I was wondering how the scientists went from proposing a planet that was 1.5 to 2 times the size of earth, to proposing it being 5-10 times the size of earth.

You Should Really Considering Explaining Acronyms Before Posting, obviously.

A remote command from some random phone to reboot does sound like the a wonderful vector for malware, though

YSRCEABP

Designing any kind of space vehicle is always a trade off.

The vehicle needs to be light enough to be launched from earth to mars, but durable enough to fulfill its mission goals.

I’m sure if nasa had access to a vehicle that could send an M1 Abram’s sized, solid steel rover to mars, they totally would, but that would probably cost more than a moon mission, and the whole point of rovers is that they’re fairly cheap for the amount of research you can get out of them.

Genghis didn’t have access to thousands of poorly assembled Humvee knockoffs and millions of poorly trained mechanics to make them somewhat functional. I’m sure some of them could survive the drive.

They think not masturbating will give them anything from higher testosterone, better focus, or to a higher IQ.

They think masturbation makes you weaker in every way.

This is of course patently false, and all basically rises from an old athlete myth that sex during training will reduce your progress. Which these dorks then took to an extreme by saying any ejaculation will reduce progress in physical and mental training. Because we all know that the key to success is stored in the balls.

You know, it would be a horribly evil plan to try and start WW3 while the new president is being confirmed.

Hell, given today’s modern technology, a leader may be able to plan the opening shots for a few minutes before or after the transition of power, essentially starting a war while the US is asleep. A traditional war may not be really affected by a transition of power, as all of the US military leadership is still able to make limited decisions about how to respond to being fired at.

However, use of nuclear weapons could be severely limited by a presidential transition. The US nuclear arsenal can only be used at the sole discretion of the acting president. The president is the only one with physical access to the launch codes, and the only one that has the authority to order a launch. So what would happen if say, North Korea or Russia launched an ICBM or dropped a nuclear bomb from a traditional bomber, or worse, launched a sub launched ballistic missile that can hit its target in under 20 minutes. MAD dictates that any use of nuclear weapons requires an immediate and proportional response. But with the president having just been confirmed, how long would it take to get them to a secure location, get the codes, order a launch, and have it be carried out? Probably too long. In the case of an ICBM, it only takes about 30 minutes to get from the launch location to anywhere in America.

Now NATO does have some nuclear bombs, but I am fairly sure most of them are provided by the United States and still require US presidential orders to launch. Britain and France have their own nuclear weapons, but far less than the US possesses. Maybe there is enough of a difference where taking the US out of the picture could allow an attacking nuclear country to not be totally glassed.

I could see how an absolutely insane leader might want to try something like that. There’s no way to win a nuclear war, but there may be a way to crawl away alive from one in the form of decapitating your enemy while they’re busy figuring out who can actually launch the damn bombs. Maybe enough of your government can survive the exchange to rebuild an 18th century style empire. The empire will have holes in it like Swiss cheese because of the cities that are now unusable wastelands, but it’s still technically an empire. And of course, the course of human history will now be irreparably altered, setting the species back by centuries of technological and industrial innovation due to all of the EMPs and human knowledge that got turned into carbon dust.

Could be insane enough to work. But I’m sure there’s some ultra classified, so top secret you get shot for seeing the folder, type plan that magically fixes this by giving the Strategic Commander sole launch authority for one day while the president transitions. I mean, the government wouldn’t be so stupid as to leave a glaring hole in nuclear security for decades, right? They fixed the issue with all ICBMs having to fly over Russia to get to Korea, right? Oh wait. Well at least we have anti ballistic missile platforms all along the coast, right? Oh those are all in other countries. At least the Exo-Atmospheric kill vehicles work 50% of the time in the simulations. And we’ve got like 40 of those, so I’m sure that’s enough to deal with hundreds of warheads.

It’s just a ball of plane batter with coke mixed in.

Look up a recipe for fritters made with flour, replace some liquid with coke syrup. Easy.

ChatGPT is a tool that is used for cheating.

The point of writing papers for school is to evaluate a person’s ability to convey information in writing.

If you’re using a tool to generate large parts of the paper, the teacher is no longer evaluating you, they’re evaluating chatGPT. That’s dishonest in the student’s part, and circumventing the whole point of the assignment.

I remember doing the bear grills one, and one of the choices was to jump over a ravine, or walk over it using a fallen tree as a bridge.

Being the hiker I am, the obvious choice of walk around it being missing kind of annoyed me, but I chose the tree option.

Bear died.

So I got to go back and pick the jump over option, which was apparently the right one.

Who the fuck does running jumps over a 15 foot deep ravine.

I never bothered with the choose your own adventure things again. When the correct choice is just not available and the next logical choice just means an instant loss, you don’t have a very fun game

If you’re a government, you can pretty much put anything in a rocket fairing and call it a reconnaissance satellite.

The only warning that actually has to be given is that a rocket is being launched, so you don’t accidentally trigger WW3 by setting off launch detection satellites without warning. After it’s in space, no one can really tell what was in the fairing. Could be a spy satellite, could be navigation. Could just be a box with a bunch of little rockets in it, designed to slam into whatever you want at ridiculous speed.

But it’s way more likely that this was just Boeing having a tiny leak in a propellant tank, or a bad thruster and as soon as the concentration of propellant and oxidizer got high enough, it triggered a detonation. They certainly have a history of not leak testing their shit: airplanes falling apart, space capsules with leaky thrusters, and now a blown up satellite point more towards incompetence than malice.

Is it really a punishment if they asked for it?

Peppers take a good idea, having extra supplies and tools for an emergency, and take it to 11.

I’m not a prepper, but I did read my local government’s disaster preparedness list and have everything on it that applies to my family. I keep 3 days or so of extra, shelf stable food in the house; bought a home water cooler and keep an extra jug of water that I rotate when we use the one in the machine so that we have a few days of clean water at all times, which is way more practical and safe than a camping water jug that will sit and stagnate in the basement; I have a battery “generator” that I keep topped up with a solar panel because we have a sewage ejector pump and a sump pump to stop the basement from flooding in bad weather; and I have good first aid kits for the house and cars.

The only thing not on my local government list are the emergency car kits, which is really just a basic vehicle toolkit, jumpstart kit, flares, sweater and space blanket, all in a cheap bag that lives on top of the spare tire.

I don’t live in the most disaster prone area, but we do get tornados and nasty thunderstorms that knock out power for a day or 3. We don’t exactly have the lights on when that happens, but we do have food, water, a non flooded basement, and even some heat in the winter, and both cars have something to keep you warm while you either fix the car or wait for the tow truck.

I kind of understand peppers, because planning all of this out after we lost power a few years ago for 4 days in fall was interesting, and there was just so much shit the internet was saying I needed: weeks or months of dried beans and rice, a generator for the whole house, enough guns and ammo to ward off a small army, etc. my local government list was hard to find compared to all of the forums and YouTube videos, but I’m glad I found it, it’s sensible and if spread out over months, very affordable. I highly, highly recommend you poke around your local government website for their natural disaster page, they’ll have resources of who to contact if you need help, and what you should have on hand. If it’s not on your city’s page, try your county or state government. One of them should have a page about disasters and how to prepare for them.

Man this three day special military operation has kind of gotten out of hand.

There was a big idea a couple decades ago that corporations were going to copyright natural genes and sell them for massive profits to other biotech companies that could use them to make cure for diseases and other things.

Michael Crichton wrote a few books about it, pretty good reads.

They did do the gene copyright thing in the real world, but it turns out that doing anything with a random gene is pretty hard and the genome isn’t just something you can copy paste a gene into and have it cure aids or cancer, so no one wanted to buy genetic sequences that they would then need to do a whole bunch of work on anyway to make it useful.

Pretty much all 23andMe did was increase the size of the Law Enforcement dna database by letting cops send in samples of suspects and get back their family members info. Of course the company said that was very naughty, but no one got into real trouble for it. And now 23andMe owns a lot of other people’s genetic code, and it’s not worth the hard drives it’s stored on.

AMD is a lot cooler than NVIDIA

I could actually see this being useful for dangerous working environments like steelworks or inside nuclear facilities. As long as the control system is on a separate intranet that’s properly air gapped.

You should still pay the operator their full wage though. The human still needs all of the technical knowledge to do the job, you’re just removing most of the physical risk.

That’s an extremely bold assumption.

The space shuttle was designed originally to be rapidly reusable, but its shortest turn around time was still measured in weeks, not days.

And its main engines only produced water as a by product, no soot or carbon deposits to worry about.

There’s a bunch of hacked chalice dungeons you can join that essentially give you unlimited blood echoes.