This is already quite old news.

It’s not clear that the Russians planning this operation understood that a very hefty part of air cargo is transported on common passenger flights, whenever there’s extra capacity left after the passengers and their luggage have been loaded.

Of course Putin is very often very disconnected from the reality, but it feels unlikely he’d think anything positive to the Russia would come out of bombing several civilian airplanes above the Atlantic. It is much more likely that they were planning to “only” bomb cargo planes. An article I read about this some months ago claimed that the Biden administration had phoned Kremlin, saying that “dudes, you’re very likely to end up hitting a passenger plane. You need to abort that mission immediately!”

But yeah, there are these kind of terror attacks taking place all the time. We should understand that they are centrally coördinated, intentional and very planned.

Today I read that it happened in an underground shelter. So, the ceiling most likely remained largely intact, simply getting repainted with an interesting black fade radiating from an artistic round-ish dark red smudge.

“Blyaaaaaaaa-splort!” 🍝

Oho, I would not have expected this comment to get downvoted. Anyone able to explain why? It’s now received one upvote and two downvotes. What is wrong about the comment? When I’m as surprised about something as now, it’s often a good chance to learn something!

In the video they say that only one of the two pilots were ejected back then in 1975, so at least in those days a Su-24 would not eject both seats with one ejection command. This one did, so it probably was not a Su-24.

The video also mentions that this happened because the other joystick was made shorter than usual. Therefore, it might indeed have been a weird technical defect, but I don’t think we have a good reason to assume it was the same as shown on this video, as the result was slightly different.

Of course, but did your world history classes talk about racism? I’d guess that was a theme in the classes about your own country’s history, whichever country you happen to be from, but not really in world history.

You needed to be taught the basics of the two world wars, the concept of dark ages and renaissance, something about Roman empire probably, etc. And people from countries whose history doesn’t include noteworthy amounts of racism have to learn about the same amount about their country as you had to learn about yours, and have about the same amount of teaching time left for teaching the same things about world history that were taught to you.

Basically because it’s light.

For example in Karlsruhe, Germany, they do have a system where you enter what is essentially a metro station (a.k.a. “a subway station”). You then enter a train that leaves the tunnel after a couple of stations and starts turning in the intersections above the ground and stopping in traffic lights. After passing the central railway station, it enters the railway tracks and proceeds to run the next 40 minutes along the very same railway tracks used by cargo trains and high speed trains.

So yeah, that can be done and is being done. But it is a very complex thing to do!
By far the most important difficulty is that the tram is too light to be safe on the railway tracks just like that. If there is a collision between a train and a tram, the heavy train will absolutely obliterate the tram. There won’t be any survivors in the tram if that ever happens. This means, you need to clear a very long stretch of the track of any heavy trains whenever a tram is about to use it. This decreases the capacity. A tram also cannot be reasonably made to run 160 km/h like passenger trains usually do, and speed differences between trains are a horror for the railway’s capacity.

At the same time, the tram’s ground clearance must be higher than usual for trams, which requires higher platforms, which can be cumbersome to organize in city streets. It also easily means that handicapped people have it more difficult entering the tram.

If you want to make the trams crashworthy enough to have a fighting chance against a train in a collision, you will end up having such heavy trams that they cannot be used on city streets.

There are situations where it really does make sense to run trams on railway tracks, but in most cases it’s better to choose one or another instead of trying to combine a tram and a train into one thing. But, Karlsruhe has a good example of when this combination does make sense!

Here’s a Youtube video of a ride on a metro->tram->train vehicle :)
A high-speed train is encountered at 35:26 and a cargo train at 38:48.

So… Apparently the ejection system works so that if either person in the plane activates it, both seats are ejected, some seconds apart from each other.

The interesting thing here is: What has actually happened?
As far as I can understand, there are two main options:

• Intentional ejection
• Technical defect

And both of those sound like awesome things!
If it was intentional, then it basically has been a case of someone not wanting to bomb Ukraine but also knowing they cannot defect, and considering the other orc in the plane to be so full of shit that the world is better without him. That would be a sign of a trend that will wreak havoc from within the Russian armed forces.
I would say that a pilot is not going to activate the ejection through incompetence. Not even a Russian pilot, as little trained as they are in comparison to other countries’ pilots.

And if it wasn’t intentional but a technical defect instead… Well, that would then mean that the Russian planes are so worn out from overuse that this kind of technical defects start taking place. That’s a good way of reducing the amount of pilots directly and also reducing the motivation to both stay as a pilot and to enter a training in order to become a pilot. Remember, planes as much easier to replace than competent pilots!

The other kids will be very unlikely to ever find out.

The continued existence of a free and democratic Europe could remind US citizens of what they once had and how much better they could be living, which makes the continued existence and success (fingers crossed) of the EU an existential threat to US conservatives.

This is the main way how Ukraine has been a threat for the Russia at least since 2008. Back then, about 40 % of Ukrainins spoke Russian as their mother tongue, and they were suddenly living a comfortable life in a democracy. Putin lives off the Russian assumption that Russians cannot live in a democracy – that the “Russian soul” wants a strong leader so strongly that any attempt at democracy would be futile. And at the same time, he’s saying that all people whose mother tongue is Russian “are Russians”. So, when people who – according to his propaganda – are Russians, are able to lead a sensible and civilized life in a democratic country, it makes a lot of people who are actually Russians think that their country could maybe achieve the same as well.

And yeah, the above is the most important reason why the Russia betrayed the nation that had come as close to considering the Russia a friend as is in any manner possible. It paints a grim future for the USA-EU relationship.

Hm… Try downloading the map of Helsinki, Finland and searching for “Tatti 5” or “Tatti 11”. At least to me the app shows different houses.

There is a bit of an illogical way of adding objects: In the upper part of the screen you choose the type of data to show. If y you choose “Things”, you can choose from a limited subset of objects to add. Beware that the location of the object to add changes during the edit if you walk while adding it, so you often need to alter the location before pressing “send”!
You can add benches and street lights, for example, but not for example the kind of very tall and bright lights used at football fields. And you cannot add gates of any kind, which is a stupid restriction! But, there are a lot of benches and picnic tables I’ve added using street complete. It’s also a very good tool for marking stairs!

You choose the Surfaces type to view, then single tap on the road you want to edit, tap the three dots on the lower left and then choose “split way”, after which you can split the way into as many segments as needed. Split in both ends of the stairs, then return to normal mode “None” as the view, and answer the question about stairs :)

It is at the same time baffling how many things you can actually do with something that is claiming to be just a mobile game, and baffling what you cannot do with a tool that can actually do a lot of other stuff!
Like, the missing ability to add gates on the map.

access=private
``` is a bit incorrect in a place that has no signs whatsoever prohibiting access. That might the least incorrect solution in any case. What would be nice would be to find some other solution that would really coincide with the physical reality of that place. But yeah, I could ask on the OSM forum what they think about using access=private in such places.
 
And yeah, I've already noticed most of that road is definitely not a driveway. I'm going to check where the driveway really ends and at least turn most of that into a footpath. But of course, footpath will still be used for routing.

You can also use IRC or Matrix or one of the bazillion other options. The OSM people are happily fragmented across various communication platforms, but each of them has people who are able to help :)

They do for me.

I use an Android App called Street Complete for this kind of stuff. It’s super quick long-pressing a spot, tapping “Add note” and writing something like “There’s a swing gate here”, pressing the “take photo” button and pressing “send” :)

Sometimes I suddenly find time to edit the map according to the note that I’ve made myself, but usually someone else is faster and the thing is marked properly on the map by the time I find time to do something more about it than add the note. And then I maybe react to someone else’s note to compensate for others having done stuff on my behalf :)

At least in my town, if I search for an address with a house number, I do get the precise house as result, not only the street.

But maybe the people adding data to Openstreetmap in your town haven’t included the houses’ numbers. That’s something you can fix by yourself, though! Just go to http://openstreetmap.org/ , create and account, press Edit and go to the house that is missing the house number. And enter the number.

A lot of FOSS software is able to compete with commercial products.

If a problem exists, it should be fixed when possible.

I also like the sentiment of merrily moving goalposts here!

First you are about to get a reward for leaving. After you have left, you are told you will get your reward if you choose a specific PM.

Once the specified PM has been sworn in, they will then tell the next condition. And so on and so on.
What an attractive offer!

It is implied in the article that the chatbot was able to point out details about the image that the reporter either could not immediately recognize without some kind of outside help or did not bother looking for.

So, the chatbot added making the reporter notice something on the photo in a few seconds that would have taken several minutes for the reporter to notice without aid of technology.