This is correct. I have NOS Rotrings made in Germany. They sell for a pretty penny online. People who love the pens know the modern production isn’t the same.
This whole article is a bit confused. Image quality isn’t about the ability to discern detail. Many people cannot see the detail in their 4k TVs or a photo, it’s about not seeing visible pixelation.
Those aren’t the same thing. Visible pixelation is connected to contrast and color depth. That’s why a perfectly smooth gradient appears as bands of color in poorly encoded images and video. There’s no detail in gradients at all. The pixelation is due to a lack of color information.
On top of that printers use different numbers of colors (from 3 to 11 or more) and different ways of sizing and layering dots (if you aren’t using continuous tone printers which are very rare nowadays).
Then you have to add in the ability to up res images plausibly using modern algorithms. Whereas before we were always stretching the data we had, now by adding false detail using ML we can scale a significant amount without a visible reduction in quality. That can be very effective at removing pixelation while preserving the original image content.
So in reality there aren’t hard and fast rules. It’s totally image and output dependent.
This was all widely reported. The problem here is that people don’t read and they routinely dismiss stories based on source, not content.
The 9/11 attacks were incredibly bizarre from day one. Everyone with any knowledge of the world immediately started asking questions.
Also remember that the attacks were the largest terrorist incidents by death for non-American countries. NY is a world city. More British people died that day than in any other single terrorist event - and that’s a country dealing with the IRA. That meant immediate global press and government investigation.
The entire premise is wrong. Humanity isn’t defined by expertise. Most average people will reach the “I don’t know” or making-it-up stage on most subjects pretty fast.
Perfect responses are more
Likely indicative of a machine than a person.
The lack of journalism in this conflict is a direct result of Israel forbidding press access and their targeting of Palestinian and other journalists. This deliberate effort enables them to then criticize the reporting which is done and cast doubt over sources.
Since October 7th sources from within Palestine have been accurate regarding deaths and actions. Often being attacked first and then quietly acknowledged later.
There is no reason to doubt the reporting of Israel’s paper of record, which though considered left wing writhing Israel, supports Netanyahu’s attacks on Gaza and applies rigorous journalistic standards.
IQ doesn’t measure intelligence. If anything it measures how well a person integrates the educational methodology they have been exposed to.
At best - and it’s a stretch - IQ correlates with intelligence sometimes. It’s far from a reliable measure though.
The problems in testing are obvious. You can depress someone’s results simply by changing the language used in the questions. I.e. you can make Americans score worse by using British English. That’s nothing to do with innate intelligence.
The F-35 cannot be made without the UK. There are key components which are only produced in the UK and for which there is no secondary supplier.
Even countries happy to spend huge proportions of GDP on weapons, like Israel, cannot build a modern fighter in house.
The solution for the UK is European integration which potentially brings the money, skills and manpower to build a better plane than exists anywhere including the US.
FYI every credible expert agrees that Iran aren’t making bombs yet. They are enriching to 60%. Far from what’s needed for a weapon. They have been capable of making bombs for decades and have chosen not to. They even adhered to the JCPOA when Trump tire it up.
It’s odd to have a country that illegally proliferated treating a neighbor who isn’t doing that yet as the greatest threat to world piece. Backed by the only country that’s used nuclear weapons in anger.
It’s very possible that in a decade the Us will be at war in Iran. Trump and Netanyahu will be off the world stage. The cost to the US will be thousands of lives and several trillion and China will have taken Taiwan while we aren’t capable of stopping them.
These wars always seem to start well because destroying things is the easy but.
We don’t know if we’ve done much damage to the buried facilities. Bunker busters don’t dive very deep, they can be deflected via engineering, and concrete is cheap.
Conflict like this are what will definitively end “The American Century” and we are currently witnessing that.
The ones used for this operation go 197 feet, including 25 solid feet of high-strength concrete, with just one bomb. The idea is to use multiple bombs trailing one another to achieve extra depth. It's too soon yet to tell if that worked, or not.
Starship is “the program to build a permanent base in the moon”. It’s not even the only vehicle involved in the moon program. It’s a rocket designed to take astronauts from moon orbit to the moon’s surface. The astronauts will actually fly to the moon in SLS.
So far it’s proved incapable of being launched, attaining orbit, and returning to earth as designed. That’s without a payload.
It has no life support system built and is literally years behind schedule.
Rather than making progress it is being redesigned on the fly to mitigate fundamental problems with its capability which Musk laughs off as “moving fast and breaking things”.
The problem is we aren’t moving fast at all.
The rocket is a disaster. Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
Comparing the programs while ignoring the fact that hobbiest regularly reach the Karman line is deceitful.
Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
> Starship is doing this on easy mode and it’s failing.
But this 'easy mode' is still so incredibly hard that nobody else will even attempt it.
I'd love to see some serious competition emerge in the reusable rocket space, but SpaceX is far, far ahead with Falcon 9 being an incredible success, even if the Starship project may be headed for failure. Nobody reports on 100+ successful Falcon 9 launches/landings in a year, those are now mundane. But a small number of Starship failures - test flights of an experimental vehicle - become big news, mostly because they involve spectacular explosions.
It seems that Starship may be too big to 'fail fast', mostly because of the visual spectacle of those failures.
The 'easy mode' is incredibly hard at least partly in terms of nobody else having the capability to finance it (with the possible exception of two superpowers and Jeff Bezos)
But yeah, I tend to agree that whether it ultimately succeeds or not, blowing Starship up is a "fail fast" strategy because they have the money (and the reputational capital from successful Falcon 9 launches) to learn from their mistakes that way, and not many others do. Much as the waterfall approach of big space projects gets derided, there's a reason entities that can't take the reputational hit of visibly blowing stuff up on a regular basis do it that way...
IMO calling it "easy mode" really misses the mark. If you ever get the chance to hear directly from the engineers working on Starship, I think you’d come away with a deeper appreciation for the scale and complexity of what they’re building. The solutions they work on go far beyond "just" launching a rocket.
> Saturn V was better by an order of magnitude and likely cheaper if you consider how much fundamental work went into creating it which is now easy to buy off the shelf.
One year of Saturn V development cost the same as the entire Starship program so far. One launch cost 20-30x more than the projected cost of a Starship launch.
It is also said that it’s simply impossible to rebuild a Saturn rocket. Not only you can’t “buy components off the shelf” because they simply don’t exist anymore, even if you had all the component blueprints (which we don’t, they were lost to time), the manufacturing know-how is long gone.
Starship was developed from scratch. SpaceX developed their own engines, their flight control surfaces are novel, the rocket structure and materials are novel, the entire approach is different. Yes, our modern electronics industry makes it “easier” but this is like saying Porsche is playing in easy mode because of the Ford Model T.
