It isnt about the flying. This is about ICE now being able to take down any drone footage and arrest those who post it. They can also obtain extensive search warrants for uploaders, giving them an investigative path into the lives of ICE protest groups.
Come on flat-earthers. I know you are out there. Lets hear your crazy rant about how this is a fisheye lens on a weather balloon or a webcam atop the eiffel tower. Why can't we see the poles? And is that an ice wall on poking up in the lower-right quadrant of the disk?
There is no point engaging in any way with people who believe in such "theories". They are like trolls, the only way to deal with them is not at all. Don't engage, don't disagree, just nothing, total silence. One can choose to be a wilful edit and waste your life and time on complete bullshit, but the rest of us should just ignore those people completely.
Ya, but eventually they all wind up wearing furs and carrying spears as they storm the gates of some government building. Its all good fun until people start to die. We laugh as soveriegn citizens are yanked from thier cars. Harder to watch are the vids of them pulling guns on police.
Conspiracy theorists need to be kept in check. Disengagment is easy but it doesnt help.
Flat Earth is a distraction or a way to ridicule any counter-narrative to anything scientific.
When a cosmologist says that a planet nobody can see exists and is made of x% helium and is y light years away etc etc with absolute certainty despite nobody being able to go there and witness any of it (look how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance), then you can always just say “what are you a Flat Earther” and easily discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.
Any idea you want the public to oppose, you can create and market an adjacent thing, like Trump. You can throw all the ideas you want to oppose in the Trump bucket and if anyone supports it it’s probably because they’re a Trump supporter right?
See you’re very very easily programmed, like clockwork.
> It is taught that the scientific method provides evidence, not certainty, in middle school science curriculum.
FWIW, this fact isn't taught properly or normies are somehow unable to process it.
There's this popular dismissal of tech people, saying that "they think in 0s and 1s, but world is shades of gray", but in reality, it's almost everyone else that thinks in 0s and 1s - STEM people and people in/into similar fields (like medicine) are usually forced to understand nuance due to nature of their interests/occupation, but everyone else seems to operate in purely binary mode, and what's worse, whether something is true and false isn't even correlated much with objective reality, and mostly with one's personal feelings about how things should be.
(Now, to be an equal opportunity cynic, in my experience, the concept of categories and taxonomies being arbitrary - invented and assigned by people, and judged by their usefulness, as opposed to being inherent facts of nature that are discovered - seems to be hard for even STEM people to process, for some reason, at least based on my observations and the number of conversations I had about this with all kinds of people.)
I do not know what you mean about "how wrong they were about Pluto’s appearance".
Since when I was very young and until now the amount of information about Pluto has continuously increased, so now we know much more about it.
For example now we know that Pluto is practically a double planet, having a relatively very large satellite. This was not known when I was a child, e.g. at the time of the first NASA Moon missions.
However, I do not remember anything wrong. Many things that have been learned recently were previously unknown, not wrong.
If you refer to the fact that Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, that is also a case of information previously unknown, not wrong.
This planetary reclassification was not the first.
When Ceres was discovered in 1801, it was considered the 7th planet, after the 5 planets known in antiquity and Uranus that was discovered a few years earlier. (The chemical elements uranium and cerium, which were discovered soon after the planets, were named so after the new planets, as their discovery impressed a lot the people of those times.)
However, soon after Ceres a great number of other bodies were discovered in the same region and it was understood that Ceres is not a single planet, but a member of the asteroid belt.
Exactly the same thing happened with Pluto, but because of its distance, more years have passed until a great number of bodies have been discovered beyond Neptune and it became understood that Pluto is just one of them, i.e. a member of the Kuiper belt, so it was reclassified, exactly like Ceres.
> ...discredit any doubt I have in these extraordinary claims with underwhelming evidence.
Something unfortunate about our media environment is that science news is a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary of a dumbed down summary. These issues you're flagging, a lack of evidence and overstated certainty - they're an artifact of the reporting process. If you work your way back to the original sources, there will be a heck of a lot of evidence and it will carry error bars (so the certainty is precisely & appropriately stated). There's bad or even fraudulent papers out there but there's a huge amount of good science being done by honest researchers who are just as concerned as you are about the quality of the evidence and the degree of certainty.
Eg, there really is a compelling explanation of how we can know the composition of a gas giant light-years away, and it isn't invented out of thin air, it's been 100+ year process of understanding spectroscopy and cosmology, building better telescopes, etc. It's the culmination of generations of scientists pushing the field forward millimeter by millimeter.
The only real difference between the "spaceflight" in the 1960's and today is that these pictures don't need to be hand painted - you can render them in Blender in a single day.
But yeah, sure. With the amount of fake stuff on the internet including AI image generation, we're expected to believe that the US government dumped billions of dollars into going to space when they could give the appearance of doing so for a few bucks in nano banana credits? Hah.
They couldn't do that for "a few bucks of nano banana credits" though. You could generate the imagery but that's only one line of evidence. A launch is easily detectable through multiple signals.
Why would Russia and China and any other country with any degree of astronomic capability that the US has an adversarial relationship with just let them get away with lying to the world? Why wouldn't they take the opportunity to humiliate the US by revealing that no launch happened and that they cannot detect the spacecraft?
How would they prove that no launch happened? There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, and if there were it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
> There isn't conclusive evidence of an absence of launch, ...
A launch is detectable seismically, visually, on radar, etc. There's a lot of investment in being able to detect launches (to detect the launch of nuclear weapons). It would be screamingly obvious if the launch was fake. It would absolutely be conclusive if there were no seismic activity, no radar return, they couldn't detect the spacecraft presently, etc. At least for a definition of "conclusive" that can be operationalized - conclusiveness is a judgement call about when evidence is sufficient and not reaching some theoretical 100% certainty. Which can't possibly be reached for any claim for the reason you outlined; you can always invent some negative counterclaim that can't be entirely dismissed, even for claims like "the sky is blue".
It's also pretty easy to find people who were physically there to witness the launch. This wasn't a secret bunker or a barge in the middle of the ocean. It was in Florida in the late afternoon.
> ...it would be accused as being fake and a ploy from American enemies to discredit them.
Hundreds of thousands of people around the world have access to this data. Astronomers, geologists, petroleum engineers, backyard amateurs. The conspirators could muddy the waters but they couldn't ultimately prevail. It is many orders of magnitude easier to go to the moon than to convincingly fake it.
I don't have anything to say to your argument, not because I don't think it's worth addressing, but because it doesn't address my argument, and because I find this statement more interesting:
> People are easily convinced by lies, as you have demonstrated just now.
You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence. You seem to be assuming my position is reflexive rather than considered.
Cynicism, contrarianism, the assumption opposing positions are unconsidered - that is not what "free thinking" looks like. That's just being dependent on the "mainstream narrative" in reverse. If you can't imagine someone examining the evidence and coming to a different conclusion than you, you are engaging in the dogmatism you criticize.
It also does not make you less gullible. Cynicism is the dual of naivete. Both are equally exploitable. Cynicism can feel rational and rigorous because it has a hard edge to it, and because it feels like legitimate skepticism. But that's merely aesthetic. People can and do pull the wool over cynical eyes by tailoring lies to that aesthetic; instead of saying, "experts say X is true, and you can trust them" they say "experts say X is false, and you can't trust them" and the outcome is the same.
Propaganda and lies are real, you aren't wrong to protect yourself from them, but I genuinely think this mechanism does not.
> I don't have anything to say to your argument, not because I don't think it's worth addressing,
...but simply because you have no argument. Just a lot of vague handwaving that amounts to nothing and seems designed to fill the air full of noise more than anything. No statement you have just uttered is of use to anyone.
> You can't have known this but there was a time in my life I was very open to these theories and eventually came to the conclusion they didn't comport with the evidence.
So you watched the multiple videos of the US flag waving in the breeze on the moon and learned nothing?
You saw the flat, unblemished surface of the moon right beneath the lander's giant rocket engine, which had just shut off moments before leaving no trace of any disturbance--not a speck of dust disturbed--and learned nothing?
You watched the Apollo 11 press conference where, far from acting like returning heroes fresh from walking on the moon, they seemed somber and ashamed?
You saw the 'rock' with the letter "C" written on it? The converging shadows? All the other discrepancies? The seams where photos were joined together to make a fake? You studied all the obvious lies being told about "space is cold", "you can't see stars up there", "a thin plate of aluminum is plenty of radiation shielding", etc, and learned nothing?
You saw the pictures of all the supposed Challenger astronauts who are still alive to this day, one of whom (Judith Resnik) is even still living under her real name, teaching law at the University of Minnesota? And you learned nothing.
It seems your "studies" didn't help you much.
Really, the evidence is so clear and obvious that to make a post as you have just written weighs the odds heavily in favor of you being a disinformation agent.
I'm not going to address your arguments if you're not going to address mine; that's me working overtime while you simply handwave with skepticism. I certainly do have points to make, but if you're not going to explain why Russia and China are carrying water for the USA, even through the collapse of the USSR, no, I am not going to respond to your points.
Yes, I studied the evidence and came to a conclusion. You've come to a different conclusion. That's not because you're smarter or less gullible. It seems to it's because you are cynical and, to be frank, over indexing on dubious evidence. If you're scrutinizing people's facial expressions to determine whether a gigantic physical event has taken place, you've taken a be wrong turn. Facial expressions are about the lowest quality evidence I can imagine to answer a question about spaceflight. It's way too far removed and there are way too many alternative explanations.
You're complaining that people dismiss you without taking you seriously while being completely unserious. You cannot preach against dogma while literally calling those who disagree with you cultists and paid agitators. You cannot complain that people refuse to engage with your arguments when you refuse to engage with theirs. (You didn't express these complaints to me but I see them in your other comments.)
Or rather, you can, but it seems like being closer to the truth is an important value to you. And if that's the case I think you are doing yourself a great disservice.
But I've enjoyed our conversation and I wish you well.
> How to talk to a science cultist: you can't, as your post will be immediately flagged and censored.
This was the comment I was referring to, as well as a vibe/through line in the rest of your comments. If I misinterpreted you I apologize.
Regarding your flagged comment, I am a human being for whatever that's worth. I don't really know what to tell you about your world view other than that it's deeply mistaken and seems to be informed more by paranoia than evidence.
Entertain for me the idea that you are mistaken. If you have built a worldview that interprets disconfirming evidence as a further layer of conspiracy and people who disagree as professional propogandists - how would you ever change your mind?
Any belief which functions as a ratchet and gets tighter and tighter without any mechanism to change your mind will eventually strangle your ability to understand the world.
A system whereby millions of people seek services from thousands of potential providers, with a life-or-death need to track which services and products were delivered where and when ... ya. It is a billion-dollar data problem. But that is the cost for the luxury of being able to walk into any hospital in the country and expect them to know everything about your conditions at a moment's notice.
And school busses go all sorts of places carrying kids to field trips and sporting events. Along with police/fire/ambulances, school busses are just another special type of vehicle that ALL drivers must learn to deal with. If you cannot act properly around a school bus, you shouldnt be on the road.
(Funny story: i was in Ottawa over the winter. There, snow plows, ambulances and fire trucks all use blue flashing lights. I thought i was being pulled over by a giant police truck ... it was a snow plow that really did not appreciate me stopping on the side of the road. Yet another special case vehicle.)
>> Starship making LEO and testing propellant transfer (a humanity first)
No. We have to stop listing to AI and twitter idiots trying to upsell stories into "firsts". The first propellant transfer, the first refueling of a spacecraft on orbit, was by the soviets nearly 50 years ago.
"Progress 1 was the first of twelve Progress spacecraft used to supply the Salyut 6 space station between 1978 and 1981.[6] Its payload of 2,300 kilograms (5,100 lb) consisted of 1,000 kilograms (2,200 lb) of propellant and oxygen, as well as 1,300 kilograms (2,900 lb) of food, replacement parts, scientific instruments, and other supplies. Whilst Progress 1 was docked, the EO-1 crew, consisting of cosmonauts Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko, was aboard the station. Progress 1 demonstrated the capability to refuel a spacecraft on orbit, critical for long-term station operations.[11] Once the cosmonauts had unloaded the cargo delivered by Progress 1, they loaded refuse onto the freighter for disposal."
If SpaceX wants a first, then it would be the first transfer of cryogenic fuel. But even that could be debated as arguably Shuttle "transferred" cryogenic fuel between the tank and the orbiter during the launch process. So SpaceX might get the first of (cryogenic + on-orbit). Any simplification is a denial of what has already been done.
Question: What percentage of windows gamers are actually Linux gamers who are using wine/proton or some anti-cheat workaround/VM that causes them to be reported as using windows when they are in fact running linux?
Using proton, I regularly see crash reports where games want to report that I was running some version of windows, which is a result of how proton implements wine. I never send such reports as they are of little use to developers.
Proton is a modified version of Wine. If the underlying game is sending a bug/crash report, it may "see" itself as running under windows as that is what wine presents.
"Proton is a tool for use with the Steam client which allows games which are exclusive to Windows to run on the Linux operating system. It uses Wine to facilitate this."
Correct. Steam, a native Linux app, will run Windows games via Proton. As Steam itself, which is collecting the data in TFA, is a Linux app, it shouldn't be affected by thinking it's running under Wine/Proton. As to your original question, I don't think many developers release information on what OSes their players are using, so I don't think we can tell
In 2004, healthcare professionals warned against overindulgence in Pontefract cake after a 56-year-old woman was admitted to hospital following an overdose. The woman consumed about 200 grams (7.1 oz) daily, leading to dangerously low potassium levels and subsequent muscle failure.
If you're reading this in the UK and happen to have rats in the garden, try leaving some out for them. It's something even rats won't go near. Except possibly Scandinavian rats when the alternative is salmiak.
According to that universal source of all knowledge Wikipedia, "The word [cake] itself is of Germanic origin, from the Germanic 'kakâ' (cook)". Who says Germans don't have a sense of humor when they've got the Brits to name their oldest sweet "Pontefract kaka".
Have you ever tried this stuff called "root beer" that Americans all seem to be into?
Sugary-sticky medicine flavoured stuff made from a poisonous plant. It's the sort of thing I'd expect from a country with absolutely no food culture like the US.
Room temperature is totally possible. Room temperature AND room pressure is another story. Superconductivity acrose a couple nanometers inside a diamond anvil is not very useful even if at "room" temperatures.
The whale=fish thing is also an old joke about catholics. Back when one could not eat meat on fridays, all sorts of water-living mamals were declared to be "fish" for purposes of eating. So a new world protestant author in the 1800s is pointing a critical finger at oldworld religion and science.
We have lost knowledge of such nuance, like rewatching MASH or Trek and missing the religious and racial messages that made them so controversial then but banal today.
In 1760, The Natural and Civil History of the French Dominions in North and South America did absolutely claim that there was some papal decree that otter tail was fish, and beaver was fish, and so on.
But... There's no actual Papal decree, bull, or otherwise in canon law that anyone can find. It's just a good story, not a true one.
Which doesnt matter. What maters is whether melville thought it to be true when he wrote the line. The joke/reference would have been understood by readers at the time regardless of whether it was factually true.
2010. Archibishop of New Orleans. Alligator is "fish". Whether or not the pope has an opinion, such things are not fiction.
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