Nathan Tuggy

@Muze: I didn't say you ran a voting ring. But you did say that upvotes aren't suspension-worthy. They are. One somewhat more serious example of why they are is voting rings. (I've never heard of a ring that made any attempt to downvote others into question or answer bans, or that made edits as part of their operations. The defining characteristic is use of upvotes to increase rep or avoid question bans in a group of connected accounts.)

@Muze: As far as upvotes being suspension-worthy… what do you think voting rings rely on, and are punished for?

@Muze: 10 votes is definitely not some sort of guaranteed minimum serial-voting threshold. The script can and will fire on much smaller quantities in certain circumstances, and moderators can as well. Basically, there is no acceptable level of targeted or serial voting. There's only cases where insufficient evidence is available to prove the invalid voting.

I'm going to have to frame these. ;)

Well, no. You can be employed as a professional ESL teacher even if you're monolingual.

I don't believe that matters.

(two answers, even, since all this chatting is easily worth another answer.)

"Self-inflicted"? That's an odd way to say "I got an answer for free from someone who wished me well"

It's my concern for the same reason I have ever bothered answering, or chatting, or commenting.

But, of course, if I don't own the website all that expertise is so much chopped liver.

Through reading dozens of discussions starting from the Area 51 definition days, through years of meta, and lots of commenting, as well as general experience on other SE sites.

I'm trying to be practical, because the ELL SE site just isn't designed, and couldn't be designed, to help everyone with all their ESL problems.

I know ESL students might have difficulty understanding simple things. But if they can't use a dictionary at all, they clearly can't usefully communicate in English on this website, and so we can't help them...

(The definition at dictionary.com/browse/shame shows a similar pattern.)

Hmm. That may well be. In that case the proper thing to do is to look at the definitions you can find and explain as best you can what you were and weren't able to figure out from them. Questions that are edited after closing get a chance to be reopened.

(The article for pity is bing.com/search?q=pity&form=OSDSRC)

ELL is not a good substitute for a dictionary, so in any case where a dictionary can actually answer the question, we close the question.

Yes, that's what that close reason is for.

And fitting those definitions into your two examples for "pity" shows that the one with an article can't fit the meaning.

That said, arguably the vote for dictionary lookup could be justified as, for example, searching Bing for "pity" immediately shows two noun definitions, one with and one without an article

I already said I hadn't voted on it myself, didn't I?

I'm not really sure why you're asking me to vote to close your question.

No one else is trying to single-handedly dictate question appropriateness.

if you expect me to respect your expertise enough to let you single-handedly dictate question appropriateness… well, no, that's obviously not going to happen

I'm not sure what you mean by "aim it at yourself"

(It's worth clarifying a couple of misconceptions. First, "off topic" does not mean "unrelated to learning English", it means "custom site-specific close reason". Second, I did not vote to close this question, so I am not defending my decision to do so; I am defending a general method and approach that good close voters follow.)

In other words, you must agree with someone's conclusions to respect their expertise or good intentions. I'm sorry, it does not work that way in any field. No one's opinions are reliable enough for that.

But if you don't assume good faith of someone when you have as little as a single reason to suppose they are clearly wrong, you're really not assuming good faith at all. It is entirely possible for someone to be wrong for good reasons (or right for bad reasons), and it's important to keep an open mind precisely at the point you are tempted to close it.

Well, it's pretty difficult. It requires the humility to realize that (for example) an answer one sees as excellent, others may not see as anything special. (There is one upvote on the answer at present, after 14 hours, and I assume it's yours.) Also, the discernment to tell the difference between someone who is wrong and someone with unsavory motives or who is recklessly incompetent. Finally, the humility to realize how easy it is to come up with plausible-sounding (but wrong) rationales to argue against something that affects you personally.

That's usually not the reason someone votes to close, and when it is, it's usually appropriate. (Questions are closed, after all, when they can't be answered properly on this site, so if someone with 3k can't answer it in a way that's useful to the site there's a decent chance it can't be answered.) In future, please try to avoid assuming the worst of folks who are mostly just trying to do a good job moderating the site.

No current satellite uses magnetic bearings, as far as I know, and while the paper linked describes a theoretical way to integrate energy storage and attitude control, few or no satellites have yet implemented this. (And, of course, if you have a functional set of flywheels, using them also for energy storage costs no extra mass. This doesn't mean it would be worthwhile to scale them up to use nothing else, or worthwhile to use them on a launch vehicle.)

@uhoh: The SPHERES satellites have 12 thrusters, per WP article.

same! :)

OK, good

Glad you liked it!

Sure enough

Huh, no idea

SoCal has a lot of advantages for high-tech startups even outside computing...

Yeah, very true

Interesting to contemplate the unusual team a startup would need to pull this off, probably including a polymer materials scientist, a cutting torch designer, and of course some serious aerospike engineering talent

btw, hi @MarkOmo!

Ah, yeah

Yeah, although you could arrange something similar to the peristaltic pump designs used in artificial lungs and kidneys

There are hydraulic cylinders that are large, but usually not that large; on the other hand, those operate often at far higher pressures, moving rather faster, and with tighter tolerances for wiggling

Not really; I don't have a lot of knowledge of good seal designs, but I assume that's reasonably doable, especially given the low speed of movement

Especially given that aerospikes still just aren't very mature

which is, admittedly, pretty substantial!

Yeah, I think the major issue would just be getting the design work done

but never got beyond imagining a water ice remass chunk that gets sucked into an NTR's intake like a push pop

TBH I've been noodling on ideas for continuous staging for years now, off and on, inspired by something from Asimov