My understanding is that (1) there is, as you say, a very nonzero risk of landing in a field and good visibility of what is _in_ that field is critical; (2) when riding thermals it is traditionally the case that many gliders soar in close proximity close to the core rising air mass, circling at quite a high bank angle – and collisions need to be avoided (many glider pilots wear parachutes for that reason…) and having visual references, particularly to mountains, really helps; and finally (3) it is common to be flying visually as one typically staircases in an altitude profile, as seen here, and go in and out of controlled airsapce (or deliberately avoid bumping into it, as I have done at 10 kft in UK airspace a long time ago).
In contrast, general aviation aircraft:
a) Have bright lights
b) Will fly in a straight line at a well defined altitude, meaning that vertical separation is sufficient to deconflict aircraft
c) Do not typically land in fields and do instead land on runways which often _also_ have bright lights.
I'm pretty sure I completed Morrowind for the first time ever using both wine and a celeron. Likewise before that with VirtualPC (remember that?) on Mac OS (note the space!) and Age of Empires (not even Rise of Rome!).
Single-digit FPS can _absolutely_ be playable if you're a desperate enough ten-year-old...
When I played (original vanilla) WoW I remember getting 2-3 fps in 40 player raids. The cursor wasn't tied to the game's framerate though. So with the right UI layout made from addons I could still be a pretty effective healer. I don't even remember what the dungeons looked like, just a giant grid of health bars, buttons and threat-meter graphs.
This would have been on some kind of Pentium 4 with integrated graphics. Not my earliest PC, but the first one I played any games on more advanced than the Microsoft Entertainment Packs.
> When I played (original vanilla) WoW I remember getting 2-3 fps in 40 player raids.
I had to look at the ground and get the camera as close as possible to cross between the AH and the bank in IF. Otherwise I’d get about 0.1 fps and had to close the game, which meant waiting in line to get back. Those were the days.
> So with the right UI layout made from addons I could still be a pretty effective healer.
I got pretty good with the timings and could almost play without looking at the screen. But I was DD and it was vanilla so nobody cared if I sucked as long as I got far away with the bombs.
> I don't even remember what the dungeons looked like, just a giant grid of health bars, buttons and threat-meter graphs.
I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a mate who was MT at the time and told me he knew the feet and legs of all the bosses but never saw the animations or the faces before coming back with an alt a couple of years later. I was happy as a warlock, enjoying the scenery. With a refresh rate that gave me ample time to admire it before the next frame :D
I've only ever played Skyrim on a 2009 13" MacBook Pro in Wine. It took like 30min to load and ran at like 4fps. But I didn't play past the first area.
Wasn't AoE1 released for PPC Mac natively? AoE2 was probably the best Mac game ever.
My Geforce2 MX 200/400 with an Athlon and 256MB of RAM began to become useless in ~2002/2003 with the new DX9 games.
Doom3? Missing textures. Half Life2? Maybe at 640x480. F.E.A.R? More like L.A.U.G.H.
Times changed so fast (and on top of that, shitty console ports) that PCs didn't achieve
great numbers at home until 2009 with a new machine.
Altough I began to play games like Angband, Nethack and the like in that era and in opened an amazing libre/indie world until today.
And, yes, I replayed Deus Ex because it had tons of secrets and it ran on a potato. Perfectly playable at 800x600 at max settings.
I don't see the relation to BGP anomalies, since this "layer 3 shaping" is basically just "if you send traffic to the IP of an AS router, it probably goes over the link of that IP". None of this would help NSA "shape" arbitrary traffic onto links they are able to tap. (I'm really not sure what exactly the point of this is, the slides talk about exfil a lot, it would seem to me like some random device sending traffic to a router is more suspicious, because normal traffic never targets routers, than hitting an actual server somewhere but idk)
In en-us education "101" is often used to refer to an introductory course in a particular topic. My inference from the fact that this _educational_ slide is called "101" is that this is a basic example of core knowledge that people in this area of work are expected to have. It therefore stands to reason that there exists a "102" or "103" course that expands upon it, as well as material going far beyond "the syllabus".
The NSA and thirteen eyes generally have detailed traffic logging capability at core internet exchanges around the world. It is reasonable to think that a good way of exfiltrating data would be by having something like an ICMP or maybe even TTL based covert channel, such that there is no chance that the sent data is ever received by the recipient. I am just speculating – but that's why I thought this was interesting.
Funny to see even the NSA makes the mistake of calling a network an ASN (maybe because it's their name backwards), which is like saying I deposited money in my IBAN, or my neighbour lives in the string "123 Main Street", or Hacker News is an interesting DNS name full of great content.
But what alternatives do we have? Coming across communities where there are people who seemingly at least think a bit is hard to come by, and certainly there doesn't seem to be any non-US resource/community that offers this today.
There is a non english international technical community debating interesting things in a non flame war style?
In what language do they communicate? Esperanto?
(I suppose some want french to be lingua franca, others spanish, others chinese .. but de facto those ain't international spoken languages, despite having lots of speakers)
No, I speak three languages fluently, and there is no $LANGUAGE non-US resource/community that has discussions on the same level as HN, particularly then it comes to the width of experience of the users + (sometimes) nuance when the topic is bit divisive.
I'm not sure where the site is hosted but the person who writes the site seems to be Canadian, and if you meant the document, of course the Snowden documents are American documents.
Regarding the spy in a bag -- the person involved was a GCHQ mathematician seconded to the SIS and studying Russia, whose "naked, decomposing remains were found in the bath of the main bedroom's en-suite bathroom, inside a red sports bag that was padlocked from the outside, with the keys inside the bag. [...] Inconclusive fragments of DNA components from at least two other individuals were found on the bag. A forensic examination of Williams's flat has concluded that there was no sign of forced entry or of DNA that pointed to a third party present at the time of his death.
Scotland Yard's inquiry also found no evidence of Williams's fingerprints on the padlock of the bag or the rim of the bath, which the coroner said supported her assertion of "third-party involvement" in the death. Metropolitan Police deputy assistant commissioner Martin Hewitt said it was theoretically possible for Williams to lower himself into the bag without touching the rim of the bath. A key to the padlock was inside the bag, underneath his body"
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams)
It's absolutely mad, but remember this happened in 2010 -- before Russia did many of those bad things you mention. It wouldn't surprise me if a combination of political pressure and police incompetence made this go away.
Nothing highlights how pointless e-sports items are more than a real dollar value for a player base of all of them. The entire global GDP is as an order of magnitude roughly $100 trillion. So this $340 trillion figure is 3.4 times planetary total economic output - meaning the theoretical value of Rainbow Six cosmetics exceeds what the entire human civilisation produces in a year. Multiple times over. You'd be valuing pixelated gun attachments higher than annual agricultural output across all nations, all manufacturing, all services, everything.
I bet it appears unchallenged at some point in a court (or insurance) document though.
While I understand what you're saying, it's pretty clear what is meant is "$X worth at the price they currently sell for". When there's a story about an object in space made of gold worth 100s of trillians of dollars, nobody believes it would really sell for that much if we captured it and mined all the gold; because the value of gold would plummet based purely on it's existence.
But I agree with you that it would be put into a court document as "it cost us this much" for the full amount, vs the amount they were likely to ever be able to sell (and can't, now that everyone got it for free, so the value is $0)
The market cap is unambiguous, a more correct estimate of "how much to buy all the shares?" is situational and would just distract from getting the point across.
Not really. If a company were to manufacture a substantially large number of shares out of nothing (no additional investment money or other value entering the company) then the market cap would not go up. It would stay the same and per-share value would go down.
The market is mostly reasonable about who can and will sell their shares. If a big mover does sell a lot of their shares at once, the price will fall. Most big holders will slowly sell off shares for this reason.
In the other direction, it’s also understood that the cost to acquire all shares of a company is more than the market cap of a company. This is why you see acquisition prices being significantly higher than the last funding round valuation, or public shares popping on announcement of an acquisition attempt.
The valuation is based on them hypothetically selling the same quantities that the hackers gave away at their retail prices, which of course no one believes they would ever actually sell that much.
What are the symptoms of being shadowbanned? I see an awful lot of "click here to prove you are human" boxes, click then, the page reloads, and I'm left with the captcha again. It's been very very frustrating.
This just isn't really true any more. The Scandinavian countries have become net green energy exporters including over winter (lots of wind power and biogas in municipal heating networks) and the block as a whole is banning Russian gas imports from next year. (https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20251211IP...)
The price per kWh has dropped sharply in recent years compared to the invasion peak, though they are about double what they were before COVID (not inflation adjusted) - see https://skilky-skilky.info/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Househ.... It's the UK that's up the shitter but that's far from uncommon....
Scandinavian electricity won't fire my gas-based boiler, not will it light my stove.
Power in general is doing just fine (though the oil countries are doing another squeeze to drive up the price again), but specific power sources quite a few European countries are currently relying on like natural gas are still hard to come by. Prices did drop after this summer, but are still higher than the standard rate before the Russian invasion.
I'd love to go all-electric, but the chances of being able to afford a place of my own before the end of the Trump presidency are slimmer than the probability that my government gets its electrical network in order (current estimation: 2035).
I'd be interested to know what the material differences are between the US DoD standards and FAA/ICAO standards (the article hints that there are) - and also what the difference is between these and a "landing zone" where I imagine it's a grass strip somewhere distant. That's a scenario that naïvely to be seems to be more likely to be temporarily made and therefore in need of standards documents...
there are various earlier, and perhaps current designs for grass strips, where differnt species mixes, and work are prescribed for different zones, as the ends of the runnways where landings occur can be reenforced, but taxi and take off runns can be less heavy duty.
agricultural colleges were(are?) tasked with this sort of thing.
we have a very large formerly paved airport localy, that has gone back to grass all by itself, and is now mowed, but it generaly only sees light planes, but the underlying gravel bed and drainage systems are still intact, and so could be used for landing a heavy jet in an emergency, but with a number of 9000' paved runways quite close, that has not happened yet.
in any case,the load bearing capacity of different soils and terains is quite well understood, and heavy jets have emergency landed in crop fields unharmed, and then been flown out after some modest preperations
Everyone is born and at some point will die. The costs associated with this vary hugely but the certainty of those two end points are inescapable. Almost every other developed country in the world recognises that and shares both the risks and the costs recognising that health is a golden crown worn by (and invisible to) those who have it. As someone with a spinal injury who would be most likely bankrupt and unemployed in the US I just don't understand why you don't get a proper, profit-free healthcare system. You spend the most on it in the world and don't get the greatest outcomes!
> don't understand why you don't get a proper, profit-free healthcare system. You spend the most on it in the world and don't get the greatest outcomes
American healthcare for the top 10 to 15% (about $150k+) is the best in the world. By a long shot. (The bottom ninety-something percent of the world's top 1% get their care here for a reason.)
Another 40% are covered by Medicare or Medicaid [1] which, while nothing to brag about, exceeds the median OECD healthcare experience.
That leaves half of the population with crappy employer-provided healthcare, the VA, scams or no insurance at all. For most of them, until they have an accident, this coverage is fine.
In summary, you have a system that works terrifically for the rich, well for the poor and old, and well enough for the rest that reform is challenging.
"In summary, you have a system that works ... well for the poor".
You don't actually know any poor people, do you? Their lives are not governed by your theoretical models.
And as the GP said, our healthcare - not the best of the best of our healthcare, as you cherrypicked, but the kind ordinary people have - is appalling overpriced for its mediocre quality.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but the simple answer to your question is that most American households are happy with their current health insurance and don't want it to change, so we keep patching the current (severely flawed) system as "needed" rather than starting over with a new one or making what would be seen as radical changes.
That poll doesn't say they're happy with their health insurance, it says they're at least somewhat satisfied with the coverage. You'd see very different results if you asked about health insurance prices.
I believe most people would incorporate the value received into their satisfaction rating.
Most people also don't have any idea how much their insurance costs in total or how it compares to alternatives, so that would be a challenging question to write with any reasonable expectation of getting a coherent response.
> The problem is the cost.
You could say this about almost anything that isn't free, and could still say it about a number of things even if they were free.
Feel free to look at the many, many, many alternative polls over the years. This is well known to anyone who has done any research into the topic at all.
Take the poll in 2026 after ACA subsides evaporate and Medicaid cuts. Highest satisfaction is for government run insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, Tricare).
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-are-sati... ("Overall, 82% of Americans said they’re satisfied with their health care coverage, including a third who said they are very satisfied with their current coverage. The group that reported being the most satisfied were older adults, with 9 in 10 Americans over 65 years old saying they were satisfied. And 42% in that age group reported being “very satisfied.”. Roughly 9 in 10 of those who have public health insurance coverage through Medicare or Medicaid also reported being satisfied with coverage, compared to 77% of those with private health care coverage.")
https://www.citizen.org/article/public-support-for-medicare-... ("Support for Medicare-for-All continues to rise, whether in Congress, state legislatures, or among the American people. Recent polls indicate that six in ten Americans support Medicare-for-All. In addition, more than 60 percent believe that government is responsible for ensuring health coverage for all Americans. And nearly 70 percent of all voters, including battleground voters, identify health care as an important issue in upcoming elections.")
Yes, it's noted in the poll I linked (which is the same one as your first link) that the highest satisfaction is with government run insurance.
Not enough people are on ACA with subsidies to move the poll results that much, and Medicaid cuts aren't going to make people less satisfied with their private insurance.
I have no idea why you and so many other people seem to be taking my explanation as to why the US doesn't adopt universal socialized medicine as some sort of endorsement of the status quo.
Recently, friends and family in other countries have asked about health care in the US and I've been very surprised by what they imagine is going on here.
Let's compare notes? If I go to a hospital (emergency) for any reason, I will be seen within an hour at worst. If I'm bleeding or something I'll be seen immediately. A clinic for surgery might be same day or up to a couple of weeks, depends on severity. More specialized surgery could be 5-6 weeks. American average monthly cost for health insurance is around $600 for a family. Individuals without a family are around $450 so they kind of get screwed. The expenditures for health care, including the $600/mo are tax deductible. This number can go as high as $1200 in places like New York where income is significantly higher as is cost of living.
Overall, averaging co-payment and deductible with accidents, you should expect to spend around $3,000 / yr on average per person in total for health care as part of a family in the US. This number varies greatly by age, and both income and health care in the US is socialized so your wages determine your healthcare liability. (Make more money? Get less social services.)
This should cover everyone, but you have issues where poor people don't file taxes, and don't file for health care. Those people will still be seen in an emergency room.
Conversely, my friends and family in other countries with "free" healthcare pay roughly the same total for their medical portion of tax liability as I pay for health care in total. But their wait times are astronomically greater when it comes to receiving care.
I've often helped financially because their wait time for something like shoulder surgery might be 10 to 12 months or even longer, but the same doctor will see them in a week if it's paid privately. So I've worked out payment plans where I contribute $1k/mo for their "add-on" private care so that they can be seen in a reasonable amount of time. That's in addition to what they already paid in medical tax.
Maybe that helps to understand. From my perspective, in a lot of countries you are told that you have free healthcare, but in fact you're paying for it in taxes, and then someone in the US will still have to pay for it when you actually need it anyway. Double payment. Hope you've got friends. (Maybe that's not true for everyone, I'm just going by what I've seen and paid for myself for my own family.)
I personally think that Europe and other countries don't have better health care, it's much worse. I've lived in several countries for 1-2 months to years in each and I've never seen health care remotely on the level that I see in the US. I would venture to guess it's the best in the world.
If it's hard to understand how people live in a modern high tech country without healthcare, it's because they don't. It's just about which rich person is paying for it. Health care is very expensive, and that's true around the world. And around the world, if you don't file/register for health care, your outcomes are generally much worse. The US is no different in that regard.
I believe you need to compare notes on a societal level, of course that richer Americans will have great healthcare. The quality of care is not the problem, it's the accessibility of it.
Waitlists do mean this is not as comparable as you make it out to be. With a 1-year waitlist for heart surgery ... you effectively do not have heart surgery cover, because you'll be dead before it happens.
Now of course, mostly people just lose a few years of life and have a number of very painful months due to delays, that it is the direct cause of death is fortunately rare.
Oh and before you say it, most of the difference in life expectancy is due to the the difference in overweight people, not medical care.
But of course people have voted everyone has care and can claim everything's great and they've done everything needed. That it doesn't translate into reality ... "is not their fault". Meanwhile you read there is such a doctor shortage in for example Southern Italy that seeing a doctor in under and hour is outright impossible ... because there isn't a doctor less than an hour's drive away from some villages, even without waitlists. And the doctor shortage is getting worse, not better.
You need to compare Southern Italy to a similar impoverished area of the USA which might have the exact same doctor shortage. Of course different parts of a country will have different availability, seeing a doctor in Torino will be much faster than in a village like Saliano...
A 1-year waitlist for a necessary heart surgery where? Every country in Europe has their own healthcare system, each one of those have their strengths and weaknesses, exactly as it would be in the USA.
Notwithstanding there are private facilities you can pay insurance or out of pocket, the difference is no matter what you have decent coverage somehow, the richer the country the better it is, the richer the region of the country the better quality it is, exactly as in the USA...
So if we're comparing, I personally know only two people here without healthcare. They don't have jobs, and won't get them because they just don't want them. They live by buying and selling trash on eBay or similar. They could get free healthcare, but they don't want to file their taxes or fill out forms. I've offered to help them.
And I've known at least as many living the same way in Europe.
You can lead the horse to water, but you can't stop bureaucrats from discouraging it with paperwork.
Same, same.
To be fair, the paperwork is annoying enough that I'm actually paying a dentist $5k for one of them to get work done, just because I'd rather do that than fight this person to file their taxes and fill out the healthcare forms before their teeth rot out of their head. And it would cost at least as much to get an attorney do it for them.
It's just not worth it to fight with them, and the reality is that if it was easy to fill out the forms, then my healthcare costs would just go up anyway to cover all those additional people.
Either way, someone has to pay. There is no free lunch.
No, all parts of Italy (and frankly all of Europe) have a doctor shortage. It just goes from "2 months waitlist for primary care physician if it's not urgent" all the way up to "over a year even for critical care". And yes, richer areas have more doctors though the country is by far the biggest factor.
And this all gets confused by the fact that countries have regulations and make their own situation, making everything complicated. So, for instance, despite bad primary care in Southern Italy, the mental care is actually supposed to be pretty good. By contrast, Eastern Europe, specifically Romania, has terrible mental care but good primary care, including areas that aren't so wealthy.
reply