Skua

They must surely be too busy confusing child abusers with foot fetishists for us to worry about it

Same place today, for anyone else curious

While the experiment is not the first for space-to-Earth laser communications, it’s the first using a commercially available ground station, according to Morizur.

The article should have mentioned the NASA test, though

No need to reference Orwell, the Forever War is already its own piece of dystopian fiction

Was this photo taken some time around 2007 or did something change that made this year so bad?

He’s a very good boy though

I’m using the term “allowed” in the sense of “China agreed to this and put it in its own law”. Freedom of navigations exercises are a way to tell a country “Do what you promised, we are willing to fight you about it if you don’t”. Since China has not actually stopped this exercise, it is following the treaty despite all its complaints. Even America follows the treaty, despite having not signed it.

Being signatories to a treaty is not decisive if no one follows the treaty.

Yeah, this is true. The treaty is just the specific set of terms (almost) everyone agreed to and continues to follow. Since everyone almost everyone agreed to it and everyome does follow it, it’s an easy point of reference to get international cooperation on. I’m sure the reaction would be quite different if China had fired on this ship vs if it had done so in a world with no agreements on territorial waters and innocent passage. In the latter case, a lot of countries would probably just tell Germany “well why did you sail a gunship where you weren’t supposed to?”

deleted by creator

Wasn’t Starlink saying it would refuse to comply with the court order to stop serving ex-Twitter in Brazil? Could this be related to that?

There is UNCLOS, which China signed up to. It defines the limits of territorial waters (they are not extensive enough to cover the whole Taiwan strait even if the same country controlled both sides) and also permits passage through straits even when they would otherwise be against that law so long as you only travel through and don’t stop

No, but it does include other things that mean Germany would be allowed to do this regardless of whether you consider Taiwan to be part of the PRC or not. Territorial waters don’t extend far enough to cover the whole strait, and you’re also allowed to sail through territorial waters - even with military vessels - so long as you stick to the middle and don’t stop.

That sounds like a prog rock band who wanted to cut loose and relax a bit, so they made a a side project to do punk music. Only, they still couldn’t quite resist the urge to play in 15/8 time.

Who decides what is an international water way?

Pretty sure this is a reference to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, UNCLOS. China and Germany are both parties to it, and doing what Germany did here is absolutely fine under it.

Ahh fuck, stuff being published by them was usually a decent sign that it’d be interesting in some way. Best of luck to the actual team, I hope they can put something new together

It could well be a consequence of how recently it became a state. There’s a similar situation in the UK where elections for the entire country use FPTP but elections for the devolved parliaments (Northern Ireland in 1973, Scotland in 1999, and Wales also in 1999) use other better options . Maybe seeing FPTP in action for a long time just turns you against it.

€6,000 is, unfortunately, well into the territory of competing with used cars. It absolutely needs to be cheaper than that to gain mass adoption. I’m sure it can be since this looks like a high-end product aimed at a very specialist market just now, but right now that is a major obstacle.

Also the simple possibility that it’s us that explores our way out to them, rather than the other way around

Fuck, you nearly got me there

I don’t think there’s any chance of converting his base, though. Surely what she needed to do - and what it sounds like she did, I haven’t finished listening to the debate yet - is persuade everyone else to vote for her? His base alone isn’t enough to guarantee him a win if there’s a strong showing for Harris, as happened for Biden in 2020

OOP describes themselves as “pro-corporation”, thinks modern Russia is communist, and seems to spend an awful lot of time immersed in 4chan. Either they’re trolling or they’re about as bright as a cloudy night sky, and I don’t much care which it is