Ever heard of a race to the bottom?
So you have two candidates for a job. But one of them has a family to support and the other one is still living at home. You don't think that's relevant to the salary offer that each candidate will consider acceptable?
Too bad the future of society depends on people having families and therefore on having incomes high enough to support families. Unintended consequences and all that stuff.
Actually the big winners are pretty clear: Netanyahu and Putin. And they are NOT tired of winning yet. Especially not on America's dime. And speculators with insider information. They also won too much and are still winning.
I'm not sure who the biggest losers are yet. Obviously the Iranians are leading candidates, especially any moderate Iranians running loose in Iran. They were probably the most targeted victims the day after the war started.
My growing concern is with Xi's plans to get in on the winning. What sort of "other shoe" is Xi going to drop on the YOB when they meet? Some kind of deal providing Chinese boots on Iranian ground to "fix" the Hormuz problem? Perhaps in exchange for a permanent military base on Taiwan? Let's have a "great deal" to eliminate any threat of a messy amphibious invasion? Or maybe offer the YOB a couple of hotel towers with golf courses near Shanghai and Hong Kong? The corruption also knows no bounds.
Actually they take pictures that include the driver's face. Just recently read about someone being impressed by the high quality of the images. They sent copies with the citation. The question of the identity of the driver seems like a minor one at that point. They would only need to confirm that the face matches a known face. If you tried to claim you had loaned the car to someone else, then it becomes even easier, just proving the photographed face does not match the claimed face. But it reverts to the general facial recognition problem if they send a photo of an unknown person who would then have to be identified using a large database of faces...
However the direction the world seems to be heading, the next step will be real time checking of registration information to make sure the car isn't stolen. After all, that could explain some of the speeding. A car thief is extra likely to be in a bit of a hurry.
Not a bad FP branch, and I can add a relevant citation. The book is mostly about abusing people to increase the profits of giant tech companies and Amazon gets plenty of mentions. They tried to focus the book on AI, and that's where most of the examples come from, but it's really a broader thing. If there is interest in more books [On Slashdot? ROFLMAO] I can dig up some others from the last few years. But this one was published last year:
Feeding the Machine by Muldoon, Graham, and Cant.
They're especially good at enforcing silly rules. The rule-making process in Japan sometimes produces terrible rules, which then get enforced with enthusiasm. Or is it worse when the rules get case-by-case treatment that can make them effectively meaningless except as threats?
So anyway, I think the opening joke was weak and the story itself didn't get any attention in Japan. The FP numbers work out at a thousand bucks per "cybersecurity engineer", which is just silly. If the decimal place slipped twice and it was supposed to be $100,000/engineer, then it's only 10,000, which is actually a reasonable number to hope for some good. Unfortunately, cybersecurity is a weak chain game, which in this case means finding any vulnerability defended by a lesser engineer. The value of a top "cybersecurity attacker" is unlikely to be capped at such a small number as $100,000 and someone is gonna git overrun and breached.
Returning to the topic of "attention in Japan", absence of evidence is not proof of anything. However if it was a big deal then it should have made the local news... My bad. Turns out it did: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworl... Or did it?
Oh wait. Is it possible the Slashdot version is wrong? NHK says it's about AI with cybersecurity getting a side-mention. Investing in AI? Where have I seen that story before. Oh yeah. Everywhere.
And one more thing. About the new Subject. The particularly stupid new rules I was thinking about involve a new campaign against bicycles. Enough to convince me to get rid of my bike. Not worth more hassles, but my typically negative prediction is that bike problems are minor and bike benefits are significant, so if the new rules push more people to buy cars then the net effects will be mostly negative...
Pardon? Have you not seen the barge landings?
There are many aspects of a flight profile. Some are based on where you put the payload when it is in orbit. Others are the weight of the payload. As an example, 9's Payload for a GTO orbit is 5.5t when recovered on barge, and 8.3t for an expended mission. LEO orbit, 17.5 t if recovered, 22.8t expendable.
Just because some flight profiles can land at a pad or on a barge, does not mean that this happens in all cases.
References from paper
A Survey of Launch Vehicle Recovery Techniques
Shraddha C.
Pankaj Priyadarshia
and Devendra Prakash Ghate
Institutes:
Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, 695022, Kerala, India
Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, 695547, Kerala, India
A pretty good read if you have the academic credentials to access it. Clear, at a reasonably high level so not too deep in the weeds, with all manner of different flight profiles for many rockets - including StarShip. And a lot more. Otherwise, I think it is a little premature to claim the success of Starship. The Falcon's are good reliable Rockets. Starship might end up a tad problematic.
2) Police officer hides, catches unsuspecting driver speeding, stops driver, issues summons.
This is the very best approach. It's got the perfect tension leading to the greatest safety.
When you're expecting such an ambush (getting caught a few times will teach you to do that), and you're really paying attention and playing "spot the ambush" then they won't catch you. But because you're being so damned focused and alert, you're also a safer driver.
OTOH if they nail you, that means you weren't paying attention. So you weren't merely speeding; you really literally were speeding unsafely, and the ticket is the proof. (If you were so safe, then how come you didn't see the guy with the radar gun in time?)
Every. Single. Time. I got ticketed, my mind was wandering and not fully focused on the road. I wasn't looking for a speed trap, so I didn't see it in time. Busted. And those times I was looking? I didn't fall for it. I slowed down and avoided a ticket.
The ideal system (in terms of safety) happens to also be downright sporting! The ol' classic speed trap was almost
Your assignment: Find out why reusable rockets are only useable for very specific launch envelopes. If you use them out of that launch envelope, there are just as disposable as the rockets you think are some sort of complete waste.
Interesting. I've never seen this claim made before; do you have a reference?
https://www.teslarati.com/spac... Forgive the link, it is a real rah-rah piece.
CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX has successfully expanded the envelope of orbital-class rocket recovery with its 50th booster landing, meaning that all Falcon boosters will have a better chance of safely returning to Earth from now on.
https://space-offshore.com/boo... "Falcon 9 missions may need to land on a droneship instead of RTLS due to the weight of the payload or the overall mission profile." I think you have academic access. Here is a good technical report on a lot of rockets that land after use. https://www.sciencedirect.com/.... You'll need academic credentials to download it. But it has a lot more info - and as part of the launch envelopes, there is constraint based on payload as well as direction. If you are going to land, there is a significant reduction in payload.
All of this is why I find it a little amusing that many among us find the most important aspect of launching these candles is the recovery.
tl,dr - where the rocket is going, what it is carrying has a big effect on recoverability. You can force things, reducing payload, or only sending the profiles to places where the first stage can make it back to the launch site, otherwise small extensions to allow it to make it back to a barge.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I am so, so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit," NASA's Dr Lori Glaze
I can expect some random science reporter to make this mistake, but bugger me, a senior NASA executive? It shows politics are far more important than any knowledge of science at NASA today.
Not only is Orion not leaving Earth Orbit (where the fuck do they think the moon is?) , it is not even entering lunar orbit. Orion's apogee has been pushed up for one orbit, but it's perigee is right down here.
Because Orbital mechanics is pretty difficult for most to grok. She does have bona fides, Doctorate in Environmental Science and Masters in Physics.
So I'm pretty certain that she well knows that Orion is still in orbit around the earth.
But just think about it. We have people in here who think that not re-using a rocket is some sort of crime, not thinking how that first stage can only return if it is close enough to the launch site. That if you want to go to the moon or a planet, you just point your Rocket at it and it's balls to the wall time. Among other misguided notions.
All said, She is an administrator, and I believe her excitement when she said that, so I'm not quite so willing to call her a political appointee. I'd call it an audio typo.
If it was me, I might say it was the first time humans have left Low Earth Orbit since 1972. And since it is a matter of providing soundbites, I would save the Perigee and Apogee part for later. Perigee and apogee are the more interesting parts from my perspective.
But, There is absolutely nothing exceptional here: This has been already achieved almost 60 years ago, with much, much less technology available.
This gets brought up fairly often. And yes, we did it before. Why do it all again?
The learning curve is why. I can't imagine there is anyone from the Apollo project left at NASA. So a whole new group of people have to learn how to make things work. All those people sitting at their consoles are learning, re-learning after a fashion, what the Engineers learned in the 1960's.
It's all good!
Yeah, it was cool watching those four $146,000,000/each RS-25 engines return to the landing pad. Stupid capitalists.
A lot of people have a lot of trouble understanding that returning a first stage to the launch site puts a huge constraint on where in orbit you can place that rocket's payload.
You can add a bit of flexibility if you return a rocket to a barge in the ocean - but not much. And when you use a barge, you are eating hard into whatever savings there are in capture and refurb.
The first stage has to have enough fuel to make it back to the landing pad or barge. If the launch envelope takes it out of that range, it's just another disposable rocket. As an indicator, people will notice I only mentioned the first stage. Because there's no good way to recover the second. The rocket is way too far downrange, the earth is rotating. There aren't many landing sites at that point.
The government wimped out and pulled funding repeatedly on re-usable launch systems even ones that were showing success.
Your assignment: Find out why reusable rockets are only useable for very specific launch envelopes. If you use them out of that launch envelope, there are just as disposable as the rockets you think are some sort of complete waste. You are a really smart guy seems like you could teach us all about this stuff.
That's what I call DEI. Lesser qualified people hired or promoted in preference to merit because of identity politics. In irony, two of the best employees I ever worked with were women, hired using this metric. But that was accidental meritocracy. They would also have been hired for their ability in a non-checkbox world, not because of their sex.
The problem with many here is the automatic assumption that anyone not a white male was unqualified most likely because they are white males.
I understand completely. Many who are orgasming about a Woman and a "Black man because it checks off a box do not like White males, and want less of them doing things. Racism is in no way restricted to the dreaded white male. The people who would call themselves inclusive aer every bit as racist and sexist.
After all, when people say we need more women and people of color in a profession, they are exactly saying they want less White men.
P.S. Race is exactly the biggest social construct ever invented. I'll believe that human races exist when speciation happens, when a human from one group cannot mate and produce offspring.
Who's tired of too much winning?
Unfortunately not Netanyahu or Putin. But I'm waiting for Xi to drop the other shoe with an offer the YOB can't refuse. Only link to Amazon I can imagine involves merchandise made in Taiwan? "But if you let us build a big military base on Taiwan then it will eliminate any risk of a YUGE amphibious invasion in the future..."
Anyway, I'm not even clear why your comment was modded Funny, much as I want to see Funny these days. Mostly seems irrelevant, dare I say off topic, unless Amazon is drafting employees the way Amazon wants to draft customers...
(And as I am too fond of saying, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. My main residual concern is that Amazon may get exclusive rights to sell something that I want and then can't get anywhere else...)
Story notes that number changes massively every month and it went 3,5 > 2,5 > 5,3 across January, February and March this year.
This obviously isn't changes in user base, but changes in tracking combined with very low sample size, meaning it's wildly inaccurate.
Props to writer in that he didn't engage in mainstream media clickbait method of "we clickbait headline and then we spin a narrative for the entire story. And then we destroy our narrative by telling what actually happened in last two paragraphs". This is explained in three opening paragraph, and literally first sentence is "if figures are accurate" proceeding to explain why they almost certainly aren't:
Quoting the story's opening below:
"If Valve's latest Steam Survey monthly figures are accurate, Steam on Linux enjoyed a very wild month of March. Steam on Linux is now above the 5% threshold and more than twice the size of the Steam on macOS marketshare.
Steam on Linux ended 2025 at around a 3.5% marketshare, dipped a bit in January, and fell to 2.23% in February. That's still much better than several years ago in the pre-Steam-Deck days when Steam on Linux was at around 1%. In absolute terms with the continued growth of the Steam user base, 2~3% was rather healthy considering all of its bumps over the past decade.
But Valve just published the Steam Survey results for March 2026 and they have never been so incredible for Linux... 5.33%! Steam on Linux was never above 5% and easily an all-time high for the Linux gaming marketshare, especially in absolute numbers. It was a massive 3.1% spike in March"
I.e. this growth is more than total supposed user base last month. This is obviously a massive statistical inaccuracy just hitting the limits of the error margin, as these numbers were tracked for many years, so we know what approximate number is. Error rate for these sorts of studies is usually 2-5% depending on sample size and methodology, so we're seeing the error rate manifest itself on massive differential reported.
It would really help if people took any decent class on statistics.
I never cheated an honest man, only rascals. They wanted something for nothing. I gave them nothing for something. -- Joseph "Yellow Kid" Weil
