Their pricing model is full of hidden fees and fees you have no control over.

See also, Cory Doctorow's introduction of the word "enshittification".

a major fuckup by Amazon

for which the customer pays directly. That sounds like Amazon, indeed.

...as long as you include it in your Ts & Cs. Chapter 47, sub section 14.37.65.34 clause 38 of 84 should be about right. And remember to make it available online as a PDF - created by scanning a 4th generation fax-&-photocopy edition using a top of the line 1990s hand-held scanner with the default OCR. That should cover all bases.

Did you remember to get it translated from the Chinese into English by a Czech who speaks neither Chinese nor English? "Golden fingers" time.

... covers what - 5% of the land area of Asia? 10%, tops.

Add in India, and you're maybe up to 20%. And around 50% of the population. (Where you draw the borders matters. Russia, west of the Urals? Iran? Iraq? Jordan? Israel?)

I mean, I know that most people are geographically illiterate outside their home countries, but you would hope for better after the Editor has gone through with the blue pencil. It's not as if it's difficult - the list of countries and their approximate areas (and populations) is not even twice as long as the Periodic Table - and people here should have a working relationship with that.

"Used to converting ...?"

Well, I certainly can do the conversion (subtract 32 ; multiply by 5 over nine, if I recall properly), but when I see "Fahrenheit", I think, "Some redneck septic who can't speak properly, and therefore isn't worth listening to." You see, it cuts both ways. "used to" does not equal either "resigned to" or "willing to".

41.9 degrees Celsius is approximately 107.42 degrees Fahrenheit.
44.9 degrees Celsius is approximately 112.42 degrees Fahrenheit.

This may (or may not) be true, but what is undoubtedly true is that 41.9 degrees Celsius is exactly equal to 41.9 degrees Celsius, without the inaccuracies introduced by conversion. So why add inaccuracy unnecessarily.

I used to think that the average Slashdot user could, possibly, count to 11 without taking off their pants or shoes. But average Slashdot users try to disabuse me of that ludicrous notion on an almost daily basis. Septic exceptionalism. I spent decades kow-towing to redneck fuckwits for pay, and I'm fucked if I'll do it in my leisure life.

More seriously, I wonder what sort of protocol they're using.

NASA have been working on developing an "Interplanetary Internet" set of protocols for decades now. I remember when Vint Cerf (one of the original designers of either TCP or IP) was hired as part of the project while everyone else was worrying about the Millennium Bug.

They seem to be using a "store and forward" protocol, with a recognition that physical and logical addressing are not necessarily going to be the same (or even similar) at both ends of a connection.

This would be a fascinating problem to solve.

So far, I believe that it's a theoretical construct. The only place that it's approached being needed is with the constellation of orbiters around Mars acting as relays between the rovers on the surface and radio telescopes on Earth. Their movements can be readily predicted (unless some inconvenient fool stops the Earth rotating, or otherwise violates Newton's mechanics), so they can book the telescope time months in advance.

But when there are multiple things in orbit in the Earth-Moon system, at least some of which can be data sources or sinks, that's going to rapidly get more complicated.

Most useful comment so far. Award yourself a "First (useful) Post" doughnut.

Since it's binary data, it's either 1 or 0 LoC s^(-1). Take your pick.

Yeah, it's not a very good animation. I think the latter part of the animation is trying to express the long (year and a bit) post-eruption "high" brightness state seen in the 1946 eruption as some effect of irradiation of the primary by the secondary, but it's not very clear.

Before I was born Bob Kraft explained how T CrB works, and it is not like that animation.

I think ideas have got considerably more detailed than that, with another half-century of work. But yes, the basic idea of accumulating mass onto the surface of the white dwarf remains the same. But - are the stars tidally locked? Does the material land on one point on the star's surface, or is it spread around it's equator? Or further, if their spin axes aren't aligned, and they mutually precess?

Harvard ADS need a better OCR engine for their archive. I had to go back to the PDF to make sense of the linked page. Hmmmm, "

" That puts quite a stringent limit on the total amount of mass transferred across the 1946 eruption. Or rather, the amount which transferred, less the amount blown away in the eruption.

Yes. And it's a public report. So? It's jargon-y, but perfectly comprehensible.

And in the blue corner, dribbling to himself, is the "electric universe" dude.

Harmless, but noisy and distracting. Like flatulence.

Still only that one observer who has reported low (bright) magnitudes. Other observers aren't reporting a significant change.

I found that I could understand enough of written Portuguese to get by, and if I didn't have a particular bit of Portuguese vocabulary, then the corresponding bit of Spanish would generally be understood.

But yeah, the Arabic influence in Portuguese is a lot stronger than in Spanish, and there are a lot of differences. I can see getting hung up on that.

There is a string of a half-dozen reports in the last couple of hours at (about) 7.5 mag.

Plateauing. .. ?

Ahhh - fuck. Reports come from ONE observatory. So could be local decrease in cloud cover. Booo!