Never in the history of time has a minute contained only 59 seconds. Even in Africa. And it has been decided that from 2035 onwards, we need to alter time itself in order to eradicate this irregular minute.

We can only hope that before that time, we get to experience one of these magical short minutes. It may happen yet.

There are open tournaments and women’s tournaments. The open tournaments are for anyone. Women have competed in them but at the top level it is somewhat rare.

The women’s tournaments are intended to provide an environment that encourages more women to play chess. There’s considerable sexism among men (not only in the chess world, hah) which is not always very welcoming.

Unfortunately, when you do find a text article explaining the thing it’s often unnecessarily long and padded out with meaningless fluff, just so more advertising can be stuffed within the contents.

Pretty sure the ace is actually scored as part of a five card straight here, skipping the K, 10, 8.

Drones work now because they are $1000 (random number in the right range), while a patriot missile is $4 billion dollars each. Sure you could shoot a drone down with one, but if you do the enemy will just send more and bankrupt you.

I agree with the point but these numbers are some orders of magnitude off. A patriot missile is typically 4 million dollars (so not billion). Drones vary widely depending on the type. Man-portable scouting drones can go as low as a few hundred dollars. I don’t think a patriot missile would ever target something that small flying that low though. The Iranian Shahed is estimated to cost around $30-50k. Russia produces its own upgraded version (better navigation systems, bigger warheads, etc.) that costs around $80k.

Even then, you can make 50 drones for the cost of a single patriot. The economics are not favourable.

Given what happened to freelancer, I think the only way you should give Chris Roberts your money is if he agrees to lead the project for two years, then quit and hand it over to someone who can actually finish it.

https://greglewisinfo.com/2020/04/18/the-b-17-saved-by-a-miracle/

The ultimate source appears to be a guy’s memoirs:

I came across this story in Elmer Bendiner’s marvellous 1980 memoir, The Fall of the Fortresses, while researching the lives of USAAF crews flying out of England during WW2.

I’m still very sceptical. This guy is not even the primary source actually:

Bohn said the shells had been sent to the armorers to be defused but had then been rushed away by an intelligence officer.

Bohn had tracked down the officer and had hounded him until eventually he had told Bohn the full story – before swearing him to secrecy.

Now, sabotage like this undoubtedly happened, although the scale is impossible to verify. However I think this specific story has just way too flimsy a chain of evidence to put any faith in. Good story though.

What you’re talking about is essentially an EMP. They don’t generally emit continuously. Instead you just set off a single strong pulse which induces such high currents in receiving antennas that they melt or otherwise damage connected circuitry.

At these levels of power, any amount of conductive material tends to start acting as an antenna. If you set up a continuous transmitter you’re going to have trouble not damaging your own delivery and power mechanisms.

The most common way to generate one is to set off a nuclear bomb that has been finetuned to release most of its energy as electromagnetic radiation.

Very little is known about the Hunnic culture, so it is not really possible to establish this with any certainty. That being said, it’s pretty typical for pastorial nomads like this to collectively own and care for their herd. Although it’s also worth noting that communal property does not usually extend between different tribes, even when these tribes were united to some extent, such as under Attila.

In general it’s difficult to fairly place ancient tribal societies into the modern day political spectrum. The structure and scale of societies has changed radically.

I did not come away from this article with a very positive opinion on Clarkson. He strikes me as the type of guy who is incapable of recognising a problem that he himself is not personally facing. Climate change wasn’t real until he tried his hand at farming. Driving electric vehicles won’t solve the climate problem, science will (did science not develop the battery technology needed to move away from gasoline cars?). Farmers are struggling and will be forced to sell to millionaires and capitalists (is he himself not the capitalist that bought a hobby farm from a struggling farmer?).

I don’t think he’s seeing his own hypocrisy here. Farmers have been facing these problems for years and no one paid attention. He calls up his buddy in Westminster, immediately gets a full cabinet meeting, and as if by magic the government starts moving in his favour (taking away power from local government, I might add).

This isn’t a black and white issue and there is merit to Clarkson’s point that local government can get captured and corrupted by personal conflicts and interests. But I don’t agree with the image he appears to project as a defender of the common man and poor farmer. He’s a millionaire who has never given a single shit about farmers until he personally owned a farm.

I think it’s more so that the kind of people contributing to these projects are on balance not that interested in doing the marketing work.

A price is usually set to cover the initial costs and to make a reasonable profit not to squeeze how much money you can from people.

There are exceptions, but usually that is absolutely not true. Making as much money as you can is 100% the goal for the vast majority of goods produced, physical or digital.

You can also view it as a strategy to extract more money from richer people, without sacrificing all the poorer customers.

Can you elaborate where your confusion lies? It’s a digital good, there is no marginal cost. So they can pretty much price a game however they want. So pricing is mostly about maximising revenue, i.e. get as many sales as you can at the highest possible price.

A sale is a relatively straightforward strategy where you first sell the game at a high price to all the people who are fine with paying a lot, then you lower the price to sell more copies to the people who weren’t willing to pay the higher price. The result is more total profit. There is a time limit too to create a sense of urgency (“I better buy now so I don’t miss the opportunity”).

Usually when code dumps like these happen they don’t include any of the art assets. That’s why you still need to get the game on steam to run it, to download the sprites and what not. Has nothing to do with the code enforcing anything.

I don’t know about these particular releases though, I could be wrong.

This applies to all cars. I don’t think there’s ever a situation where you should buy a completely new vehicle over a used one that’s 2-5 years old. The value proposition is just insane

He’s the NATO chief, and NATO is basically the embodiment of America militarily defending Europe. Of course he wants Trump and Zelensky to make up and kiss. He’s just saying what his job demands him to say.

You might think that, but the United States exited from the Paris agreement on climate change mitigation twice: Trump first withdrew in November of 2020, then Biden rejoined in February of 2021, and now Trump is withdrawing for the second time.

This is “the gadget,” an implosion type nuclear bomb detonated in the trinity test, the first nuclear bomb test on earth (that we know of, heh).

It’s shown partially assembled inside the 100-foot test tower where it would eventually be detonated.

Technically just a little bit different from fracking as used in the oil/gas industry, since it doesn’t create new fractures in the rock, it only expands existing ones. However it carries basically the same risks with at most a difference in magnitude.

There’s an interesting case in Switzerland where they tried to drill one over an historically active fault line, without first doing a seismic risk assessment.