I'll quote from the Wikipedia Article: "In urban planning, walkability is the accessibility of amenities by foot." It is important to contrast this with the practices it was intended to counter (again from the same article): "... urban spaces should be more than just transport corridors designed for maximum vehicle throughput."

Transit is an integral part of walkable planning simply because it gets people *into* neighborhoods so they can do things on foot. But cars are a way to get people into an area too, so cars can and should be part of *walkability* planning. For example there's a main street area near me with maybe 50-70 stores. When I visit I contribute to congestion by driving around looking for a parking spot. A carefully placed parking lot could reduce car congestion on the street while increasing foot traffic and boosting both business and town tax revenues.

Because a law passed by Congress actually *requires* what you are calling "the administrative state" to draft those regulations. The executive branch can't regulate something just because it thinks doing that would be a good idea. There has to be a law directing the executive branch to draft such a regulation.

Now if you actually look in the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), you will see that each and every regulation in the CFR cites a *statutory authority* -- that is to say a law passed by Congress which compels the executive branch to draft a regulation about such an such a thing. For example 40 CFR Part 50, a regulation written by the "administrative state", cites 42 USC 7401 a statute passed by Congress.

Note that I say the statutes "require" and "compel", not "empower" and "enable". That's bcause the executive branch has no choice in the matter. It *must* issue a regulation if so directed by statute, even if it disagrees with that statute. This is why regulations don't just disappear when an anti-regulation president gets elected. An administration can tweak regulations to be more favorable to business, but if they go too far in undermining the intent of the statute they'll get sued for non-enforcement of the law (e.g., this).

So if you think an adminsitration has overstepped its statutory authority with a regulation, and you have standing, you can sue to have the regulation amended. But if you fail in your suit, you won't be able to fix it by electing a President who agrees with you. You need a Congress which will repeal the statory authority for the regulation.

If your information on this stuff from political news channels, you can be forgiven for thinking government bureaucrats just make up regulations on their own initiative, but it just doesn't work that way.

The idea that poor folks are the backbone of Trump's base is a myth. In 2016 Clinton won the under $50k income vote by 12% and tied with Trump in the over $100k income group. Trump notched a modest 3% margin of victory in the $50k-$100k group.

The actual backbone of Trump's base is white people without a college degree who are nonetheless doing fairly well for themselves. This is particularly influential demographic in rural states, which have outsize representation in the Electoral College.

Thought problem for the physics mavens here.

The event horizon is usually described as requiring an escape velocity faster than the speed of light, and anything that falls in can't get out.

Suppose an object came in on a parabolic or hyperbolic course, in the manner of a meteor or comet going around the sun. Ignore tidal and time dilation effects for the moment because that's something the object will experience and I want to view this from a reference frame outside the black hole.

Suppose the orbit of the object goes inside the event horizon at an angle, so that the object wouldn't intersect the singularity at the middle.

Would it come out again?

In Newtonian terms the object would speed up as it approached the black hole and crossed the horizon, and it could never exceed or attain the speed of light, but would get kinetic energy in excess of it's actual speed. Things appear heavier as they are accelerated, and more and more of the energy is put into mass while the velocity only approaches the speed of light.

Coming around the object the same process happens in reverse, so the object isn't travelling at escape velocity but the pull from the singularity takes mass energy instead of slowing the object down. Without slowing down appreciably, the object should pop back out of the black hole and continue on it's original course.

Is there a good reference that points out the fallacy in this argument? I'm just a little surprised that there's this area in space that will grab anything that flies by and suck it in permanently. Especially since the black hole has roughly the same mass as a regular star, so flying around in the vicinity should be no more difficult than flying around in the vicinity of a typical star.

(I've been looking into whether the universe is computable, and the existence of boundary discontinuities 'kinda throws a wrench into those theories.)

Is there a good reference online that explains this?

I've been out of IT for many years now, but one question I always have about these ransom scenarios is this: wouldn't advanced journaliing filesystems make recovery from an attack much easier, particularly filesystems where you can mount a shapshot? You could just start serving a past snapshot then make any updated files available as you clear them.

Back in the day I had customers who had incompetent DBAs bork their databases with bad SQL DML and DDL. Where the customer was using Oracle it was pretty easy to walk that stuff back because under the covers Oracle has been making heavy use of COW in their database storage. This allowed me to selectively walk back certain sets of problematic transactions. I could roll back just the transactions made by a certain user on a certain day that involved particular operations or database objects. You didn't have to figure out how to undo the individual effects of the bad transactions, you just waved your magic wand and it was as if those transactions never happened.

There must be some reason people aren't using file systems with COW and efficient snapshotting for general file service, because of on the face of it this seems like an obvious solution to the problem.

I wish you wouldn't dox people like that.

He writes a comic, it's funny, and he pokes fun at your team. Lighten up, allow other people to say things, and respond.

The only purpose for doing it is to cause him suffering.

For any people here with a background in philosophy, this meets the definition of evil: doing something to someone else that, if it were done to you, would cause you suffering.

Just stop. Instead of suffering, try causing more good in the world.

It's both easing of the accellerator and using the brakes to scrub off speed, with precise performance altered by the drive mode.

In this case the reasoning is somewhat circular. *If* there are many simulated worlds just like ours and there is only one real world, then it's more probable that our world is simulated than it is real. That's necessarily true, because it's a tautology. The truth of the statement as a whole tells you nothing about the world we actually live in.

As usual, tech bro hype has taken some impressive (to laymen) demos and spun them into a scenario that is far beyond was is demonstrably possible. Sure we can have the comptuer draw pretty pictures, but we actually can't model the world we live in very well. No computer model can tell you the price of Apple stock at the close of business tommorow or the temperature at 2PM in the afternoon a year from now. You can't model a fusion reactor sell enough to get to the point of building a working power station, you have to build many physical experiments to validate your model results. As the statistician George Box famously noted: all models are false; some models are useful.

As for faith, it has its place in science. You do an experiment because you feel confident it's going to tell you something; you usually have a pretty good idea of what you want to happen. That feeling of confidence is important in directing your efforts, but it carries no weight in arguments about results. Faith is only a "sin" (Greek *hamartia* -- to miss the mark) when you demand others share it.

For most people some of the time, and for just about everyone some of the time, modern automatic transmissions will perform better than they would with an ICE vehicle. But no matter how good any automatic transmission is, the one thing it will never be able to do is read your mind about what you *intend* to do next. So there will always be situations with an ICE vehicle where you'd rather have a manual or semi-automatic than an automatic.

That doesn't apply to electric motors, which produce nearly peak torque at 0 RPM and then over a wide range of RPMs; so you never have to match the motor's RPMs to what you want to do next. There are corner cases, like towing an extremely heavy load or traveling at extremely high speeds outside the motor's very wide power band, where you'd want to have different gear ratios. There are various ways for engineers to address these cases, but if they chose to give a vehicle a shiftable transmission, there's no reason that a computer couldn't do the shifting; there's no need for it to "read your mind".

As for on snow, regenerative braking can feel a lot like engine braking depending on your driving settings. In a vehicle's maximum efficiency mode the motor will very noticeably begin to absorb energy from the wheels when you let up on the "gas".

Faxing is better. Powders and simple devices can be sent by letter, and politicians have to watch out for that.

Faxing means you're likely to be in a place that has a fax, ie a business, and if you put your thoughts on a letter with corporate logo then that's even better.

And yeah, faxing is very old school, but it's still used in a lot of down-to-earth places, the kind of grass-roots companies that politicians like to cultivate.

A chainsaw is a great tool. Some fool chopping his leg off with one doesn't change that.

That's just getting old. When you're middle-aged you're too busy for things that used to give you joy, but you spend years lugging them around with the vague idea you'll get back to them someday. That includes people too; in middle age you don't priortize the people who make you happy, you prioritize the ones you need to get through your busy days. Then if you're old enough, you'll find yourself with an addressbook somewhere with dozens of numbers of people you'd like to call but with numbers that probably haven't worked in years.

Losing touch with something or someone doesn't necessarily mean that thing or person wasn't worthwhile. Sure, if you're 70 you should probably get rid of that ice-axe or scuba gear you haven't used in forty years. But there's probably things you threw out that you wish you still had.

I'm not saying it *can't* be someone who is enthusiastic about aviation, but there's the danger of what psychologists call "motivated thinking" -- you or I would call it "wishful thinking" or "denial". If someone really loves the product, you need him to be able to believe something he wish was not true.

That's actually a rare quality. If a close call by a referee goes against your team, I'd say at least 90% of people would automatically believe it was a bad call and could not be convinced otherwise.

No, you don't want someone who *romanticizes* aviation. You want a hard-nosed realist who can think critically and has got his priorities straight.

In a crisis of trust, what you need is a leader with *character*. You need someone who understands the responsibility of building a product that people trust, but which can kill them. You need someone who can speak with discretion while at the same time being scrupulously honest about things people have a right to know.

Above all, you need a realist who is going focus on things that make an actual difference rather than just managing perceptions and evading blame. Saying the right thing has never been Boeing's management's problem, they always said exactly what needed to be said. They just never did what needed to be done.

I think the need for a leader with outstanding character is why people would like to see an engineer in charge. People trust engineers, otherwise they'd never get in a car or a plane. But we're not all ideal engineers, are we? Look at the CEO of OceanGate; he was an aeronautical engineer, but you sure as hell wouldn't want someone like him in charge of Boeing. A lack of enthusiasm for his vehicle wasn't what caused it to implode; it was a lack of sober and critical thinking.

That's really the only thing I miss about vinyl -- Thos great big album covers. Especially the two disc sets, which had covers that opened like books, or even were books.

Anyone who doesn't remember this can get an idea of what it was like here.