I have sleep apnea and specifically asked my doctor if there was a best or better sleeping position, and she said no. I find laying on my back causes the least interference with the mask, but I've yet to manage to actually sleep on my back yet, been trying for like 3 years now.
Sadly, today that often interprets to: someone bought (or just claims to have) the rights and now makes a living suing people for using it. If you plan to use it for anything serious, it's worth the effort to find something with an actual license.
I'm surprised some of the C64s still work. I had to return mine (for exchange) many times. I remember seeing huge signs at the return counter that said "NO RETURNS ON COMMODORE EQUIPMENT". As a kid it didn't set off any alarm bells. But apparently quality wasn't a goal at all. I remember seeing a talk by a former employee where he saw a stack of C64s and a sign that said "bad". He walked by the same spot a little later and someone had shipped them. Apparently the 1541 drives were even worse. I could never find one to buy, as anytime they were in stock people would bring theirs back for exchange, so not a lot of motivation for stores to stock them.
How do the algorithms from something like Dan Boulet's "Methods of Orbit Determination" hold up to modern methods? I have the book, never actually did anything with it though, but have recently been thinking about giving it a try.
Lol, Windows search doesn't suck because of the filesystems it supports. I can only assume you're a Linux or Mac user who has never used the Windows menu before, as quite literally anyone who has seen it would not come to such a conclusion. I envy you, so I will not taint your view of reality with an actual description of why it is so universally hated.
Sadly, the tech savy of the news seems to be going the other direction IMHO. It might also be that "redirected" sounds like something went wrong and will get more clicks.
This assumes the their presence has no affect on me. It takes time to click a page and let it load, and more time to dig through all of the results when all of them are unreadable. Maybe if there were a tag like [ungodlyamountofads] on each, it would help. But even then I'd still have to scroll through them.
I think the point is that the lunations vary by a couple of days within a year, so you might confuse users by stating a phase is on the wrong day when they are unaware a low accuracy algorithm is being used. But that algorithm probably would be good enough for just drawing an icon, since the differences would be imperceptable.
Honestly, I recommend people use the most accurate algorithm they practically can, even if it's overkill for the given application. This just avoids user confusion when different apps give different answers, even if it's not significant.
E.g., I have ported VSOP87 which gives the position of the moon and planets to sub-arcsecond accuracy to a couple of dozen languages. They are much, much longer than the "snippets", but are not impractical, and users won't notice much difference in application size or computation time. https://github.com/gmiller123456/vsop87-multilang
I have a site with a lot of these stand alone "snippets" so that you don't have to include/port an entire astronomy library just to get the Sun rise/set times, etc. https://www.celestialprogramming.com/
Most of them are written in JavaScript only, but specifically written to be easy to port to other languages.
Ok, so it's not "keeping them in sync" as you stated in your first post, it's not a "leap second sneaking in" as in your second post. Now it is somehow data that is not labeled, and only becomes a problem during leap seconds. I'm sure you can see how changing your story and lack of details would make someone skeptical that the problem even exists.
If there really is a problem I'm really interested in hearing what it is. But it doesn't sound like you plan to be straight forward about explaining it.
Generally if your victims are in a country, other (friendly) countries will arrest and extradite you if the crime is serious enough to justify the effort. There is no "world police" that forbid countries from prosecuting crimes committed outside their borders. A lot of it boils down to how friendly the two countries are with each other, and how serious they view the crime.
Not sure about "most skilled", as there are some very good machinist with skills in different areas. I'd say he's definatley the most patient, learning and explaining ancient methods and every step along the way. And the videos are certainly of the most visually appealing.
What experiments are those? I don't doubt if you lock someone in a room they'll lose sync with the sun, but people in society do rely on it. The fact that we use DST in the face of very vocal opposition shows a lot of people do care about it.
The existence of China as an outlier isn't much evidence. The most people on one side do not keep the same schedule as those on the other. If daylight really weren't an issue, there would be only one timezone for the entire Earth. So you can't point to one while ignoring the reason all of the others exist.
Specifically when is not knowing UTC will skip a second six months later a problem for you? As I said, you don't know the interval between any two seconds on your clock, a sync or frequency change can happen at any time. And if you really needed to know the interval at those points, Atomic Time can serve your purpose.
Does anyone have an actual example where leap seconds are a problem? Specifically one that can't be solved simply by using Atomic Time? Maybe then we can figure out what the problem we're trying to solve is.
Few people or systems even interact with a clock that is precise enough to detect the difference, and instead rely on clocks that are 100's or even 1000's of times less accurate than what would be required to even detect a leap second. And these clocks undergo thousands of corrections between leap seconds without a complaint.
We add an entire day to the calendar about every 4 years. It's not a problem because everyone is aware of it. So I think the only real thing that needs to change about leap seconds is awareness of them.
Leap seconds are needed in civil time because people's schedules are still dominated by the Sun. Not to the second, maybe not even to the hour. But the leap second was chosen because it's large enough to be infrequent, and tiny enough that only a tiny fraction of systems will notice.
I remember reading something where the author said the first project they implement when trying to learn a new language is to implement a hex editor. Said it ticked a lot of boxes as far file handling, GUI, text layout, memory management, etc.
I was a bit surprised how much he emphasized how open the protocol was. I remember seeing you could mail in a form asking for the code. Part of the form asked why you wanted it, for which I said I wanted to learn the protocol used so I could write a server. The response I got back was that they couldn't release the code to an individual, only organizations. There may have been other sources for information on the protocol, but they didn't bother telling me if there was.
The Vikings supposedly had a "sunstone" (cordierite crystal) that could help find the Sun through clouds or fog. I did buy a piece and wasn't able to get any good results, but my life didn't depend on it.
I actually often have dreams that I'm lying awake in bed. Sometimes I wake up and am in a different position, which is the only way I know it was a dream. I imagine there's a lot of times I think I really was lying awake when I was really sleeping.
They used to tell us you could stand an egg on its end on the equinox because the Earth was standing straight up and down. It really wasn't part of class, just something people mentioned. I even remember seeing a short news story of kids actually trying it in school. Then at one point one of my teachers pointed out people figured out you could do it any day of the year.
Systems that do this use the latest value for leap seconds. The conversion becomes ambiguous, but not undefined. For any system sensitive to the ambiguity, you simply would keep the time in TIA rather than convert it.