Well, from what they said, the tank simply didn't hold the pressure.

Filling one with N2 and seeing what happens is the obvious cheap way to do this.

SpaceX chose the very expensive way of blowing everything up after filling the lot with O2 and CH4.

More to the point: the better security we get from iOS and Android devices is nothing to do with vetted app stores, and everything to do with restricted, deny-all, permissions apps get on those OSes. Each app operates in its own walled garden, with no access to anything beyond its own data and the internet, unless flagged by the app and explicitly granted by the user. On Android, each app is its own *nix user. iOS operates the same way.

THIS is why writing malware is much harder on Android and iOS compared to Windows, MacOS or Linux, where apps operate with the user's privileges.

Only being able to install apps from trusted sources, or The One Trusted Source as the case may be, has nothing to do with it.

Hasn't been for a while.

It was true, when 30 or 50 year old adults who had never seen a computer in their life suddenly had one dumped on their desks and were told to use it. I still feel for them...

That was 25 years ago, tho.

At this point:
- everyone in an office under 45 has had to use one since they started working - at worst.
- everyone has had the internet on their phone for 15 years.
- everyone under the stage of 30 only ever had a smartphone.

On the other hand, those "digital natives" only ever had to tap the "do it" button to get something done. When it's not right in front of their faces, it's this one, that one, and then it happens. Magic words. Unlike their parents who had to understand enough of what was happening to get what they needed.

Clarke's technology/magic threshold is right on point. I feel we're well past it when it comes to computers and the internet. It's not a bad thing, mind. I wouldn't be able to fix a car, unlike my dad. It's great!

But it does mean that teenagers are no better armed to deal with "tech" than their parents.

Well, there's a big element of marketing BS in what they claim they can do, but generally, I agree. Social Media has been remarkably disingenuous.

My personal, and quite recent, favorite, is that when the debate was about their responsibility, they were all about "The User's posts" and "common carrier".

Then AI turned up, along with the need for training data, and the very same suddenly became "My Data" and "selling access".

No.

The birthday "problem" arises only because there's only 365 days in a year but we think of birthdays as unique. It's purely a perception problem.

The Baltic sea is 377000 km^2. The longest cable in it, C-Lion1, is 1172 km long. About 0.5m across. 0.6 km^2. If you were to drop an anchor randomly, the chance you'd hit it is 1.6e-6. Real close to the "gold" standard 5 sigma used as evidence in particle physics. Way beyond the p0.01 that's enough everywhere else.

Of course, undersea cable do get cut still. Close to shore, because they tend to terminate where other things, such as harbors, and therefore ships, are.

Twice in a couple of days? In the high seas?

Women are for cooking and making babies. Gays should be treated. Criminals belong in "rape in the ass prison". Rape? Women can "shut the whole thing down" if they didn't want it.

MAGA! Fascist! Evil!

Women are for cooking and making babies. And should be stoned for adultery. And should be killed for dishonoring the family. Gays? Throw them off rooftops. Thieves should have their hand cut off. Rape? They're jewish. Or attended a rave. Or hostages. It's "decolonization". Women can "not be there" if they didn't want it.

Give me their flag so I can fly it!

As an actual leftist, I've defended the first point of view all my life.

People who switch from the first to the second? Narcissists with no convictions who just care for something to protest about and their social standing. Scum of the earth.

I don't like that Python took the "stream of bytes" approach. It's supposed to be a high level language.

Having said that, Unicode is an ungodly mess.

Back in the days, you had 8 bits characters, nice and easy. Problem: you can't fit a lot in 256 values.
Allright, then, let's use 16 bits, that's enough. That was the case when Java decided to go with 16 bits chars. It did have a serious performance penalty: if you were dealing with ascii, your throughput was halved. But it did preserve the efficient random access semantics. In spite of the performance penalty, it feel it was the right choice at the time.
Except Chinese speakers complained because you couldn't fit all traditional chinese characters in Unicode. Only simplified ones. And, in fairness, they had a point. Unicode was meant to represent _every_ character.
So suddenly the character set was expanded beyond 65536, which made the 16 bits the _worst_ choice. Some "characters" had to be split into two codepoints. All the inconvenients of having multi-"characters" characters, all the inconvenients of large characters to begin with, without the advantages of efficient random access.

So now, you can either have an API that has 4 byte characters (easy to use but dreadfully inefficient), UTF8 (efficient but painful to use in some cases), or just bytes (efficient but painful to use in other cases)(or more correctly, "not my problem, best of luck", quite the acceptance of inability from people whose job it is deal with just that).

It's really a case of picking your poison.

> There's a reason old programs were measured in kilobytes and ram was measured in megabytes.

Right. I learned assembly before I learned C. Ram was measured in kilobytes. 6809, 8088, 68k (luxury!). 512 on my Amiga if you threw out the OS.

The reason "old programs were measured in kilobytes" is because they did not quite nothing but as little as possible. We're talking about a time when sorting a list of files alphabetically was considered a major improvement.

I'm all for blaming a certain "the compiler will make it fast" or "just throw more hardware at it" philosophy for unfathomable slowness in modern software. Not to mention general cluelessness about algorithms. I've done it myself.

But, come on, the fundamental reason old software was small, fast and efficient is because is was useless crap.

I'm not vegetarian, never mind vegan. I enjoy a Good piece of beef as much as anyone. Ribeye, medium-rare, thank you very much. Emphasis on Good. I hate to sound like a snob, but most beef out there is s__t anyway. I'm sure I'd love your burgers, but I'm not ordering beef in a restaurant unless they sort of specialize in it. Most places can neither source good meat nor cook it correctly, regardless of price.

Anyway.

"thick patties cooked medium". Well, duh! That's your problem right there, and not the "preparation". It's not beef. Don't try to cook it like it is. Would you cook bass like you cook steak?

Anyway #2

A good piece beef is nice. Foie gras is nice. A Filet-o-Fish with fries is nice. Vegan burgers are nice. I'm happy to have that over any fast food burger. They taste just as good (or bad, your taste) and they're better for the environment.

I just wish they were less expensive. I suspect BYND and they others figured they could mint money by ripping off the vegans. Well. There's always beef :-)

Last thing: I don't care for "internet health expert" advice. If you can't run a marathon, sit down and shut up. And if you can... Good for you!

There's a third camp:

People who don't mind, or are in fact happy with, the "societal topic" aspect of a show, but think it's crap for completely unrelated reasons, and are also conveniently lumped in with camp 1.

Because that's much easier for those responsible than to address the criticisms, _and_ they know that the second they pull the "people don't like it because it's progressive" card, said critics will either shut up or be attacked and silenced online by simpletons for something they never said or even thought.

Nice.

A couple of things.

Given the mass range in the paper, we're talking more super-earth than ice giant. The smaller size alone could easily add another magnitude.
The paper's most probable magnitude is 21.
Eris was discovered in 2005. Its magnitude is 18.7. 20+ is _hard_, especially if you don't known where to look.

I entirely agree with you, and the TFA, and I've been saying this for _years_.

SQL, the language, was designed in a time when "making it look like English" seemed a good way to make languages user friendly (see also COBOL). That didn't work. No manager is typing in their own queries.
What we did get was something that makes composition next to impossible (what the TFA has under 'incompressible'). Ever tried generating queries that combine other generated queries?

That was actually my problem with the so-called 'noSQL' movement. They threw away the good bits of relational databases (foreign keys, ACID, constraints), which had nothing to do with SQL, and called the result noSQL for some reason. Then, they realized a query language was a good idea, and guess what they came up with? SQL, of course!

I've been thinking a good start for a query language would be a functional language. I mean the very idea of transactions is that the state is constant, unless _you_, very specifically, not very often, and usually at the very top of the query, want to change it. Let me think of languages that work like that...

You're so full of s__t.

For the sake of it, I just tried running a jar file compiled with Java 5 (released 2004) on god knows what on my Mac with java 14. Guess what? I just works. Swing UI and all.
I also tried compiling the same (it's an old download), then running it. Guess what? I also just works.

My experience is that there's exactly _three_ languages for which you can take _any_ code, from anywhere, anytime, and _trust_ that it will work just fine now on the same platform: C, Java and Perl (a bit of a cop out, seeing as it hasn't changed) with everything else new. The two for which that is also true on a different platform are Java and Perl.

The worst offenders are:
1) swift. Talk about a language written by the whims of the moment.
2) C++. Does not have either a grammar or an ABI (not even a stable one for a single vendor). Stuff _will_ break.
3) Python. The 3 migration still hurts.

No offense to Rust. I haven't had the chance to try it.

I do agree with you on Version number creep. Java 16 should really be Java 1.16 (marketing took over with Java 1.5, that's why it became Java 5). The major version number carries an expectation (and reality) of breakage, which does not exist in Java.

The reason we're not changing from Java 8 is not fear of breakage. It's that the built-in profiler is gone. And I'm not trading a built-in profiler, for all its flaws, for cosmetic sugar.

To add to that...

It wasn't just faster and cheaper. It was also much more convenient.

Linux would run on that decommissioned PC you had lying around, hardware you could get from the shop down the street, or, if you wanted fancy, something you could buy online from Dell that would be delivered in a few days.
In _2005_, if you wanted to get anything from Sun "the dot in dot com", you had to _ring a distributor_. If everything went smoothly you might get it the following month!

Another important thing was, well, Java.

On the server, suddenly you didn't have to worry about portable C, makefiles, various compilers, build machines, or any of that. You just copied the jar where it was needed. And it didn't matter one whit if that was on a Linux machine cobbled together from spare parts, or a $1M Sun or IBM. So why would you buy a "cheap" Suns to build and test? One for system testing, just in case. And that was it.

I don't have a problem with Google banning the Parler app, or Facebook or Twitter or AWS banning anyone. They have a ToS, it's up to the customer to follow them, and if they don't want to, they have alternatives, which they should have considered from the beginning. More importantly, if the _users/customers_ disagree with those policies, they can use the alternatives. And there's nothing Google or Facebook or Twitter or AWS can do about that.

I do have a problem with _Apple_ banning the Parler app. Because they're not just banning it from their store. They're banning it from iPhones. There's no alternative. In other words, _Apple_ is deciding that _their customers_ don't want Parler or Trump.

I can't agree with that, however much I despise Trump.

In addition, I can't help but notice that the aforementioned were quite happy to make money from the presence of the now unwelcome, while draping themselves in "freedom of speech" when violence erupted for the same reasons abroad, but as soon as violence erupted at home, and money looked less likely, they decided that previously "fundamental principles" were actually rather ancillary. Hypocrites and liars, the whole lot of them.