“Dirthat” has some potential

Yeah, gravity assists are a cheat code here, but the delta-V is still being changed—just by stealing velocity from elsewhere.

Yeah, orbital mechanics gets a little bit mind-bendy sometimes. If you’re in a stable circular orbit, accelerating in the direction you’re traveling will actually result in you traveling more slowly because you have moved to a higher orbit, and firing engines to slow down will actually speed you up because you move in closer to the host body and take up a faster orbit.

This is actually a problem spacecraft deal with regularly. If a Dragon capsule is behind the ISS and wants to dock, using its thrusters to accelerate toward the ISS will actually result in it falling further behind. Decelerating will get it closer, though it will then be in a lower orbit. Orbital rendezvous is tough.

Ok… I’ve never seen on a log on a plate before.

“Oh yes sure please make my comfort food more difficult to eat thanks”

I’m right there with you. Serving shrimp tail-on might as well be serving something on a log instead of a plate.

I don’t doubt that someone might be thinking that, but I do doubt that any lawyer thinks it’s necessary. As far as I know nobody has ever brought suit against a TV show for a suicide case.

But I’m not an attorney.

If you’re willing to settle for that kind of timeline, you could “launch someone into the sun” by just…leaving them on Earth for five billion years. At that point, the sun will become a red giant and probably expand to engulf the Earth.

Good question, but if you cancel out only a little bit of orbital velocity, you just orbit in a little bit closer. Without any appreciable drag acting on you, there’s nothing that will keep your orbit decaying. You’ll just be in a smaller, perhaps slightly more eccentric orbit.

It’s obviously a head shot of a person holding their hands in the air like they just don’t care.

Because the Earth is really cookin’, and anything anyone you hurl toward the sun will inherit that orbital velocity as well, meaning that they’ll actually end up going around the sun, instead of into it. And due to the speed it would pick up on its way in, it would basically take up a highly-eccentric yet stable elliptical orbit.

“Well, what if we throw them in the other direction, to make up for it?” That’s called retrograde, and that’s basically exactly what you’d have to do: cancel out the Earth’s entire orbital velocity. Which would take a lot of energy, plus a couple of really exacting gravity assists from planets on the way in.

(Edit to add: I may have explained this poorly. Basically, if you don’t change your orbital speed at all, any movement you make toward or away from the host body means you just end up in an orbit of the same average distance, but in a more eccentric [elliptical] shape.)

By contrast, even though the escape velocity from the solar system is no slouch (42 km/s), you get to start with the Earth’s orbital velocity (30 km/s)–meaning you’re already a little under 3/4 of the way there. Plus, if you can make it to Jupiter and Saturn, you can get a significant gravity assist, and they’re much bigger targets for such a maneuver than Mercury or Venus are.

So, yeah, bottom line: you only need a delta-V of about 12 km/s to get out of the solar system, but a delta-V of 30 km/s to get to the sun without going into orbit.

iirc, that’s the protocol that lets a connected device turn a display on via HDMI.

John Riccitello should find it very hard to get a job as an executive after a blunder that massive, but alas he’s doing just fine.

it’ll take many, many years for them to even be on the radar for most developers now.

Probably longer than the company has, to be honest. The engine’s best bet is to get purchased by another company that partially open-sources it or something.

I’m a simple man. You go into ad hominem territory, I leave the conversation. See ya.

How would you have written this comic to get the idea across, then?

I realize that. The person above seemed to think that everything in this clearly allegorical comic is somehow intended to be taken literally.

I mean, they can rein them in or not. I really don’t care either way, because I’m going to leave most of them off anyway. I turn off the obvious ads, of course, but almost everything else too. Basically, unless it’s something that I can take direct action on or someone I know who is intentionally trying to contact me, it doesn’t get a notification.

And the biggest clue to the truth of this is that the ACA is basically just RomneyCare with a few more individual protections bolted on. It was literally Mitt Romney’s plan to fix health care, and the Obama team used it because they knew that it could get support in the GOP.

No. What is actually happening in the comic is that a character is having a discussion with another person (not a racist conversation, because sea lions are not sentient beings despite what is about to happen). Treating it as anything more than that is reading something into the story not intended by the original comic. Not everything is so literal, particularly with Malki comics.

Not gonna cry over what the victims of racism do to racists.

Eh…I dunno. I’m not going to tone police anyone, and consequences for bad actions are definitely good, but do two very-wrongs make a kinda-right? I’m not sold.

[the rest]

Look…if you don’t vibe with the comic, that’s fine. It’s just obviously not about all the stuff that you seem to think it’s about.