thombat

Of those 15, it might be illuminating to know how many did not on grounds of principle versus merely that the cost/benefit didn't favour it for them at that time?

I used character styles that set the proofing language with hot keys assigned, so shift-alt-1 sets to English, shift-alt-2 to German, etc. As character styles they apply both to the current insertion point when typing or any selected range (e.g. when I forgot to set it proactively and now have a line spattered with wiggles)

Or just set the proofing language for the entire text to None to banish all spelling and grammar diagnostics.

The link to Criterion streaming doesn't work for "Brazil" (#51) - it shows a list of movies that likely have the word in their synopsis such as "Kiss of the Spider Woman" but not the actual film (which famously doesn't reference the country at all)

This note in that WP link is wild:

"On July 7, 2021, Barry Cadden's original 9-year sentence was increased to 14.5 years. An appeals court court decision required the trial judge to consider patients, and not only hospitals, as victims of the crime."

The law is always more complex than a layman like me thinks, questions of standing, etc. But I would have simply assumed that the patients hurt and killed would naturally be counted among the victims and not just the organisations left out-of-pocket.

Feels like a proper movie that political boundaries like state lines would be significant for all concerned. One meteor for Rhode Island, one for Texas... Any questions? (Asks the alien overlord of his minions in his crisp British accent)

And then you have arrived at "Last Thursdayism", where the universe could have been created a few days ago, or literally now, or might not exist at all and you are the only soul in existence hallucinating everything, because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator.

This overlooks that the Rubin telescope has a relatively wide field of view and a thirty second exposure time, so LEO satellites do routinely appear in images. The size of the object isn't so important as its relative brightness, so while a car on the surface of the Earth is hard to locate from 400km above, a sunlit car 400km up in the night sky is visible to the naked eye.

The US requirement is that passengers on flights to the USA have been processed in conformance with US regulations _and_ since that processing have not had any contact with passengers processed otherwise. It's not in itself a stupid rule but does make the US rules contagious, since either other airports re-build to keep the US-bound and other passengers segregated or they have to apply US rules to all.

This hit Auckland International badly: it had a lovely open atrium with a garden but the rules forced a forest of partitioning walls since passengers were transferring from smaller airports that couldn't quickly adopt the US rules.

Not OP, but it's more the warning not to underestimate the cost required for compliance, and apprehension of this cost may deter their creation.

The final phase of Symbian OS was becoming the open-source Symbian Foundation. This required the existing codebase, hundreds of thousands of files, to be categorised properly (mostly homegrown, some acquired, some licensed) and where necessary restructured so that each directory only had one kind. Painful, exacting, tedious archaeology which all-but-froze development for weeks. Like a long-deferred merge, the cost to pay for belatedly resolving a mess of licenses is daunting.

Thank you for that haunting image, of the recognition that their last user was gone, that this aspect of 65,000 years of local history had come to its end.

I hope that Payirti, the one who turned back, embraced that final solitude and understood how his family had chosen otherwise. I hope he felt his ancestors with him as he died.

But a much shorter flight time compared to ICBMs coming from the USA, and being launched from unhardened sites, so looking more like a first-strike decapitation weapon than a retaliatory MAD capability.

Of course submarine-launched ballistic missiles have the same flight time if launched from the Black Sea or off the Eastern Seaboard, but at least they have a strong second-strike potential.

Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship

But it isn't speeding by, it's heading away following a closely predetermined trajectory. A better analogy would be filming a high-altitude aircraft flying away from you, using a gear-driven tripod mount.

He wasn't wrong in that claim: for the most part the bombers did get through, especially at night. The problem was that their effectiveness once "through" was far lower than the bombing proponents had claimed, due in particular to the lack of precision, but also the resilience of both targets and the enemy population.

It comes years too late, but I finally understand the reliability problems I had with a DVD drive mounted on its side. If only I'd had your insight then, I could have taken the PC to a playground and burnt disks on the carousel.

Derek Lowe's take on this, probably written before those HHS comments, was that "the agency appears to have signed off on the trial design as proposed, and I can’t see Moderna going ahead with it if the agency had done otherwise". Does it appear that the design was actually approved?

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-refusal-file

Please do! It will fit the spirit of your splendid post, unpacking the complexity of a thing we take for granted (at least as native English speakers)

The historian Hubertus Knabe made the horrifying observation of the film "The Lives of Others" that "There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler", i.e. that in the whole history of the DDR they didn't in fact have a Stasi officer turning against the system from a crisis of conscience, as Wiesler does in the film. To prevent such long wolves they took the simple expedient of always having two officers performing the surveillance, so not just the target but also the Stasi men on the case were monitored.

Asimov is right to think that the costs were ruinous, as was the area of agricultural land sacrificed to the restricted zone near the border wall. But it was very much a price they were willing to pay.

Indeed, this is such a central point that it's made clear in the first chapter:

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live--did live, from habit that became instinct--in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Remarkable that Asimov could overlook this.

Absolutely! I'd read LotR many times before I first read it aloud as a bedtime story season and was abashed to find how much I'd been skipping over, mostly parenthetical details of geography and world-building, while hastening in pursuit of the plot, like the holder of a big box of bonbons gorging target than savouring.

Both Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with it) so even when Earth is further from them than the sun there's 35 degrees of separation.

Searching for the tech angle... "the police had used a helicopter with a heat-seeking camera, and could see that some of the waste was indeed starting to decompose." - a less exciting but cheaper and more informative option could have been donning overalls and rubber boots and taking a spade and a probe thermometer across it

They'll add a footnote explaining that the term "flight" should be understood as a non-refundable ticket in a transport lottery. Similarly to how most sales of entertainment now are providing you with a revokable license to access it, rather than a reusable copy in your possession.

This is your receipt for your husband. And this is my receipt for your receipt.

But unless you have a way of slowing down again you'll never see anything of your destination, just the briefest of flares of light as you sail past. And if you do have a way that involves anything like physics that we recognise, you've brought along a huge rest mass that then got accelerated to near light speed. Probably your civilization needs to be approaching Kardashev Level 2 to pull this off.

The article notes that this data would reveal abortions or miscarriages, and that in some states this information is used as input for criminal prosecution.

And it starts with the all-too-familiar "Chesterton's Fence" arrogance of the domain expert who sees something done wrong and presumes that this is due to the ignorance or laziness of the doers, only to learn that there are sensible decisions made by sensible people behind it.

The only reason that the subsurface rock is cooler than magma is being able to conduct heat through to a cooler surface. When that surface becomes exterminatingly hot and remains so for a while the subsurface will be heating up too. Since the sun is estimated to remain a red giant for about one Gy it will become hotter than the surface.

Perhaps I'd become effortlessly fluent in Aramaic if I had to read enough articles in it, but absent some substantial benefit I'd prefer to keep with standard English.