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.

Not if she outsources it to the lowest foreign bidder it wouldn't

With a pretty solid centrist record as governor, if I remember my history books correctly

Yeah, but it's the add, subtract, multiply and divide that must be missing...

What sort of echo chamber does this woman live in to think she's got a good record as a manager to run on? Romney at least made real money and ran a real state government. Fiorina started lots of pissing contests, got booted by the shareholders for loosing money and assets, and lost a senate (not even governor's) race. Wow.

No, Russia is to blame for thinking that it has a say over where their neighbors' alleigances lie, and for referring to engagement as "meddling"

Depends on the price and how easy it is to modify. There's a (small) mobile shelter and enclosure market mainly for military and disaster relief already, and there's pre-fabricated buildings and sheds you can buy that go on concrete pads. The question is how much would this cost relative to those for the given mission. My guess is that housing displaced people for a long time is sufficiently different from what we tend to need in the US that the design choices made in these units make them less than the ideal choice for other applications given the other available options.

no. people know politicians are evil. so which do you want: evil and stupid or evil and competent?

Same reason people go "hey, that's a good idea" when I tell them about how soviet-made cars in the 70's and 80's had backup handcranks stored in the trunk that you'd insert into a slot hidden behind the front license plate when your engine wouldn't turn over on its own. Western stuff just doesn't need those sorts of workarounds built ruight into it.