pavelrub

The common approach is to take a photo of an object from above together with a ruler or something of a known size for scale, then import that directly into the CAD software, scale according to the scaling object, and create a cutout along the object's outline. No need for calipers, 3d scans, or other complex measurement procedures. There are a lot of videos and guides on how to do that.

What do you mean? The previous iPad Pros didn't have a home button either. The last iPad with a home button was the 9th generation iPad, released in 2021.

(2014)

No. Because you have to consider:

1. Current or future means of intercepting hypersonic missiles.

2. The ability to disable or reduce the enemy’s ability of launching hypersonic missiles, or of pinpointing and accurately tracking the exact location of aircraft carriers.

Yes — discussing the actual motivations for the law, as provided to us by Israeli politicians and previous Supreme Court decisions, is a good and valid starting point for discussion. Claiming that the law is bad simply because it disproportionally affects some subset of the Israeli population, is not. The argument I was addressing in this particular subthread is the latter, not the former.

It targets people who sleep under bridges. If, for example, there is a major safety hazard associated with sleeping under bridges, it would make sense to prohibit it, and it would be bizarre to criticize the law just because it affects mostly homeless people. If, on the other hand, the law prohibits only homeless people from sleeping under bridges, it becomes clear that the intent is discriminatory, and this becomes a valid criticism.

There is a fundamental difference between a law that prohibits a specific ethnicity from doing X, and a law that prohibits everyone from doing X, but a specific ethnicity/minority is more affected by it than others. The former is pretty much never legitimate, while the latter is often unavoidable, and I imagine exists to some extent in any country with minorities.

The restriction applies to everybody, not just Israeli Arabs. However it is true that Israeli Arabs are the ones most affected by it.

this is about Arab or Christian Israeli citizens

This is incorrect. There is no distinction in the law between Arab Israelis and Jewish Israelis. The law applies equally to Israeli Jews who wish to marry a resident of the WB/Gaza, or one of the other countries mentioned in the law.

Israel has neither an authoritarian nor a semi-authoritarian regime. From your analogy I think you are misunderstanding NSO and its relation to the Israeli government. NSO is not a civilian cover for government operations. It’s an Israeli arms manufacturer. Its foreign sales require approval by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, and as such can be facilitated by the government based on diplomatic considerations. This is not unlike other arms manufacturers in the US or in western countries in general.

In my experience people who dislike subtitles are mostly native English speakers living in English-speaking countries, who are used to the fact that almost all the media they consume is produced in their native language, and so they’ve never developed the ability to read subtitles comfortably.

When the occasional rare case arises where they need to watch a foreign film/show, they find it straining to both read the subtitles and watch the film, and so they conclude that subtitles are bad or “not for them”. In practice this stems from lack of practice — the perceived conscious effort of having to read subtitles while watching a film disappears entirely after you have done it a few times with sufficient regularity, and becomes completely effortless, subconscious, and automatic. But this is a skill that needs to be developed. Saying that subtitles are bad because they distract from the film is like saying that riding a bicycle is bad because you fall all the time, when in reality you just haven’t learned to ride one.

They have a very limited amount of hydrazine, used for small course corrections for drag compensation and debris avoidance. It's not used, nor can be used, to "change orbit" in the sense of redirecting the satellite to look at some specific location on demand, outside of the satellite's original orbit.

Satellites in general aren’t maneuverable. The camera angle can be changed to point at, and capture, a region of interest when the satellite passes over it, but the satellite’s orbit is determined on insertion and doesn’t change on demand.

The argument you are addressing is a strawman. Nobody claimed that anal sex is limited only to sex between men. Anal sex is, however, far more common in frequency among homosexual men than between heterosexual couples, and significantly increases the risk of HIV transmission compared to vaginal sex, therefore it is a risk factor that is strongly correlated with sexual orientation.

HIV transmission is partially related to attributes that are correlated with sexual orientation, the most prominent of which is the fact that the chance of transmission is much higher for anal sex than it is for vaginal sex.

The “instruments” are direct visual sighting by several pilots.

It’s unclear how you’ve reached the conclusion that #2 is unlikely without knowing how widespread the use of this technology is, and in what circumstances/locations it’s being used.

Classified military technology exists and is being tested all the time, without any high-res pictures leaking.

I think this is in general how NASA often operates. Dr. Robert Zubrin has made the same criticism multiple times. Missions are invented in order to provide rationale for previous decisions, instead of it being the other way around.

You should stop spreading misinformation. The agreement Israel signed doesn't allow Pfizer any access to the "country's health-care database". That's complete nonsense. Nor is there anything even remotely "shady" or "undemocratic" about it.

Israel will provide Pfizer daily aggregate data that contains no identifiable health information (as defined by the Israeli Patient’s Rights Law), or any data that may result in the identification of individuals.

The signed agreement is publicly available, is under the oversight of Israel's Helsinki committee, and is in full compliance with Israeli law. Any citizen who believes their rights are being infringed upon, can petition to the Supreme Court of Israel.

The reason Israel was able to reach such an agreement, and the EU wasn't, is because Israel, given enough vaccines, will be able to vaccinate its entire adult population by the end of March, whereas the EU isn't even close to having such capacity, regardless of vaccine access.

The main unknowns aren't around short-term efficacy, but long term immunity. If it turns out that a single dose provides ~80% protection but only for 3 months, whereas the second dose provides strong long-term protection, the one-dose scenario would be significantly worse.

The physical Esc key was already added in the previous generation

I think the larger point is that the goal of vast majority of intelligence gathering programs - and judging by the slides this seems to include PRISM as well - has nothing to do with stopping terrorist attacks, which is a tiny subset of what intelligence agencies do. Judging their utility by counting the number of terrorist attacks they've prevented is mostly a meaningless exercise.

As I said - assets are routinely called "spies" in colloquial use and in the media, as is evident even in the story that this post links to, as well as countless other media references.

A case office is not an handler, a field officer is, a case office is an analyst.

This is incorrect, as is evident by a basic google search. An analyst is -- surprise -- called an analyst.

There is no such thing as a paramilitary officer, their are field officers

This is also completely incorrect. CIA SAC/SAD operatives are called paramilitary officers. The official CIA designation is Paramilitary Operations Officer.

You might have encountered different definitions in your work or private life, but they are not representative of how those terms are commonly used, both colloquially and in common professional contexts.

Beyond that - your replies add nothing to the discussion. The precise definitions and terms change from agency to agency, and from country to country, and are irrelevant to the original point being made.

That's possible, but your previous comment is still incorrect.

In everyday colloquial use, the term "spy" applies to what you are calling "embedded assets", whereas the term "trained spy" isn't used professionally at all. A "handler of assets" is a case officer. An intelligence agency employee who "does intel work" in the field might be a paramilitary officer, or some other name depending on the agency.

In the context of this thread, Alexander Yuk Chung is definitely not what you are calling "a trained spy", but an asset that was recruited by Chinese intelligence almost 20 years after joining the CIA. Like I said - there is no reason to believe that most of those would be have any sort of training relevant to passing polygraph tests.

What are the chances of an actual spy being able to beat a lie detector?

I'd say not even remotely close to 100%. What is an "actual spy"? Those people are often regular employees with zero relevant training, that are simply recruited by a foreign intelligence agency via pressure, money, or manipulation, and are targeted based on their access to information. I'd say that a huge percentage of them won't be able to beat a lie detector.

Secondly, polygraph tests are used for a lot more than weeding out actual spies.

The claim that "it's a real thing" doesn't mean anything other than that some people exhibit certain behaviors that some other people decided to group together, give them a name, and put it in DSM-5. None of this refute GP's claim that "that's what they call mouthy rebels these days".

Not sure what you mean. The differences in impact seems to be trivial to explain given the vastly different measures taken by different countries, and their timing relative to the start of the outbreak. The IFR estimates are very similar everywhere.

It's unclear to me what you are basing this on. How do you know that the "how careful do we want to be to avoid testing failures" parameter was exactly where SpaceX wanted it to be in this experiment? Or was at an optimal point for SpaceX in general? If you don't know this - then your reply doesn't really mean anything, and can be be used to justify any mistake whatsoever.

How is this "much more likely to be a malicious state actor"? There is literally nothing about this attack that indicates a state actor.

I haven't seen any evidence supporting the argument that they do not protect the wearer. The argument seems to be that they aren't 100% effective at that, and therefore shouldn't be used for those purposes, which doesn't make any sense. Even 20% reduction in the amount of incoming droplets is significant - both for protecting the wearer, and for reducing R0.