Comment Re: My religion also requires I be paid for nothi (Score 1) 45
A small percentage of a few billion people is a big problem.
Yes, regardless of whether their name is Muhammed or Breivik.
A small percentage of a few billion people is a big problem.
Yes, regardless of whether their name is Muhammed or Breivik.
Why not here? Because for starters, humanism isn't a religion (and I say that as a humanist). It's a philosophical stance within atheism. And atheism is the absence of religion** (it's literally right there in the name), not a religion. You can't claim "religious" exemptions as an atheist. What this person actually wants is a philosophical exemption, akin to, say, a vegetarian wanting an exemption from having to cook meat at a restaurant or whatnot.
** - Well, except for those atheists who worship Athe.
Yeah, nothing insular about the Amish.
(Oh wait...)
Headline from 1845.
Agreed. If you don't know what you're doing it's hard to even ask for the right thing or know what's possible. For example: I'm currently developing a system that uses a local AI to help debug internal issues. The initial incarnations of it were very slow to start up each command; clearly, it wasn't doing proper KV caching and was having to prefill every turn; it required patches on the llama.cpp fork and our API wrapper, and also adjusting the system prompt to keep variable content at the end. But if you have no idea about KV caching issues, how do you even know something is wrong with the backend, let alone what to tell the AI to fix? You'll end up deciding you need to upgrade the GPU instead.
(That said: "lovingly handcrafted" code is a hilarious phrase that should give any developer who's ever worked on a big corporate software project the giggles, and also, these software devs are clearly people angry at knowing they're going to be let go looking for revenge by badmouthing their boss to the press)
Escape from Pluto is much easier, and the Pluto-Charon distance is 1/20th of the Earth-Moon distance.
Build what, exactly??
If we build it, then it will frictionlessly tell us what to build.
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.
the germs to punish humanity for allowing transgender Muslims to practice Sharia law while eating your pets! Repent, heathens, or you'll end up with a brainworm like RFK's and low testosterone!
for the New Horizons probe to explore, like they did with the "snowman asteroid"*, but the area of space it can reach is rather limited, as it can change its path by only about a degree with the fuel it has left.
It's still amazing something going that fast can change its path by a whole degree. Due to luck, it didn't have to use much of its onboard fuel to get to its last 2 big targets. I hope it gets a chance to use it on something important.
* Found the by the Hubble scope, actually. They keep changing the rock's name, so I just call it by its nickname.
...one way
There are other options besides QWERTY and DVORK.
"Plutocrat 'A' grew too big for their britches, so lets give some of the business to Plutocrat 'B'."
What could possibly go wrong?
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.
Speak for yourself, Pluto is fascinating. Tectonically active. Cryovolcanism so abundant it appears to have formed large mountains by the merger of individual domes. A gigantic scar exposing its mantle, which over time roils in massive convection cells, pockmarked in sublimation pits. Mountains drifting like icebergs and accumulating on the shore. Penetentes (sublimation ice spikes), the size of large hills. A multilayer blue atmosphere, in which organic chemistry occurs, depositing not just organic matter onto its own surface, but that of its moon as well. Active glaciation. A probable subsurface ocean, in contact with rock. Conditions suggesting it was habitable when it formed.
IMHO, it's way more interesting than a number of recognized planets.
(Also, I'm confused by your response. This isn't about the moon, and the moon has no atmosphere for flying)
Hackers of the world, unite!