Systems like that can easily be difficult or impossible to test on the ground, because they aren’t strong enough to work under gravity. They might need to be in free-fall to survive being deployed

The president can’t actually make law, as far as I understand it. He, and the various offices managed by the executive branch, apply and enforce the law which Congress has written (give or take some interpretation by the courts).

Sometimes of those laws specifically give the executive broad enough authority over something that it’s very similar to the president being able to write laws about it, but it’s not quite the same and it cant overrule actual laws

Why shouldn’t they? Nose and toes do rhyme.

It’s possible there’s some accent I can’t immediately think of where they don’t, but all of the accents which come to mind use the same sound in both cases

While that sort of analysis probably isn’t impossible, it is computationally unrealistic to do in realtime on a language which wasn’t designed for it.

It’s the sort of thing which is simple in 99% of cases, but the last 1% might well be impossible. Sadly it’s the last 1% you need to worry about, because anyone trying to defeat your system is going to find them

There’s no need to leave earth, just lift it into a medium earth orbit. There are literally thousands of kilometres in between low earth orbit (where there are lots of communications, spy, navigation and weather satellites) and geosynchronous (where there are lots of communications satellites), and outside of those two there’s virtually nothing there

Oh, sure. It’s not likely to be a serious threat, but not for the reason people keep saying

People keep saying that, but it isn’t true that the leak being in the disposable part of the vehicle means it’s not a safety problem.

It’s the pressurisation system for the thrusters. If that fails, then they won’t be able to control the capsule until it hits the atmosphere. That could mean they get stuck on the ISS, in the most extreme case, or it could mean that they lose thrust mid-manouvre and they re-enter the atmosphere incorrectly. That could be anywhere from inconvenient (they miss their landing spot and someone has to come get them), to dangerous (they land so far away that they’re in danger of sinking or being eaten by bears before anyone reaches them) to outright fatal (they skip off the atmosphere, or tumble their way into reentry and burn up)

It’s a matter of perspective. To someone who’s job is to write the system which interprets ASM, ASM is high level

“dissolving parliament” means they’ve announced a general election. Parliament won’t meet any more, and all the existing members of parliament will go home and begin campaigning

I don’t think loss of tiles was the problem, actually. There were vapor trails in various places which I thought at the time were something venting, but Scott Manley pointed out that they actually look like hot air seeping through the gaps in the hinges. That would have exposed unshielded metal to hot gas, bypassing the heat shield entirely

The problem is that their point is nonsense.

This isn’t a long-standing problem being persistently ignored, this is a test flight designed specifically to discover such problems. They were so keen to test how the system handled problems like this that they deliberately damaged the heat shield before the flight (somewhere other than where this particular problem occurred).

The implication that this partial failure of the heat shield is damning evidence of negligence is either ignorant or deliberately deceptive

You declaring a debt isn’t meaningful because you don’t have legal authority to do so.

A licence statement is describing in what way you’re granting permission for something you do have the right to control, which makes it meaningful

Nah, we’re alright. I don’t think anyone has clearly defined the requirements of earth citizenship, we can assume it’s like Ireland who hand it out like candy

No it wouldn’t. Whoever touched it last is responsible for it, that’s entirely consistent with the metaphore

I’m pretty sure it means exactly what it says, but you lot are all misreading it.

I interpret it as “all rights, except the right to commit, are reserved” (which doesn’t mean you surrender the right to commit, but rather that it’s the only right you aren’t depriving everyone else of)

You’re mostly correct, but hilariously even all that wouldn’t be good enough because water behaves differently at different scales. Surface tension would dominate in a miniature model, and the water would be trying to stick to everything in a way which oceans simply don’t do

In principle they could have pulled out slightly, if there’s jostling and tiny movements in skull then you’d expect them to work loose over time if they’re not securely anchored

Well it’s definitely alive, that’s not a terribly high bar (plants and sponges qualify, after all).

The ethics question is whether it’s a person yet (or should be treated like one)

He’s the foreign secretary. I’m pretty sure that makes him the person who’s permission they’d need, unless the prime minister immediately overrules him

The Artemis 1 launch was also staggeringly expensive, and yet to be repeated.

In the time it’s taken to develop that rocket, SpaceX has gone from it’s very first real flight (by which I mean actually achieving something, rather than a pure test flight) to launching far more every year than the entire rest of the world combined. Note that by that definition, Artemis hasn’t had a single “real” flight yet.