I didn't say you did.

I would have thought NASA would calculate a re-entry trajectory for a 5,800-pound cargo pallet that would safely take it to a graveyard in the Pacific.

If you deorbit something, i.e. attach a rocket to it and reduce it's orbital velocity so it reenters and lands in fairly short order, you can "calculate a re-entry trajectory" for it.

If you jettison it, and let random atmospheric drag gradually do the job over the next three years, you can't.

They weren't in the 50s and 60s and 70s when most of Slashdot was growing up listening to their parents bitch about how inaccurate weather predictions are.

The youngest boomers are 60. The average age of a Fortune 500 CEO is 58, and lots of them are in their seventies.

They're not (all) as dumb as it sounds to you.

There's a bunch of organizational behaviour research that shows you can motivate employees to work harder by giving some of them nice stuff. Corner office, parking space, cubical by the window, whatever, so long as it's desireable and conspicuous. It turns out that somebody else having nice stuff motivates quite a bit better than higher pay, so it's a very economical method.

Flexible working hours is one of the ultimate nice things. It works great if Bob breezes into his corner office at noon and leaves at three, no doubt to do Important Things. It doesn't work so well if Bob just doesn't come in at all, because nobody sees him doing it. It works even less well if everyone is working from home, because then none of the other dirty tricks works either.

Not terabytes. A big chat-type system might be 100 GB, but you can do very well with a lot less. You can do very well with a LOT less if you stop trying to encode the world's knowledge into the thing and let it search the web.

The pallet was jetisonned, not de-orbited. You can't predict where something that you just let float away from the space station is going to land until just before it comes down.

I think you must have misspoken there. It sounds like you said there was not a carnival of torture and murder with kidnapping of noncombatants. If that's what you meant, this discussion is over.

I never even heard those things until now, so this is a straw man if I've ever seen one.

The Hamas fighters are in tunnels under buildings like hospitals. You can't precision-target a tunnel under a densely populated city. Hamas designed the conflict to have maximum collateral damage. It's unavoidable. (If you don't believe that, what is the purpose of a human shield?)

Regarding the population mostly not having voted for Hamas, that may be true, but polls show they support the carnival of rape and torture they perpetrated on Israel: https://www.reuters.com/world/...

Also, they killed people in the most painful ways they could imagine. They cut a fetus out of its mother's womb. Do you think those were isolated cases? What are you doing defending them? You should be horrified.

Release the hostages! That's the only complaint anybody should be making. Israel has its hands tied, as they can't/shouldn't just let their people be kept as slaves. On the other hand Hamas could end the war tomorrow by releasing the hostages and accepting terms (probably including giving up its tunnels and submitting its war criminals for tribunal).

The space equivalent of the hand reaching out of a car window and casually dropping a McDonald's box.

None of those things are true. Labs go through consumables like mad. There's nothing unlimited about an isolated one. They're also not the least bit simple. Lots of the equipment is also bulky, delicate and needs very precise sample preparation. Electron microscopy, for a fairly mundane example. Do you seriously think every mission hasn't already been packed with as many instruments of as many different kinds as possible already?

We have lots of BSL 4 labs on Earth, if you're being paranoid. We also have lots and lots of lower level biohazard labs that would be able to study rock samples from a dead planet perfectly safely.

It's just possible that thousands of professional scientists know more about this than you do, you know?

But it doesn't just cost double--it's using thousands of times more mass dedicated to fuel and transport hardware to recover few small samples.

It isn't really. There have been a bunch of proposals for stationary lander sample return missions in the ~10 tonnes in Earth orbit range, about half a Curiosity. China's and the various iterations of the NASA-ESA plans are a little heavier than Curiosity, but not twice and certainly not thousands.

To be fair, you should be able to build a space capsule that's going to work without having to launch protypes to space repeatedly. SpaceX did that: the first Dragon 2 to go to space was an unmanned demonstration flight, then was destroyed during a static fire. The second one carried crew and is currently docked to the ISS.

You should also be able to bolt together long-used, very expensive parts and be pretty sure they're going to work. That's SLS.

If you're actually doing something new, experiments seem to be definitely the way to go. Most of the companies who are actually doing something new do a lot of experiments.

TV leads me to believe that fencing stolen goods often yields much less than 30% of their value.

And Dark City came out the year before. And the 13th floor came out the same year but earlier. Both were 'fake worlds' movies, both were also more intelligent movies, imho. Both were box office failures.

But I'd say all 3 are pretty original movies. (Although 13th floor was loosely based on a book (Simulacrum-3; and had previously been made for TV in the 70s in Germany) -- but even so I'd say its an original movie.

Your argument that nothing is original because you can identify tropes is too dismissive. If you couldn't identify any tropes the movie would be just be random images and noise... and that's probably a trope too.