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Comment Re:Titan or Bust! (Score 3, Informative) 27

Why?

NASA's obsession with Mars is weird, and it consumes the lion's share of their planetary exploration budget. We know vastly more about Mars than we know of everywhere else except Earth.

This news here is bittersweet for me. I *love* Titan - it and Venus are my two favourite worlds for further exploration, and dragonfly is a superb way to explore Titan. But there's some sadness in the fact that they're launching it to an equatorial site, so we don't get to see the fascinating hydrocarbon seas and the terrain sculpted by them near the poles. I REALLY wish they were going to the north pole instead :( In theory they could eventually get there, but the craft would have to survive far beyond design limits and get a lot of mission extensions. At a max pace of travel it might cover 600 meters or so per Earth day on average. So we're talking like 12 years to get to the first small hydrocarbon lakes and ~18 years to get to Ligeia Mare or Punga Mare (a bit further to Kraken Mare), *assuming* no detours, vs. a 2 1/2 year mission design. And that ignores the fact that they'll be going slower in the start - the nominal mission is only supposed to cover 175km, just a few percent of the way, under 200 metres per day. Sigh... Maybe it'll be possible to squeeze more range out of it once they're comfortable with its performance and reliability, but... it's a LONG way to the poles.

At least if it lasts for that long it'll have done a full transition between wet and dry cycles, which should last ~15 years. So maybe surface liquids will be common at certain points, rare in others.

Comment Re: Humans won't go extinct from climate change (Score 1) 115

The day after tomorrow wasn't a documentary.

I haven't even seen it. I don't watch most movies.

Besides, think about what you're saying for at least ten minutes

Wow, you really think you know something, don't you? Hilarious.

You're saying the cold season, which already isn't suitable for growing in higher latitudes anyways, is going to get colder, therefore unsuitable for growing.

Well, at least we know your reading comprehension is shit.

What I said is that the higher latitudes will have colder temperatures than lower ones when they are at their coldest.

This is a fact.

When you learn to understand English, come back for a debate. The best you can do now is be berated.

Comment Re:Screw the American auto industry (Score 1) 297

I like my Versa but I wouldn't tow even a thousand pounds with it without brakes. It's really excellent to drive under most conditions but if you really push it hard then its vector starts to become slightly indeterminate. Mine is in fairly good shape, it's been gone over in some detail and the only thing very wrong besides the nonworking AC is that the front subframe bushes are starting to develop some slop, but they ought to have years in them even around here where it's lumpy and bumpy.

I think Nissan USA probably made the right call for this country. I've done some towing here and there, and I've driven the Versa a lot, and I don't want to imagine having a trailer back there and having things get hinky.

Comment Re:Can we stop calling distributions OSs? (Score 1) 24

What's an OS? A kernel and a set of utilities that ship with it, right? The kernel is only one piece of it, like the engine is to a car. You have a set of components in it that enable software to run.

Early operating systems were basically just a bunch of code for starting a main executable, along with runtime libraries that got called synchronously from whatever program was running, which is a far cry from anything that we would call a kernel today. So I wouldn't even say that an OS necessarily contains a kernel, though modern OSes typically do.

Heck, there have even been attempts to do kernel-free OSes more recently.

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