The invention you describe, by making possible cargo transport without dependency on either a supply of fuel or the vagaries of weather, would revolutionize the global economy to an extent little short of utopian.
You might want to pick a better example the next time you advance this argument, is what I mean to say.
Not so great for the black ones, but that's okay. It shows honest wear, including from my watch strap's steel buckle, and the sharp pressure is a good reminder to improve my typing posture and protect my aging wrists.
The only people who took seriously the idea of a Shuttle FOBS were the Soviets, and frankly not even all of them; as far as I've ever seen credible evidence to substantiate, it never went much past a single position paper from the early 80s. The idea that Buran was meant as a MAD-restoring FOBS has, so far as I know, not even that much support. (If you know of primary sources, in translation or otherwise, please link them.)
Read Payne Harrison's 1989 novel Storming Intrepid, followed by NASA publication SP-4221, "The Space Shuttle Decision," from 1999. [1] The first is a pretty good depiction of what you're imagining, and the second explains why the imagination of a technothriller author is where that idea went to die. Then maybe give your head a shake. If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?
> If Reagan had violated the Outer Space Treaty - via NASA of all agencies! - how do you imagine it'd have stayed secret over these forty years just past?
While I have no reason to believe this particular escapade, I do expect that there are a thousand such wild stories that have remained secret. Watergate seems obvious and explosive to moderns, but at the time it could easily have gone undiscovered or unremarked. How many other similar scale plots, domestic and international, succeeded or failed without ever being surfaced into the history books? A few? Dozens? Hundreds? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Thousands? Millions? Trillions? Hectoseptisquintillions? "Ignorance is not a datum." Teach that as catechism from 1975 and we might have been spared the "rationalist" scourge altogether.
That was the fair estimate for the Shuttle program. NASA caught hell in public, justifiably, for pretending otherwise. But astronaut memoirs such as Mullane's excellent Riding Rockets paint a much more nuanced picture.
I waited until splashdown to permit my emotions to get involved, and I'm glad I did. It was really something earlier, to hear my whole neighborhood bar set up a cheer for an American mission to the Moon.
They are pretty good friends of mine and I never sensed any tension. It really was a marriage-ending bolt out of the blue, like discovering an affair or severe financial infidelity.
I don't really want to say "thank you." That story, more to the point that I can't find a priori cause to doubt it, makes me glad I'm about to go enjoy a gorgeous spring afternoon full of birdsong and sunshine. But I appreciate your taking the time to follow up.
I was married for a decade. Little of that was happy. (We both made the mistake of marrying each other, then compounded it by both being afraid to be first to admit to having noticed.)
Everyone noticed - and of course I've seen it from the other side, too, many times. You can't hide when people are together who don't want to be. That always shows.
Sorry, no. I was married 18 years and then divorced. Some people weren’t surprised, many were. Ditto for other couples I’ve seen divorce. You can never know what goes on behind closed doors in someone else’s marriage.
One might insightfully argue the whole point of the psychopath is precisely that it doesn't show. I recommend Cleckley, whose definition is seminal in The Mask of Sanity, [1] originally 1941 but prefer his 1988 fifth edition especially for its rather disconsolate preface. But even a cursory review of either will trivially show the comparison does not hold.
Begin your reading on page 346, at the heading "Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love." After that, review Section Two for its many examples of psychopathic (mis)behavior in the marital context.
Eat the gamma, pocket the beta, hold the alpha. Nothing in the picture here stops gamma rays so it doesn't matter what you do with those; skin will stop alpha particles, but so will mucosa (and you die of that); in your pocket, the beta source will spall X-rays off your trousers at least some of the time so the beta burns will be mitigated.
Sure thing! That probably won't take more than a couple years at 10-20 hours a week of tutelage, and although my usual rate for consulting of any stripe is $150 an hour, for you I'm willing to knock that all the way down to just $150 an hour.
Just give us a taste of what we'd be paying for? I'm sure you're an expert but before I commit to 2+ years of consultation I'd like to see your approach.
I've already pointed this out as the silly, purposeless argument it's become. (Or more become.) Even I at this point can't figure out who is advocating what or why, other than for the obvious ego reasons. You're bikeshedding at each other and wasting all the time and effort it requires, because no one else is enjoying it any more than you two are: if anything you have left your audience more confused than we began, but I see I repeat myself.
Show me you can stop doing that, and I'll happily mediate a technical version of this conversation that proceeds respectfully from the two of you each making a clear and concise statement of your design thesis, and what you see as its primary pros and cons.
For that I'll take a flat $150 for up to 4 hours. I usually bill by the 15-minute increment, but obviously we would dispense with that here, and ordinarily I would not, of course, offer such a remarkable discount. But it doesn't really take $150 worth of effort to remind someone that he should take better care to distinguish his engineering judgment and his outraged insecurity.
I don't get it, you joined this thread to call me an idiot with a meme, and now you're talking about being a neutral arbiter for a technical discussion that I supposedly ruined.
More than anything I'm getting frustrated with HN discussions because people just insinuate that I'm stupid instead of making substantive arguments reasoning how what I'm saying is wrong.
Are we performing for an audience or having a discussion?
I can't make heads nor tails of anyone's position in this mess, precisely because of its devolution into everyone yelling at one another. Yours happened to be the tail comment on this branch at the time I posted. Don't take it more personally than it was meant.
I understand why this website doesn't have DMs except among YC founders. But if it were otherwise, I'd have DMed you instead of posting that first comment publicly. The criticism I remain convinced has merit, but such things are better done in private. If I chose to make an example out of you over the other guy, it was because you looked like offering a better chance than he of redirecting this into the kind of discussion from which someone could conceivably learn something.
You might want to pick a better example the next time you advance this argument, is what I mean to say.
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