Feels like a proper movie that political boundaries like state lines would be significant for all concerned. One meteor for Rhode Island, one for Texas... Any questions? (Asks the alien overlord of his minions in his crisp British accent)

The rest of the world, if they’re even mentioned in the plot, get one per country at most.

Europe gets one, under the eiffel tower.

“France is the size of Ohio why would they send more ships to France than to Cleveland”

Really good wine and cheese?

And then you have arrived at "Last Thursdayism", where the universe could have been created a few days ago, or literally now, or might not exist at all and you are the only soul in existence hallucinating everything, because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator.

And thus, the creator having being able to create anything at any point, yet our world having no proof of that happening, leads you to the only logical answer: either a book of abrahamic folk tales is the fundamental law of the universe, or it’s just a book.

> because all evidence on any of these points could have been arranged by the omnipotent creator

An omnipotent creator that creates lies? What else should we disbelieve from that Prince of Lies? How can we tell that now that invisible sky daddy is telling the truth this time? What about last time? Are we going to see some giant PSYCH! written in the sky?

Or Next Tuesdayism: the universe will be created next Tuesday. Your current sense of experiencing reality is merely the fabricated memory which will have existed after the universe gets created.

Thanks for this. You unintentionally gave me some acute Douglas Adams deja-vu. It sounds exactly like something he would’ve written.

Falsifyability is the key difference between a religious vs scientific claim.

This overlooks that the Rubin telescope has a relatively wide field of view and a thirty second exposure time, so LEO satellites do routinely appear in images. The size of the object isn't so important as its relative brightness, so while a car on the surface of the Earth is hard to locate from 400km above, a sunlit car 400km up in the night sky is visible to the naked eye.

A sun lit satellite on the night side of the Earth.

You’re really starting to push the friendship.

The US requirement is that passengers on flights to the USA have been processed in conformance with US regulations _and_ since that processing have not had any contact with passengers processed otherwise. It's not in itself a stupid rule but does make the US rules contagious, since either other airports re-build to keep the US-bound and other passengers segregated or they have to apply US rules to all.

This hit Auckland International badly: it had a lovely open atrium with a garden but the rules forced a forest of partitioning walls since passengers were transferring from smaller airports that couldn't quickly adopt the US rules.

I often fly from Milan Malpensa airport, and I’ve noticed there are two separate security areas: one for people flying to the US or Israel, and one for everyone else. I’d always wondered why this was the case, and now I get it.

Not OP, but it's more the warning not to underestimate the cost required for compliance, and apprehension of this cost may deter their creation.

The final phase of Symbian OS was becoming the open-source Symbian Foundation. This required the existing codebase, hundreds of thousands of files, to be categorised properly (mostly homegrown, some acquired, some licensed) and where necessary restructured so that each directory only had one kind. Painful, exacting, tedious archaeology which all-but-froze development for weeks. Like a long-deferred merge, the cost to pay for belatedly resolving a mess of licenses is daunting.

Only retroactively.

Thank you for that haunting image, of the recognition that their last user was gone, that this aspect of 65,000 years of local history had come to its end.

I hope that Payirti, the one who turned back, embraced that final solitude and understood how his family had chosen otherwise. I hope he felt his ancestors with him as he died.

Which directly followed the USA stationing Jupiter missiles in Turkey with the range to strike Moscow. As part of the mutual climb down from the missile crisis the USA removed the Jupiters, as both sides then understood the wisdom of avoiding hot brinkmanship

It's genuinely amazing how few people in the USA appear to be aware of what you have written.

It'd be nice to put jingoism aside for a change.

americans are the most brainwashed people on earth when you consider how naïve of their own propaganda they are

Which in hindsight seems like just a sideshow, since both sides already had ICBMs in development that can strike from anywhere in the world.

But a much shorter flight time compared to ICBMs coming from the USA, and being launched from unhardened sites, so looking more like a first-strike decapitation weapon than a retaliatory MAD capability.

Of course submarine-launched ballistic missiles have the same flight time if launched from the Black Sea or off the Eastern Seaboard, but at least they have a strong second-strike potential.

But it isn't speeding by, it's heading away following a closely predetermined trajectory. A better analogy would be filming a high-altitude aircraft flying away from you, using a gear-driven tripod mount.

He wasn't wrong in that claim: for the most part the bombers did get through, especially at night. The problem was that their effectiveness once "through" was far lower than the bombing proponents had claimed, due in particular to the lack of precision, but also the resilience of both targets and the enemy population.