• 7 Posts
  • 133 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • A fact is something that has specifically been observed, zero inference. It is a fact that this apple I dropped fell to the ground. It is a fact that Earth orbits the sun. It is a fact that the solar system orbits the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.

    I wouldn’t even go that far. We didn’t even know that galaxies existed as a concept until about 100 years ago, believing that spiral smudges we saw in the telescopes were just weird nearby nebulae. It was at the Great Debate of 1920 that the consensus shifted into believing in multiple galaxies spread across large distances. Galileo notably got into trouble for promoting the other mentioned theory. If you start calling these “facts”, you yourself are giving into OP’s world view that a theory becomes fact if it is strong enough.



  • Fuck, I would have personally benefited from these bike lanes! Whenever I’m in Astoria and want to bike on 31st Street, I always have to do this slalom between the columns. When lanesplitting in the driving lane there, there is not enough space for cars to pass safely, and New York drivers WILL NOT suffer the indignity of driving behind a bicyclist. So I have to slalom into the parking lane whenever a rush of cars approaches from behind, then slalom back when they have passed to stay out of the door zone, because there is not enough space in the parking lane to pass safely either, again because of the columns and also double parkers. It’s challenging but tiring. Ironically the reason I want to be on 31st Street is because that’s where all the businesses are! For now it’s just too annoying though so I usually just go eat elsewhere.








  • The helicopter route at the time of the collision allowed the Black Hawk to fly as close as 75 feet below planes descending to land on runway 33 at Reagan National Airport, according to the NTSB. With allowable errors in the helicopter’s altimeters and other equipment as well as Army rules expecting aviators to hold their altitude within 100 feet, it could end up being much closer.

    “How much tolerance should we have for aviation safety whenever civilian lives are at risk?” asked Todd Inman, NTSB board member. “How much is that tolerance,” he continued. “I think it should be zero.”

    Sounds like the tolerances weren’t big enough! Odd interaction putting those two paragraphs next to each other. NTSB demanding zero margin for safety…






  • It’s worse. They are saying that the EU copyright law, as written, only allows decompiling/reverse engineering to “fix bugs”. A bug fix would involve a software patch of some sorts. But the security researchers did not have time to write a patch yet, what they did is tell the customer “Yep, it’s fucked. Your vendor put in a killswitch to make the trains brick themselves.” So that does tell them where the problem is, but it is not a bona fide bug fix from the Bugfix region of France, and therefore illegal.