That's what they said about the F-4 in the 60's. Then they had to put a cannon on it real fast after theory met reality in the skies over Vietnam.

Mod parent up.

Even the multi-function displays in the middle of the instrument panels on *all* cars made in the last three or four years is too much. Old fogeys like myself, at the crusty old age of 29, have gotten used to associating a particular spatial location in an automobile's console with a particular piece of information so that it's second nature.

This is how the mind is wired to absorb information from the world at a very basic level. Want to see what the weather it is? Look up. Want to see if you're walking on steady ground? Look down. Want to see if there's danger or prey out there? Look around.

Same in a car, or fighter jet for that matter: Want to see the time? Look at where the clock is. Want to see what radio station you're listening to? Look at where the tuner is. Want to see how much gas you've got? Look at where the fuel gauge is. This is constant-time lookup. If you have multifunction displays that *change* where these basic things are, now you've upped the cognitive load on the driver in that he now has to keep track of what state the display is in rather than just glancing in a well-remembered spot.

A proper heads-up display, and a proper desktop GUI, smartphone app, etc, preserve this feature so that you can see what you need by looking where you remember. Incidentally, this is a large part of what 'type rating' is on commercial aircraft, and aircraft manufacturers frequently retain large commercial customers by laying out the cockpits of their newer models the same exact way as the old one, with the selling point that pilots don't need to be retrained to figure out where they need to be looking and where their hands need to be in the new cockpit.

The point is, a good HUD for a car will show the same thing in the same place all the time. Just projections of dials and needles if I had my way. No popups, no text to read, no nothing. If there's something wrong with the car, a single idiot light that says 'check engine' will do it, because you're not going to diagnose it yourself while on the highway. That way it actually does save you time and keeps your gaze closer to the road.

But yeah. If you've got bells and whistles and distractions in your field of vision, of course it's unsafe. Most people are probably smart enough to ignore the popup message crap polluting automotive mutlifunction displays, by keeping their eyes up. If the crap follows them there, that's not an usafe display mechanism, that's unsafe human interface design. </rant>

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...