GreyEyedGhost

small thing to get hung up on

The thong, right?

Or something like this.

While I get that it's not a small feat, and an unusual finale for space flight, this isn't much higher than some skydiving packages you can book today. Still pretty ballsy for back then.

If every Starlink satellite shattered into the most dangerously-sized pieces simultaneously, it would only affect our access to space for 5 to 10 years. It would perhaps be bad enough to put manned missions on the back burner during that time period, and would certainly cause major issues for terrestrial astronomy, but it wouldn't cause much harm to the space program overall. If they were in a higher orbit, it would definitely be a concern.

You were added to a group chat that was described to you as a way to make sure everyone got home safe. If you didn't want to be a part of it, you could have easily waited until everyone checked in, expressed your happiness that everyone was safe and removed yourself from the chat. If you didn't want another group forming without you being able to keep tabs, that obviously wouldn't work. So I have to wonder about your motivations when you don't take the easy and obvious way out.

Nothing of value was lost when we defederated, nothing of value will be gained by refederating.

The number of well-educated men with comfortable lives who are willing to sacrifice themselves are very small. I'm not talking about people like Osama bin Laden, who are happy to send other people to die, I'm talking about the people who are willing to do the actual fighting, killing, and being killed. Some of the best solutions to terrorism are education and financial security.

The movie Charlie Wilson's War gives a nice prelude to the 2001 war. The good news is, the fraction of the cost of the war in the 80s that education of the people would have cost was saved...and spent in just days the next time around.

Just given the nature of diamonds and light, there are more interesting shapes. They could cut it into a simple cubic, but that wouldn't be very interesting and you would still have some substantial pieces left over to make other diamonds from. So the usual plan is to cut more or less the largest stone you can while avoiding any major flaws and using a cut that will display the properties of diamond in their best light, and then cutting the rest into diamonds that can be sold, as well. I believe there was a larger diamond found a while back that had two fairly large diamonds cut out of it because the nature of the uncut diamond made that more profitable and esthetically pleasing than if they had just cut a single larger piece.

Diamonds are interesting and can be pretty, but they're also valued for vastly more than their worth, and there are other very interesting options for jewelry that are neither as expensive nor as ethically dubious as many diamonds are.

o7

I'm sure she suffered, too. He fathered a child on her, after all.

Only partly serious.

My company changed the policy to increase the time between password changes. To compensate, they increased the required password length.

Neither of these policy changes were communicated to the employees. The expiry time tells you when it arrives (don't tell me you change it before it expires, good for you if you do), but if your new password doesn't meet the policy requirements it doesn't tell you what they are. The support request response indicated the minimum length was three letters longer. The only good thing about this ordeal is that I get paid by the hour.