Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
I mean...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/20/us-navy-sail...

> Kristian Saucier, of Arlington, Vermont, appeared in federal court in Bridgeport, where a judge also ordered him to serve six months of home confinement with electronic monitoring during a three-year period of supervised release after the prison time. He pleaded guilty in May to unauthorized detention of defense information and had faced five to six years in prison under federal sentencing guidelines.

> Saucier admitted to taking six photos of classified areas inside the USS Alexandria in 2009 when it was in Groton and he was a 22-year-old machinist mate on the submarine. The photos showed the nuclear reactor compartment, the auxiliary steam propulsion panel and the maneuvering compartment, prosecutors said.

> Saucier took the photos knowing they were classified, but did so only to be able to show his family and future children what he did while he was in the Navy, his lawyers said. He denied sharing the photos with any unauthorized recipient.

Comment · 3 years ago
That could be it but his other videos recently have been over-long too. Paraphrasing:

> "In this video I'm going to try fusing two bullets together but uh, I don't want to 'break the internet' with clickbait so actually 30 minutes of this video will be about me talking about the safety measures I took."

[Spoilers: the bullets didn't fuse.]

It's fine I guess, his videos are usually still worth watching. I just wish the youtube system was better at rewarding concise videos that are as long as they need to be, not rushed or stretched.

Comment · 3 years ago
You're right that the F-22 and F-35 aren't black, but neither are they the blueish gray I'm talking about which is much darker: https://dragonladyhistory.com/2019/04/30/u-2-black-paint/ The B-2 also isn't very blueish, it's more on the dark gray end of the scale but I can see how that's subjective.

And you're forgetting the U-2 and SR-71, which lacked full blown RCS reduction geometry but were still fitted with the black RAM coating (the SR-71 also had some stealth geometry; that was the purpose of the chines.)

Comment · 3 years ago
> Unhoused people are [...] not murderers.

"Too dangerous" obviously includes robberies and assaults, but you've neatly excluded those to narrow the focus of the conversation to murder. Where is this idea coming from, that violent crime doesn't count unless somebody is murdered (or specifically shot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374483)?

This attitude exemplifies the problem; that all manner of crime should tolerated from homeless unless they shoot or murder somebody. Only then does it rise to your concern. And in the case of tlogan's comment that I just linked to, even somebody getting stabbed to death doesn't count because they weren't shot. This is how you get situations as described by seanmcdirmid here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36374451 Crazy guy known to be violent is tolerated by local authorities because he hasn't yet killed anybody. No big deal until he murders somebody, only then do people care. This is why the electorate of these cities is the root of the problem, because the electorate don't give a shit about the crime until somebody gets killed.

Comment · 3 years ago
The root of the problem is the electorate (not the leaders, who are downstream from the electorate), and that problem mainly falls under category A. They, the voters, have this idea that more social services, more compassion and understanding and more tolerance for the minor sorts of crime like vandalism and shoplifting will eventually bear fruit and cause the crime rate to drop. The failure of the plan to deliver the promised results is explained away as a matter of needing more time, more funding, more reforms... The plan hasn't failed; people failed the plan.

And of course there is a lot of D, people denying there's a problem at all. The "this is fine" response.

Comment · 3 years ago
When I think of dangerous street people, I don't think guns. I think knives. The times I've been threatened by street people, they showed me or made reference to knives. A gun seems like an expensive liability to such a person, which could be sold or traded for a substantial amount of drugs but could get them into a lot of trouble if they were caught with it. A knife though is worth basically nothing and won't get them into very much trouble if they're caught with it either. So a low rate of shootings doesn't give me much consolation. I'm more interested in the rate of stabbings and beatings, robberies and assaults... violent crime generally not specifically those done with guns. Why even single out one particular kind of weapon if you're trying to reassure somebody that a neighborhood is safe? That's weird, particularly since the people who are cause for concern are unlikely to have that kind of weapon in the first place.
Comment · 3 years ago
I love Pipewire, Pipewire fixed bluetooth headphone reliability. For years I had frequent trouble where the bluetooth headphones and bluetoothctl would both say they were connected, but there was no audio sink for pulseaudio. Sometimes there would be audio, but it would be crappy mono audio in "headset mode". For three or four years I had this problem several times a week. I believed this was an issue with the linux bluetooth drivers until one day, after several unsuccessful cycles of reloading, restarting and rebooting everything I got fed up enough to install Pipewire (which was unexpectedly painless.) From that moment on, not once have my headphones failed to connect on the first attempt. I've concluded that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way Pulseaudio recognizes and responds to a bluetooth speaker being connected, and Pipewire obviously doesn't have this flaw.

There's a popular narrative of "linux enthusiasts hate anything that's new"; you hear this a lot from people defending Pulseaudio and SystemD from "the trolls". It was never true. People love new things when the new thing solves their problems, and hate the new thing when it introduces new problems. The haters narrative is little more than cope; a way for the authors of buggy software to rationalize the negative response to their software.

Comment · 3 years ago
In related news, an ABC reporter for Good Morning America recently revealed on air that he was told not to report live from the location of this mall because it wouldn't be safe.

"But it is worth mentioning that we are not at Union Square or the Westfield Mall this morning because we have been advised it is simply too dangerous to be there at this hour"

Comment · 3 years ago
Wow, that New Yorker article really is something. She hires private investigators to obtain sealed court records about an allegation of child abuse and de-anonymized the child. Then when the university reprimands her for this and tells her to turn over the documents, she calls that an "Orwellian nightmare". Orwellian? Who's the one doing the spying, procuring documents they have no right to possess? Loftus herself was the Orwellian nightmare but she saw herself as the victim in this. Even if Loftus's hypothesis about the case is correct, she clearly caused a great deal of emotional anguish for this person but was more concerned with the university telling her to leave it alone. The whole of this article paints her as a narcissist if not a psychopath.

The whyevolutionistrue rebuttal is insubstantial, it doesn't address this at all.

Comment · 3 years ago
SBIRS is intended to use infrared to track ballistic missiles through all stages of flight, including decoys and debris released during the mid-course phase in space (so we know it's meant to be extremely sensitive, not limited to tracking hot rocket engines during the boost phase) Seems like a good bet that orbital systems with such sensors could be used to track LEO satellites too.
Comment · 3 years ago
There's an interesting question concerning why (most) US stealth aircraft are black. Black isn't the best color to make an aircraft invisible at night; a dark blueish gray is best for that. One possibility is that the radar absorbent material is inherently black so they don't have a choice, and indeed the U-2 was originally a dark blue color before it received a new black RAM paint. That is probably the real reason I think, but another possibility is that when missile and radar technology made visual intercepts less relevant, they were freed to paint these secretive aircraft a less optimal black, which everybody knows is the proper color for secretive aircraft.

Incidentally the new B-21 apparently won't be black. Maybe they have a new RAM paint formulation that doesn't force the choice of black.

Comment · 3 years ago
Take it up with barelyauser, I only mention Africa because they brought it up.
Comment · 3 years ago
> They are even offering to pay companies the extra cost to reinforce their payloads to try and get customers and they still can't get anyone to do it.

It certainly can't help that Spinlaunch can't put anything into space.

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