slowhand09

Why does it take 10 days? Because it's not powered the whole way. You fire the engines briefly from earth to get to near-escape velocity, then coast to the moon, all the while slowing down because earth's gravity is pulling you back. It's like kicking a ball up a hill to get it into a dip over the top: you need to kick it hard enough to just get over the hill - i.e. when the moon's gravity is stronger at that point than earth's. If you went powered all the way you'd need a lot more fuel, and you'd also need even more fuel to slow you down when you got there.

Two what?

Two yutes?

What?

Ohhh... Youths... Two youths...

I'll see myself out.

Very Cool! I had Smalltalk-80 back in the mid 80s and loved it. Prob forgot most by now tho. Just cool you've made it a thing again.

Waiting for an obligatory WinampAI post because... It Really Whips the Llama's Ass.

I spent approx 1 year working on a very hush project at FDA. It (I shit you not) had requirements to allow rerouting of drug application and progress reviews (workflow system) around list of folks determined to be overly zealous in ensuring requirements were met. On top of that, our contract was terminated with one week notice (we met every milestone) and was awarded to the project manager's husband's company. My company threatened to sue and was awarded the entire contract amount.

I've long been a fan of HP Voyager series calculators. I used an HP-11c daily at work years ago. I still have it, an HP-15c, and and HP-12c. The 11c and 15c are both probably still on their 2nd set of batteries, after 40+ years.

Interesting. Nobody writes about the Rural Electrification project which was to run electricity to very remote farms, then high speed internet to them. Turns out satellite (or Starlink) can do it for a tiny fraction of their budget. Also, nobody writes about the food pyramid which is totally non-science based. These are under USDA tho, not directly USAID. Interestingly enough, USDA works for Big Agriculture producers to, not for consumers.

This is more leftist propaganda from a leftist rag becoming more irrelevant daily. If only they could employ journalist to research and write articles.

When I started we had a clear distinction between titles and the duties associated:

Assistant (entry level)

Associate (3-5 yrs)

Research (7 or more yrs)

Senior (typically >10yrs)

We transitioned from Programmer to Software Engineer during my 1st 10 yrs. It was a sore point for other company employees because we had nearly as many electrical engineers as programmers. They weren't happy with us becoming "engineers".

"53 teeth are from one shark and experts estimate the shark would have been close to 50 feet long."

Chang resecured himself to the space station and made his way to the main hatch while Huan brought Tiangong-3’s weapons online. The station crew had realized they were moving to war footing twelve hours ago when Huan switched off the live viz feed of their activities. But it still felt slightly unreal. Once the taikonauts were all inside the station, Huan powered up the weapons module. The chemical oxygen iodine laser, or COIL, design had originally been developed by the U.S. Air Force in the late 1970s. It had even been flown on a converted 747 jumbo jet so the laser ’s ability to shoot down missiles in midair could be tested. But the Americans had ultimately decided that using chemicals in enclosed spaces to power lasers was too dangerous. The Directorate saw it differently. Two modules away from the crew, a toxic mix of hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide was being blended with gaseous chlorine and molecular iodine. This was really it, thought Chang as he watched the power indicators turn red. There was no turning back once the chemicals had been mixed and the excited oxygen began to transfer its energy to the weapon. They would have forty-five minutes to act and then the power would be spent. The firing protocol for mankind’s first wartime shots in space was well rehearsed. The targets marked in the firing solution had been identified, prioritized, and tracked for well over a year in increasingly rigorous drills the crew eventually realized were not just to support war games down on Earth. The long hours spent in the lab would finally pay off. “Ready to commence firing sequence,” said Huan. “Confirm?” One by one, the other taikonauts checked in from their weapons stations. Chang touched the photo taped to the wall in front of him. His fingers lingered on the image of his beaming wife and their grinning eight-year-old son. The smiling Ming, missing his two front teeth, wore his father ’s blue air force officer ’s hat. What the photo did not show was how upset his wife had been when he’d given Ming that hat the night before. She thought it made her son look like a prop in a Directorate propaganda piece. He moved his hand away from the photo and began his part of the operation, monitoring the targeting sequence. He startled even Huan when he cried out, “Ready!” For years, military planners had fretted about antisatellite threats from ground-launched missiles, because that was how both the Americans and the Soviets had intended to take down each other ’s satellite networks during the Cold War. More recently, the Directorate had fed this fear by developing its own antisatellite missiles and then alternating between missile tests and arms-control negotiations that went nowhere, keeping the focus on the weapons based below. The Americans should have looked up. Chang snuck another look at the photo and caught Huan pausing, his trigger finger lingering above the red firing button. He appeared to be savoring the moment. Then Huan gently pressed the button. A quiet hum pervaded the module. No crash of cannon or screams of death. Only the steady purr of a pump signified that the station was now at war. The first target was WGS-4, a U.S. Air Force wideband gapfiller satellite. Shaped like a box with two solar wings, the 7,600-pound satellite had entered space in 2012 on top of a Delta 4 rocket launched from Cape Canaveral. Costing over three hundred million dollars, the satellite offered the U.S. military and its allies 4.875 GHz of instantaneous switchable bandwidth, allowing it to move massive amounts of data. Through it ran the communications for everything from U.S. Air Force satellites to U.S. Navy submarines. It was also a primary node for the U.S. Space Command. The Pentagon had planned to put up a whole constellation of these satellites to make the network less vulnerable to attack, but contractor cost overruns had kept the number down to just six. The space station’s chemical-powered laser fired a burst of energy that, if it were visible light instead of infrared, would have been a hundred thousand times brighter than the sun. Five hundred and twenty kilometers away, the first burst hit the satellite with a power roughly equivalent to a welding torch’s. It melted a hole in WGS-4’s external atmospheric shielding and then burned into its electronic guts. Chang watched as Huan clicked open a red pen and made a line on the wall next to him, much like a World War I ace decorating his biplane to mark a kill. The scripted moment had been ordered from below, a key scene for the documentary that would be made of the operation, a triumph that would be watched by billions.

-Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War by P.W.Singer and August Cole https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2J8BG-XlCfeNHlYbWN4aVhDQlE...

I'm not signing up or creating a "free" account without at least seeing a sample of it. JMHO.

Good article, but the author is using low numbers for the "speeding bullet" stats. Like many jobs both around the house and industrial stuff, know what you are doing before you attempt it. But go away with the "it's too dangerous for mere mortals" speeches and special legislation to protect us all. Many people are capable and willing to do work that is hard and or dangerous. Snowflake legislation doesn't help the world work. Darwin awards work for the betterment of society.

And those $138 billion in loans were not "forgiven". That would be the loan companies, or the universities saying "don't pay us" or "don't pay us back".

What happened is AHIC said "let raise everybody's taxes. We'll print more money and 'inflate it'. Nobody will notice."

I'm a fan of affordable education. This is just vote-buying. If I'm re-elected, free ice cream for all.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Hacker News jury, I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and runoff into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my mobile phone, I wonder: “Did little demons get inside and type it?” I don’t know!My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know – when we get a "new" solution that replaces all the former solutions, and uses React or HTML, IT MUST BE MAGIC!

I would never believe anyone could be this stupid... until my stepdaughter was scammed out of $12k in a very similar way.

Geez... This sounds like one of those stories where somebody had just enough charisma to convince investors and employees that he knew what he was doing, when he didn't. Developing software isn't the same as running a business.

Didn't that happen in the 1st Spiderman movie, except the robber killed Uncle Ben...

Love this topic. Early in my computing career I was trying to modernize our software testing. I wrote a small pgm to generate the Cyclomatic Complexity of our Fortran code. I was especially pleased after discovering an error while working thru the IEEE paper McCabe had published.

That's sad and unfortunate. Experts and dealers of such equipment are a dissapearing breed. I have 2 slide rules; a super cheap plastic unit from high school days, and a full-sized Dietzgen I bought for a dollar (leather case and all). It was in a junked car at a pick'nPull yard. My skills have gotten very rusty, so now I prefer my HP-15c handheld or my HP-42c emulators on my iPhone.

Cue the Terminators. Wait, can it smell?