TAL did a different episode along a similar line where two babies were accidentally switched around in the hospital nursery, so they were raised by the wrong families.

Do snow crabs live to be 35?

Monty Python is technically a proper name, but they went with the snake, because they wanted a last name that “sounded slippery.”

“Monty” may or may not be a reference to Field Marshal Montgomery, from world wars 1 and 2.

The programming language is named after the comedy troupe, not the snake.

You missed “CM,” which was common in copyright statements in the 20th century.

The EA games I played on Commodore 64 were, meh, about as good as anything else.

Back in the Roman empire, they didn’t have any punctuation marks or spaces between words. Reading was a lot harder. It was normal to read very slowly, compared to nowadays. And always out loud, sounding out the words, even in private.

This response is based on the San Remo Manual of International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea.

If Israel is conducting a lawful blockade, then they can intercept neutrals who have expressed intent to run the blockade. It doesn’t matter whether the events happen in Israel’s territorial waters, international waters, or the territorial waters of Israel’s enemy.

A blockade is an act of war, and war doesn’t respect territories, and it’s not always respectful to neutrals.

Now, there is a decent argument that this particular blockade is unlawful for a different reason: it is a collective punishment of Gazan civilians. Collective punishment of civilian populations as a whole was made illegal after WWII.

Secondly, the blockade is unlawful if its only purpose is to starve the enemy population of food (102). Israel must be getting some proportionate military advantage out of this blockade besides the starvation for it to be lawful.

And finally, regardless of whether the blockade is legal, Israel has to let the humanitarian supplies pass through (103-104). And I’m not sure they did that. They will say that they let these things through on the (heavily regulated) land route, but the book here doesn’t say that land route is a substitute. Also, they are not using an impartial Protective Power to distribute the aid. This is why they offered to reroute the flotilla’s supplies on to the land channel.

Note: the rule is they have to let the supplies through, not the people or vessels. If they’re running a legitimate blockade, they can capture neutral vessels that are running it, and they can capture the neutrals on board and subject them to legal process, or maybe even intern them for the duration of conflict

The ballistic coefficient, mass divided by cross section area, still determines how drag effects trajectory in the LEO environment.

It should be pretty straightforward to extrapolate if you know the relevant parameters on both spacecraft.

This is only true because the Senate’s floor time is valuable enough that leadership would rather move on to consider other bills than waste time on a real filibuster. The “silent filibuster” is not an official part of Senate rules.

People have been saying that Congress is gridlocked and ineffective, and that is true, by several subjective and objective measures. But even in the gridlocked state there are still a bunch of bills that are debated and passed. And it takes floor time to work on those.

If you’re getting into private jets, you should also know that brands have reputations even there.

Gulfstream is a luxury brand within the private jet world. You can easily get a comparable product from Bombardier or Cessna Textron that performs equivalently, but only pay half as much operating costs as Gulfstream. Like Gucci, you pay a lot of money just for the Gulfstream name.

At the low end of the market, Honda makes a small jet. (This is in the Very Light Jet category which bumps up against the turboprop market).

At the very high end of the market you get into Boeing Business Jets, and the Airbus equivalent. These are converting airliners to your exact interior design specifications. Airliners are like another order of magnitude higher cost to operate.

From The Wiki:

Congress can pass up to three reconciliation bills per year, with each bill addressing the major topics of reconciliation: revenue, spending, and the federal debt limit. However, if Congress passes a reconciliation bill affecting more than one of those topics, it cannot pass another reconciliation bill later in the year affecting one of the topics addressed by the previous reconciliation bill.[3] In practice, reconciliation bills have usually been passed once per year at most.[16]

Edit: Are you saying the Senate and House made two identical budget resolutions in this year? Or is it just that Senate Republicans don’t want to blow reconciliation for the next year on what is probably mostly continuing resolution?

Everything that says 51 can be read as 50 plus VP,.

There is a rule that the reconciliation bill can pass on 51. But there are two main limits on reconciliation:

1. Reconciliation has to be at least nominally about the budget, as you said, and

2. Only one reconciliation bill per fiscal year.

The Republicans already shot their reconciliation shot with the BBB. They can’t do it again until the next fiscal year (which arrives tomorrow, so they can get started).

A bunch of answers but nothing talking about modern consumer devices.

• The OS code on a computer is stored on a “drive”, usually flash memory, but it has to be loaded into RAM to actually run.
• the OS code is usually not encrypted when it’s in RAM. Processors don’t decrypt the code directly on the fly.
• it is relatively common nowadays for the stuff on the drives to be fully encrypted. This can include the OS, it the OS code can be on a separate partition that’s not encrypted.
• For all the major operating systems, there’s not a lot of value in keeping the binary code secret, because they all leak out eventually, anyway.
• If it’s encrypted, the OS code has to be decrypted when it is loaded off the drive into RAM. This is done by a separate “firmware” software during boot.
• the keys needed for boot up cryptography are usually stored in dedicated chips that ship with modern computers. These are called things like TPM or “secure enclave”.
• the chips are hardened against physical attacks that could reveal the keys.
• usually the passphrase is part of an encryption key that encrypts the real encryption key that encrypts the whole disk. Wrong passphrase means the computer is incapable of decrypting the real key.

Adding this because I don’t see it explained anywhere else:

It takes 60/100 votes to pass the budget bills in the Senate, instead of 51, because the Senate still has a filibuster. The minority Democrats have the power to stop the vote from coming up by simply talking on the floor forever until the Republicans give up and go home.

The 53-47 vote was for a cloture motion, which is to put time limits on debate on a particular budget bill. The rules don’t let Dems filibuster the cloture motion for obvious reasons, so that vote happened. But it takes 60 votes to pass cloture, so it went down.

Now, there are some resolutions that don’t involve coming to a compromise:

• the Democrats could choose not to do the filibuster. Then the bill would come up, and they could all vote against it, but it could pass on 53 votes.
• the Senate could change the rules to get rid of filibuster. This is usually called the “nuclear option” because it removes the 60 vote barrier using a rules vote that only needs 51 to pass. The procedure is to make someone actually start a filibuster, then raise a point of order that filibustering member is taking too long. The Parliamentarian will deny the point of order based on the current rules, but that can be appealed to the whole Senate on a majority vote. And the point of order is not debatable.

There’s a class of orbits called “polar orbits” that are sideways and perpendicular to the spin of the earth. These orbits are useful for satellites whose main job is taking pictures of earth, because they will cover nearly all of the earth’s territory over time. You get into a polar orbit by launching to the north outer south.

Aside from that, nearly all launches go towards the spin of the earth, because it’s a free boost. The fancy rocketry word for this is “prograde”.

The sun appears to traverse from east to west in the sky. This means that the earth is moving the opposite way: west to east. So if you want to take advantage of the free boost, the rocket needs to take off in an easterly direction.

The amount of spin you get is greatest if you launch from the tropics near the equator, and it falls off at greater north or south latitudes. In theory, if you set up a launch pad at the north pole, the spin boost would be zero in all directions, because you’re just rotating in place. At the equator, the free boost is around 1000 mph or 1600 km/hr.

So the ideal launch site is as close to the equator as possible, and it has low population off to its east, in case the rocket blows up or crashes. The United States has two sites that meet these criteria: one in Florida and one in extreme south Texas. Both of these face an ocean to the east. Europe launches Ariane rockets from French Guiana in South America. Russia uses Kazakhstan, which is on the southern ends of the old Soviet Union.

Be extra careful about not frying your liver if you’re mixing Tylenol and booze.

The North Atlantic area is defined in an expansive, but not unlimited, manner. The treaty defines the North Atlantic area as:

• all of North America
• The Atlantic ocean, including islands, north of the Tropic of Cancer
• the “home” territory of any European member.

So, Turkey is at the extreme flank of the area, by having a bit of core territory in Europe. All of Turkey’s territory is covered, though, even the parts not in Europe.

Palestine is not eligible to join the alliance, because its territory is not in Europe or North America.

Some other tidbits: Guam, Hawaii, the Falkland Islands, Reunion, and the British Indian Ocean Territory are all examples of member territories that are not protected because they fall outside the North Atlantic area.

No. This isn’t a NATO thing. NATO is pretty much only concerned with the security of the North Atlantic area.

After recognising the state of Palestine, these countries can proceed to exchange ambassadors with Palestine.