Dog lord isn’t exactly high frequency, but it’s higher than I would’ve guessed.

Why do you care if the person you voted for wins?

Because it’s an election with consequences, not an online fandom.

$83 billion per month is almost $1 trillion per year. That sounds about right.

What are the oceans if not one giant salt lake?

Deseret can have a little coastline, as a treat.

John Oliver sometimes runs random out of context clips of MILF Manor and I’m not sure actually watching them in context would make them any less ridiculous.

Oh you can remember which one is which by remembering that they have a university named USC.

Weren’t those synthesizers and drum machines huge in the 70’s, culminating in the game-changing TR-808 making its mark on basically huge swathes of music that followed?

Whatever it is we’re talking about, it certainly wasn’t invented by the current generation of musicians.

I didn’t know I was learning a life skill at the time.

The House of the Dead 2 was a really popular arcade game at the time, so adapting the preexisting game into an at-home typing trainer was actually genius innovation.

Typing of the dead

Still my favorite example of gamification: take a useful task and make it so fun that people will gladly devote hours and hours of their time to it.

If you you blow the guts out and faces off Russian soldiers by more traditional means they are just as dead

I (and all the people and organizations that have worked throughout the last century to get incendiary weapons banned as anti-personnel weapons) generally feel that the method of killing matters, and that some methods are excessively cruel or represent excessive risk of long term suffering.

The existing protocol on incendiary weapons recognizes the difference, by requiring signatory nations to go out of their way to avoid using incendiary weapons in places where civilian harm might occur. Even in contexts where a barrage of artillery near civilians might not violate the law, airborne flame throwers are forbidden. Because incendiary weapons are different, and a line is drawn there, knowing that there actually is a difference between negligently killing civilians with shrapnel versus negligently killing civilians with burning.

There are degrees of morality and ethics, even in war, and incendiary weapons intentionally targeting personnel crosses a line that I would draw.

The moral high ground is absolutely critical in war. War is politics by other means, and being able to build consensus, marshal resources, recruit personnel, persuade allies to help, persuade adversaries to surrender or lay down their arms, persuade the allies of your adversaries not to get involved, and keep the peace after a war is over, all depend on one’s public image. There are ways to wage war without it, but most militaries that blatantly disregard morals find it difficult to actually win.

In this case? The entire military strategy of Ukraine in this war is highly dependent on preserving the moral high ground.

The United States and the UK successfully blocked attempts to outlaw all use of incendiary weapons, and all use of incendiary weapons against personnel, and all use of incendiary weapons against forests and plant cover.

This is an area where it’s perfectly reasonable to disagree with how the US watered down this convention, to push for stricter rules on this, and to condemn the use of thermite as an anti-personnel weapon and the use of incendiary weapons on plants that are being used for cover and concealment of military objectives.

So pointing out that this might technically be legal isn’t enough for me to personally be OK with this. I think it’s morally reprehensible, and I’d prefer for Ukraine to keep the moral high ground in this war.

Wait is there a way to invent awful things and then patent troll so that nobody can actually bring them to market?

The escalation of Starlink not complying comes from that, not the other way around.

I’ve looked closer (at other articles, too). You’re right - the freezing of the SpaceX accounts came from the same order that ordered that Twitter be blocked, and before SpaceX announced it would refuse to comply.

The proper thing to do is to recognize the legally distinct personhood of SpaceX, which isn’t part of Twitter, even if Twitter/X itself is wrong on the law.

Twitter has accounts that Brazil says violates Brazilian law.

Brazil took steps to shut down those accounts in Brazil.

Twitter refused to cooperate, going as far as to fire all of its Brazilian staff, so that it can’t be reached by the Brazilian courts.

The Brazilian courts ordered all of Twitter be blocked until they comply with local law that they designate a corporate representative who can be served by court processes.

Brazilian ISPs complied with the court order to block Twitter.

Starlink did not comply, and Brazilian courts froze SpaceX’s Brazilian assets, including bank accounts, and started making moves towards de-licensing Starlink, including its 23 ground stations located in Brazil.

The issue escalated to the full Brazilian Supreme Court, who ruled that the assets should remain frozen until Starlink starts complying with court orders.

Now Starlink says it will comply with the court order.

The order to block Twitter went to all Brazilian ISPs, and Starlink is the only one that didn’t comply on Saturday. So the escalation stems from the disregard of an order that everyone was required to obey, but the intertwined nature of both companies being controlled by Musk is both part of the reason why SpaceX would even consider not complying with local law in a country it operates in, and why the Brazilian courts seem to be willing to aggressively enforce their own orders.

Edit: I’m convinced. This comment as originally written presented the facts out of order.

There’s a paper from 1984 that worked out the math for a two-sail system that could get a spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, and slow down and end up in that gravity well, with a 41-year mission time. It would do so by discarding a reflector that points backward at the actual payload with its own sail. The paper also proposes a mechanism for a round trip mission, too, using 3 sails.

Why would you think it’s stupid to recognize visual patterns?

We’re hard wired to be able to recognize human faces and all sorts of meaning behind a single face, from the person’s age to their emotional state. We can extend that complex pattern recognition skillset to dog breeds, animals, tree species, fruits, vegetables, paintings, flower types, colors, and all sorts of patterns from the natural world. Even the shape of clouds tell us something about the weather, and the color of a wound can tell us something about how it’s healing (or not).

Human-created patterns are easy to memorize, too: letters, numbers, fonts, patterns, fabrics, clothing types, symbols, emojis, warning labels, signs that mean “no smoking” or “emergency exit this way,” etc.

So is it that much of a stretch that we can recognize an impressionist painting or an Art Deco building or even specific examples of those, and remember the artist/architect and maybe even things like the year it was created, and where it is physically located? If we’re doing that kind of stuff seamlessly with our brains, recognizing a few dozen car models seems trivial in comparison.

What’s fun about these is that the mass of the actual vehicle can be much smaller if it doesn’t need to carry rocketry and fuel on board. So even though they’ll never compete with rockets for power (energy used over a specific length of time), starting at a lighter weight and never running out of fuel means that these systems could theoretically exceed the top speeds (relative to the earth) of our fastest rockets, given enough time.