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Dark Matter Black Holes Could Fly through the Solar System Once a Decade
  • You don't need a force to prevent collapse if there's no drag force to slow things down. It would actually be almost impossible for a cloud of dark matter to collapse since any individual particle has momentum and no way to slow down, so they'll all be in some sort of mutual orbit

  • Elon Musk destroys astronomy
  • People down voting you for bringing up Kessler syndrome were correct to do so. It's a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.

    Light pollution is a more reasonable objection, and the effects on the upper atmosphere of all those satellites burning up would be as well, but not Kessler syndrome

  • Starlink v2 satelites will ruin science.
  • Then you'd be defeating the careful planning which went into making sure the satellites don't become a long term problem, by raising them out of the orbits which decay in just a few years and into orbits which never decay.

  • FAA fines SpaceX for launch license violations
  • I have at least a little sympathy for SpaceX's position that the regulations are unfit for purpose if they need a modification to their licence to use a different fuel tank, that seems totally immaterial to the flight

  • 'All good here': Last messages revealed from Titan submersible before implosion: Coast Guard
  • For an emergency ascent, they'd probably have dropped more than two. They also probably wouldn't have taken the time to type a message to the surface if it were going wrong that quickly.

    It seems more likely to me that they were controlling their rare of descent. I'd expect them to lose a little buoyancy as the vessel compresses, so it seems reasonable that they'd drop the occasional weight as they descend.

  • ‘Appalling And Indefensible’: Elon Musk Incites Rage Online After Claiming No One Is ‘Trying to Assassinate Biden/Kamala’
  • Actually, I suspect he's implying that nobody's trying to assassinate Harris because all the democracy-hating assassins are on her side, or she's the one setting them up, or something to that effect.

    It's still the sort of slander which in a reasonable world he'd be called on, but that seems unlikely

  • Remember: GNU/Linux and other UNIX systems can make files that are case-sensitive, Windows can't make files that are case-sensitive
  • No, I'm arguing that the extra complexity is something to avoid because it creates new attack surfaces, new opportunities for bugs, and is very unlikely to accurately deal with all of the edge cases.

    Especially when you consider that the behaviour we have was established way before there even was a unicode standard which could have been applied, and when the alternative you want isn't unambiguously better than what it does now.

    "What is language" is a far more insightful question than you clearly intended, because our collective best answer to that question right now is the unicode standard, and even that's not perfect. Making the very core of the filesystem have to deal with that is a can of worms which a competent engineer wouldn't open without very good reason, and at best I'm seeing a weak and subjective reason here.

  • Remember: GNU/Linux and other UNIX systems can make files that are case-sensitive, Windows can't make files that are case-sensitive
  • The reason, I suspect, is fundamentally because there's no relationship between the uppercase and lowercase characters unless someone goes out of their way to create it. That requires that the filesystem contain knowledge of the alphabet, which might work if all you wanted was to handle ASCII in American English, but isn't good for a system which needs to support the whole world.

    In fact, the UNIX filesystem isn't ASCII. It's also not unicode. UNIX uses arbitrary byte strings, with special significance given to a very small number of bytes (just '/' and '\0', I think). That means people are free to label files in whatever way they like, and their terminals or other applications are free to render them in whatever way seems appropriate, without the filesystem having to understand unicode.

    Adding case insensitivity would therefore actually be significant and unnecessary complexity to add to the filesystem drivers, and we'd probably take a big step backwards in support for other languages

  • Any arguments against separating identity from instance/platform? (single identity across the fediverse)
  • That's going to be a problem whatever solution you come up with, because of the federated nature of the lemmy system.

    There's no central authority to hand out usernames, so if two people sign up to different instances with the same username, any design which didn't attach instance name to each username would fail. The only way around it would be for each instance to contact every other instance which exists, including the ones which haven't federated yet, and negotiate ownership of the new username, and that's just not possible

  • Lula says Elon Musk’s wealth does not mean world must accept his ‘far-right free-for-all’
  • The assesment that he's the wealthiest person on earth is pretty dubious, actually. The analyses which list the worlds wealthiest people always are, because they have to decide what counts as wealth and how to count it.

    Normally that's fairly easy, but for very powerful people (who, as you point out, the people at the top of those lists are) it gets murky because of things like stocks and options which they could liquidate in theory, but which would crash in value if they tried to actually do so. Does it still count as wealth if it only exists so long as you don't spend it?

    There are also people who's wealth isn't held in any currency, or gold, or stocks. How do you measure the wealth or power of a sovereign king, or any other kind of dictator? You certainly can't neatly put it in a scale alongside people who just have a dragon's horde of cash somewhere, that wouldn't be comparing like for like

  • Sovcit tells us how to talk to the judge.
  • In their defense, a judge probably would try and answer basic legal questions to support a defendant who for some reason didn't have a lawyer to ask, unless that defendant had already gone out of their way to antagonise the judge.

    Sadly, I suspect there's a lot of overlap between people who are representing themselves and people who have annoyed the judge

  • [CSI Starbase] How To Prevent Raptors From Destroying Superheavy Pt.2 [80 minutes]
  • I would describe it as being in free-fall whenever it's not in being held up by any interaction with a solid surface, even indirectly. I'm not sure everyone would agree with my definition, but it's not a term you'll see used much in serious engineering precisely because it is a bit vague.

    For example, an aircraft in flight isn't in free-fall because it's being held up by the air, which is in turn held up by the ground. An aircraft (or spacecraft) which has no wings is being slowed down by air resistance, but not actually held up and is therefore in free-fall.

    An ascending rocket is generating forces which hold it up, rather than transferring forces to something which won't move (like the ground), so I would consider it to be in free-fall

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    MartianSands @sh.itjust.works
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