Steve Burton

It's past time. Boycott any company that advertises as of today on MSNBC, CNN, CBS, ABC, PBS. Tell them why. #BoycottMSMEnablers. If we cut off their funding, they die. It's past time.

@ChrisMartzWX Careful bud. A lot of that generation went to Vietnam and wouldn’t take kindly to being called hippies and weirdos. Don’t generalize. They are used to getting the truth on TV news. They’ve been lied to and don’t know it.

When I was a kid, I used to think that old people were smart and wise. That definitely applied to those part of the silent generation. My grandads were in that group, born in 1936 and 1944, respectively. And, boy I miss them. That generation of elders is mostly gone. Now we are stuck with these hippie-era weirdos for the next 10-20 years.

@DrewShieldsOG @MikeBales She’s what happens when you turn your anus inside out. You can tell by her lips. Lots of hemorrhoids.

Yup. My theory is that you measure time by how much time you have lived. When you are 2, last year is half a lifetime for you. When you are 10, it’s 10%. When you are 65 it’s a tiny fraction. The practical impact is that time accelerates when you get older. I’m about 15 years from the age my grandfather died. I retired 9 years ago. That seems like yesterday.

When people get in their 50s and 60s and up, do you start thinking about how many years you have left? I’m curious

My first computer was a Commodore Pet 8k. It had a cassette player to load up basic and the operating system. I first learned Basic but quickly learned 6502 Assembly to write a fight simulator for it (way before MS Flight Simulator). I’ve since learned Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, Algol, APL, C, 80386 Assembler, C++, REXX, Visual Basic, Java, JavaScript, Python, Swift and now I’m learning AI programming (not really a language but a different paradigm). I’ve been retired for 9 years but I will never stop learning.

I got my C64 in 1984. One of my earliest memories is the strong desire to understand how it worked. Games obviously had the highest appeal, but I was also curious about what lay “behind” the screen - how things functioned, how they were connected. Not so much from a hardware perspective, but more from how programs actually worked. Naturally, in those days, you would read about programming in magazines, and they often included several pages of code that you could type in to create "your own" program. None of those programs were overly complex or particularly great, but that wasn’t the point. It was simply fascinating to see that if you wrote this, then that happened. If you tweaked a value here, a color would change there. Add an extra parameter and the result looked even better - or it all fell apart, depending on what you changed. I remember one of the earliest programs I wrote in BASIC was a number guessing game. You had 5 guesses and started by entering a number between 1 and 100. The program would then tell you "too high" or "too low" relative to the random number it had generated for that session. What a truly epic experience for a 9-year-old at the time! I changed parameters that were easy to identify in the code, such as the number of tries you had, the range of the random number, and - what made me especially proud - I even modified the computer's replies. Instead of just "too high" or "too low," it would now give more precise feedback (e.g. way too high, too high, a little bit too high, etc.). All of this sounds extremely trivial from today's perspective, but it was a playful way to explore what was possible. I continued writing programs in BASIC and later dabbled in Turbo Pascal. It never went much further than that, but it remains one of my best memories from a time when computers felt more fascinating and accessible - they made you curious and invited you to be creative. Did you ever do this back in the day? If so, what were your first steps? BASIC, Pascal...?

@snoopyschimera The didn’t really play up the 1.5G on the trip either. There was one reference to whether he always had muscles on his whiteboard but they had to chop that detail out to shorten the story.

i wish the ending of project hail mary had shown how much living on erid affected grace like … he was walking with a cane at the end of the book because the gravity on erid is making his bones degenerate faster

@WendyPlowman @ThrillaRilla369 Are you absolutely sure Wendy? LOL.

No way in hell, Absolutely not, Fuck no, Hard pass, Over my dead body, Not a chance, Nope not happening, Hell to the no, Big fat no, Negative ghost rider, Under no circumstances, Not in a million years, Absolutely fucking not, Don't even think about it, Straight up no, No, and that's final,

To the women who are on this app, be honest Are you OKAY with a man claiming to be a woman using the ladies room if you're in there? 🤷🤔

@mnemetic @TomjSmith2 @wealthmoose I can’t say it better. We now know exactly who to look out for next time they try to pull this bullshit. Oh and you are acting just like all those Germans who claimed they had no idea what was happening in the concentration camps outside their villages - ASSHOLE.

@mapsonburt @TomjSmith2 @wealthmoose No one cares about your made up bullshit, and hurt fee fees. It was a litmus test, about how much you care about your community, the elderly and society in general. You failed, asshole.

🇨🇦 vs 🇺🇸 No politics. Just a choice. If Donald Trump offered you U.S. citizenship today… Would you take it? YES or NO 👇 #cdnpoli #Canada #USA #Immigration #Poll

The real issue with them isn’t really the materials (Carbon nanotubes are strong enough to be the tether). It is that the time required to do a round trip would be measured in weeks making it economically infeasible. The top counter mass that pulls the cable tight would need to be about 100,000 km (~60,000 miles) up. You could (and most designs do) build a detransiting station lower down but basic physics comes into play. Essentially if you stepped off at any point below Geosynchronous orbit (~36,000 km or ~22,000 miles) you would not have enough tangential velocity to maintain orbit and you would fall back into earth. At GEO, you are traveling at 3 km/sec or about 6900mph. At 100 miles (the internationally recognized boundary of space aka Kármán line ) you would only have a velocity of ~0.5km/sec or ~1000 mph which is only about -6% of what is needed. The problem is actually exponential as well at 10,000 kms (~6200 miles) you are still only at ~24% of the needed velocity. Those massive rockets aren’t used just to get the mass off the earth up 100 miles, they are used to accelerate to the velocity needed so even if you left the atmosphere you still need to accelerate 94% of the velocity (which still results in significant fuel savings). Realistically then since we aren’t towing rockets into space to be launched perpendicular to the cables, you need to go all the way up to the geosynchronous space station 36000 kms above the equator. The best projections for the maximum speed of any climber are about 400 km/h so you are looking at 6-7 days to get there and 6-7 days to get back. If you had dual tethers (one for up and one for down ) and you put the maximum number of climbers on each cable (determined to be about 7) that’s ONE trip per day each way at peak throughput. That’s about 5500t per year. We can do this today with about 600 Falcon 9 launches or 185 starship launches at a cost of $44.5 and $16.7B respectively. Pretty hard to make a business case on that plus there’s that pesky problem of not being able to reliably produce the tether (we need 100,000 kms of something we can’t grow more than a few feet of in the lab and can’t join it together. )

Earth spins fast enough to theoretically work for it. Its not entirely about speed as it is finding a material strong enough to withstand all the pressures placed upon a space elevator. We even currently have a contender for that material but its simply too hard to make in enough quantities to build one. If the Eridians have a space elevator then that means they already have the engineering knowledge and materials to make one. Interplanetary exchange would quickly grant us the tools to do so as well, and would change a lot for life on earth and for any plans to colonize the moon or Mars.

You know in Hail Mary’s world, astrophage solves literally every spaceflight problem ever. Not sure if you can use it for surface-to-orbit, but it makes interplanetary travel so easy.

@DamianNuno @omegilla @CilvisNova @deltaIV9250 Carbon nanotubes.

@omegilla @CilvisNova @deltaIV9250 I’m curious, what is the material that is a contender for making a space elevator?

The sun wasn’t “dying”. The Astrophage was soaking up its output radiated out towards earth (and the other planets) so the effect was that earth was getting less of it and cooling. Also in the book Andy was clear that in all the star systems the decrease leveled off - unfortunately for us, this was at a level below which we would lose half the population within 26 years.

@The2x4 @deltaIV9250 What heat? The sun was dying. U cant redirect light from light source that is off

@JasonLavigneAB The Indians didn’t have the written word so “signing” a treaty was done with a mark. The amount of grievances they shout about after having Canadians (and Albertans) fed and housed them for a century is ridiculous.

If Alberta First Nations had a veto over Alberta independence, they wouldn’t need to file an application for an injunction or appeal to King Charles. The fact is, they are taking legal action, and on April 7, I expect the court to deny their injunction. iclg.com/news/23426-fir…

@MansaMusa720 @RiseOfAlberta They’ve had 150 years. (Or since Trudeau 1 if I’m being generous)

@RiseOfAlberta I personally never support the separation of Alberta from Canada. It would weaken Canada and its people. The Prime Minister of Canada should be given time to fix everything.

Danielle Smith just made it official. The independence question will be counted first in October. Only if it fails do the other nine questions come into play. Because if independence passes, it becomes the defining result of the entire referendum.

@elonmusk Yes and it’s 56 years and we haven’t gone back!

Incredible that it was only 66 years from the first controlled, powered flight to landing on the Moon!

@SenateGOP No thanks to you! We can only thank a Republican Senator for running out of town and giving Schummer what he wanted.

Thank a Democrat for long lines and disrupted air travel. Thank President Trump for doing everything he can to keep airports open.

@validmavericity I’m an orthodox atheist but I am far less concerned about someone holding a bible professing their morality to their chests and while voting than I am about leftists letting non citizens vote.

This should terrify every thinking person.

@SenateGOP @SenSchumer WHY DID YOU ALL SLINK OUT OF TOWN LAST NIGHT AFTER PASSING HIS BILL?

Senator Schumer said he supports voter ID.  But yesterday, @SenSchumer voted against a simple voter ID bill.  Why did he lie?

@ScottPresler Have you forgotten the Save America Act?

Every Senator that fled DC to get on a plane for home must immediately return back to the Senate to fully fund the Department of Homeland Security & TSA agents. You signed up for this job when you ran for the US Senate. This isn’t a game — get back to work.

@sarobertsonca Who ordered those ice breakers??? PM Harper. Nevertheless those icebreakers will be trying to smash through polar ice while US, Chinese and Russian subs glide easily underneath them.

PM Carney on Canada's contribution to Arctic security: "We already have the second largest icebreaker fleet in the world after Russia. Once our icebreaker program is completed, we will have the largest. We will have 42 icebreakers. The Americans have one."

@SenatorCollins You useless twat. You and your gal pal have almost single-handedly screwed up the entire GOP movement. You try to act nice to the democrats and “act” surprised when they go nuclear. Retire already as you are not going to survive the primary.

Passage of the Department of Homeland Security funding package brings us closer to ending the reckless and harmful shutdown of DHS that Democrats triggered when they walked away from the bipartisan funding bill for the Department. That original bill contained new safeguards and oversight to protect the American public and our law enforcement, including additional funding for body-worn cameras and deescalation training. Over the past five weeks, Republicans have made repeated attempts to reach bipartisan consensus to reopen the Department. Republicans offered proposals to expand the use of body-worn cameras; limit civil immigration enforcement in sensitive areas such as schools and hospitals; increase oversight of detention facilities; and implement visible officer identification. While Republicans worked in good faith to try to reach agreement, Democrats remained intransigent and unreasonable with their list of demands. Congressional Democrats have done real damage to the appropriations process by repeatedly forcing government shutdowns and refusing to fund entire agencies. Their refusal to fund ICE and Border Patrol leaves our borders and our country less secure and sets a precedent that they may one day come to regret. Today’s action moves us closer to ending the disastrous shutdown at the Department, which has caused chaos at our airports, made us more vulnerable to cyber and terrorist attacks, delayed disaster response to communities in need, and caused thousands of hardworking federal employees to report to work with no guarantee of when they will be paid. Moving forward, I remain committed to ensuring adequate funding to secure our borders.

@SenMcCormickPA You ran away in the middle of the night. Say good bye to your donations.

I said what I said on the Senate Floor yesterday and I meant every word of it. A lot has happened in the last 24 hours, none of it changes the basic truth: the Democrats shutting down DHS in the middle of ongoing combat operations abroad and terror-linked attacks at home is reckless and dangerous.