Well, there is a story, but it's more about a single point of failure between the generating plant and the customer. No failover transformer? No spare on site? Did the old one give up the ghost of old age when it should have been rotated out and rebuilt a long while ago?

Haleakala, not Mauna kea. And those operators with security clearances don't always have to be uniformed military.

I run the park, therefor I am an expert. I am the CEO therefor I know the business best. I am the emperor, therefor I am not naked. Appeals to authority only work when the audience has just fallen off the turnip truck within the last minute.

Not code for. Is equivalent to. Still holds water though. Sorry, try again.

True, but/and the reason for keeping the state and church apart is so that you the free citizen can run your life in a way compatible with your understanding of God, for there is no real meaningful godliness without a real chance at failure. If the church has a say in public policy, that takes away some of your ability to make the correct choice.

This is true. Daniel Inouye used to rule those mountaintops with an iron fist. I hear through my grapevine that he nixed an upgrade to make some of the military's satellite tracking telescopes up there back in the 80s because the automation would have cost some of the native Hawaiian telescope operators their jobs.

Illegal my ass. We occupied and annexed it fair and square, replacing tribal savagery where might made right on the scale of every day life with actual laws and courts and civilized institutions. The fact that we also brought modern religion (that is to say a small-L liberal judeo-christian tradition) to replace this "the colors of the wind" bullshit is all the more icing on the cake.

Not like Ada, where you can fuck up much easier by choosing the wrong floating point type for your altitude indicator.

TL;DR; if White didn't understand the issues with his setup the first time around (vacuum wasn't the biggest), I don't trust him to make a meaningful measurement this time either.

The biggest question I had wasn't whether this would work in a vacuum, it was whether this was really an "anomolous" electromagnetic torque against the steel vacuum chamber due to improper shielding of the RF the thing radiates out combined with the effect of piping the RF in from outside the balance (ie the wires carrying the RF lines stiffenning in a weird way when carrying current).

Which is not the correct behavior for a headless server. The correct behavior is to start anyway and for any user processes that depend on access to the unavailable filesystem to exit with a -1 status and log whatever perror() spits out to standard error, at which point it is clear to the sysadmin what happened and without having the other stuff on the box held up. LP really must have grown up with Win95, because real Linux servers often do more than one thing at a time and hold more than one service at a time, and this behavior of systemd breaks that functionality on a logical level (that is it's not a bug, it's an error on the part of the designer).

Sure. Let's assume that because it's the emperor, he must be wearing the finest of clothes.

As comrade Reagan used to say: Trust but verify

Mod parent up. All technology can be used, misused, over-applied, and under-applied. Sci-fi type AI will never be a threat. All computers only do what they're programmed to do, and only effect what they're allowed to effect. If you think it's a stupid idea to hook up a random number generator to a time bomb, then Congratulations: you have all the sense necessary to avoid AI Armageddon. If you aren't afraid to point out when other people are about to do the same thing, then Congratulations Again: you have all the courage you need to prevent your neighbor from causing AI Armageddon. Some things really *are* that simple. I speak as someone who's worked on and around "artificial intelligence" for the better part of ten years, though not as an academic researcher.

Somebody do some back-of-the envelope calculation for me (it's late an I'm tired): is it actually possible to cut down enough plantlife so dip the atmospheric O2 levels down and CO2 levels up to a dangerous place? My instinct says that there's just too big of a critical mass of photosynthesizing organisms out there and the buffering effect of fewer plants now making more room for growth for what's left makes it impossible to actually get into a dangerous situation through anything other than global thermonuclear war, and even then...

Uh huh. Associates degrees in $BUZZWORD Engineering Technology explain a lot of that, but they still count as the T and E in STEM. Excluding those, if you can spell 'engineer' you have a job. At the height of the recession 5 years ago, it was record low unemployment for real engineers.

The perpetual fallacy in procurement of both the private and governmental sort is that it is possible to quantify innovation. If the original bid was 1.6, then yes it was dishonestly low and the NASA bureaucrats were incomeptent for not spotting it. On the other hand, find me a civil servant who thinks it's a good thing for his career to inflate the cost of an underbid contract, even if he does see it for what it is? It always takes two to tango.