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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • “shortest route” and “straight line” actually mean pretty much the same thing. The shortest route is the straight line. Sorry if I confused the matter by switching up the terminology.

    Flying parallel to the lines of latitude would mean that your bearing doesn’t change much, sure, but flying in a straight line would require your heading to change continuously.

    The aircraft in the screenshot was flying a very not-straight course



  • No, it’s not. It’s noth of the equator, so the straight line route would look like a curve towards the north. This route is curved south, which means it’s actually because of air traffic control routing them along approved flight paths. That might be for traffic management reasons, or because of terrain on the route, or restricted airspace.





  • MartianSandstoComic Strips@lemmy.world"Politics"
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    22 days ago

    It was pointed out to me a while back that the paradox of tolerance is only a paradox if you consider tolerance to be a philosophical position.

    In fact, we don’t treat it like that. We treat it as a social contract, in which context it is no paradox at all to say that if you aren’t tolerant then other people aren’t obliged to tolerate you in turn



  • For once, I don’t think that particular charge is entirely inconsistent with the dictionary definition.

    He’s accused of killing a member of the public in the hope of frightening everyone else in that person’s position into taking some kind of action.

    I think the law says something about killing for a “political purpose”, with the goal of changing some kind of public policy or behaviour. That’s not an unreasonable interpretation of what happened, I think.

    Unfortunately that means they get to use the laws which were written to deal with mass murder and bombing public spaces, which I don’t think is particularly appropriate but doesn’t seem out of line with the law




  • It’s asking for the ability to take screenshots, which is definitely suspicious unless there’s an in-app screenshot feature, and for the ability to launch discord and interact with it. The thing is it’ll be interacting using your discord account, I expect. That means it’ll be able to see your conversations and all the servers you’re in. It’ll also be able to post as you. Again, that’s the sort of thing which is very suspicious unless there’s some way in the app to have conversations over discord for some reason (maybe a bug report button, or a social feature).

    Basically, I’d consider both of these alarming but not necessarily evidence that they’re spying on you to collect personal data or training data for an AI





  • There certainly was a lot of scepticism early on in SpaceX’s history. They had to fight political pressure just to take part in the commercial launch program, and had to take NASA to court and argue (successfully) that they hadn’t followed their own rules when they rejected SpaceX’s bid.

    They seem to have gotten over that now. Presumably it’s difficult for anyone to argue they can’t do the job when they launch more rockets than the whole rest of the world combined, and they (eventually) delivered on the commercial crew program while the “safe” (and much better paid) pick, Boeing, seems to be very publicly failing and considering cutting their losses.

    As for Soyuz, I’m not sure how much those rockets and capsules actually cost so I can’t perform a direct comparison. It must be cheaper though, because they stole all the business for commercial launches from Roscosmos and left them with a serious budget problem. They charge about $60 million for a basic Falcon 9 launch, and they’re making huge profit at that price. We won’t really see the real cost of the rocket until someone builds something which can compete with them for business, because they’re really the only player worth mentioning in their weight class for anyone who doesn’t have ulterior motives (such as governments who want to support their own launch industry)

    What I can say for sure is they never came even close to the launch rate of Falcon 9. I think it took something like 8 years, off the top of my head, for total Falcon 9 launches to exceed the number of Soyuz launches and the number of launches per year is still increasing.