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I agree, and I've heard this property referred to by linguists as a "shallow orthography".

What did the server bring to your table? A fan?

They understood what I meant, and then the French folks I was with had a long discussion with me about how it's not the same sound.

Yeah, I've been there. Apparently my pronunciation of "Chretien" (Christian) was indecipherable, and the French people I was speaking with clarified it for me by saying, "you're saying cray-tee-uh(n), but it's pronounced cray-tee-uh(n)"

And note that "crétin" means "dumb", so mispronouncing "chrétien" can seriously go wrong.

https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cr%C3%A9tin


Yeah, this is my major difficulty with French, and it's even more difficult in colloquial spoken French which may drop entire syllables or words. I often find African pronunciations of French to be easier because they seem to pronounce each syllable distinctly.

I don’t think the American right wing has any concerns about being perceived as inconsistent. They will reverse their positions overnight if it suits them, as they have illustrated every week for since the start of 2025 (most recently “no new wars / america first” to cheerleading the war in iran.

Presumably the parent’s objection to ISPs and copyright cartels is precisely that they are so frequently (and to such a large degree) unjust. FWIW, I don’t think the parent’s objection was subtle about that point, I’m frankly not sure how it was overlooked.

Frankly, I don't see how you can't parse that their point, as written, is "I'm on the side of bad guy A because bad guy B is worse than bad guy A" which is completely orthogonal to "A is in the right and B is in the wrong".

If you look at the whole scenario, this will mean that Cox won't pass $1 billion dollars of punitive fines off to their customers, because, after all, the customers generate the money.

In reality, this would have made their innocent customers pay for the crimes of their guilty customers and made both Sony, and in the long run, Cox richer, because once paying an extra $5/month becomes normalized, then there's no way they're going to go back down in price just because the fine is paid off, any more than the government will ever stop charging tolls on a toll bridge that was paid for by tolls no matter how many times the cost of the toll bridge is paid off.


I said "allow it". It was mainly about my feelings. I can feel what I want. It also just so happens that Cox was in the right and Sony Music was in the wrong.

Because I'm a native English speaker and "worse" is definitely not orthogonal to "in the wrong".

Can you elaborate? Why is HR useful for starship engines?

I suppose they mean if you could harness Hawking radiation to do useful work, then you could use any matter as fuel.


Seems like this flew right over a few heads.

and yet the joke fell right into our laps

United says we should tone down the sarcasm

How do these work? I would think radar would have a very difficult time seeing a ship against the backdrop of the ocean from so high above. Is the satellite bouncing radar waves off the side of the ship as the satellite is near the horizon? Even if you can detect a ship, I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?

Even with an extremely low resolution radar hit they are very identifiable.

Most naval vessels move in groups/squadrons. Carriers basically always travel with a "carrier strike group"/CSG of a dozen other ships and destroyers often travel in "destroyer squadrons"/DESRONs. So any time you see a cluster of hits, just by the relative responses of each hit you can narrow down and guess the entire CSG/DESRON in one go and then work out which responses map to which ship in the CSG/DESRON once you have a good idea of which group you are looking at.

This is especially true because ships even within the same class have varying ages, different block numbers, and differing retrofits. So each one has a unique signature to it.

But also if you aren't completely certain you can always come back with a second high resolution pass and then it's trivial to identify each ship just visually.


Granted, but how does satellite radar actually see ships at all? How do the ships not blend into the ocean (the relative difference between the distances between ship<->satellite and ocean<->satellite is minescule)?

EDIT: the sibling comment already provided a high quality answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47458766


SAR operates in side-looking slant geometry.

Consider shooting a ray at the ocean at an oblique angle from a satellite: it bounces off and scatters away from you. Hardly any of the energy scatters back towards you.

Now, put a ship there. The ray bounces off the surface of the ocean and scatters up into the side of the ship, and from geometry, it's going to bounce off the ship and come straight back towards its original source. You get tons of energy coming back at you.

A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.

> I'm having a hard time imagining a sufficiently high radar resolution for such a wide sensor swath width at such an extreme range. Is the idea that you locate it with the wide sensor swath and then get a detailed radar signature from a more precise sensor?

That's one approach, there are so-called "tip and cue" concepts that do exactly this: a lead satellite will operate in a wide swath mode to detect targets, and then feed them back to a chase satellite which is operating in a high resolution spotlight mode to collect detailed radar images of the target for classification and identification.

However, aircraft carriers are big, so I don't think you'd even need to do the followup spotlight mode for identification. As an example, RADARSAT-2 does 35 meter resolution at a 450 km swath for its ship detection mode. That's plenty to be able to detect and identify an aircraft carrier, and that's a 20 year old civilian mission with public documentation, not a cutting edge military surveillance system. There are concepts for multi-aperture systems that can hit resolutions of less than ten meters at 500 km swath width using digital beamforming, like Germany's HRWS concept.

tl;dr: Radar works very well for this.


>A ship on the ocean is basically a dihedral corner reflector, which is a very good target for a radar.

This is why the Zumwalt and other low observable designs are going back to roughly tumblehome hulls:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zumwalt-class_destroyer#/media...

If only it could actually do anything. I genuinely don't understand how we refused to retrofit any weapon system to the gun mounts. We have 5inch guns. They aren't the magic cannon it was designed for but do they really not fit? Apparently we are now putting hypersonic missiles in those mounts instead.

Can't exactly make a Carrier that shape though.


A Zumwalt with 5 inch gun offers almost no mission capability above a simple coast guard cutter.

They're putting hypersonics on it because they've got 3 hulls and might as well get some value out of them, but not because it's what you'd design for from scratch.

The Zumwalt program was dumb from day 1. It was driven by elderly people on the congressional arms committees that have romantic notions of battleships blasting it out.

The reality is since the development of anti ship missiles, sitting off the coast and plinking at someone is suicidal, even if you have stealth shaping and uber guns of some sort.

It was a DoA mission concept.


The Zumwalt class are being refitted to carry CSP. And the boutique gun system is really a complex thing, it's not like packing in a bunch of VLS containers.

This is cool. Thanks for the detailed follow up!

> I would think

Just do a youtube search and you'll find plenty of talking head explainer videos. Ignore the talking head and just look at the imagery and data they share.


Tangentially, some scientists think humans may have hardwiring for detecting snakes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_detection_theory

> However, even a minor inconvenience is still an inconvenience.

I do not miss spending 30 seconds untangling my headphones every time I used them nor do I miss trying to find clever ways to wind my headphones back up so as to minimize the likelihood of them becoming tangled. If someone solved this problem well I would use them, but putting my airpods on a charger once a week is a much lesser inconvenience IMHO.


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