The Weekly Weird - 2016-09-06
- SpaceX had a little boo boo the other day. It's too early for a solid answer of what happened but some very clever analysis seems to indicate the a fuel-air explosion from just outside the second stage. This might make you uncomfortable about crew riding on top, fortunately Dragon has enough thrust to have cleared the explosion easily and the industry as a whole has a good idea how to make sure the launch escape system fires (video). Of course, there's also a Range Safety Officer with a big red button just in case. ~All of this is from the /r/spacex megathread to give credit where it's due.
- Speaking of big red buttons, don't just push it by accident.
- You know what makes me feel better about living in 2016? Nothing. Shorting medical equipment manufacturers because their pacemakers can be hacked (or maybe they can't?) is too much future for me.
- Also, DNS is not secure but we all should have known that already.
- Random links I haven't really read in detail: questdb high-performance time series database, Flexible Paxos: Quorum intersection revisited,
- ~3% of Korea's shipping just kind of ran out of money, stranding a few dozen giant container ships in the middle of the ocean because there's nobody to pay the port fees. And of course, shipping rates tanked in response.
- A cool quora answer on how Jio's 'free' internet can make money