Flying with other live aircraft and the accompanying radio chatter was an experience like no other. Sure, my feet never left terra firma, but my mind was really flying. The prep work to pass the final CAT flight was real, and using the correct phraseology on the radios and working through the three-dimensional problem-solving in real time to navigate the complex airspace of KSAN required my complete attention. The effort was real, even though the flight was virtual.

This is the value proposition provided by having a flight sim in your own home: You can focus on nearly any element of flying that you want to learn or practice and, by doing so, carve back some quality aviation time in your life. My goal has been to fly in my sim once or twice a week, usually starting at 10 p.m. to best minimize distractions.

Via The Guardian: Lockdowns and face masks ‘unequivocally’ cut spread of Covid, report finds. Excerpt:

Measures taken during the Covid pandemic such as social distancing and wearing face masks “unequivocally” reduced the spread of infections, a report has found.

Experts looked at the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) – not drugs or vaccines – when applied in packages that combine a number of measures that complement one another.

All of this is theoretical anyway, as it would take a constitutional amendment to institute age maximums. Because guess what? A solution already exists. Vote them out. We act as if these septuagenarians and octogenarians have been thrust upon us by some unknown force. We put them there. If three-quarters of voters truly believed Biden is too old for office, they would find someone else to run. But Democrats would rather pretend that the president, not exactly Cicero in his best days, is an intellectual and physical dynamo because they want to hold onto power. Deep down they know no one in their right mind thinks a fresh-faced Mayor Pete is any better.

The reality is that when it matters, voters across the country love the old timers — perhaps because they are known quantities or maybe they bring home the money or maybe people genuinely like them. If they didn’t, none of them would be in Washington.

If New York millionaire Democrats paid half as much attention to border policy as illegal immigrants do, maybe they’d grasp what’s going on at the border, and why. Maybe they could then start to make sense of the anger and frustration of working- and middle-class residents of their cities, who increasingly show up at public meetings to express outrage at the migrant crisis.

Fulton County DA Fani Willis has evidence exonerating Republicans she’s targeting in her 98-page Georgia indictment. //

The revelations unearthed in the transcript raise a significant question: If Willis was in possession of the transcript prior to Aug. 14, why did she charge Shafer and Smith for allegedly partaking in a “conspiracy” to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results when the aforementioned document shows otherwise? //

Unlike the 1960 Hawaii case, which was promptly resolved in court prior to Congress’s certification of the election, the Fulton County state court reportedly violated Georgia’s election code by failing to swiftly assign a judge to hear Trump’s election challenge. Furthermore, the Georgia court delayed the first scheduled hearing of Trump’s lawsuit until Jan. 8, 2021 — “two days after Congress certified Biden the winner of the 2020 election” — which effectively guaranteed that any court decision invalidating potentially illegal ballots would be moot.

It’s worth mentioning that evidence unearthed following the 2020 election shows Trump’s legal challenge in Georgia had strong merit, with records indicating there were more illegal votes than Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia. Under state law, Georgians must vote in the county where they reside, unless they changed their residence within 30 days of Election Day.

As The Federalist reported, however, Mark Davis, the president of Data Productions Inc. and “an expert in voter data analytics and residency issues,” used data from the National Change of Address database to identify “nearly 35,000 Georgia voters who indicated they had moved from one Georgia county to another, but then voted in the 2020 general election in the county from which they had moved.” In a phone interview this week, Davis told The Federalist that more recent figures show more than 12,000 of those 35,000 Georgians later updated their voter registration addresses, “providing the secretary of state the exact address they had previously provided to the [U.S. Postal Service].” In other words, more than 12,000 in-state movers tacitly confirmed they illegally cast their vote in the wrong county in 2020.

The open source, multi-platform, self-hosted, feature packed web site for remote device management.

This user guide contains all essential information for the user to make full use of MeshCentral, a free open source web-based remote computer management software. The guide provides quick steps to setup administrative groups to remote control and manage computers in local network environments or via the Internet. Latter parts of the document will cover some advanced topics. The reader is expected to already have some of the basic understanding on computer networking, operating system and network security.

What was the justification when immigration policy preferences of less than 10% of the electorate dominated 90% of the electorate for decades from the early 1960s to the late 1990s, and even today, dominates with more than 75% opposing increased immigration?

Source:  US Department of Homeland Security

It must have been an overwhelmingly obvious justification for that 10% -- so obvious that the 90% could be discounted as ignorant if not xenophobic rubes, unworthy of anything remotely resembling consent of the governed, normally considered the overriding human right in any significant dispute.  That human right was tossed out the window for some reason.

What was that reason?

The reason most frequently trotted out during this era was that "diversity is our greatest strength" and that the "greatness" attributed to the United States was "diverse" because it was a "nation of immigrants".

OK, that sounds good, but what was the support for this assertion -- support that must have been so overwhelmingly intense and urgent, even if obvious to only an "educated" elite, as to justify throwing out the most fundamental of all human rights for decades in, not just the US, but in all of European derived governments -- in a policy that most believe to cause irreversible changes?

Whatever that support might have been, the most comprehensive academic study of the actual results of that massive violation of human rights supported the opposite conclusion: //

Let's look at the long term, not in terms of anecdotal polemics, but in terms of statistics: A large number of operationally defined data points comparing "diversity" and "human development" in the world maps (see below), of these. Superficially, what we see is that in areas with the highest "diversity" we find the lowest "human development". At the other extreme, such as Scandinavia with its very low "diversity", we see the highest "human development" (Norway was ranked #1 in "human development" by the UN).

But this is a relatively superficial view of these maps. With a closer reading for what might be called "long term" effects, we see that in the places with the longest history of "diversity", such as sub-Saharan Africa, there is not only the highest "diversity" but the lowest "human development". Moreover, the apparent exceptions in places like the US and Canada were, until recently, so lacking in "diversity" that the attitudes of men in those prior eras, by today's standards, are considered "white nationalist" if not "white supremacist" or even "Nazi".

"The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function." - Edward Teller

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Al Bartlett

Below is a first-order (approximate) description of a fast (potentially very fast) doubling time system for remediation of civilization's environmental damage. The fast doubling time drives exponential growth that could, at enormous profit and in under 15 years, drastically reduce civilization's ecological impact while, incidentally, sequestering large amounts of CO2. It is not intended to overcome Dr. Bartlett's accusation that sustainable growth is impossible and cornucopian thinking is "The New Flat Earth Society". It is intended merely to argue that imminent environmental catastrophes may, with appropriate refinements and corrections of the described system, be averted within the time estimated for environmental catastrophes by some of the more pessimistic projections (usually several decades rather than a mere 15 years).

An important principle to keep in mind is that as baseload electricity costs decrease, recycling beats other sources of raw materials. This means that if one is targeting zero environmental footprint, the most compelling path is through lower baseload electric cost simply because recycling is more economical than waste.

With device geometries on semiconductor chips continuing to shrink in order to pack ever more transistors onto a chip, semiconductor manufacturers reached a point where the device features they needed to make were smaller than the wavelength of visible light, previously used to print structures on chips through the process of photolithography. High-end chip manufacturers such as Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC), Samsung, and Intel have migrated their cutting edge fabrication to extreme ultraviolet photolithography (EUV), using a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres, a part of the electromagnetic spectrum previously called “soft X-rays” before being renamed to something less scary. (By comparison, visible light is in the range from 380 [violet] to 750 [red] nanometres.)

EUV is a technology which not only allows building things never imagined during the golden age of science fiction, it is made up of parts that, had Doc Smith dropped them into one of his Skylark novels, would have been considered techno-confabulation (“400,000° Celsius laser-driven tin plasma light source”).

But, as those who wish to survive in the semiconductor business must constantly ask, “What’s next?” As node sizes scale below the next major milestone of 3 nanometres, the sole survivor in the high-end photolithography market, Netherlands’ ASML (formerly Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography before, like all big companies, it decided a meaningless name was more appropriate) has decided the next milestone will be achieved by increasing what is called the “numerical aperture” of its photolithography machines. Numerical aperture (NA) is a dimensionless quantity that measures the amount of light an optical system can deliver to its target (similar to an f-stop 4 in visible light photography). Present-day EUV machines from ASML have a NA of 0.33, which allows a resolution of 13 nanometres (note that the optical resolution of the photolithography machine, the feature size on the chip, and the “node size” of the process are all different things, with the latter having more to do with the marketing department than engineering or manufacturing). The next generation high numerical aperture (high-NA) EUV machines under development by ASML aim to increase NA to 0.55, initially allowing 8 nanometre resolution, with scaling to as small as 3 nanometres in the future. This requires hardware even more science-fictioney than existing EUV, but also revision of the entire fabrication process. Masks (the master pattern printed on the chips), photoresists (exposed by the lithography process), and even the silicon wafers and positioning equipment (that must have extraordinary flatness and precision to cope with the minuscule depth of field at such resolutions) must adapt.

Lest one of my trolls accuse me of a "victory is just around the corner" mentality, I can assure you that is not the case. As Clausewitz observed, war is a continuation of "political intercourse" by other means. Ending the war is a political, not a military, problem. Victory is defined in world capitals, not on the battlefield. What the Ukrainian Armed Forces are showing is that in planning, leadership, and execution, they are overmatching the Russians. Whether that leads to victory and what that victory looks like remains to be seen. //

Shashank Joshi
@shashj
·
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I thought figure was over 600. Didn’t realise it was over 700. That suggests there have been many non-public expulsions of suspected Russian intelligence officers from Europe.
Christopher Miller
@ChristopherJM
“At least 705 diplomats suspected of spying have been expelled from Russian embassies across the world since 2022 – almost twice as many as the whole of the previous 20 years.”
9:05 AM · Aug 25, 2023 //

Russia went into this war a second-tier power. It's going to come out of it with the political and military clout of Burkina Faso...with nukes. //

Yevgeny Prigozhin did not have long to work out who had killed him. But he had long enough. He must have twigged.

It can’t have been more than a few seconds between the explosion aboard the otherwise reliable Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet, and the moment the Russian thug blacked out in his vertiginous acceleration to earth; and yet in that instant I am certain that he knew with perfect clarity what had happened.

He knew whose hidden hand was sending him 28,000 ft down, to be immolated with the rest of his Wagner group companions in a fireball in the countryside of the Tver region north of Moscow — and then on downwards, of course, for the shade of Prigozhin: down, down to Hades and the Tartarean pit below.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12445989/BORIS-JOHNSON-Yevgeny-Prigozhin-assassination-Putin.html //

CJ @CasualArtyFan
·
ICYMI: US Army just dropped a massive update to our C-UAS doctrine, and clearly took quite a few drone-related lessons from Ukraine to heart.

https://irp.fas.org/doddir/army/atp3-01-81.pdf
8:30 PM · Aug 25, 2023 //

The latest drone strikes using cardboard planes is just adding insult to injury.

Beginners may find it difficult to relate the facts from the formal documentation on the BSD rc.d framework with the practical tasks of rc.d scripting. In this article, we consider a few typical cases of increasing complexity, show rc.d features suited for each case, and discuss how they work. Such an examination should provide reference points for further study of the design and efficient application of rc.d.

They were found through a quirk of the region’s geopolitical history, which left a photographic trail of WWII aerial photos and declassified Cold War-era spy satellite images.

A group of children were listening to a story beneath the shade of an African juniper tree in a small church forest near Debre Tabor in northern Ethiopia. Three women walked along a path, the sound of their chatting permeating the dense trees as our group of 12 people, clearly foreigners, approached.

When the children spotted us at the forest’s edge, they came running along the dusty path, jumped over a low rock wall, ducked under branches and approached us curiously. I was tagging along with a group of researchers led by ecologist Dr Catherine Cardelús from Colgate University in New York state and Bernahu Tsegay from Bahir Dar University, Ethiopia who were here to learn about the forest’s ecology. The kids, meanwhile, were already experts. They knew every inch of the place; having grown up in these trees, this is the only forest they have ever seen.

I was in a ‘sacred forest’, more than 1,000 of which are scattered across the landscape in a near perfect lattice, each protecting a traditional Ethiopian Orthodox church at its centre. These small, neat clusters of trees, each about 2km away from the next, ensure that the local people are never far from the forests that are so deeply rooted in their social and spiritual lives. They’re used as community centres, meeting places and schools; for religious ceremonies, burial grounds and even bathrooms; and provide the only shade for miles. Although some sacred forests are fairly accessible, like the island forests on Lake Tana that can be visited on a half-day boat tour from the city of Bahir Dar, in the rural, mountainous landscapes of South Gondar, east of Bahir Dar, where I now was, the church forests can be harder to find.

Each dot of green stands out on the landscape because they are some of the only trees left in a country that’s experienced widespread deforestation. Some forests are more than 1,000 years old, and these precious trees have been spared thanks to shadow conservation – conservation as a by-product of religious stewardship. But they are small and threatened by encroaching roads, buildings and farmers' fields. Paradoxically, humans have both protected them yet pose the biggest threat to their future.

In south Texas, in the places where D.C. bureaucrats never go, the ordinary people are acutely sensitive to the issues at stake. Mere weeks back my colleagues met with ranchers in Starr County, Texas — remote, rural, and hard up on the Rio Grande — and one of those ranchers, a man who has encountered armed traffickers from Mexico on his own property more than once, asked about exactly this. He was a U.S. Army veteran who defended his country at war, he said, so why won’t the United States defend him?

He’s asking the right question. Washington, D.C., is giving the wrong answer. The good question and its bad answer illuminate what’s really at stake in the buoy-barrier case, which is — as is so often true — about things far beyond itself. Every American citizen in every American community has a legitimate expectation that his government will not attack his way of life, and will not side with foreign powers against him.

The Biden regime does both. In understanding what it means, we hear echoes of Thomas Jefferson’s distress from two centuries back: “This momentous question, like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once as the knell of the Union.” But the Union is not done yet. The question is whether the regime in D.C. will succeed in rendering it a tool for our repression — or Texas will succeed in returning it to its founding purpose.

The question is open. All we can say for sure is that if the Biden regime fights for Mexico, it is Texas, now, that fights for America.

Although many travellers will have heard of the rock-hewn churches of Lalibela in Ethiopia, few will know about the "new Lalibela" being carved out of the rockface by a devoted monk.

Legend has it that the dramatic rock-hewn churches of Lalibela were created with the help of a team of angels. Buried deep into the rock in the highlands of northern Ethiopia, the 11 monolithic churches were built in the late 12th and early 13th Centuries by King Lalibela, who, so he claimed, had built the churches on the instruction from God.

With the Crusades in full swing and the pilgrimage sites of Jerusalem too dangerous to visit, the Lalibela churches were envisioned to be a "new" Jerusalem and a place of pilgrimage for Ethiopia's large Orthodox Christian community.

Today, the churches remain a major place of pilgrimage for Ethiopia's Christians. They're also a Unesco World Heritage site, and international travellers flock here to see one of Africa's most extraordinary historical spots.

It’s taken 400 years of scientific discoveries to make it possible for anyone to find his location anywhere on the globe using GPS. //

With the letters GPS, we instantly recognize an innovation that has revolutionized our lives. The concept was born half a century ago in a sweltering room at the Pentagon over Labor Day weekend in 1973.

That’s the genesis of the concept for a constellation of platforms orbiting the Earth, transmitting radio signals to determine location. Many years of calculation, experiment, and miniaturization led to the Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging (NAVSTAR) satellites that became known as the Global Positioning System (GPS). //

Our society has been blessed with rare and precious genius that has combined across centuries to yield the civilizational achievements we enjoy today. Orbital mechanics originated from careful geometric analysis by Johannes Kepler in the 17th century. Two centuries later, electromagnetism was empirically measured by Michael Faraday and mathematically characterized by James Clerk Maxwell.

Atomic oscillation arose from the quantized radiation law Max Planck discovered, while Albert Einstein discovered relativistic effects, both in the early 20th century. These were the giants on whose shoulders later scientists and engineers stood to build their guideposts in the heavens.

While only a tiny fraction of the electorate understands the enormity of government waste, fraud, and abuse, now and then we learn of some extraordinary achievements underwritten with your tax dollars. GPS is one of them.

"China has labelled [this] a selfish and highly irresponsible action,"
Yeah, and China knows all about those actions. //

and other fascinating comments...

They were labelled a waste of time and money, but in 1957 the bulging tips of two exhaust shafts rising above Sellafield arguably saved much of northern England from becoming a nuclear wasteland. The towers of Windscale Piles have been a landmark for decades but soon the last of these Cold War relics will be gone.

Cumbria's skyline will change with the removal of the towers - known as Cockcroft's Follies - but had they not been in place 57 years ago, the entire landscape may have been drastically different.

Asks Beijing to stop the phone calls harassing civilians, as tests show impact of nuke plant water

Company after company has had their start in open source software, and then gone on to dump their open source licenses once they've achieved a measure of success. It's time to stop it. //

"Companies fail to understand that open source is not a business model. As a result, we see this 'rights ratchet' model, pulled off as a defensive move against competitors, instead of building a sustainable business model. Unfortunately, this means that vendor-owned open source is becoming a business risk to users. relicensing is one-way open source that can 'turn to the dark side.'" //

There's nothing wrong with making money. But, I've gotten really tired of projects that use open source for their start and then turn their backs on the philosophy that made them their first hundreds of millions. At the very least, they need to stop pretending they're open source once they've moved to a "Look but don't touch" or "Look but don't profit from it" license.