defrost

> and the download page looks like this: https://sourceforge.net/projects/celestia/

The page that states "Please do not download Celestia from this repository. This repository has been abandoned, and the new source and website are here and here, respectively." for the past four years ?

Try: https://celestiaproject.space/download.html and https://github.com/CelestiaProject/Celestia for version 1.6.4

Both Celestia and Stellarium have "open data" file formats that come "standard" with downloads and "extra" from community forums - ie all manner of real and SciFi movie/novel objects can be added with name, bitmaps, orbits, etc.

Do the settlers wear uniforms when they kill villagers?

The world is aware of the answer to that one.

> No trackers.

Excellent.

How can I formulate a blend suitable for blowing up a building or having a Roman candle in the desert from a bore hole? Asking for a friend.

Alternatively, there are one or two issues with bulk fertilizer orders and custom blends surely.

To properly curate and conserve wild land will take a lifetime, it's not a puppy for Christmas.

To be comfortably setup in life needs functioning set of buildings with five or six people can be done in a year with zillionaire budget.

Existing topographic and resource maps (it's Sweden, they likely have good records) can be supplemented with draped air geophysical survey to digitally map land surface and subsurface structure (geomagnetic).

After a discussion about location, heavy lift helicopters can bring in light one man excavation machines to cut out, build out a well drained stable level pad. While this sits, modular home components are factory assembled - the kind where three or four large semi trailer sized heavy concrete base lego blocks with fully plumbed and wired house sections are transported to site and slid together with hydraulic jacks to lock together.

These are flown in to the pad and fitted together, while septic tanks, wood sheds, battery banks, smaller staff units, etc. are also landed.

This is work that has to planned in advance with seasonal considerations, sure, but with people that do this work, local knowledge support, good logistics and funding it's possible to have a comfortable livable foot print to expand from.

Lagniappe: Mass trespass of Kinder Scout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_trespass_of_Kinder_Scout

In the hypothetical .. the infighting between those who are "tribe" V "not tribe" and proportioning any cash value carve outs alongside custodial issues of the land etc has the potential to be a bunfight - such issue already exist.

Moving away from native title, there are also many "peppercorn leases" bequeathed to various cities about the globe - large parks carved out from once larger farming estates, now fully urbanised and embedded within a sea of million dollar lots and apartments.

Should anyone sue over the park land no longer being a pure park (for example) or for petty reasons of "peppercorn" rent not being paid (ie violation of the terms of the gift to the city), the park would be returned to the rightful descendants .. an army of (say) fourth and fifth generation offspring all at odds for recognition and weighting and a piece of very valuable real estate.

There are only two broad outcomes, either things stay as they are, or much of the US is returned any remaining descendents of various treaty signatories.

The first is effectively a waste of time, the second a messy descent into hell on all sides.

Boring financial stuff about supply chain fragility not as sexy as Google being weird and re-litigating whether the Musk salute was a Nazi salute I guess?

More seriously there's a HN tendency to skip over dull physical logistical stuff, hand wave climate tonnages, space data centre physics, etc.

I imagine the investor class that look to fine details read these things closely and keep their thoughts to themselves to preserve any perceived edge.

Fair play to you if you're into Intelligent Design or whatever it is you're obliquely alluding to, we're all entitled to hold opinions.

However:

> and replace it with a system run by scientists

is just bogus straw manning.

It's pretty obvious the emergence of life on earth wasn't part of a "system run by scientists", the comment you replied to talked of the very antithesis of hierarchical systems run by entities in the phrase "emergent property of underlying physical laws".

This ties directly into

Financing of historic AI buildout raises systemic risks in US, researcher says - https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/financing-historic-...

stemming from the Brookings report: Financing the AI buildout - https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/4c_Van-...

( and ignored here on HN over the past days: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=brookings.edu )

> Armed robberies are done with profit motives by professionalized members of the organized crime. By definition these people have access to the kind of organization and weapons you need to mount such attacks.

Really? Maybe read up some more, OC scale mafia groups weren't doing many of the bank raids of the US 1970s / 1980s - in any case these are still well below my bar on what constitutes a "very strong force".

> Also, I think you massively underestimate the sheer size of an IA data center.

You think wrong.

> If you want to destroy one with grenades you're going to need a literal truck load of grenades.

Exactly right, or rather several drums of farm grade fertiliser, diesel, ball bearings, a stolen truck, and somebody (or two) prepared to do a ram raid. Groomed idealogues or addicts with debt have all been used for such things.

Or, as already mentioned, drive parallel and mortar the centre from one end to the other, achievable by small discontent militia types (who abound in the US).

Serious question time: Are you honestly unaware of Timothy McVeigh? Would you describe him as "a very strong force"?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_McVeigh

HN eschews pop culture references, the down voters are almost certain to include those that are aware of US sitcoms.

  The Native American democracy that the U.S. founders were most likely to know about was the Iroquois Confederacy.

~ https://theconversation.com/before-the-american-revolution-n...

and from other native groups you'll see many statements like:

~ https://collegefund.org/blog/democracy/democracy-is-rooted-i...

IIRC there's a lot of material about the North-North-American fur trade origins piggybacking onto existing Great Lakes and other regions trade networks with the French and the British picking up political and trade habits from those peoples.

( Not a scholar in the field, just a broad reader )

> Go to Africa or Middle East and see how they treat gays.

Yeah - a good many of the former European colonies in Africa do have criminal laws against homosexuality that were introduced during European colonisation - this is very true.

Uganda's easily one of the more extreme in that regard, with quite the history of British origin anti-gay laws and more recent substantial support from US homophobic Christian lobbies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Uganda

It's a time capsule of European origin values. Other countries in Africa are less extreme.

Worth noting that one can go to Europe and see how they treat gays, eg:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Azerbaijan

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Russia

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Turkey

> If you consider a full fledged insurgency in a civil war setting

Who said anything about civil war?

The US has many splinter loon groups who blow up buildings and like to attack infrastructure (see: US news). This has happened over the past decades with no civil war.

Data centres are soft targets - softer than banks. Do you remember when armed bank robberies were all the rage in the 1970s and 1980s? Not a time of civil war, just a time when a couple of people took control of buildings while heavily armed. Such a small group with fragmentation grenades can easily render a data centre unfit for use for several months with relative ease and fast ingress and egress.

Implied is the claim that the black recently Dutch citizens and others of the neighbourhood come from extremely homophobic cultures and / or countries (say, for example, Uganda) and are ethnically prone to the kinds of terrorist attacks seen elsewhere in Europe.

The Emperor Penguins would disagree- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildlife_of_Antarctica

They've been lucky the area's too cold for Black Rats from ship wrecks to survive and decimate their colonies, as has happened to many birds on many islands and remote peninsulas.

Pretty strong opinion that overlooks all those students that study or attend courses specifically to learn.

Australia’s Lord Howe Island has officially been the world’s largest inhabited island to eradicate feral rodents since July 2023:

  Two years should elapse before an island can declare itself ‘rodent free’, allowing for any survivors to breed up to a detectable level.

  So, in July 2023, the LHIB ‘Checkpoint’ program began its search for rodents.

  Over a two-week period, teams systematically surveyed the island’s Permanent Park Preserve and the settlement area. More than 950 detection device checks were undertaken including 140 tracking tunnels, 32 trail cameras, and 300 wax tags and chew cards, along with sweeps by detection dogs. The collected evidence, analysed by the Island Eradication Advisory Group from the New Zealand Department of Conservation, found no signs of rats or mice on the island.

  The island’s rodent population had – officially – been eradicated. 

~ https://www.australiangeographic.com.au/nature-wildlife/2026...

To recap; the quote, as given here upthread on HN, was "The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons", and I described it as "an attributed quote, translated, from discussions on and around his semi-autobiographical novel about time spent in prison."

So not an actual quote of his, but one sprung from the minds of people who imagined him to have said that or meant that.

There's an article that claims to have sourced the origin of that attributed quote (or bogus-quote) to 1964, the Canadian playwright and ex-inmate John Herbert [1]&[2] which I imagine you'd enjoy reading as the article author, Ilya Vinitsky, argues that Dostoyevsky would have been _aware_ of the Western notions of "civilisation" and prisons while not being _aligned_ with them.

A strong case is made for Herbert having started that attribution to Dostoyevsky, and for inspiring the spread of the quote as Herbert and his work were latched onto by prison reformers of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[1] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/dostoyevsky-misprisioned...

[2] https://lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/beyond-reasonable-do...

The articles trace far more than I can (I'm not in the least bit fluent in Russian), and the specific blame likely falls to a non Russian prison inmate reading as widely as possible in prison, jumbling multiple sources, taking "literary licence" and not having access to a lot of background on Dostoyevsky.

You do have to put some effort into understanding crime and prosecution figures though.

Was it actually flock that saw the cratering of car breakins in 2024 - or was it the increase in successful prosecutions following the passing of SB 905 which closed the "locked door loophole" ?

Geod-Ellipsiod separation dynamics both mean globally and on a plate by plate basis accounting for creep is a thing. As is epoch based modelling and forward and backward projection.

So measurements from harbour posts can be reconciled to WGS84 despite a bit of Californian bounce.

A great many people that read Russian novelists simply don't read Russian.

Translators can and do create translations that aren't faithful to the original in at least one or two significant ways. It's a challenge somewhat like Flattening the Earth - there's always some compromise on angles or areas.

As a result, there are many English readers who see Dostoyevsky through a clouded lens; they imagine him to have traits more unique to some translation than to his core.

* https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/F/bo363285...

Background on the man, and a review of the 2002 book submitted here:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Whyte_(poet)

* https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/view/27...

Looks like something that slotted well into the self help, searching for vocation, metaphysics end of the corporate bookshelf spectrum.

A couple of rednecks in a pickup with a mortar is far from "a very strong force"; consider how you would upgrade their description if they additionally had three helicopters, now describe them if additionally their numbers doubled, now throw in a couple of tanks.

When you start describing rabble level opposition that high you run out of ceiling very quickly.

The US is filled with ex service personal who can whip together a mortar, as "military hardware" goes it's on par with what civilian firework techs have access to and can build in a garden shed, it's home grown resistance level guerilla tech.

If there's growing ground swell opposition to US data centres then the same Y'All-Qaeda militia plotting against dams and power substations will feel empowered to have a shot at a DC or too.

> it's understood that it's meant as translated

I find it best to never underestimate how pedantic strangers on programming related forums can be, so good we've got that out of the way.

I imagine you'd enjoy Martin Porter's four Principles for Quotations and his two pieces on sourcing the Edmund Burke BogoQuote:

* https://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote.html

* https://tartarus.org/martin/essays/burkequote2.html

( and possibly even Porter's paleoCompSci work on stemming: https://tartarus.org/martin/PorterStemmer/ )

> It's really curious why people who never read Dostoyevsky make up quotes for him with phrases that nobody with a good command of the Russian language could have written.

It's a solid quip, almost serviceable as a Reader's Digest Condensed Book one page summary of Dostoyevsky prison book save for being too good (in English at least) for that sad US affront to literature.

People make up quotes for all manner of reasons, imperfect memory, a need to summarise, it's a joy to tumble both rocks and words to knock off some rough edges and brighten up a gem. Attribution to "elsewhere" is also common enough -- it can upsell your own work by attribution to a great name, it can deflect criticism if you've only polished a turd.

As curious questions go though, why not attribute it to a translation of Solzhenitsyn or Henri Charrière, (it's in the spirit of Oscar Wilde or Stephan Fry perhaps, but their works are already in English and a little too familiar for the bogoquote treatment (maybe)).

Jeff Koons, artist or client?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppy_(sculpture)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_and_Bubbles

etc.

It might be an issue with how you think of Philosophers then, you've just essentially given a seal of approval to Dennett and Chalmers who are regarded by some as the leading names in philosophy of the mind.

( Also, say, Stan Dahaene, David Rosenthal, Jesse Prinz, Guilio Tononi, and others also I guess )

Stuff like information theory and computability are part and parcel of educating about thinking, math, and physics for late 20th century universities.

David Chalmers is Australian university educated, like myself, Dominic Hyde (metaphysics), Jerome Gauntlett (quantum field theory), and others all of the same generation - we all had the same undergraduate exposure to physics, pure applied mathematics, and can handle thermodynamics, information theory, Turing computability, and related undergraduate topics.

Chalmers specialised in pure mathematics, was broad enough to get a Rhodes Scholarship and jumped ship for being a global leader(?)(according to some) in philosophy of the mind.

Perhaps you're thinking of Dennett who was more of a biology nerd, although I see no reason to think he is incapable of grasping thermodynamics, information theory, and Turing computability given his broad autodidact tendencies.

Name names?

Søren Kierkegaard predates the things you're mentioned, while neither (say) David Chalmers nor Michael Polanyi would have any trouble with them.