Viewing profile — thombat

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 th…

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 t…

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 t…

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 …

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…

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 obje…

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 passeng…

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 (most…

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…

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 retal…

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 …

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 g…

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 bo…

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 …

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 goin…

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…

Indeed, this is such a central point that it's made clear in the first chapter: The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level…

Absolutely! I'd read LotR many times before I first read it aloud as a bedtime story season and was abashed to find how much I'd been skipping over, mostly parenthetical details of…

Both Voyagers left the ecliptic plane with their final gravitational slingshots (Voyager 1 went north, Voyager 2 went south so only the Canberra radio dishes can communicate with i…

Searching for the tech angle... "the police had used a helicopter with a heat-seeking camera, and could see that some of the waste was indeed starting to decompose." - a less excit…

They'll add a footnote explaining that the term "flight" should be understood as a non-refundable ticket in a transport lottery. Similarly to how most sales of entertainment now ar…

This is your receipt for your husband. And this is my receipt for your receipt.