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Comment Re:*facepalm* (Score 1) 177

This was always going to end this way. Sorry Ofcom but 4chan is 100% in the right here. Your authority extends only to requesting it be blocked in your country. Nothing more.

This isn't a multinational company and it is not in any way subject to any laws other than US law.

The US should think and act the same way: activities, companies and individuals outside the borders of the US are not subject to US laws. America is not the world's police force, as much as it likes to think it is. Mind your own business, and the rest of the world should do the same.

Allow me to posit the following: we could very well be minding our own business but still strongly influence the rest of the world. For example, if a company wishes to do business in America -- the world's largest and most lucrative commercial market -- they must comply with US laws. This is no different than any other country. You may not like it, but that's how commercial business works, and it'd be no different if someone like North Korea had the market everyone wanted. You'd just be complaining about a different country.

Don't like it? Don't do business in the US and you're free to do whatever you want. You'll be excluding yourself from probably 70% of the available market, but you're free to make that choice.

Don't forget, your argument can be turned around quite easily: you could mind your own business and stop trying to tell the US how to do business according to your wants/needs. Funny how that works.

Comment Re:UK folks went to 4chan, 4chan did not go to UK (Score 2) 177

they are no longer in the UK and UK laws no longer apply.

You're blissfully unaware of how laws work.

There are certain crimes that can be prosecuted and punished in the UK even if they were committed in Thailand or Antarctica. It is sufficient that they can get to you somehow, for example via an Interpol arrest request or an extradition order or by freezing your assets, etc.

Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

You're blissfully unaware of how national sovereignty works.

Good luck getting the US to accommodate an Interpol extradition request for 4chan and its personnel. There's no reason the US would agree to it since 4chan has violated no US law. So long as 4chan operates in the US exclusively and violates no US laws, they are effectively beyond the reach of the UK government. They could presumably nab some 4chan executive if they ever visited the UK, but all one has to do to avoid that is just not visit the UK.

This is how international legal disputes have been handled since the dawn of international legal disputes. Don't trust me, look it up, I'm sure chatgpt can fill you in.

Comment Admitting the obvious (Score 5, Insightful) 184

It's about time they admitted to something that was obvious to almost everyone: nuclear power is the only effective path to carbon-free base load power generation. Wind and solar make good intermittent sources, but base load has to be utterly reliable regardless of whether the wind is blowing or the sun is shining. That's nuclear.

Getting rid of the nukes was a knee-jerk reaction, not a smart technological decision. The pivot to depending on oil and gas from a potential hostile neighbor just added to the madness.

Comment Re:New American Revolutionaries take note... (Score 1) 45

He spent 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers on YouTube. That's as sucked in as you can get to the system. He is very much a large part of the system you think he should be raging against.

He financed, produced, starred in, and distributed the film completely independent from the "Hollywood System". For God's sake, how much less "sucked in" can a person be and still have the means to do it at all???

Give the man some credit.

Comment Re:Fuck that (Score 0) 143

I mean, let's just come up with a hypothetical example. Let's say that baby formula manufacturers realize that the specific tests used by the regulator to check for protein can be fooled by melamine and so they use melamine as an ingredient to save money while fooling the regulator. Consequently hundreds of thousands of babies get sick and tens of thousands are hospitalized with some dying, and that's just the ones that are known about. Should the regulators be the only ones that get in trouble while the executives who made the decisions buy themselves some private islands? I mean, A. that's not a hypothetical example and, B. I just do not understand what you are trying to argue here. Maybe it's my fault, but it just seems incomprehensible to me given the actual, real-world history of corporate behavior when it comes to food and drug safety.

I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.

As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.

Comment Re:Hmmmmmm (Score 4, Insightful) 35

I don't think " success" means what they think it means. This game isn't even going to break even unless I'm missing something.

You're not missing something. Much like Disney's "Snow White" was called a "success" despite bombing both at the box office and on streaming, the corporate media stooges will blithely state the complete opposite in an attempt to hide abject failure. Ubisoft is no different.

AC fans waited years to get a game with samurai's based in feudal Japan. What they got is a "samurai" game with no actual Japanese samurai protagonist. Ubisoft's reason for this is painfully obvious to everyone. This is why Japanese consumers have largely rejected it and has a lot to do with why sales have tanked overall.

There's a saying for this that ends with "go broke." It's slipping my mind at the moment, but I'm sure it'll come to me eventually.

Comment Make the bounty have some teeth... (Score 1) 17

If more companies would not only put a monetary bounty on these crooks but also specify "dead or alive," perhaps it would start to put a dent in their activities. They're already operating from countries that either look the other way or actively assist them in their activities. Putting a death mark on them ups the stakes considerably and allows the use of...ahem...alternate actors...ahem...that can operate beyond the law to get actual results.

Comment Re:At least he's honest? (Score 1) 73

I suspect he doesn't know about - or thinks most people don't know about - ad blockers, and so offering a browser that has more relevant ads will attract people who hate the irrelevant ads but figure they're unavoidable.

Obviously, for those of us who are smart about adblocking, who almost never see ads we don't agree to see, it's stupid.

But shockingly, there are probably plenty of people who will happily sign up for that "improved" experience.

Comment Re: That's not what the studies show (Score 1) 293

Trump's "Agenda 47" includes most of the talking points from Project 2025.

"Most" is pretty vague. Which ones don't overlap? Do you even know? Have you read both? In full? Project 2025 is 922 pages long. Somehow I doubt you've read it, instead relying on the media to tell you what to think and say and do.

What if "most" of the overlap are things that are relatively mainstream, non-controversial things? What if the only places they don't overlap just happen to be the Big Boogeyman Ideas you're so terrified of? Did you ever consider that enough to bother reviewing both proposals? Or did you simply hear "Trump = Project 2025 and Project 2025 = bad, therefore Trump = bad"?

The sheer lack of curiosity about the stances some people are willing to take is stunning sometimes. Presumably you have a prefrontal cortex. You may wish to use it from time to time to think on your own and come up with your own opinions.

Comment Re: Here's one thing that didn't happen... (Score 1) 293

Teach a man to fish, and he'll be unemployed as soon as we build an AI-controlled fleet of fishing drones.
And we'll all eat forever.
This old adage may need some updating.

And yet who will build, program, and maintain this AI-controlled fleet? Another AI-controlled facility? Who will build, program, and maintain that? Or is it turtles all the way down?

At some point humans have to be involved, and those humans will be gainfully employed and benefit from their labor. Those who adapt to this new economic reality will prosper. Those who do not, will not.

This is nothing new. When mass production put artisans out of work, the same hue and cry was raised. The human race as a whole is incalculably better off today than it was when that happened. Those who try to stand against the march of technology to maintain the status quo will always get steamrollered. And we should not weep for them, for we all benefit from the march of progress. If you truly believe in the betterment of humanity, you cannot allow the creation of a society where stagnation is rewarded.

Comment Re: Lots of false information in this reply (Score 3, Interesting) 51

Not surprising - given the accident description, the pilots dramatically exceeded the structural limits of the airplane by dramatically exceeding the posted limits of safe operation.

Here's the report of the event:
https://asn.flightsafety.org/a...

It reads to me as if the (co)pilot deliberately amplified the Dutch roll motion (which is a simple lateral/directional dynamic characteristic of aerodynamics of ALL aircraft, whether or not it's operationally significant) until reaching such a large motion (probably a combination of simultaneous roll and yaw rate) that it exceeded the strength of the engine pylons.

In particular, it's possible to overstress the aircraft by putting in large OPPOSING inputs in an attempt to stop to the Dutch roll motion too quickly. It's quite possible that if they'd simply gone hands/feet off the controls, it would have damped out naturally with no damage. The failure of AA587 is an example of this: the pilot's large rudder input against the yaw motion (which was due to a yaw excursion due to unexpected turbulence) is exactly what caused the tail to snap.

Comment Lots of false information in this reply (Score 5, Informative) 51

Nearly every claim in this post is factually wrong. This person apparently knows nearly nothing about aircraft flying characteristics, other than buzzwords.

I am a degreed aerospace engineer working in flight test for over 30 years and I have tested large commercial/passenger-class aircraft, including deliberately-induced Dutch rolls for test purposes. I have sat in the cockpit behind pilots executing these Dutch roll maneuvers intentionally. I personally joined a flight test team that had a crash a few years before, due to a Dutch roll event during flight test in the early 1990s. I also edited the US Naval Test Pilot School handbook FTM-103 "Fixed-Wing Stability and Control Theory and Flight Test Techniques" in 2019-2021. So I'm working with definitive expertise acknowledged in my field.

Some facts.

1) The proper term is "Dutch roll", uppercase, not lowercase, just like "American flag" not "american flag."

2) Dutch roll has absolutely NOTHING to do with the wings alternately stalling. Zero. Nada. Its cause is more subtle and would take a few pages to explain; go look up section 5.2.2.3 of the USNTPS FTM-103 flight test manual (which I edited) if you want the math. A wing stall MIGHT occur AS A RESULT of Dutch roll if you cause such a very large Dutch roll at a very low speed, but I've never seen that happen in hundreds of flight test events, some of which were done with me in the airplane. And even if the wing DOES stall, it's not a big deal most of the time; I've also done many stall tests. We're careful and we know what will happen, but most stalls are immediately recoverable (because all airplanes are carefully designed to recover quickly and gracefully from an inadvertent stall).

3) There is no "triplet" input to "get out of" Dutch roll. It is a natural oscillatory motion and will persist until a "yaw damper" is engaged to counter it automatically; it's almost impossible to manually damp out because it will simply recur naturally. Even if you put in a complicated input to damp it out, it'll start again just due to small gusts. No pilot wants to spend all their time fighting Dutch roll; that's why aircraft have yaw damping systems.

4) Dutch roll absolutely CAN shear off the vertical tail if it becomes large enough. Look up the crash of American Airlines AA587 in 2001. And I personally worked on a program that crashed a Navy S-3B test airplane in 1991 from Dutch roll testing when the vertical tail failed due to bad test technique (deliberately overdriving the Dutch roll mode beyond the limits of the vertical tail strength, due to miscalculation of the tail strength limits). I personally have on my desk the control stick that was recovered by wreckage divers from the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay to remind me of that failure. That crash still informs Navy flight testing practices today.

5) But in normal operation with a properly-functioning control system and absent extreme pilot inputs, Dutch roll will never become large enough to cause a failure; all aircraft are designed with sufficient stability to not reach this point without a control system input (either deliberate or due to a hardover rudder input). It is, however often a nuisance residual motion which can be annoying or nauseating.

6) Dutch rolls not exactly a "very slow" oscillation. Slow, but not VERY slow. In most large aircraft, its period is about 5-6 seconds per cycle. Smaller aircraft have faster oscillations, maybe 2-3 seconds. It's easy to observe, and quite annoying.

See my root-level post here with more information about Dutch roll in general, and the actual issues in this event.

Comment Some factual information about Dutch roll (Score 5, Informative) 51

I have a few observations about this incident, because I see some false information in this thread.

I am a degreed aerospace engineer working in flight test for over 30 years and I have tested large commercial/passenger-class aircraft, including deliberately-induced Dutch rolls for test purposes. I have sat in the cockpit behind pilots executing these Dutch roll maneuvers intentionally. I also edited the US Naval Test Pilot School handbook FTM-103 "Fixed-Wing Stability and Control Theory and Flight Test Techniques" in 2019-2021. So I'm working with definitive expertise acknowledged in my field.

Some facts.

First, the proper term is "Dutch roll", uppercase not lowercase, just like "American flag" not "american flag." Basic respect for Holland and all that.

Dutch roll, according to the US Naval Test Pilot School handbook FTM-103 "Fixed-Wing Stability and Control Theory and Flight Test Techniques", is defined as a second-order oscillatory lateral/directional mode of oscillation, sometimes referred to as a nuisance or annoyance motion. It is characterized by an oscillation back and forth between roll and yaw (sideslip); if you look out the side of the aircraft you'll see the wingtip trace a small circle or oval path. Nearly every airplane will exhibit Dutch roll - it's baked into the aerodynamics - the only question being how susceptible it is, and how well it naturally is damped.

So every airplane ever flown is deliberately tested for lateral/directional stability including deliberately inducing Dutch roll to check for its damping characteristics: will it naturally die out or is the "yaw damper" needed to reduce it, and how fast is it reduced by that system.

Dutch roll testing is actually one of the more benign types of flight tests. We are careful to avoid exceeding the sideslip limit of the airplane, so we build up to the larger test points, but it's generally quite safe.

You can see a sample plot of relatively representative Dutch roll motion here: https://www.researchgate.net/p...

My read of the article and other information I can find about this incident is that it wasn't a Dutch roll that *caused* the problem. "Dutch roll" is simply a natural mode of oscillation present in any airplane, and won't lead to any aircraft damage unless something else went badly wrong. In this incident, it's likely that the rudder power control unit (PCU) had a "hardover" or oscillatory failure and drove the tail to swing sideways (either once or oscillatory) far enough to cause physical damage to the tail (the FAA preliminary report says "substantial" damage), which I presume manifested as popped rivets and visible sheet metal buckling (I've personally seen these before after flight test events that went a bit too far). So the failure was not Dutch roll itself. Presumably the pilots immediately turned off the Dutch roll damping system (the "yaw damper") and maybe even the rudder PCU itself. The resulting residual motion after such a failure, without the yaw damper reducing the oscillation, might be characterized by a sustained yaw/roll oscillation which WOULD be a Dutch roll mode of oscillation, but that was the effect, NOT the cause.

Dutch roll is not inherently dangerous. What *is* dangerous is when it is excited (by pilot input, by control system failure, or by wind gusts) and becomes large enough to cause structural damage, usually to the vertical tail due to side loads on the tail. The crash of American Airlines AA587 in 2001 is an example of what happens when the vertical tail fails due to overstress; the pilot encountered an wind-gust disturbance and used too much rudder to try to correct the motion, and literally sheared off the vertical tail. So modern aircraft include rudder limiting systems to prevent large inputs at high speeds.

In this incident this week, the rudder PCU apparently malfunctioned and caused a huge yaw input, leading to (probably) vertical tail damage.

AFTER the real failure and any damage that occurred, because of the failure of the PCU, it's likely that the rudder couldn't properly damp the Dutch roll during the rest of the flight, so there would also have been a sustained but small oscillation which can cause people to get nauseous or worse due to motion sickness.

If you want to learn more about Dutch roll, here is an older public-domain copy of FTM-103 (the new version I edited is not being released publicly) and you'll find the relevant information in section 5.2.2.2.3.
https://usntpsalumni.wildapric...

Finally, is this a symptom of Boeing design = bad? No, I don't think so. Every aircraft has a ton of parts which must be well maintained. Servos (PCUs) fail due to wear and tear. Aircraft maintenance practices are designed to spot failing or worn parts such as PCUs and replace them before this happens, but sometimes it still happens. That has nothing to do with the fundamental design. And as I have tried to convey above, Dutch roll is inherent to every airplane. The only question is how good are the systems to limit and damp it out, and how good is the servo design to not cause it. Since this and thousands of other 737 aircraft generally have no problems like this, it's not a design flaw; it's a worn-out-parts flaw. So if anything, I'd pin this as most likely due to maintenance not catching a worn part, but maybe just bad luck.

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