bodhiandphysics

more like wolves of the sea, since they hunt in packs and often attack prey larger than them.

you can just put a quartz watch in a faraday cage. That'll be more accurate than any mechanical timepiece. Mechanical clocks have a nasty habit of breaking.

The rest of the world only thinks the US is dumb because they rely upon us to make the kind of decisions that they don't want to have to make. It's easy to criticize without real skin in the game.

I mean Trump is an idiot... but umm... Berlusconi?

It's a little more complicated than that. There are two international treaties at play here (that the US has ratified)... the Outer Space Treaty requires that countries regulate the actions in outer space of their citizens and companies, in compliance with the outer space treaty and other international treaties (cf. Article VI and Article III). The Convention of the International Telecommunications Union of 1997 (the last version the us has ratified) specifies that the US shall abide by the rules of the ITU, including in allocation of satellite spectrum (Article 6). The ITU allows countries to limit the use of spectrum in certain bands (including those used by starlink) within their borders.

So Zimbabwe actually can ban starlink. And if it ignores Zimbabwe... well Zimbabwe will complain to the ITU, and the ITU to the US. The US would be under obligation to regulate Starlink... with the minor exception of its not clear that the US has any agency that can, at least under current law.

Anyway, it would be a total mess if Elon did that (except in a country like Russia where the US wants him to do that)... and I have no idea what would happen.

no... you can do fibonacci as O(log n)... you cannot represent (1 + sqrt(5))/2 on a computer.

no... if she's losing a steady 5% of $1000 bucks, she's paying 50 dollars to the casino. That's not enough for the casinos... her room costs more. The casinos want her to spending a lot more money. That's the really big problem of gambling... most people can do it in a relatively healthy way. But problem gamblers make the house most of their money. The house is strongly encouraged to find the problem gamblers and focus on keeping them.

The security council defines terrorism as "…criminal acts, including against civilians, committed with the intent to cause death or serious bodily injury, or taking of hostages, with the purpose to provoke a state of terror in the general public or in a group of persons or particular persons, intimidate a population or compel a government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act, which constitute offences within the scope of and as defined in the international conventions and protocols relating to terrorism…"

the crucial lines is "provoe a state of terror in the general public." That is to say, terrorism uses arbitrary violence in order to cause fear and panic leading to political goals. By contrast, the targets of this attack were directly against the personnel and leadership of a militarized organization currently in a shooting war with israel. The goal is not to instill terror in a population, but to directly target the capabilities of a military organization.

Note that doesn't mean its not a war crime (I don't think it is but...)! It could still be a war crime for all sorts of reasons... it just means it's not terrorism.

you still need to agree on some things... For instance even if you're passing data through text, you have to agree on the actual encoding (Unix uses ascii, but there are lots of different text encodings!). You also have to agree on the meta-properties of the communication. How do programs find other programs to communicate with? How do they actually pass data to each other? How do they maintain transactional integrity (i.e. a request sometimes needs to be atomic, either happening or not happening, and the requesting program needs to know if a request happened!).

This seems like a great idea! It was in fact a major focus on effort by basically everyone from about 1988 until 2004... This was the idea behind Microsoft's COM, IBMs SOM, smalltalk, Objective C and Openstep, many different projects at apple, and many more places.

It failed for reasons that are obvious in retrospect. Creating a system where you can embed one app in another requires everyone to agree the interface standard. But the interface is extremely complicated! You have to pass arbitrary data between two applications, and do so quickly. You also have to decide on how much the apps are isolated from each other (getting it wrong creates either massive security failures, or performance that is way too low). You also have to deal with such issues as how to synch the user interfaces!

So any such system is going to be extremely complicated, and getting everyone to agree on standards is almost impossible. What standards do get created are so complicated that they become unusable except for very stereotyped use cases. The other alternative is when a single company forces a standard down everyone's throat. But that creates the problem of vendor lock in, so people tend to reject that!

There are in fact a couple of notable successes. The most obvious is the digital sound market, which btw is a really interesting software market because there is huge competition. There are 4 major DAWs (digital audio workstations), and a number of still used minor DAWs, plus lots of companies that make synths, effects, tools you name it. And they all get sold! A huge amount of this software is in the form of "plugins" apps that run in the DAW as a container. This works because the interaction between plugins is a) similiar to unix pipelines (it forms a directed acyclic graph), so the interation is relatively controlled, and b) there are two standard data interchange methods. One is raw sound data in the form of 32 bit 48 kbs PCM, and the other is midi (a form from the early 80s for controlling synths). The user interface problem was solved in the easiest way... there is no user interface specification, or library, and every app has to roll its own interface (which it does by just using bitmaps... you end up with the most horrribly skeuomorphic designs you've ever seen!). There are actually 3 different standards for interfacing with the DAW, but one VST is dominant. Moreover, because of the simplicity of the data exchange format, the interfaces are actually quite simple to use, if you know about the weird world of audio programming.

The other success story is Microsoft Office. Office is based on MS's tech for creating components, known as com. When you a draw a graph in word or excel, you're actually using a different little app that draws graphs... and you can embed that in your own (windows) app. But COM is extremely complicated, and com components are almost used in apps specifically designed to be part of Office. There's a fairly big ecosystem of these apps (or there was) but its very tightly controlled and integrated by Microsoft.

Try animating a photogrammetric model! How about one that changes its shape? You get awful geometry from photogrammetry…

In practice the answer to will this be useful is yes! Subdivision surfaces coexist with nurbs for different applications.

Boeing "recalls" aircraft all the time. That's what it means when the FAA grounds an aircraft type. Any problems will be identified, and then fixed, either by Boeing or the carriers.

Ammonia has the mild issue that it's not just flammable, but toxic and flammable!

Just to point out... the whole point of Terraform Industries is to solve the problems that are raised in that sobering view! That doesn't mean they will succeed, but saying "this is hard, so they won't" is also not terribly useful. Ultimately, when faced with difficult problems, the only hope is to try to figure out how to solve them.

Even the biggest artists still need promoters (Taylor Swift has a promoter... it's Massina Touring Group, Beyonce is with Live Nation). The reason is obvious... star's can't afford the capitol costs of their own shows. Renaissance had a capitol budget of over 100 million. Beyonce's net worth is about 500 million... she's not going to tie up 1/5th of her net worth in a single tour! For someone like Olivia Rodrigo, the economics are even worse. Guts probably will have a capital budget in the 10-20 million range (or higher!) but Olivia's net worth is about 5 million. The promoter's advance is what allows artists to actually have their tours. The promoters are the ones who actually own and sell the tickets. They have a lot of power over decisions like whether or not to use dynamic pricing.

No... first hebrew is basically just a dialect of Phoenician, and phoenecian isn't an indo european language! It's semitic, like arabic and Akkadian. Also the name Casesarea is of course from Caesar (the city was founded in honor of Augustus by Herod)