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Comment Re:Transparency (Score 1) 220

That said, it is pretty stupid that Space X has not been testing random parts

So uh... "Further testing of struts in stock found one that failed at 2,000 pounds of force"

Sounds to me like they likely were testing them at random and then decided to start testing a vastly significant number of them to troubleshoot.

Comment Re:Of course (Score 4, Funny) 321

Nope. See, the way it was done was by employing ~19,000 to go forward with the mission, but at some point, a small team running maintenance on the mission mid-transit realized the mission failed when the probe was popped 2/3rds of the way through its flight. A plan was hatched with the NSA to use existing test code from the development effort to emulate signals from the probes at all the telescopes capable of listening to it. The NSA's role would simply be to install the interception equipment at the telescopes to man-in-the-middle the responses from the telescopes to the relevant computers in such a way that the expected test data would be injected. Therefore, you only had a small team of maybe ~50 which was involved in covering up the failure of the operation, including a few graphic designers who could create astounding mockups of Pluto and Charon extrapolated from a combination of the Hubble 2010 image with artistic direction guided by existing photos of Triton, a body very similar to Pluto. Introduce a scary software glitch mid-flight because nothing ever goes 100% right. As far as the ~19,000 knew, the mission succeeded.

OR, the glitch a weekish before the rendezvous was the point where the graphic design and emulation teams would have to be brought in. THAT's what happened! It's just that the probe was unrecoverable from a software glitch!

Or, you know, it actually went as fucking planned.

Comment Well, she was an interim. (Score 5, Interesting) 467

Ellen made all the hard changes, like clamping down on offensive speech. She was then canned as a scapegoat, the desired person was brought in for the long term role, and all of Ellen's changes stick.

All the while, Reddit looks like it acquiesced to the masses. Brilliantly played.

Comment Re:Oh hell no! (Score 4, Informative) 273

A contractor is free to decide when and where the work is done. So Uber does not fit the contractor model.

And before anyone disagrees with this, I should note in duckintheface's favor that Uber penalizes drivers who decline too many fares, especially drivers of upscale services such as UberBlack who turn down too many UberX fares. Ergo, drivers cannot reasonably decide which work to take, reinforcing duckintheface's point.

A cab doesn't have this problem.

Comment Re:If... (Score 3, Interesting) 173

The only times we've ever heard of the US actually doing anything were with Stux and its variants, and that was always after they had done their damage. There really wasn't much of anything else, so there's no real way to know who's better because of the clandestine nature of these operations anyway.

At the very least, we know the Chinese are prolific, but we have no idea if the Chinese are better, the Russians, the United States, the Israelis... heck, maybe the Brits upstaged everyone. It's impossible to know.

Comment Opinions on the Koenigsseg Regera? (Score 4, Interesting) 229

Marketing Literature - Top Gear writeup

Asking because it seems they've used electric motors in a more direct capacity to allow them to ditch a traditional gearbox altogether, and since electric vehicles and supercars are both points of experience for you, you're in a unique position to share insight on where this kind of technology might end up.

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