It's at least good enough to teach some of us armchair astronauts a bit more about engineering and orbital mechanics!

And yeah, if you want to be reliably successful at it you have to go and learn at least some of the core concepts of the related fields of engineering and physics. There are some crib sheets and whatnot online (like delta-v charts and optimal orbital insertion guide tables) but they still require that you understand things like delta-v and design your ships in a way that puts the center of mass, aerodynamic resistance and control points in the right places.

If you want to do less orbital mechanics calculations you can get the MechJeb autopilot that does a lot of the basic work for you (as seems to be the preferred method lately among real-world satellite launches). It won't figure out things like orbital transfer sequences or slingshots or anything really complex. What it will do is get your orbit perfectly circularized (or properly elliptical), help you rendezvous with another orbital object, hold your orientation along some orbital axis (prograde, retrograde, etc) or help control a descent burn so you hit a given target location.

From TFA referenced in that slashdot post you linked to:

He never said he was cancelling the plans, just that he can't do it himself right now.

Except that by asking him to do something illegal, the NSA invalidated their own contract. Under U.S. law no contract may require a person to commit an illegal act, nor may it prevent them from reporting a criminal act so long as they have first attempted to report the criminal activity using internal policies. As long as Snowden tried to get his bosses to stop the illegal wiretapping and reported their actions to his supervisor, he should be protected under us whistleblower protection laws.

That said, this is the NSA, and they seem not to care about the law. Running away is smart, to keep them from doing something illegal to punish him for reporting the OTHER illegal things they did.

It probably depends on what their job is. Asking this as an open question is like asking "Which is a better tool, a hammer or a saw?"

If they're your UI designer, Software Architect, or User Experience Designer? It's probably better to err on the side of "talent" (creativity) rather than technical skill. These people don't need to output elegant and functional code, they just need to come up with clever ideas and solutions from a broader more holistic perspective.

If they're your Frontend Developer, UI Developer, or a high level programmer of some kind? They probably need a mix of the two, with an emphasis on technical skill. Their job is output code, but it won't usually need to be perfectly optimized and they will often need to solve new problems in unexpected ways.

If they're your backend dev, production software engineer, or other nitty-gritty code writer? Technical skill will be the more important trait. These guys will usually not be expected to solve the weird UI problems themselves (That's what the UX Designer is for!), but their product needs to be rock-solid from a technical perspective.

This has been brought up on several occasions, and the counterargument is that the chain of information relating to the pickup is much more secure for rideshare operators.

Taxis are scary because people essentially just hop in a passing car without telling anyone, and hand the driver some cash. Fake taxis were a great way to abduct or rob people, which is the origin of a lot of the "safety" based regulations. Erratic or unlicensed drivers were another risk, since they could pose a threat to their fares and everyone around them.

With these rideshares, the passenger is submitting a request over the internet to a public facing company. That company in turn sends out a pickup request to a specific driver, who accepts it and logs their intent to pick up the passenger. With most of the services, the passenger in turn gets a chance to confirm that they have actually been picked up. Since these requests only go to their drivers, the company has the opportunity to do background checks, ensure their drivers are regulated, and keep appropriate records as a chartered ride service. It also creates a chain of responsibility that leads to the driver, if anything were to happen to the passenger.

The rideshare companies in turn have a strong incentive to get rid of unsafe drivers. They might be legally liable for letting a driver continue to operate with a dangerous history, and they have to keep at least basic records of who got picked up when and by whom to avoid getting in trouble for financial violations.

Check up on the "medallion" system and how it's been manipulated to get an idea of how your statement (though technically correct) is not practically true. The gist is that there are a limited number of "medallions" or similar tokens given out to allow roaming taxi operators, and new ones are allotted only rarely. Due to this lock on competition there is a lot of bribery and corruption in deciding who gets them during the "random" selection, and a common scam of medallion holders continuing to hold them while not operating a service, then renting them out for exorbitant prices to other operators.

Historically, what's happening is exactly how most regulatory laws get changed. Someone starts by showing that their service is in-demand and safe. Eventually they are challenged on whether they're breaking some regulatory limit, and either fight it in court or petition the local government to make the needed changes.

Actually, they're arguing that people are trying to apply the wrong rules to them. Since their drivers don't roam and pick people up at random, instead arriving on request to pick up a specific individual, they have typically been arguing that they are a chartered transportation service. Those services are regulated under different rules, so Lyft, Uber et al are obeying those regulations. They're claiming that the fact that they book their rides minutes in advance instead of days doesn't change the nature of their business, since the only change is the speed at which they deliver the requested service. The taxi operators are trying to get them classed as taxis because those companies have a lock on the limited number of permits for such vehicles, which would allow them to shut down a source of potential competition.

In terms of obeying the spirit of the law, Lyft and Uber actually pass that test fairly well. The most commonly cited reason for the limited number of taxi medallions given out is to keep people from clogging up the roadways with idling taxis waiting for fares. Uber and Lyft drivers park or idle in parking lots and other out of the way places, only entering the roadways to pick up a customer.

What? Is this a troll comment?

Okay, key point: the form of Nitrogen that we're talking about generating here is not the gaseous sort. It's "fixed" nitrogen which I believe is mostly in the form of ammonia. Urea, commonly found in various animal feces, is also a convenient source widely used by the agricultural industry. It is also generated by bacteria but under different circumstances. (In your butt and/or intestines depending on how childish you want to be...)

Nitrogen is also the most abundant component of air, so even if we were talking about the gaseous sort we wouldn't need to worry: worms, ants and other tunneling insects already infiltrate the ground with (~70%) gaseous nitrogen already. If you've ever visited a relatively lush un-farmed field when it was damp and noticed how much the ground sinks under your feet? That's your weight squishing the air (which is mostly nitrogen) out of the ground. It isn't a threat at all in that sense.

...even if their markers are accurate. What do you do with a person that carries known biomarkers for violence? If they later do something wrong, are you legally liable for allowing them to be born if you've done prenatal testing and found the markers? What about doctors who notice them midway through the person's life, should they be legally required to report such people to the police for observation?

I'm getting flavors of both Minority Report and Brave New World from this: You're left in a place where one of the most ethical options is to pre-judge the people, push medication and counseling on someone who's never done anything just to be safe, or encourage them into a societal role where their violent tendencies won't be as risky. Perhaps you put the violent kids in their own special (high security) elementary school, where they're guided towards a profession in the military, police, sports, or other violent profession?

Very scary, despite how potentially useful such a discovery might be.

Scenario: You have been set up by someone else to take the fall for a murder. They stole your gun, used it to shoot the victim, and then put it back. Realizing what had been done, you chose to hide the gun because all the evidence would unfairly point to you. You don't know who did it and have no evidence to prove what happened. The prosecutor asks "Do you own a gun that fires this type of bullet?" followed by "And where is that gun located?"

Without the right to silence you are left in a scenario where you'd be forced to either commit perjury (by saying you don't know where it is) or provide evidence that you know will be misleading to your own detriment. If the prosecutor could use your refusal to answer as a point against you, you could be convicted anyways.

Your FAIL 3 applies, but the condition itself FAILS on several counts:

FAIL 3 is flawed in that it implies that acquitting a guilty person is equal in "wrongness" to convicting an innocent person. I do not believe this to be the case, if for no other reason than that a guilty person can be later caught and their punishment enforced, but an innocent person cannot be "un-punished" and have their lost freedom or life restored.

It is additionally flawed because it would prevent any laws that hamper investigation work for the protection of innocents. By applying your same logic in other circumstances we would have to allow the police to shoot at anyone they want, since the immunity from being randomly shot is equally beneficial to both criminals and non-criminals. We would also want to strike the 4th amendment (since it lets criminals hide stuff as just as well as innocent people), and then we'd want to look into many other situations.

To boot, your supporting statement about a law that hampers all investigations equally being equivalent to deciding guilt by random choice is some sort of logical fallacy, but it's so illogical I'm having a hard time classifying it; it's some terrifying love child of a straw man, false dichotomy, faulty cause/effect, and slippery slope argument. It's so wrong can't even really argue against it except to point out that protecting some percentage of all people from conviction is in no way equal to randomly punishing all people regardless of guilt or innocence, since in the first case innocent people are still safe but in the latter case they have an equal chance of being convicted when compared to a guilty person. It falls apart further from there, but the point has been made.

Shoddy logic here man, and it undermines whatever legitimacy your argument had to begin with.

Does anyone else notice that odd numbers seem to be the ones skipped to create that jagged graph? Perhaps below a certain threshold (95 by appearances) they simply round up to the nearest even number for some reason? I'd be interested to see those charts re-rendered for even numbers only.

The notes about how skewed some of the bell curves are actually raises more questions about the test than the grading to me. A perfectly even bell curve seems like it would only appear if the test was full of equally difficult questions worth the same number of points. If instead there are a large number of easy, valuable questions and a small number of very difficult low-value questions I'd expect to see a charts like these: ones that rise towards that "easy" point total, and then drop off sharply at the range earned for those last few very hard questions.

Also as many people have said: I'm not surprised to see a "grace" gap just below the failure mark; it seems like the kind of thing most colleges would do to avoid debates about grades and ensure they don't fail someone based on a single unlucky error or math mistake. The way they're doing it, anyone who fails fails by a LOT, making debate unlikely.

Of course people can produce stuff as easily as drawing in Paint or GIMP, using something like Zbrush. The problem is that they're going to get about the same level of quality that the average untrained artist would get out of Paint or GIMP, i.e. blobs and uneven stick figures.

Fact is, producing well-engineered 3d modeled parts or art objects takes technical skill and/or artistic craftsmanship that is beyond the average untrained consumer. Just as your average consumer could not be expected to paint well with oils, sculpt well in clay, or machine well in aluminum, so to they should not be expected to design well in polygons.

The real revolution in 3d printing will be tied to people feeling comfortable learning to design and a broader universal availability of art and design education.

Also, the event you're responding to happened over a year ago. February 2012.

Still they should have been toning things down, but he'd just won the election. A certain amount of fanfare is in order, and we weren't in quite such dire straits at the time.

The obvious solution is to go so fast the radiation never catches up. I hear that electromagnetic energy has some sort of hard speed limit, perhaps they could just go a little faster than that?

Bitcoins yo.

The issue here is that the builder was obviously aware that his tools were being used for illegal activity but continued to produce them for those same clients. His knowledge was demonstrated by his freakout about the massive piles of cash and demand to have them removed, and the fact that he knew his customers were crossing borders with his secret compartments. (They were calling from places like Tijuana asking for repairs)

"I don't know what this is being used for" is a legit argument when there's a reasonable expectation that the product is not being used for illegal activity (such as in the stated case of building robots), but at a certain point it crosses the threshold where any reasonable explanation would point to illegal use. At that point the person making the product is arguably liable, since any reasonable person should understand what their product is being used for.

In the example of a robot, just making a robot that can patrol an area wouldn't cross that threshold. If, however, the robot was commissioned with the ability to detect police badges, interpret police scanner data, and incinerate packages if police were detected en-route? That would cross the threshold of "Well what the fuck did you THINK they were gonna use it for?"