"We found a way to reframe the debate from 'Republicans vs. Freedom' to 'Republicans vs. Big Government', so we're going to do that both to hammer home that 'Democrats are Dictators' meme and because we're getting fat stacks of cash from the people who stand to profit from it".

That makes sense, and I recall that this is the most heavily-loaded Dragon yet, so less dV for orbital maneuvers would make for a shorter launch window.

And I did seem to be remembering things wrong - every previous CRS flight I could find a launch window for had an instantaneous launch window. I must have been thinking of the non-CRS flights.

I've seen short launch windows before, but not for ISS-bound launches. I remember previous Dragon launches having significantly longer windows to launch. Am I remembering wrong, or is there something about this launch that requires a shorter window?

That rant is a pretty fair (if harsh) criticism of Esperanto, but it doesn't really point out any irregularities in Esperanto itself. Many of the flaws it points out are actually cases where the language is too regular, where it mandates something everywhere instead of making it optional where possible.

The only grammatical irregularity in Esperanto I can think of is how -A affix can be used for female names, instead of the -O used for all other nouns. Other than that, everything is regular and self-consistent.

There are two types of flying: instrument flight rules, and visual flight rules.

IFR is used at night, when the weather restricts visibility to under a certain amount (thick cloud cover can do this, no precipitation needed), on flights long enough that you can't guarantee VFR conditions at your destination, and just whenever you feel like it.

VFR is generally only used for beginning pilots or quick flights. It's sometimes seen as a relic of earlier times. Sure, you get taught how to fly this way, get taught some basic dead reckoning techniques, but nobody really flies this way, most of the time.

But instruments fail. Autopilots fail. Engines fail. When everything fails, you want someone in the cockpit who can look out the window, navigate by landmarks, and if necessary put the plane down on the straight sections of highway Eisenhower built to accommodate bombers returning from the Soviet Union.

When things go wrong, you want something smart and adaptable in control. There are procedures for damn near everything in aviation, but there's still things you can't pre-plan for. Until we get a general strong AI working, the only thing smart and adaptable enough is a human.

Now, that doesn't mean we can't have fully computer-controlled aircraft. It just means there shouldn't be people on board those computer-controlled planes. Drones are fine - even if it's a cargo-laden drone version of a 747, the loss of life it can accidentally cause is miniscule, compared to even a small passenger plane.

And the key remains private.

Sure, just make sure the security on it is lock-tight. Bad things happen when you let enemies suborn your orbital mirrors (although in that case they were to counter global warming, not for power).

Space exploration? Hardly. They haven't done any exploration since the Berlin Wall fell. NASA's putting probes on every planet they can, the ESA and JAXA are launching their own probes, even China and India are doing more exploration than Russia. The only real active area of research for Russia is on the ISS.

Russia's just a cheap source of rockets - and that has more to do with their low cost of labor and massive subsidies than the actual cost-effectiveness of their rockets. The fact that they're currently the only way to the ISS has more to do with the political failings of NASA than any redeeming quality they have.

PS: Russia's economy is still failing. It's not in the near-freefall it was in the 90s, but it still looks more like a big second-world country than a developed nation.

Your TFH is on a bit tight, but your real problem is lack of knowledge.

Computers are not "in control" of Airbus aircraft, any more than computers are in control of Ford cars. There is absolutely a manual - it just isn't a physical link, because we've moved beyond wires and pulleys, or even hydraulics.

Large aircraft are designed for skilled pilots - ones who can respond to the often unusual disasters that strike when in the air. There's an override for everything, because you never know when you might need to do something unusual in response to some other failure. Want to engage the thrust reversers while in-flight? Sure - normally that would be catastrophic, but that might be the only way to prevent an overspeed in a steep dive. Want to land without lowering the gear? It'll yell at you but it won't stop you.

In fact, very few things even require an override. The normal thing for an aircraft to do when it thinks the pilot is making a mistake is to yell at them, not stop them. And in this case, we have on the cockpit voice recording the sounds of the alarm saying "PULL UP. PULL UP. PULL UP."

But the aircraft didn't stop him, because there are easily dozens of situations where stopping him would have been even worse. For example, an all-engines out emergency landing. Or a GPS malfunction, and there's no mountain there. Or... you get the picture.

There are no aircraft that don't have a mode that acts like manual. There are a few military aircraft where, even in manual, the flight computers will make constant control movements to keep it stable, but even in a B-2, if you slam the stick forward, it'll dive right into the ground.

Now if only someone could create a combination crowbar and towel. Keep one of those on you, and you'll be set for anything.

I know how suspension bridges work. I probably could build a small one, but any lengthy span would be well beyond me.

I know how internal combustion engines work. It would take a year of training on the tools before I'd be able to make one that even sorta worked, and then it would be at 1900s-level functionality.

I know how nuclear weapons work. Several types, in fact. But I cannot make them.
1) I could build a gun-type weapon, given the material (200lbs of 90% pure U-235, a 76mm artillery barrel, and some regular explosives), but I could not create the equipment to refine uranium.
2) I could probably build a reactor to generate plutonium, with massive effort and a significant risk of poisoning myself, but I could not build a working implosion bomb with it. It would take a year's training in explosives just to be able to build an existing design, and those designs are tightly secured.
3) With the materials, I might be able to upgrade an unboosted fission weapon into a boosted one. Maybe.
4) A fusion weapon is completely beyond me. You could stick me in Lawrence Livermore with all the parts in front of me, and without some Ikea-like instructions you aren't going to get anything.

We are protected from homemade gun-type weapons by the scarcity of uranium and the immense difficulty in refining it. Remember, this is something that was beyond the capabilities of most nations a scant 70 years ago. A dedicated nation-state or perhaps certain multinational corporations could pull it off, but not without detection.

We are protected against homemade implosion-type weapons by the complex engineering necessary, the esoteric nature of the specific engineering knowledge needed (nuclear physics and shaped explosives are not a common dual-major), and by the absolute need for testing before use. The former prevents fringe groups from succeeding; the latter prevents the non-suicidal from trying.

We are not protected by lack of general knowledge on nukes, because no such lack of knowledge exists. I learned half of this stuff from school textbooks, and the other half from Wikipedia. Anyone driven to find more can easily do so.

The key point this misses is that the Bechdel test is about the work itself, not who wrote it. This test is thus susceptible to certain flaws. In particular, it will flag numerous single-developer projects as "sexist" due to simple chance.

This would fail at least 50% of all single-developer projects, even if there were no sexism anywhere. Other small projects would be unfairly penalized, and projects with tiered architectures and tiered development would be especially susceptible.

This is obviously contrary to the goal of the "test", and in fact bears only superficial similarity to the Bechdel test (the point of which, by the way, is not to determine which works are sexist or not (after all, Debbie Does Dallas passes), but to show how endemic weak female characters are by the sheer number that fail).

Compute might use it. The Titan was traditionally both the top-tier graphics card, as well as the entry-level compute card. They've slashed FP64 performance with this iteration, but FP32 performance is still sky-high, and they're pushing situations like that for using this as a compute card.

You often tell jokes that rely on fairly advanced math, science or economics. Have there been any jokes you scrapped because you thought they were *too* advanced for your audience?

Well, you've perked my interest.