thombat

Introducing yourself with "I'm from United" will get your ear chewed off with complaints about airline service

Ask the chat bot?

Right you are, and thanks. I should have pondered the path in the sky at higher latitudes...

The corollary of which is that no function the driver might sensibly need while underway should be presented or accessed through a touch screen.

So physical levers and buttons. With some tactile feedback, such as raised lips or centre bumps or distinct shapes, so without looking the user knows which one their finger is on (third from left in the Aircon group). Displays can be present multiple items (don't need physical dials) but changing that display when driving comes back to buttons.

Bouquet or brickbat? I have no idea what outcomes unite these countries, nor whether you think this is good, bad, or even both at once. Could you expand on this?

Doesn't the sun do this at all latitudes at the equinoxes? (Rises due east, sets due west)

The first series of "Blackadder" has a vignette of such reportage:

Messenger 3: My Lord, news…

King: What?

Messenger 3: Lord Wessex is dead.

King: This news is not so good.

Messenger 3: Pardon, My Lord?

King: I like it not. Bring me some other news.

Messenger 3: Pardon, My Lord?

King: I LIKE NOT THIS NEWS! BRING ME SOME OTHER NEWS!!!

Messenger 3: Yes, My Lord!

(Messenger 3 leaves; King tosses things around angrily; Messenger 4 enters — actually just Messenger 3 pretending to be a new messenger delivering new news.)

Messenger 4: My Lord, news…

King: What?

Messenger 4: Lord Wessex is not dead.

King: Ah, good news! Let there be joy and celebration; let jubilation reign!

But it would promptly deform into a sphere, since its yield strength isn't remotely high enough to withstand the pressure of its own gravity

That's tracking or dollying, a term from the days when cameras were large and fragile so moving in a straight line meant rolling it on light rail tracks. OP is correct, a pan keeps the camera on top of its fixed tripod and rotates it to follow the action.

I delegated this errand to my manservant. I am quite unaware of what means of access he may have at his disposal but I trust that his resourceful nature will suffice to provide a precis of this internet website.

I'd mark them face-to-face, but here? Maybe I'm talking to a bot. Or maybe you'll be, if you reply.

Of those 15, it might be illuminating to know how many did not on grounds of principle versus merely that the cost/benefit didn't favour it for them at that time?

I used character styles that set the proofing language with hot keys assigned, so shift-alt-1 sets to English, shift-alt-2 to German, etc. As character styles they apply both to the current insertion point when typing or any selected range (e.g. when I forgot to set it proactively and now have a line spattered with wiggles)

Or just set the proofing language for the entire text to None to banish all spelling and grammar diagnostics.

The link to Criterion streaming doesn't work for "Brazil" (#51) - it shows a list of movies that likely have the word in their synopsis such as "Kiss of the Spider Woman" but not the actual film (which famously doesn't reference the country at all)

This note in that WP link is wild:

"On July 7, 2021, Barry Cadden's original 9-year sentence was increased to 14.5 years. An appeals court court decision required the trial judge to consider patients, and not only hospitals, as victims of the crime."

The law is always more complex than a layman like me thinks, questions of standing, etc. But I would have simply assumed that the patients hurt and killed would naturally be counted among the victims and not just the organisations left out-of-pocket.

Feels like a proper movie that political boundaries like state lines would be significant for all concerned. One meteor for Rhode Island, one for Texas... Any questions? (Asks the alien overlord of his minions in his crisp British accent)

And then you have arrived at "Last Thursdayism", where the universe could have been created a few days ago, or literally now, or might not exist at all and you are the only soul in existence hallucinating everything, because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator.

This overlooks that the Rubin telescope has a relatively wide field of view and a thirty second exposure time, so LEO satellites do routinely appear in images. The size of the object isn't so important as its relative brightness, so while a car on the surface of the Earth is hard to locate from 400km above, a sunlit car 400km up in the night sky is visible to the naked eye.

The US requirement is that passengers on flights to the USA have been processed in conformance with US regulations _and_ since that processing have not had any contact with passengers processed otherwise. It's not in itself a stupid rule but does make the US rules contagious, since either other airports re-build to keep the US-bound and other passengers segregated or they have to apply US rules to all.

This hit Auckland International badly: it had a lovely open atrium with a garden but the rules forced a forest of partitioning walls since passengers were transferring from smaller airports that couldn't quickly adopt the US rules.

Not OP, but it's more the warning not to underestimate the cost required for compliance, and apprehension of this cost may deter their creation.

The final phase of Symbian OS was becoming the open-source Symbian Foundation. This required the existing codebase, hundreds of thousands of files, to be categorised properly (mostly homegrown, some acquired, some licensed) and where necessary restructured so that each directory only had one kind. Painful, exacting, tedious archaeology which all-but-froze development for weeks. Like a long-deferred merge, the cost to pay for belatedly resolving a mess of licenses is daunting.

Thank you for that haunting image, of the recognition that their last user was gone, that this aspect of 65,000 years of local history had come to its end.

I hope that Payirti, the one who turned back, embraced that final solitude and understood how his family had chosen otherwise. I hope he felt his ancestors with him as he died.

But a much shorter flight time compared to ICBMs coming from the USA, and being launched from unhardened sites, so looking more like a first-strike decapitation weapon than a retaliatory MAD capability.

Of course submarine-launched ballistic missiles have the same flight time if launched from the Black Sea or off the Eastern Seaboard, but at least they have a strong second-strike potential.

Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship

But it isn't speeding by, it's heading away following a closely predetermined trajectory. A better analogy would be filming a high-altitude aircraft flying away from you, using a gear-driven tripod mount.

He wasn't wrong in that claim: for the most part the bombers did get through, especially at night. The problem was that their effectiveness once "through" was far lower than the bombing proponents had claimed, due in particular to the lack of precision, but also the resilience of both targets and the enemy population.

It comes years too late, but I finally understand the reliability problems I had with a DVD drive mounted on its side. If only I'd had your insight then, I could have taken the PC to a playground and burnt disks on the carousel.

Derek Lowe's take on this, probably written before those HHS comments, was that "the agency appears to have signed off on the trial design as proposed, and I can’t see Moderna going ahead with it if the agency had done otherwise". Does it appear that the design was actually approved?

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mrna-refusal-file

Please do! It will fit the spirit of your splendid post, unpacking the complexity of a thing we take for granted (at least as native English speakers)

The historian Hubertus Knabe made the horrifying observation of the film "The Lives of Others" that "There was a Schindler. There was no Wiesler", i.e. that in the whole history of the DDR they didn't in fact have a Stasi officer turning against the system from a crisis of conscience, as Wiesler does in the film. To prevent such long wolves they took the simple expedient of always having two officers performing the surveillance, so not just the target but also the Stasi men on the case were monitored.

Asimov is right to think that the costs were ruinous, as was the area of agricultural land sacrificed to the restricted zone near the border wall. But it was very much a price they were willing to pay.