How did you calculate that? The question didn’t even mention a specific speed, just “near the speed of light”.

The kinetic energy for a grain of sand near the speed of light is somewhere between “quite a lot” and “literally infinity” (which is, in a sense, the reason you can’t actually reach light speed without a way to supply infinite energy).

For once, I don’t think that particular charge is entirely inconsistent with the dictionary definition.

He’s accused of killing a member of the public in the hope of frightening everyone else in that person’s position into taking some kind of action.

I think the law says something about killing for a “political purpose”, with the goal of changing some kind of public policy or behaviour. That’s not an unreasonable interpretation of what happened, I think.

Unfortunately that means they get to use the laws which were written to deal with mass murder and bombing public spaces, which I don’t think is particularly appropriate but doesn’t seem out of line with the law

I disagree. It’s perfectly possible to hold an internally consistent view that it’s wrong to execute a prisoner, both because there’s no reason to do so (the prisoner already being imprisoned) and because courts get the decision wrong too often (and/or because the courts aren’t trustworthy), while also believing that it’s acceptable to kill under other circumstances

The vast majority of people celebrating the death of the United Healthcare CEO would have been perfectly happy with him being stripped of power and imprisoned, but that wasn’t ever an option so the only thing available is death. There’s also some evidence that his death has actually made a difference, in the form of other health insurance companies chickening out of unethical policy changes.

In the case of these prisoners, they’re already safely behind bars. It’s also, broadly speaking, much more likely that they aren’t guilty of what they’ve been convicted of (although I don’t know anything about these particular cases). We also have evidence that the death penalty doesn’t have the effect on crime rates which proponents claim it does, so it’s different in a whole bunch of ways

You understand that they were at war for a long time before they managed to sweep Assad and his forces away, right?

The final sudden advance may have come virtually overnight, but they’ve been fighting since the Arab spring in 2011

No, it couldn’t. That’s pure misinformation.

Kessler syndrome is only a possibility in orbits high enough that atmospheric drag is negligible. Starlink, by design, is at an altitude where the atmosphere is still thick enough to bring any debris or old satellites down to earth in a timely fashion rather than building up like Kessler syndrome requires. (To be clear, the air is still so thin that you’d need sensitive instruments to detect it at all. It’s just enough to produce a tiny amount of drag, which adds up over weeks or months to lower the debris’ orbit so that it meets thicker air)

There are plenty of perfectly legitimate objections you can raise to starlink without resorting to Kessler syndrome

It is guaranteed, actually. US law imposes requirements on telecoms providers to support wire taps

No, basically. They would love to be able to do that, but it’s approximately impossible for the generative systems they’re using at the moment

For an emergency ascent, they’d probably have dropped more than two. They also probably wouldn’t have taken the time to type a message to the surface if it were going wrong that quickly.

It seems more likely to me that they were controlling their rare of descent. I’d expect them to lose a little buoyancy as the vessel compresses, so it seems reasonable that they’d drop the occasional weight as they descend.

Actually, I suspect he’s implying that nobody’s trying to assassinate Harris because all the democracy-hating assassins are on her side, or she’s the one setting them up, or something to that effect.

It’s still the sort of slander which in a reasonable world he’d be called on, but that seems unlikely

They certainly won’t be bored. Astronauts time on the ISS is a precious resource, and work will have been found for them even if they weren’t expected to be there

Third party, sure, but Starlink is absolutely a US corporation. They have joint projects with the US military, even

Cuboids are prisms. Specially, they’re rectangular prisms

Fair enough, I didn’t consider compute resources

The actual length of the password isn’t the problem. If they were “doing stuff right” then it would make no difference to them whether the password was 20 characters or 200, because once it was hashed both would be stored in the same amount of space.

The fact that they’ve specified a limit is strong evidence that they’renot doing it right

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)

Just one padlock is enough, but you can use up to 6.

You need all the locks removed before it’ll open, so you don’t need to count on someone to carefully count everyone back in. You just make sure that each person uses their own lock

Also, it’s probably possible to fix the partition so that it’s as big as it used to be. It’s likely that some of your data is corrupted already, but the repartitioning won’t have erased the old data except here or there where it’s written things like new file tables in space it now considers unused

What they’re suggesting is to back up the whole disk, rather than any single partition. Anything you do to the partition to try and recover it has the potential to make a rescuable situation hopeless. If you have a copy of the exact state of every single bit on the drive, then you can try and fix it safe in the knowledge that you can always get back to exactly where you are now if you make it worse