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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • To be clear: to get back to the ground safely, the spacecraft RCS has to operate for no more than about five hours.

    As far as I know, this spacecraft is still certified for emergency reentry, and if they needed to, the crew can get in and leave at any time. And they have good confidence that the spacecraft will get them to earth safely.

    These delays aimed at getting more data to justify certification as an operational vehicle instead of flight test. If it doesn’t work out, the worst case seems to be that a second test flight may be required.

    Delays don’t really cost NASA anything either. There’s plenty of consumables on the station for the crew, and when the capsule is docked the RCS can be shut down so it doesn’t leak.


  • Dude, all the work is in the maps, and they generally sell them proportional to the amount of map content. There are two benefits:

    1. Studio doesn’t have to staff up to do all the content at once, but they still get paid periodically for what they do produce. This keeps the staff employed longer in a more stable position.

    2. You can pick and choose which areas you want to get. If you want a big bundle, those still show up on Steam too at various levels of discount. But you’re not locked into having to deal with Ohio too.






  • Let us all remember that, at least back when it started, the establishment alternative to systemd was a product named after its original operating system, System V UNIX, which is a direct descendent of the original UNIX from AT&T. This sysvinit software used complicated shell scripts to manage daemons. Contrary to some opinions, these shell scripts were not “just working”; they were in fact a constant and major maintenance burden for Linux distributions. When I started on Linux at least, Debian had a suspiciously large fraction of bugs on init script breakages.

    All this is to say that the new system, systemd, doesn’t have to be anywhere near perfect to be worth replacing sysvinit.

    People argue that systemd is rejecting the “UNIX philosophy” of small tools that do one thing well. I argue that this UNIX philosophy is not some kind of universal good with no tradeoffs. It’s an engineering rule of thumb. There are always tradeoffs.

    People argue that systemd is too much like Windows NT. I argue that Windows NT has at least a few good ideas in it. And if one of those ideas solves a problem that Linux has, Linux should use that idea.


  • I believe the story is that the original three Lord of The Rings films were licensed under an old film option deal (as in the option predated Peter Jackson working on the project). That deal was made when the Tolkien estate was under different management or something. And the current regime is not doing any film licensing for Silmarillion or anything else.

    I think this is also related to the Rings of Power Amazon series. I think they sublicensed the rights to the LOTR appendices from the same movie option that the Peter Jackson films were made from, but they couldn’t get access to a Silmarillion.


  • A big part of WWI is that the web of treaties and alliances were all secret, as in classified information by each country.

    NATO is not a secret. The membership roster and terms and conditions are known to all, including potential adversaries like Mr. Putin. This has a major effect on stabilizing international relations because nobody has to guess what NATO would do.

    Despite his rhetoric, we know that Putin understands how NATO works, because he has been pulling materiel out of Kaliningrad. This leaves the Russian exclave extremely vulnerable to an invasion from NATO territory. But Putin is not worried about that, probably because he actually trusts NATO to follow the NATO charter.