431–440 of 540 posts
With this many satellites being launched I hope he has a plan to clean them up when they're ready to be decommissioned or worse if a couple hundred get destroyed. aka natural disaster or state sponsored
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/space...
It is not unthinkable that the NSA has faked the moon landing and pictures of earth with photoshop / film equipment. You havent been above earth, so how do you know? I think you should be less arrogant at the prospect of somebody having a different opinion than you. Even the astronauts could be fooled, remember that they only ever see space through a sheet of glass, whether it's from inside the space station or their…
Occam's Razor isn't perfect, but it applies here. We have two options - either we did something that was very expensive but completely doable, or we faked it with a massive overarching conspiracy that must have involved thousands of willing participants. And they must have remained silent about it for more than 50 years at this point. Judging by the fact that the Manhattan Project and all sorts of other top-secret stuff has been leaked since then, why would this be any different?
I don't know too much about rocket science other than my experience with Orbiter and Kerbal Space Program, but I was in the military, and let me tell you how terrible we are at conspiracies that involve shitloads of people. It's the same reason why chemtrails are hilariously stupid; everyone on the airport flightline has to be in on it, or else you're going to have to be constantly threatening and/or disappearing baggage handlers and mechanics who've been determined to "know too much!"
So, it's not the trained ideologues you have to be worried about. It's the thousands and thousands of PFC Shmuckatellis who will get drunk at the local bar and start bragging about top-secret government things to the first semi-attractive woman in the vicinity. It's happened many, many times before.
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I wonder how much it would cost to purchase an island with 10-20 people and build houses on it. Could you live there in a sustainable way? Possibly seems like an interesting way to live.
You can buy a small (~2 ha) undeveloped island for as low as 100,000 USD. Bigger ones cost more depending where they are located. However I saw really big islands (~2,200 ha) for about 2M USD in Chile (I think that is cheap considering that a luxury apartment in my city, Florianópolis, can cost way more than that). Current solar energy solutions and biogas production from waste can form a solid base for a sustainable…
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Lunatic, perhaps, but "fringe" actually does imply numeric inferiority.
no in politics it means on the extreme end of a spectrum eg the KKK or the equivalent on the left who where calling for the workers of the world to help our Baathist sisters and bothers crush the uprising.
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Yes, it's called a sun-synchronous orbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun-synchronous_orbit The exact orbit has to be arranged so that it precesses once a year, keeping it aligned with a particular local time of day. "Typical sun-synchronous orbits are about 600–800 km in altitude, with periods in the 96–100 minute range, and inclinations of around 98°"
There are 5 planes of 75 satellites planned by SpaceX later on for 81 degrees inclination which might be sun syncronous during the day but the initial 32 planes of 50 satellites are all headed for 53 degrees inclination which I'm sure isn't. You can't have sun synchronous orbits anyways for those satellites providing coverage during the night.
Um, what? Of course you can.
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no in politics it means on the extreme end of a spectrum eg the KKK or the equivalent on the left who where calling for the workers of the world to help our Baathist sisters and bothers crush the uprising.
Oh God, tankies. Can we just not talk about fucking tankies? They're disgusting.
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You can buy a small (~2 ha) undeveloped island for as low as 100,000 USD. Bigger ones cost more depending where they are located. However I saw really big islands (~2,200 ha) for about 2M USD in Chile (I think that is cheap considering that a luxury apartment in my city, Florianópolis, can cost way more than that). Current solar energy solutions and biogas production from waste can form a solid base for a sustainable…
2,200 hectares? Do you have a link for that? That can't be right / seems amazingly cheap (also if compared to that small island, too good to be true). If you split $2m between 20 people you get 110ha for $100k. 110ha is massive.
Has lakes, a small marina, but is far way from any big city.
However, with gigabit internet and a bunch of interesting people it can become a very good place.
If I had 2M on hand I would start a community there right now.
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2,200 hectares? Do you have a link for that? That can't be right / seems amazingly cheap (also if compared to that small island, too good to be true). If you split $2m between 20 people you get 110ha for $100k. 110ha is massive.
Sure, this one in Chile is a good example: http://www.privateislandsonline.com/islands/isla-verdugo Has lakes, a small marina, but is far way from any big city. However, with gigabit internet and a bunch of interesting people it can become a very good place. If I had 2M on hand I would start a community there right now.
I honestly wonder how many people would be interested in living like this.
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> This is entirely normal - the young like things to change, the old do not. This voting pattern well predates the internet. Makes no sense given the context. Clinton was absolutely not the change candidate in this election. Old people predominantly voted for a shakeup, a radical change in the way American govt operates.
That "shakeup" was a vote to regress things to how they were in the past. It was a vote to rollback changes, not go in a new direction. It was a fundamental part of the campaign slogan: "again". I'm not sure if you noticed, but both houses went Republican, and the Republicans who have been controlling congress for the past 6 years have been stonewalling and blocking everything. The people who were voted in? They actu…
There are actually two ways to pass a constitutional amendment. 2/3 of both Federal legislative houses is one, but they can also do it with 2/3 of all state legislatures.
Republicans do very well in the state legislatures, they're only about five states short of the latter threshold.
2018 is likely to be a bad year for Democrats, there's a huge number of seats to defend and only a handful of Republican seats that must be defended, with only like 2-3 competitive seats. A very real possibility is that this turns into the usual midterm bloodbath and they pick up a few more seats/legislatures and start pushing constitutional amendments on wedge/social issues to lock in their wins.
People's adherence to this as a "religious document" is oversold - the document includes a method to change itself, and this is "playing by the rules". But frankly they wouldn't even think twice before rationalizing, when presented with the opportunity to lock in their wins for multiple decades.
You're right about it being in their best interest not to mess with the election system right now. The multi-level (state/federal) and district-by-district/state-by-state nature of the system favors them heavily compared to the popular vote. Republicans have near total dominance of all levels of government, with what amounts to a popular loss. One thing they may change is to have more blue states start splitting their electoral votes, like Nebraska and Maine do. States get to determine how their electoral votes are allocated, and Republicans control many of the "blue" states' governments (eg Michigan, Wisconsin, etc). Republicans can essentially make those states not count for Democrats electorally, since they will go half-and-half for both Republicans and Democrats (+/- a few seats).
