certainly be illegal.

> How does anyone justify these obscure tokens and coins being worth billions.

The Greater Fool Theory. This stops working when you run out of fools, but the notion of "there's another sucker born every minute" probably keeps the ball rolling for a while.

Until high ranking government officials start getting very length prison sentences for this sort of shit, I doubt it will ever get better.

I don't think it has anything to do with energy or the environment. I think Elon Musk distancing himself from Bitcoin is a consequence of the recent spat of highly publicized ransomware attacks using bitcoin. Elon Musk is connected to the military-industrial complex; it is plausible the federal government has given him forewarning of an impending war on crypto currencies, to make sure their asset, the guy who launches lots of their satellites, doesn't get caught in the crossfire.

This is pure speculation of course.

Maybe this could work for some. Personally, if I watch more than a few movies in a week I begin to feel like I'm losing my mind. I think variety is key, and not just having a variety of movies. Mix in some books and video games (particularly ones that foster creativity) and I think the odds of success will be much higher.

> These are the people that have been selected to be astronauts. How often have you seen one have a breakdown during a mission?

I'm not sure about mental breakdowns per se, but there has been some insubordination. I can't recall which at the moment, but one of the Gemini astronauts during an EVA refused to get back into the capsule until he was plead with. Perhaps this could be categorized as a mental breakdown. (Edit: It was Ed White: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_4#Extra-vehicular_activ... )

There was also that well publicized incident in 2007 where an astronaut's life unraveled and their career was destroyed, but that wasn't during a mission.

I fear the US government might allow Elon Musk get away with anything, as long as he keeps launching satellites for the military.

Perhaps the niche for a space elevator is bulk passenger transit. An elevator could perhaps ferry more people than a reusable lander, while not turning them into goo as the g-forces of a railgun might.

This use of the word 'handy' reminds me of the classic Red Green Show quip: "If women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy."

I have always taken this to mean that if you aren't good to look at, you can still make yourself appealing by being good at things. There is a possible double entendre with foreplay, but I never considered this joke to be suggesting unconsensual groping (I think that's the implication being suggested above?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Green_Show#Handyman_Co...

Maybe so, you could be right. But if this man is taking contracts from the general public, I think that must be a good lead.

Maybe my grandchildren will somehow have better luck than I did. Archive.org doesn't have several forums I used to post on. I'd like to get copies of my old posts, but gave up on that years ago. I did manage to track down the owner of one of the forums, but he had no backups.

"Everything stays on the internet forever" is a good cautionary principle, but isn't a strict reality.

Unless the hitman has decided to retire, it's probably only a matter of time before they catch him using good old fashioned detective work. For instance, investigators might be able to catch the hitman in a sting operation, if they know what marketplace the hitman sells his services on.

> "A space elevator makes no sense on the moon. First of all the orbit is unstable and you would need constant station keeping."

In a typical space elevator, the counterweight end of a space elevator is not in orbit. The center of mass of a space elevator would be above geostationary orbit, so the counterweight would be moving substantially faster than orbital speed at its altitude. A space elevator is held taut by centrifugal "force".

For the Moon it would work a bit different; the Moon doesn't spin fast enough for a purely centrifugal elevator. Instead the elevator would pass through one of the Lagrange points, in effect being held taut between the gravitational pulls of Earth and the Moon.

The Lagrange points aren't stable orbits either, but technically the space elevator would be going through a Lagrange point, not sitting inside that region in orbit. I am not sure how much station keeping would be required. You might still be right overall here.

In this analogy I am still a hypocrite but I'm still dead-right, so sure.

Manned suborbital launches are little more than glorified pogo-stick rides. This has been true ever since America tossed Alan Shepard into the air as desperate PR damage control after the Soviets put Yuri Gagarin into orbit.

If nothing else, "New Shepard" is appropriately named.