more saintamh's comments

saintamh · on Dec 8, 2020

The author of that article, William Langewiesche, has written several others in that vein:

- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...

- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/04/inside-el-faro-the-w...

- https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/01/the-mecca-stampede-t...

- https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/06/us-airways-200906

- https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2009/01/air_crash200901

saintamh · on April 25, 2020

I'm curious why this got downvoted -- would it not work?

zodmaner · on April 25, 2020

I have no idea why that reply got downvoted as well. It is essentially how I installed Firefox on my Debian stable laptop , and it has been working great as far.

saintamh · on July 12, 2015

http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/space-images/charts/what...

Updated monthly

saintamh · on Nov 15, 2012

Still does. They've got almost every European budget airline, actually. And I hear they have pretty good coverage of the Asian market, too.

saintamh · on Feb 4, 2011

I heartily recommend FastMail. I've been using them for a couple years now for all my mail, and they've been great.

They have so many features it's almost comical (it's all in the small details, e.g., you can download your list of last login times as a CSV file; they can SMS you a one-time password if you're in an Internet cafe; etc.).

Once I had a problem with incoming mail from a certain domain not reaching my inbox, and they were extremely helpful. it felt like the guy had nothing else to do but help me. (Oh, and it turned out the problem was on another network, not their end).

In two years I've never experienced any outage.

Really, overall an awesome service (they're not paying me to write this, promise!)

saintamh · on Oct 5, 2010

I believe you're thinking of the Voskhod 2 mission. They landed in deep snow in the Urals and had to camp the night out in their spacecraft until the rescue party could reach them the next day.

Alexei Leonov's 1st-person account can be read here: http://tinyurl.com/voskhod2 (taken from the book "Two Sides of the Moon", co-authored with Apollo 15's Dave Scott)

I'd tend to agree with my above sibling that bringing guns in a spaceship sounds like the opposite of safe, but according to Leonov they had a pistol, and "plenty of ammunition".

jerf · on Oct 5, 2010

"bringing guns in a spaceship sounds like the opposite of safe"

After the millions of pounds of propellant spent on getting them to and from orbit, you're going to sweat a few grams of gunpowder? Everything in space is an explosive if you consider the kinetic energy involved. The gun is one of the few things in the spacecraft we can honestly say we have centuries of experience with; if that even shows up on your top 100 list of risks and concerns, you've got a pretty damn safe space program.