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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I can’t immediately find a reference for this, but I would assume that all US forces deployed to support NATO in Europe can be commanded by the Supreme Allied Commander (SACEUR) who is always an American general. If the Russkies decide to invade, I’m sure that SACEUR has the authority to dictate response if he can’t immediately reach the President.

    The only reason that NATO would need to urgently and immediately speak to POTUS is for nuclear weapons release, and fortunately that scenario has been wargamed to hell and back.





  • To be clear: to get back to the ground safely, the spacecraft RCS has to operate for no more than about five hours.

    As far as I know, this spacecraft is still certified for emergency reentry, and if they needed to, the crew can get in and leave at any time. And they have good confidence that the spacecraft will get them to earth safely.

    These delays aimed at getting more data to justify certification as an operational vehicle instead of flight test. If it doesn’t work out, the worst case seems to be that a second test flight may be required.

    Delays don’t really cost NASA anything either. There’s plenty of consumables on the station for the crew, and when the capsule is docked the RCS can be shut down so it doesn’t leak.




  • Let us all remember that, at least back when it started, the establishment alternative to systemd was a product named after its original operating system, System V UNIX, which is a direct descendent of the original UNIX from AT&T. This sysvinit software used complicated shell scripts to manage daemons. Contrary to some opinions, these shell scripts were not “just working”; they were in fact a constant and major maintenance burden for Linux distributions. When I started on Linux at least, Debian had a suspiciously large fraction of bugs on init script breakages.

    All this is to say that the new system, systemd, doesn’t have to be anywhere near perfect to be worth replacing sysvinit.

    People argue that systemd is rejecting the “UNIX philosophy” of small tools that do one thing well. I argue that this UNIX philosophy is not some kind of universal good with no tradeoffs. It’s an engineering rule of thumb. There are always tradeoffs.

    People argue that systemd is too much like Windows NT. I argue that Windows NT has at least a few good ideas in it. And if one of those ideas solves a problem that Linux has, Linux should use that idea.