So Shaw took the precautions available to him.

"When we got on orbit, I went down to the hatch on the side of the orbiter, and I padlocked the hatch control so that you could not open the hatch," Shaw said. "I mean, on the orbiter on orbit you can go down there and you just flip this little thing and you crank that handle once, the hatch opens and all the air goes out and everybody goes out with it, just like that. And I thought to myself, 'Jeez, I don’t know this guy very well. He might flip out or something.' So I padlocked the hatch shut right after we got on orbit, and I didn’t take the padlock off until we were in de-orbit prep." //

After the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986, the focus of the Shuttle program shifted somewhat, and NASA started flying fewer payload specialists. Those who flew came to be considered more a part of the crew and were met with less suspicion. According to some Space Shuttle astronauts, the lock was used less and less often. The final payload specialist to fly on the Shuttle was Ilan Ramon, the first Israeli astronaut. He died, of course, in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, when the vehicle broke up in the atmosphere during its return to Earth.

Although much of the concern for Shuttle commanders had come from flying non-professional astronauts, there was another incident later in the program with an all-professional crew that revived interest in the padlock program. It occurred during a 1999 flight. Because I have not been able to confirm the details with multiple sources, I won't name the astronaut or the mission. But essentially, a multiple-time flier had a bad reaction to some medicine he took after the launch. This seriously affected his mental state, and the astronaut had to be physically restrained from taking drastic action, including opening the hatch. //

This all may seem like a bit of historical trivia, but the issue lives on today. The Space Shuttle has been retired for 13 years, but the padlock remains in the fabric of US spaceflight with Crew Dragon. A commander's lock is an option for NASA's crews flying to the International Space Station on Crew Dragon, as well as private missions. //

That such incidents don't happen more often in commercial aviation may give us some comfort, but in reality, there have been many attempts by passengers to open an emergency exit door in flight. (Fortunately, it's almost impossible at cruising altitudes). And given that it has happened with two people out of the approximately 650 who have gone to space, it suggests the odds are non-negligible.

Nield concluded his note to me with a request. "Let me know," he said, "if you have any thoughts on how to mitigate the risks."

I wish I did. //

jeremyp66 Ars Scholae Palatinae 7y 811

YetAnotherBoris said:
The solution is obvious in this age of AI: automate all hatches, and put a computer exclusively in charge of activating them. The computer will be in turn controlled by a totally stable and reliable AI, with which the crew can communicate via voice interface.

Bonus points if it's called HAL...

The Hatch AI Lock

The precursor to the Internet carried its first login request on October 29, 1969. //

On October 29, 1969, at 10:30pm Pacific Time, the first two letters were transmitted over ARPANET. And then it crashed. About an hour later, after some debugging, the first actual remote connection between two computers was established over what would someday evolve into the modern Internet.

Funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (the predecessor of DARPA), ARPANET was built to explore technologies related to building a military command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear attack. But as Charles Herzfeld, the ARPA director who would oversee most of the initial work to build ARPANET put it:

The ARPANET was not started to create a Command and Control System that would survive a nuclear attack, as many now claim. To build such a system was, clearly, a major military need, but it was not ARPA's mission to do this; in fact, we would have been severely criticized had we tried. Rather, the ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them. //

The first letters transmitted, sent from UCLA to Stanford by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, were "l" and "o." On the second attempt, the full message text, login, went through from the Sigma 7 to the 940. So, the first three characters ever transmitted over the precursor to the Internet were L, O, and L. //

When it was shut down, Vinton Cerf, one of the fathers of the modern Internet, wrote a poem in ARPANET's honor:

It was the first, and being first, was best,
but now we lay it down to ever rest.
Now pause with me a moment, shed some tears.
For auld lang syne, for love, for years and years
of faithful service, duty done, I weep.
Lay down thy packet, now, O friend, and sleep.

LordP666 said:
I think everyone is vastly overthinking AI.

In my opinion all we need are smart individual devices with built in AI.

Take a smart lamp - all it needs to know is it's name, it must recognize your voice, and what it must do:

Lampy McLampface, Level 2

That's it! If a thief breaks in he can suck eggs because he can't turn on a lamp or anything else. He can steal the lamp, but again...eggs, because Lampy will miss his owner and never turn on for anyone else.

How about a car? A thief gets in the car and he says Fordy McFordface "Start", and Fordy says "screw you thief, you are not the boss of me" and starts honking his horn while locking the doors.

Smart devices need to be more like very loyal dogs. ///

Best a/i comment ever

Pay me or I'll tell everyone you were foolish enough to buy an internet connected broom.

In case you don’t know, we here at The Post call our front pages “the wood.” Back when the newspaper was typeset, metal letters weren’t large enough to handle the job of a big opening headline, so those letters were carved on wood blocks, then used to stamp the ink on the page.

The wood is a collaborative process. //

Last week, we picked the 24 woods that exemplified 2023.

From the gas-stove ban pursued by Gov. Hochul (SHE’S DE-RANGED) to Biden’s hoarding of classified documents next to his car (ANYBODY VETTE THIS GUY?) to the academic who held a machete to the neck of one of our reporters (THE NUTTY PROFESSOR).

We asked you to pick the 25th — and you came through.

You suggested the soap opera of George Santos (GEORGE JETTISON) and Hunter Biden (MR. GRIFT GOES TO WASHINGTON) and the government finally admitting COVID likely came from a Chinese government lab (IT HAD TO BE WU).

Doreen H. picked BIDEN RESIGNS, which we looked for and never found — but thanks for reading, Doreen. Maybe you’re getting hopeful for 2024. //

Many picked Donald Trump’s mugshot, which ran on the front page August 25 without a headline, perhaps the only time in our history that has happened. And so it became what readers wanted it to be. //

So: The results. The second runner up is SURRENDER, from Dec. 20, a picture of a lone Border Patrol officer facing down hundreds of migrants at the border — a crisis that continues into the new year.

The first runner up is New York’s Jamaal Bowman pulling the fire alarm to try to delay a vote in the House. DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A DOOR HANDLE? we said of his ridiculous excuses. //

And speaking of Democrat politicians behaving badly, the winner you picked for the 25th front page of 2023 by a wide margin is . . . HAUTE MESS.

Post reporter Jon Levine dressed as Senator John Fetterman, in long shorts and a sweatshirt, and tried to get into New York’s exclusive restaurants and clubs. Hey, if it’s good enough for the Senate, is it good enough for the Ritz?

Tax his land, tax his wage,
Tax his bed in which he lays.
Tax his tractor, tax his mule,
Teach him taxes is the rule.

Tax his cow, tax his goat,
Tax his pants, tax his coat.
Tax his ties, tax his shirts,
Tax his work, tax his dirt.

Tax his chew, tax his smoke,
Teach him taxes are no joke.
Tax his car, tax his grass,
Tax the roads he must pass.

Tax his food, tax his drink,
Tax him if he tries to think.
Tax his sodas, tax his beers,
If he cries, tax his tears.

Tax his bills, tax his gas,
Tax his notes, tax his cash.
Tax him good and let him know
That after taxes, he has no dough.

If he hollers, tax him more,
Tax him until he’s good and sore.
Tax his coffin, tax his grave,
Tax the sod in which he lays.

Put these words upon his tomb,
“Taxes drove me to my doom!”
And when he’s gone, we won’t relax,
We’ll still be after the inheritance tax.

Bomb Defusal Manual, Version 1

Find out more about the game "Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes" by Steel Crate Games® at https://www.keeptalkinggame.com

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -- Phil Karlton

Long a favorite saying of mine, one for which I couldn't find a satisfactory URL.

Like many good phrases, it's had a host of riffs on it. A couple of them I feel are worth adding to the page

Leon Bambrick @secretGeek
·
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors.
9:20 AM · Jan 1, 2010

Mathias Verraes @mathiasverraes
·
There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of messages 2. Exactly-once delivery
2:40 PM · Aug 14, 2015

Released On: 24 Dec 1959

Charles Dickens' Christmas tale takes a bashing from Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe.

They're rarely helpful. Actually, they usually add insult to injury. But what would computing be without 'em? Herewith, a tribute to a baker's dozen of the best (or is that worst?).

"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.” So goes an old quip attributed to Paul Ehrlich. He was right. One of the defining things about computers is that they–or, more specifically, the people who program them–get so many things so very wrong. Hence the need for error messages, which have been around nearly as long as computers themselves..

In theory, error messages should be painful at worst and boring at best. They tend to be cryptic; they rarely offer an apology even when one is due; they like to provide useless information like hexadecimal numbers and to withhold facts that would be useful, like plain-English explanations of how to right want went wrong. In multiple ways, most of them represent technology at its most irritating. //

13. Abort, Retry, Fail? (MS-DOS)
    In many ways, it remains an error message to judge other error messages by. It’s terse. (Three words.) It’s confusing. //

[UPDATE: Almost four hundred people have chimed into this discussion, and many nominated other error messages that are at least as worthy of celebration as the ones in the story. So celebrate ’em we did–please check out The 13 Other Greatest Error Messages of All Time.]

John LeFevre @JohnLeFevre
·
Charlie Munger’s formula for success is simple and perfect:

• Spend less than you earn
• Invest prudently
• Avoid toxic people and toxic activities
• Defer gratification
• Never stop learning

4:12 PM · Nov 28, 2023 //

Geiger Capital @Geiger_Capital
·
Some of the best of Charlie Munger:

“Every time you hear EBITDA, just substitute it with bullshit earnings”. Absolute legend. 🐐
5:00 / 5:00
4:15 PM · Nov 28, 2023 //

My favorite from that clip? "Warren, if people weren't often so wrong, we wouldn't be so rich." //

In a 2019 interview with CNBC, Munger taught us how to lead a happy life:

You don’t have a lot of envy, you don’t have a lot of resentment, you don’t overspend your income, you stay cheerful in spite of your troubles. You deal with reliable people and you do what you’re supposed to do. And all these simple rules work so well to make your life better. And they’re so trite.

And staying cheerful ... because it’s a wise thing to do. Is that so hard? And can you be cheerful when you’re absolutely mired in deep hatred and resentment? Of course you can’t. So why would you take it on?

A great time was had by all, and the speeches were all really quite interesting.

I learned from the doctor at HMO-NO that throwing sodium into the Charles River really is an MIT tradition, as I speculated it must be during my talk. This only serves to reinforce my point that while many have thrown sodium, few have documented or video taped it, and fewer still have been willing to submit their work to the judgement of the public in the form of a web publication with video and an admission of guilt. I seem to be the first, in fact. Odd really.

Perhaps my example will prompt someone to video tape the Harvard tradition next time. (Should such a person wish to have the video posted, with attribution or anonymously, I would be quite happy to provide the service.)

When you've gotta go, you've gotta go. In the case of a Glendale, Wisconsin, car thief, while fleeing police last Wednesday, he picked not only the wrong time and the wrong place but the wrong witnesses. //

Now, consider if you will, the structure of your basic port-a-potty. Having spent a week in Army Basic Training cleaning these receptacles while our company was on "detail week," I can safely say I'm very familiar with how they work, and the basic structure of these things has not changed since the early '80s; there is, of course, the tall plastic shell, with a door that locks from the inside, the appropriate receptacles for both setters and pointers and a tank beneath filled with chemicals into which the products of micturition and defecation are deposited. (When I was a kid back in Northeast Iowa we had the kind that just went over a hole in the ground, but the images of the port-a-potty in this case are clearly of the more modern sort.) //

With that firmly in mind, consider the likely consequences of one of these being tipped on its side, and what might happen to a person within that unit when it is tipped over. Yes, that's right; stuff that one would expect to find on the streets of San Francisco would instead be covering the fleeing felon, along with the other aforementioned chemicals and by-products. Not that I have a lot of sympathy for a car thief, even if he is dealing with a lot of crap. It is, however, appropriate to feel some sympathy for the police officers who had to transport the befouled perpetrator, covered as he almost certainly was in the stuff sometimes cast on City Hall steps as a form of protest. //

Clearly, the suspect pitted himself against the wits and willingness of the golfer, and the suspect came off Number Two. He was arrested and taken to jail, where, presumably, he was given a towel to wipe away his worries. Still, a car was stolen, and that stinks. //

Kudos to the quick-thinking golfer who knew at a glance how to deal with a sticky situation. At least the thief and his less-smelly compatriots were caught; in that, at least, everything came out all right. //

pat
2 days ago
You forgot to mention, the soup pours out of the bowl onto the backside of the now door which is the floor that the fleeing feces is now laying on, unable to stand up. I am sure when the police finally had him, he refused to come clean, though he needed to. They probably gave him the turd degree before they did the final paperwork. //

Mark-0
2 days ago
I bet I know what his first two words were.

On 18/03/2022 00:07, Colin Percival wrote:

On 3/17/22 08:17, Arthur Chance wrote:

Is it possible to invalidate an existing tarsnap key so it cannot be
used in future. I have a key for a decommissioned machine so it's no
longer needed and hypothetically it could be used for DoS attack (by
creating bogus archives and draining the account funds). Obviously this
is impossible unless the key leaks somehow, but operational paranoia
would suggest invalidating it would be a good idea.

The API for disabling keys is "send Colin an email". ;-)

So API = Application Programmer's Initiative. :-)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back into the tulip fields, now we see that Dutch authorities are warning us of a venomous African green mamba that escaped from its owner in the town of Tilburg. //

The African green mamba has a nasty neurotoxin venom, and its bite can be extremely dangerous, but authorities--while urging caution--no doubt wish to avoid panic; it won't help for the Dutch populace to become hissterical. In the cold climate of the Dutch winter, the tropical snake is unlikely to be viperactive. In fact, it may well still be in the owner's house; it's not as though the snake could commandeer a vehicle and flee, not even an ana-Honda. And it's likewise certain that the snake won't be boarding an aircraft back to Africa, which would transform it from a Green Mamba to a Boeing Constrictor. //

Back to snakes. I could rattle off a few good snake stories myself; in the northeast Iowa hills where I grew up, venomous rattlesnakes were common, some growing up to 72 inches in length--you have to measure them in inches because they don't have feet--and while their skins made great hatbands, which one could show off at the local boa-ling alley, they weren't bad eating, either. You just had to be careful to stay away from the sharp end, and the residents of Dutch Tilburg would be well-advised to do the same.

Samuel L. Jackson was unavailable for comment. //

Anne in Rockwall Texas
6 hours ago
Dear Mr. Clark.

Thank you. I laughed so hard, I moved that d*** kidney stone. Greetings from Texas Presbyterian Hospital. I'm going to read it again and maybe I'll be out of here in the morning! You sure can write. //

Ward Clark Kenamy
7 hours ago
Are you saying I should scale it back some?

Domino Ward Clark
5 hours ago
On a sssliding ssscale, about two notchessss.

Chris Rose @ArchRose90
·
A satire show in Israel deservedly mocks the BBC again and the disingenuous calls for ceasefire. Wait until the end, it’s worth it. 😂
3:23 / 3:23
4:29 PM · Nov 14, 2023

Plus, the size of Wales in cubic furlongs

I am a software engineer, and have been for most of my life.

One afternoon I was thinking about my tendency to obsess over minor technical details. I'm not alone in this tendency, but I have no doubt that many others — even some in my profession — view it as a peculiar form of madness. What metaphor, I wondered, could possibly convey why it was so difficult to let go of seemingly-trivial issues?

As it happens, I'd recently been discussing Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach with a friend. It was that book which introduced me to Zen kōans.

Thoughts collided, and the first of these pseudo-kōans was born. Consider it an experiment: an attempt at merging vocation and avocation. //

Although the title of this collection is a rather obvious play on The Gateless Gate (a historically important collection of Zen kōans), please note that the offerings here are not Zen kōans, nor do I intend any disrespect to practicioners of Zen Buddhism.

The jingling of the door-bell announced four arrivals: a blast of cold December wind; a spray of fine snowflakes borne upon it; the sound of horses clopping up the cobbled street; and two gentlemen. They were good portly fellows, pleasant to behold. The younger of the pair doffed his top hat and shook fresh snow from the brim as the elder consulted a list.

“Cratchit,” read the old gentleman. “Ware-housing, Pawn-brokering, Business Loans.” He looked up to find the sole occupant of the establishment seated behind a large wooden desk: a slight, sandy-haired young man of twenty-odd years with a genial expression. The gentleman adjusted his spectacles. “Have I the pleasure of addressing Mr. P. Cratchit?”

Here’s a very 1960s data visualization of just how much code they wrote—this is Margaret Hamilton, director of software engineering for the project, standing next to a stack of paper containing the software: //

As enormous and successful as Burkey’s project has been, however, the code itself remained somewhat obscure to many of today’s software developers. That was until last Thursday (July 7), when former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, //

But as the always-sharp joke detectives in Reddit’s r/ProgrammerHumor section found, many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.

One of the source code files, for example, is called
BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE