In aviation, “retard” is a command to reduce the throttle position. It is used throughout the industry but is especially noteworthy in Airbus aircraft. These highly-automated planes make aural callouts based on the aircraft’s radar altitude, including one telling the pilot to retard the thrust levers on their final approach to landing.

When first heard from the jump seat or in a simulator, the Airbus call out of “50…40…30…20…RETARD, RETARD” can sound a bit odd. Numerous jokes have popped up. After all, who would want to fly a plane that insults its pilot?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the verb retard as “to delay or impede the development or progress of…to slow up, especially by preventing or hindering advance or accomplishment. For example, chemicals are used to retard the spread of fire.”

In the example of an aircraft, the thrust levers are moved aft to retard the power produced by the engines.

Download MusConv - Version 4.10.268
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Senator Rand Paul delivered what could have been seen as a six-minute Ted Talk on how science works and how delivery of things like vaccines, along with diet and other considerations, change over time, and how parents, not the government, should be making decisions that affect their children.

Is there an ATC shortage? Yes, there is, and we'll get to that. Was it caused by any action of the Trump administration instituted eight days ago? There's no planet on which that's true. You don't train to be an air traffic controller in eight days, much less would you be assigned to what is one of the most senior sectors in the country.

But if Democrats want to go down this road, we can. What caused the current ATC shortage? The Biden administration, which took its cues from diversity programs created by the Obama administration, rejected over 3,000 qualified applicants who didn't meet DEI standards. How do we know this? Because it led to a major class action lawsuit that is still ongoing. //

In other words, Democrat presidents put DEI above safety, purging thousands of people who could have solved the shortage because their skin color didn't match up with the left's political wants. That's what the Trump administration is trying to fix by eliminating diversity quotas at the FAA. So again, if Democrats would like to go down this road of trying to place blame, Republicans should be happy to do so. It won't work out well for the former.

With that said, it does not appear that ATC was primarily at fault here. There may be questions about how much separation was allowed to begin with, and an investigation will figure all that out. In the meantime, these attempts to blame a presidential administration that's been in office for eight days are laughable. Not only that, they are ghoulish and disgusting.

DCA JIA5342 & PAT25 mid air

I have a soft spot for fictional computers, having implemented compilers, bytecode interpreters, and even program synthesis for various made-up computer architectures.

This post is yet another dive into VM implementation, looking at a particularly fascinating ecosystem from Hundred Rabbits:

The Uxn CPU is a simple, 256-instruction stack machine
Varavara defines a set of peripherals that turn that CPU into an actual computer (display, keyboard, mouse, etc)

Unlike many fictional computers, the Uxn + Varvara ecosystem is sophisticated enough for actual use, and there are dozens of different ROMs – everything from text editors to drawing programs to synthesizers.

The Hundred Rabbits devlog motivates this design with far more eloquence than I could offer; I'd encourage you to browse their sprawling wiki of documentation, blog posts, and development notes.

My implementation is called Raven.

Uxn is the virtual machine powering the Hundred Rabbits software.

This one-page computer, programmable in Uxntal, is an portability layer with a focus on hosting graphical tools and games. It lives at the heart of the Varvara ecosystem.

• Uxn Instructions: Reference, Tests
• Varvara Devices: Reference, Tests

This wiki along with most of the audio-visual projects documented on it are running on Uxn.

This is a blog post based on a transcript of a talk Devine gave at on November 26th 2024. Watch the video version(on YouTube). The slideshow presentation was made using Adelie.
A Shining Place Built Upon The Sand

I dreamt I was in a Library, but it didn't look like a library at all. You know how in dreams you feel like you know someone to be a specific person without them necessarily having their appearance? This is how I knew this was a library.

i want that registered user can see DIFF button and everything, and non-registered can show only 'recent changes', so my wish is to have a DISABLEACTION function managed by a sort of ACL.

A simple way to solve this problew is it that follow.

in /incl/template.php, change:
case 'diff':
 html_diff();
    break;

with:

 case 'diff':
    if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'])
    {
        $first = is_numeric($_REQUEST['first']) ? intval($_REQUEST['first']) : 0;
        html_diff($first);
    }
    else
        html_login();
    break;

in this way, if you are a logged-in user, you can display the DIFFERENCE section, with code confront.
if you are not logged, it displays a form for login.

Allegro du concerto pour piano et orchestre, en fa dièse mineur, op.20
Alexander Scriabin

DaveGinOly | January 29, 2025 at 4:26 pm
Remember, Milley created a bottleneck in the chain of command during the final hours of the Trump administration, requiring that only orders issued or approved by him were to be followed, effectively elevating himself above the POTUS, the lawful civilian authority at the top of the military chain of command. He can’t be tried for this criminality, but he should be demoted for it. (Nancy Pelosi encouraged him in this venture, and she remains exposed to prosecution for her part in it.)

Eric Daugherty
@EricLDaugh
·
Follow
RFK just gave a flawless answer to Bernie Sanders asking if health care is a human right.

Bet Sanders didn't expect an answer this intelligent... he interrupted RFK IMMEDIATELY.

SANDERS: Is it a human right? Yes or no?

RFK: In the way that free speech is? It's different, because free speech costs nothing. In health care - if you smoke cigs for 20 years, and you get cancer - you are now taking from the pool of resources..-

12:12 PM · Jan 29, 2025

But Sanders wasn't done. He went off on a crazy rant about baby onesies that were produced by an organization that Kennedy had been involved with that said, "Unvaxxed unafraid" and "No vax, no problem." But apparently Sanders didn't know or couldn't absorb that Kennedy said he was no longer part of the organization or on the board. He just started shrieking his head off. Kennedy started laughing, as did Megyn Kelly, who was sitting behind him in the audience.

"Are you supportive of these onesies?" Sanders screamed.

"I'm supportive of vaccines," Kennedy calmly replied.

Sanders continued to scream, "Are you supportive of this clothing which is militantly anti-vaccine?"

Kennedy and Kelly started laughing, because it was just so ridiculous. "I'm supportive of vaccines... I want good science." //

DK1969
4 hours ago
Healthcare is not a human right because it's product of someone's labor (scientists, doctors, administrators etc.). If one has a right to product of someone's labor, it's called slavery.

(((Harry Enten))) @ForecasterEnten
·

"Big League" for Trump. His approval rating is significantly higher at the start of his second term than at the start of his first.

Moreover, Trump's made history as the first president to be more popular at the start of his second term than at ANY point in his first term.

11:22 AM · Jan 24, 2025

Abortion has been a notoriously divisive issue in America, but actually I see an emerging consensus: that abortion should be legal up until a certain number of weeks, and restricted thereafter. Even in the reddest of red states, voters reject total abortion bans. And in blue states, almost no one supports third-trimester abortions except to save the life of the mother. And so I support the emerging consensus that abortion should be unrestricted up until a certain point. 

But I also believe that we can reduce more abortions in America by choice than by force. This is at the heart of the “More Choices, More Life” policy we’ve developed. Every abortion is a tragedy, and by better supporting mothers, parents, and families, we can dramatically reduce abortions across the board. //

I'm going to support President Trump's policies on Title 10. I agree with President Trump that every abortion is a tragedy. I agree with him that we cannot be a moral nation if we have 1.2 million abortions a year. I agree with him that the states should control abortion. President Trump has told me he wants to end late-term abortion, he wants to protect conscience exemptions, and that he wants to end federal funding for abortions here and abroad as Title 10 states. I serve at the pleasure of the president, I'm going to implement his policies. //

Lankford asked, "Will you step in and say that healthcare individuals have the right of conscience again as the federal law allows?"

Kennedy responded:

The first thing that occurs to me when you ask that question is what patient would want somebody doing a surgery on them that believes the surgery is against their conscience being forced to perform that. I don't know anybody who would want a doctor to perform a surgery that the doctor is morally opposed to.

Kennedy took his argument further: that recognition of conscience exemptions is a part of the diversity of thought that the country needs to return to. //

LANKFORD: Will FDA move to be able to actually give transparency to the America people and to say, "this drug is no different than any other drug, we're not going to protect it just because it's political to some folks." People should know side effects on this drug and there should be reporting?

KENNEDY: It's against everything we believe in this country that patients or doctors should not be reporting adverse events. We need to know what adverse events are, we need to understand the safety of every drug, Mifepristone and every other drug. And President Trump has made it clear to me, one of the things, he has not taken a position yet on Mifepristone—a detailed position, but he's made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues, and I will ask NIH/FDA to do that. //

Indylawyer
6 hours ago
Those are the sorts of responses I was hoping to hear. I do not expect the federal government to eliminate abortion by legislative fiat anytime soon, and certainly not by administrative fiat. But the Democrats and RINOs have long been twisting law and policy in all sorts of hideous directions in order to promote and encourage abortion. Our abortion policy at the federal level ought to be similar to what Lincoln sought to do with slavery - recognize that it is immoral and contrary to natural law while acknowledging it that states have certain sovereign powers and we need to temporarily permit them to exercise their discretion not to protect unborn life within their borders until we can build a true national consensus that abortion has to be eliminated. RFK Jr.'s responses sound consistent with that. //

St. Joseph, Terror of Demons
7 hours ago
And so I support the emerging consensus that abortion should be unrestricted up until a certain point.
There is no “emerging consensus that abortion should be unrestricted up until a certain point.” As a practicing Catholic, I believe all abortions are immoral, even in the incredibly rare cases of rape or incest. The child is innocent, has an immortal soul, and deserves a chance to live his or her life. Note: Some pregnancies are not viable (e.g., ectopic pregnancies), and in those sad cases, it is permissible for a doctor to terminate the pregnancy to save the mother’s life. //

There's no arguing with these different numbers that a majority of Americans support this because they're all the same across the different pollsters, Enten said. 

Enten, the data nerd, also explained how the numbers have changed over time, from Trump's first term to now, that it's now 20 points higher than it was just before Trump came into office the last time. Enten concluded that gave Trump a "lot more leverage to go with the American people" to address the issue, "I think the American people are going to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt to do what he wants to do.”

Enten also noted the number of people — 55 percent — who want legal and illegal immigration reduced. That's a 14-point rise from 2023. 

Piano Concerto in B Flat Major

1. [Allegro]
2. Un poco adagio
3. Allegretto
   Emilie Mayer

DOT should certainly enforce refunds for services charged but not provided. But they shouldn’t lock airlines and airfare search sites into displaying specific charges in a standardized way, the same everywhere. We should be encouraging competition in meeting consumer needs, not making airline sites and Expedia displays the same forever. It’s not only seat and bag fees that matter – and even those don’t always matter!

United has received its 1,000th mainline jet, claiming the title of the world’s largest mainline fleet. The aircraft ‒ a 737 MAX 9 with registration N77584 ‒ was delivered by Boeing on Monday.

With this latest delivery, the Chicago-based carrier not only has 1,000 aircraft in its mainline fleet but also has the most airplanes of any airline globally. Data from aviation analytics company Cirium shows that United took delivery of 57 total aircraft last year. //

The airline now trumps the mainline fleets of both Delta and American, which were the previous titleholders. According to planespotters.net data, Delta has 985 aircraft, while American has 978.

Look up the adjective biweekly in this dictionary and you will see it defined as "occurring every two weeks" AND as "occurring twice a week." Similarly, the adjective bimonthly is defined as "occurring every two months" AND as "occurring twice a month."

For this, we are sorry. But we don't mean "sorry" in the sense that we feel penitence; we are not to blame. We mean "sorry" in the sense that we feel a kind of sorrow aroused by circumstances beyond our control or power to repair. //

One such case, sort of, is very similar to the cases at hand: the language offers us biannual for "twice a year" and biennial for "every two years." This is useful and elegant, but, alas, also frequently botched, with biannual so frequently used to mean "every two years" that we've had to enter that meaning in our dictionaries. But here another solution is readily available: skip biannual altogether and use in its place the common semiannual.

Ah, semi-! Just as a semicircle cuts a circle in half, so too does the prefix semi- semantically cut what it is affixed to in half: semiweekly means unambiguously two times per week; semimonthly means two times per month; semiannual means two times per year.

As we've said many times here, the normal community understanding on contribution licensing is inbound=outbound, which is to say that contributors agree for their contributions to be licensed under the project's existing licence.

In the case of copyleft licences, as the linked question says, this is actually a requirement of the licence. In the case of the permissive licences like MIT, however, it's just a community understanding. Unless the project required a CLA from you, you could make an argument that you never licensed your contributions to the project at all, but I'd expect it to be a hard, uphill business to convince a judge of that (indeed, as Bart points out (thank you, Bart!), given GitHub's embedding of in=out in their TOS, it will likely be next to impossible).

But the project is completely entitled to change to a proprietary licence, and unless you can convince a judge that you never agreed to licence your contributions, you have no right to demand they stop using your contribution. One of the many advantages of copyleft licensing is that, once contributions have been accepted, the project can no longer unilaterally relicense. The permissive licences don't give the same protection, and this is generally understood, so what they've done, though not nice, is neither unlawful nor unethical.

One thing you can do is to take the copy of the MIT-licensed source you've found, and make sure it's available from your website (or at least, not solely from your github account). You have every right to do that, and as the search engines pick it up, you may hope that their proprietary-licensed version is supplanted by the free version.