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Comment No, it's their "War on Free" (Score 1) 69

I had several dozen apps in the Play store. This is a lot like the Unity Engine debacle from a little while ago, Google realized free apps are cutting in on the market for paid apps, and has been adding more and more flaming hoops for developers to jump through to keep their apps in the app store. All of my apps are (were) free, no ads, no tracking, etc, I made not a dime from them. It finally got to the point where having apps in their store wasn't worth it. When you have 50 apps, and they give you a five minute task for each one, that's five hours of my time. The final straw for me was when they required everyone to update the compiledAppVersion (or whatever it was) parameter every two years, even if the app was supported on 99+% of all active devices. I had already decided to let all of my apps die at that point, I had a copy on my phone and that was good enough for me, and I figured Google was only going to turn up the heat from there. And they did, the final final straw was the "Data Privacy" section in the store listing, which is where the permissions an app requires *SHOULD* be listed, instead they want app developers to do a semi-free form explanation the data the app collects to give users less motivation to go to the actual Permissions section (which keeps getting more and more buried). None of my apps collected data, so there wasn't really anything to put there, and I couldn't ethically convince myself to play their game of hiding the actual permissions from users, so not updating that section was why most of my apps were pulled, even though they eventually would have been pulled for not updating the compiledAppVersion.

Their goal is quite clear, make maintaining apps painful enough that only people who get paid to keep them there will put up with all of their crap.

Comment Re: Maybe collaborate with the space junk database (Score 1) 99

The data from the MPC is freely available, no coordination is required beyond what happened. Orbits change and new observations are required to update the orbits. Old object reidentified as existing ones happens all the time when an object becomes more visible than it has been for a while.

MPC data downloads: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fminorplanetcenter.net%2F...

Comment Re: pop up adds for nav? (Score 1) 81

Navigation systems are intended to be looked at while driving by design.

But the legal system doesn't work like that anyway. Most states are either comparative negligence or modified comparative negligence states, where parties are liable for their percentage of fault. With the "modified" version preventing plaintifs more than 51% at fault from recovering any damages. But 3rd parties will always be able to recover from all other parties based on their fault percentage.

Comment Re:Where? (Score 1) 52

The first 8Mb was not empty, starts right off with some non-ASCII characters, probably because passwords aren't limited to ASCII. Looks to be on password per line, but pretty useless for any type of research. It's just a list of (possible) passwords, we don't know if the people supplying it just seeded it with a bunch of random garbage, and there's no username or system to tie it to, so you can't look for common patterns where people use the system's name or parts of their username. I can't tell if dupes have been removed, but it certainly doesn't appear sorted.

Comment Re:Uh, what? (Score 1) 75

the second is defined in terms which exclude those ("unperturbed"). So there is no validity to the claim - the second is deliberately defined to be invariant (to the best of our knowledge), and physical clocks are corrected for such errors.

This is completely wrong. There are quite a few different time standards developed to deal with the fact that the length of a second is different in different places. UTC is based on Atomic Time, specifically defines what a second is near the surface of the Earth. An SI second is defined as a certain number of vibrations of a caesium atom, which will be observed differently by observers in different reference frames.

There are numerous time standards defined to deal with this. E.g.. Geocentric Coordinate Time, which is time at the center of the Earth without gravitational time dilation. Barycentric Dynamic Time, the time at the center of the solar system, Barycentric Coordinate Time which is the same, but without gravitational time dilation. This new lunar time will just be one more of those.

Comment Re: Really necessary? (Score 1) 118

No, we don't have positive leap seconds scheduled. Whether or not a leap second will be introduced is determined by the International Earth Rotation Service and announced about 6 months in advance (no earlier) in their Bulliten C.

See the IERS bullitens for more info: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.iers.org%2FIERS%2FEN%2FP...

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