Not really. You mentioned a sequence of unlikely events, while I am wondering about the outcome of an ongoing investigation.
Note that "a bit" refers to the second half of the sentence, not your comment exactly.
Readit Newsgravescale commented on NASA indefinitely delays return of Starliner to review propulsion data arstechnica.com/space/202... · Posted by u/ceejayoz
I wonder what the options are if it is decided that Starliner is unsafe to return with human occupants.
A bit like imagining how many of the royal family have to die before Princess Eugenie becomes Queen or a Borgen-type affair where a junior minister becomes prime minister, can you imagine the crazy sequence of events that has astronauts rescued by a Shenzhou capsule?
And would it produce some detente or raise tensions?
Not sure why this is being downvoted because it is correct.
The product of public domain materials can be copyrighted. For example, if someone were to publish a new book of Tom Sawyer whose text is in the public domain, that book can be copyrighted. Everyone can still publish their own new books of Tom Sawyer using the public domain materials, but noone can copy that book of Tom Sawyer.
Specifically, any new creative input to the book is copyrighted. Usually, this is things like new prefaces or forewords and new illustrations or cover art.
gravescale commented on Why does current flow the opposite way from the electrons? mathstodon.xyz/@johncarlo... · Posted by u/johncarlosbaez
dexter is Latin for right and sinister is left, rotatory is probably rotation and hat fit in with polarization.
Where does levor... come from for left? Perhaps a newer Latin "left" than I was taught?
It comes from the Latin "laevus".
Funnily enough, although "sinister" came to mean "the bad side", it may have come from Proto-Indo-European for the "favourable side".
gravescale commented on Ask HN: What happens when I click "request for quote" on your SaaS? · Posted by u/mjbale116
Ooh we had a one of those!
They organised an in-person demo at our office after they filled in the online forms for their "multi-million dollar drinks distribution company", right in our target zone of customer type and size. So we had a few salespeople present to give a swish demo and hopefully win them over.
Turned out to be a 15 year old doing door to door sales of his home made ginger beer. He told us our (half the price of the nearest competitor) product was too expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed in business like he would.
Kudos to our sales guys though: After the initial shock and eye rolling, they treated them like the large business they claimed to be and just used the time to practice their demo/sales techniques.
> He told us our product was too expensive for what it was and that we would never succeed in business like he would.
To be fair, when you're a 15 year old selling homemade drink, everything seems expensive, because you have basically zero costs other than your own time and a sack of sugar and it's difficult to conceive how much money roars around in business with any non-family employee.
I've been working 20-ish years and I still get sticker shock over even quite minor things even though some sap pays me three figures, more than my childhood annual income maybe, a day.
Perhaps it's too much free (as in beer) software and over exposure to ridiculously cheap-through-insane-scale consumer goods - a whole mid-grade phone for the same cost as a meal for two, say. But I think there's also a huge disconnect with how we tell children the world of "good, capitalist work", in which they'll probably spend the rest of their lives, works, and how it really works. About all you really get is Peppa Pig setting up a lemonade stand and learning a lesson on the value of hard work, say, and a jagged line graph briefly mentioned on the news.
The school system, at least for me, was extremely light on that kind of thing, even when you include economics (which I didn't take). In fact even in the media, other then specifically financial things like the FT, how the whole world actual or books in the subject specifically, how everything actually functions at any practical level is just...never really mentioned. Kids might know every kind of dinosaur, the function of the bits on the steam engine, the names of the sails on a ship-of-the-line, but it's almost like everyone has agreed we just don't need to talk about daily reality. It's like a huge "draw the rest of the owl" meme.
> Lost revenue is at least $10,000 on nights when the no show rate is high, based on an average spend of $100 to $150 per customer.
Just charge reservations a $50 cover? You show up and that $50 goes towards the bill and you still only pay $100 ~ $150 and you don't show up and your bot network goes broke.
Could also do some kind of lottery for reservations. If you want a reservation then you need to enter information about you and the date/time you want. Some time before then the lottery runs and selects a winner who gets the reservation. Prune people from participating in the lottery if they are frequent no-shows and possibly if they're trying to get a reservation for every single day+hour ...
Just like Amazon being unable to deal with fake reviews and listing manipulation, despite having so much data that they have to invent new words for it like lakes. They don't want to do it: presumably they make better and-or easier money by letting scammers operate with impunity.
gravescale commented on 1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch chrisfenton.com/1-25-scal... · Posted by u/akkartik
> But what is a Nixie Watch? How does it function? These are some questions worth exploring with this distinct and idiosyncratic wristwatch. So—let’s continue!
> ....
> Without getting into the weeds too much, the watch harvests electricity from said battery; deploys that electricity through currents; then the currents are switched off-and-on at exact times via a circuit board—which governs the electrical currents.
While this certainly isn't "in the weeds", it does rather feel that this is not even within visual range of any plant at all.
At the risk of eating the Onion, though it's not inaccurate, it doesn't seem like a very useful description, to anyone, even if the reader has never encountered electricity. The juxtaposition of that sentence with the earlier airily unelaborated-upon "a Nixie tube is a cold cathode tube" is pure art.
gravescale commented on 1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch chrisfenton.com/1-25-scal... · Posted by u/akkartik
I love to imagine this kind of thing dug up by an alien civilization. That it displays the moons of Jupiter will be a fun puzzle and a source of wonder. “Obviously”, they will say, “these people must have worshipped Jupiter as a god and used the position of its moons to keep time.” But the pieces of the puzzle will never quite fit.
Who knows, maybe the Antikythera mechanism or the pyramids were a similarly ludicrous prank?
"Some people (X'Grn'k et al) say it was a device used for humorous purposes. However, we consider that the presence of sacred etched silicon devices rules this hypothethis out. While crudely worked in that time, and despite the abundance of raw material on the planet, such silicon was in short supply and was central to the nascent Guptian Church movement. In addition, records suggest that the "geo"politics of the time, somewhere between 1980 and 2050, had silicon artisanry in constant high military demand (see the F'llr'wq Metaversity analysis on use of Phonic Screen Devices in Central-West Asian planet-surface warfare between 1945 and 2045), and if not inducted into the Guptian priesthood, a silicon carver could expect a so-called 99-6 life, a 105-Earth-hour cycle with 99 hours in a warfab and 6 hours to rest (J'Hrar et al). Furthermore, per a recent discovery of a transaction record thought likely to be payment for living volume at the Western-American coastal enclave, the artisan class appears to have little in the way of disposable resourcing. Thus, we consider it unlikely that an artisan of that period could have spared or even been allowed the resources or time for such levity."
gravescale commented on Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now threema.ch/en/blog/posts/... · Posted by u/andrew918277
There was a disjunction around the late 90s/early 2000s when the internet got big. That was around the time that the corporate news sources started losing control of the news to more citizen reporter types running podcasts or whatever gets big on social media. What gets called "the narrative" split from being the consensus of journalists to a cacophony of random people who don't form consensuses.
Before that change, a scandal in the papers also meant you had to have lost political favour with the people who owned the media companies, ie, were losing big political battles. You also had no hope of being re-elected through a hostile media because if they didn't carry a favourable message there was no way to communicate with voters. I'd argue people like Jeffery Epstein never really made it to trial or public attention because stories got buried.
Afterwards the better approach is to point and shout "Fake News". There are multiple channels that reach voters and it turns out that the corporate media are actually much more unreliable and unpopular than were previously suspected. A lot more dirty laundry is aired and the Streisand effect takes hold.
CA wasn't the change, it was just one of the first big scandals to happen in the new era.
I don't know, I think there was definitely a turn around the mid 2010s when actions and consequences really started to diverge.
And to be clear, I don't mean that the exposure of CA was the cause, I mean that what CA and their ilk was delivering to their customers - detailed, real time, granular analysis of the reactions to actions.
Some time a bit before the public CA exposure would have been when analysts looking at the data delivered by CA would have first realised just how little what would until then have been "scandal" actually moved the needle of their supporters, without having to infer from slow and inaccurate techniques like polling and focus groups.
gravescale commented on Chat Control Must Be Stopped – Now threema.ch/en/blog/posts/... · Posted by u/andrew918277
We have to make the more traditional methods popular again.
The problem is that this (if my theory is not just bunk) isn't something you can really go back and do differently. An emergent property of the reactions of polarised groups to the behaviours of their leaders was discovered to be quite different to what had been assumed. You may as well say "we have to go back to the old ways" when lamenting the relativity makes physics too complicated.
Though, as to the point I think you're actually making, it's also been made very difficult to object to these things in any terms that could possibly have an effect without being thoroughly denounced as a nutter, an extremist, or worse. After all, the "right" thing to do is always to simply "vote!".