A two hour smartphone limit would in the US likely be Constitutional since it is content neutral https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/content-based/. A two hour max for specific purposes, such as at most 2 hours of funny cat videos, would not be.

The law already is this way, but a lot of websites are non-compliant.

Operational cookies do not require consent, so you don't even need to display the popup for the authentication.

Now that you are saying it, it really does look like a Niva and even the dimensions are very similar. Some of the local foresters use these since it was the cheapest offroad car available for many years.
And yes, the US car market is weird - far less varied and fragmented than in the EU, with the top 5 selling cars taking a sizeable chunk of the total market instead of just a few percent.

You mean the... wait for it... Apollo lunar module?

Didn't say it was't. I just said it was a lunar mission, but not a mission to the moon.

No question about that. Any mission where the astronauts return home in one piece is at least partially successful, because that one ultra-critical part still went right.

I have to disagree with that. Yeah, the shuttle design sucked in a lot of critical ways, but we mostly have the military to blame for that, because of their requirement that satellite retrieval be a critical feature in any future NASA craft. Pretty much all of what doomed both of the failed shuttle missions ultimately stems from that design decision and the compromises that came out of that decision (specifically, the need to put the shuttle on the side of the stack stemmed from the need to use the SSMEs to have enough lift capacity to bring large satellite payloads to orbit).

Challenger failed because of that. Columbia failed because of that.

Sure, there were other causes. Challenger also failed because warnings about the o-rings were dismissed by middle management and not brought to the attention of the people who could do something about it. It failed because nobody saw the leaking plume and thought, "The tank could blow. We need to do an early SRB sep and an RTLS abort or an abort once around (depending on alitude).

Columbia also failed because NASA failed to deal with the foam problem that had plagued numerous previous shuttle missions. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have any plan in place to repair critical leading edge tiles in orbit. Columbia also failed because NASA didn't have a plan for launching a rescue shuttle if something went wrong. Columbia also likely failed in part because NASA didn't replace the oldest bird in the fleet with one of the newer, much lighter versions, which weighed about four tons less (112.4 pounds per square foot of wing area on Columbia versus 107.5 pounds per square foot for Endeavor, for example). Maybe that small difference wouldn't have made it survivable, or maybe it would have.

Columbia also failed because they deliberately didn't look to see the state of things, believing that nothing could be done, and therefore they did not launch a supply rocket to restock them so that they could extend the mission until they could come up with a solution or launch a rescue shuttle. They did not sacrificially open the landing gear early to cool the wing and allow plasma a path out of the damaged wing during reentry (and increase drag). They did not deploy the drag chute early sacrificially to increase drag. They did not perform all of their turns in a way that would minimize heating on the bad wing or bring the thing down in a continuous curve to increase heat on one side and decrease the heat on the other side. And so on. None of those things were even discussed, because they took it as a foregone conclusion that there was nothing they could do, so they didn't even try.

But at the same time, the number of things they *did* think of, at least during the design stages, is incredible. For example, if they *had* caught the Challenger problem in time to do an early ET and SRB separation, they trained for aborting back to KSC, and the crew could have been saved. Columbia was pretty much screwed without a rescue mission, of course, but the fact that the computer could basically autoland the shuttle (except for the landing gear, which required an umbilical and some new software) meant that *if* they had caught that in time and sent a supply mission and a later rescue mission to bring the crew home, they could have attempted a landing of the shuttle without sacrificing anyone. It meant that if the crew became incapacitated, it could probably mostly bring itself to a landing, albeit a very tile-destroying landing. And so on.

So at least for Columbia, it isn't so much that they believed that they were smarter than they were so much as that they gave up. I don't know which is worse.

I definitely don't think it's worth the expense. They're doing three flights with the design and then throwing it away for a different version in the fourth flight, then throwing it away again in the ninth flight, meanwhile, assuming SpaceX continues on its current trajectory (with Starship block 3 launching in 2026), the Artemis block 2 lift vehicle will be hopelessly out of date years before its first launch (post-2030, with a quarter the payload capacity, and at orders of magnitude higher cost).

It's the best rocket Congress and defense contractor lobbyists could design.

LOLer as you're the dumbest fuck on the planet if you think any of that is going to happen. Trump was right the first time when he said the green pajama joker held no cards.

I've never seen a cookie banner ask for consent to collect and store my IP address. If that is their reason, they completely failed to obtain consent in a manner that meets the law.

The reason for the banners are simple - a court case ruled that cookies are covered by GDRP, but they haven't explicitly ruled on other tracking mechanisms. So ad companies pushed the minimum and most annoying method of conforming with that ruling without changing their practices, and continue to ignore the fact that all the other tracking they are doing without consent is blatantly illegal.

I don't buy that argument, and here's why: They knew political parties were a problem but they didn't spend literally any time writing rules for them. What I think is that they wanted problems they thought they would be the only ones smart enough to exploit.

The founding fathers claimed all men were created equal, then gave the vote only to landed white males. They were not all the same, but they all colluded to preserve their power.

When you participate in capitalism you are seeking some level of efficiency. Your specific goals may differ, but you're trying to get a service at a price point. I like to treat people like people, I don't expect to push a button and have them vend, but that includes taking what they want into account. Politeness exists in the intersection of that and what I want. If you're bartering goods that's one thing, if you're trading money for products or services it's another. Putting a song and dance in front of it so you can pretend it isn't happening and everyone is having a good time is delusion, to which I am opposed mostly because it retards progress.

I don't know TRS' story so I can't comment on it.

Commodore flattened itself with a shitty CEO. They also published schematics for their computers. There was nothing closed about the Amiga platform except the source code, and the chip designs. Both the accelerator slot and the expansion slots were well-documented. And on Amigas with bridgecards you can have ISA cards... or now you can even get a PCI bridgecard. And there are PowerPC accelerators, '060 accelerators with FPGA, ARM accelerators...

Your rebuttal is that you're intellectually lazy? Tell me something I don't already know, friend.

*shrugs*

I *would* argue that Apollo 8 and 13 did not go to the moon, though Apollo 8 is notable for being the first human spacecraft to enter lunar orbit, which means it still a huge milestone. Apollo 13, of course, failed spectacularly in its attempt to reach the moon, and is notable for being one of the most amazing saves in the history of the space program. And clearly they are both lunar missions, in that they are moon-related, whereas when I think of a moon mission, I think of a mission specifically to the moon's surface. Very esoteric linguistic distinction, and I may just be splitting hairs.

About 5.56 billion people have Internet access, but subtract 1.12 billion for China and 130.4 million for Russia, because I'm pretty sure neither has access to U.S. social media, an that leaves 4.3 billion. So it's *maybe* possible that 69.8% of the Internet-using world uses Instagram...

But yeah, a lot of them almost certainly are bots.

Artemis (block 1), not Starship. So more like 50 launch attempts, 1 launch, no explosions. :-D

In all seriousness, three launch attempts, but it felt like 50.

Because an average person reading the headline would think that they are going to the moon, not that they are going around the moon. "NASA plans moon-orbit mission for february" would be clearer and not that much longer.