Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.

Things like that will appear eventually. It's too early to expect them. And eventually it will be the user that has the read-only access...and it will never be used. But eventually may be a couple of decades from now (and it may also be a couple of years from now...there's a large variance in that prediction, but I'd be really surprised if it were less than a year from now or longer than a couple of decades).

I missed the part that said it involved leftists, fats, or lesbians.

Yeah, let's ressurect a 30-year-old flame war!

I actually think that you could craft good arguments for allowing trojans. It's the stuff in temporary resonance orbits that I was really thinking of. There are a lot of orbits that are only semi-stable, say stable for a century or two, but not for millennia.

I've only been paying attention since 1990 but every single time a feature they don't offer "is stupid" until they offer it.

Even when I liked the company this Cluster B behavior always bothered me.

If there's an example of "that's a really nice feature our competitor has but we don't offer it yet" I haven't seen it.

The closest I can think of was offering WebObjects for Solaris. Not sure if that ever shipped or we just had a beta. I bailed from that Healthcare IT team when the CIO pulled funding for two-phase commit among disparate patient medication systems with the rationale "even if medication errors kill someone it'll be cheaper to settle the lawsuits than pay for the license." Enough people left that they outsourced and everybody still hates that replacement system.

I learned too late that MBA's don't care about quality.

My vintage MacBook Pro is now running Linux, so the illuminated apple logo seems to be some kind of false advertising. After all these years it's still my sexiest box. Too bad I don't buy computers for sex? (I would have been willing to go for a dual boot, but Apple made that too difficult, so...)

Funny part is that I regard it as my most secure box and I only use it about once a month for a bit of Internet banking. Rather too bad my banks don't seem to understand much about computer security. Lots of top news stories about online breaches of major companies, including FinTech operations. Am I delusional or naive to hope my physical SIM is still protecting me?

Will I ever buy another Apple? Feels unlikely, but I confess that I am still hoping for Microsoft to go away, so maybe I'll have to?

I hadn't heard the YOB had offered to rename the moon, but one third is only by volume. For mass it's about one sixth and diameter would be around two thirds... (At least that's what the genAI told me, and I can't imagine why it would hallucinate again.)

But I think the seventh dwarf joke was funnier, even though I can't remember the song he must be referencing. I'm guessing it's a Disney thing?

Me? I suppose I prefer my politicians feckless and "mostly harmless" rather than dictatorial profiteering wolves in sheeps' (shills'?) clothing.

> everything you do has fucked the consumers

Say more ... how has suing to end the Play App Store monopoly 'fucked consumers'?

Let them do their thing.

I remember in High School the Camaro guys couldn't stop talking about how their Camaros were better than Mustangs but the Mustang guys never felt the need to denigrate the Camaros.

It's a matter of nature.

unrelated: Tailscale is so fooked today:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...

Some people here may need to panic right about now.

Okay joke, but these days we have to take any CDC news with a huge grain of salt. Or dose of penicillin?

Is this coming from an actual scientist or a political appointee who has been parachuted into the CDC?

The actual problem is quite complicated. We want a certain amount of exposure to pathogens to "exercise" our immune systems, but not so much exposure as to start breaking things permanently. It's a different flavor of the youth thing. Young people who recover may even wind up better than ever, mature people may recover fully, while old people are more likely to recover only partway, and quite slowly even for that.

Part of my general age definition joke of the week:

1. Young: Balance of change works out positive.
2. Mature: Changes come out around zero overall.
3. Old age: None of the above, sorry.
4. When the changes stop you're dead, so have a nice day changing.

The other reply had the XKCD about gravity wells, but it's one of ones that's really hard to look at because of size issues...

Well, when you put it that way, it does sound better than the local source, but mostly thanks for the XKCD link. Always appreciated and usually funny, too.

Thank god for that. It was hard enough to learn 9 (now 8) planets at school. Can you imagine having to learn all the names if the hydrostatic equilibrium definition held?

Since when does science work by a standard of "what is easy for children to memorize lists of"? Do we say "There are 8 rivers in the world, and all others are dwarf rivers, which really aren't rivers" to make it easier on kids? Do we say "There are 8 bones in the human body, and all others are dwarf bones, which don't really count as bones"?

That's not how science works. Science is focused on practical distinctions about how things developed and their physical properties relative to each other. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very practical definition. The process of undergoing relaxation induces metamorphism and releases heat, altering bodies. You go to non-equilibrium bodies if you want to study the primordial makeup of our solar system. You go to equilibrium bodies if you want to study tectonics, volcanism, non-primordial chemistry, and search for past or present life. The boundary could not be more meaningful. Yes, there is a bit of fuzz between equilibrium and non-equilibrium, but the same applies to pretty much all scientific fields.

Supporters of the IAU definition (which I should add was a deeply biased sample, in that it looked like they were headed toward no definition or a hydrostatic equilibrium definition, so most supporters of that left, but the people trying to switch it to an orbit-clearing definition stayed) will argue that it's cleared if the remaining objects are trivial transients or in orbital resonance. But that's not what the IAU definition says. Also they'll point to the Stern-Levison parameter, but (A) that was based on the ability to scatter today's distribution of asteroids, not the primordial distribution, which included outright planetissimals**; and (B) Mars didn't even clear it's own orbit, Jupiter did. Also, in the paper that introduced the Stern-Levison parameter, they argued for a better definition where you combine adjectives and nouns (each with specific implications about the body) as needed to describe its size, composition, etc.

But the OP's point stands, in that it's stupid to say that something is a "dwarf planet", yet not a planet. It's like saying dwarf stars aren't stars or dwarf galaxies aren't galaxies or whatnot. An adjective-noun is almost always a noun, that's how language works. In the cases where an adjective-noun isn't a noun - say, "shooting star" or "slow worm" or whatnot - we treat these as scientifically erroneous colloquialisms, and formalize corrected scientific terminology. We don't do literally the opposite and have science codify misleading language.