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Already exists, it's what people refer to as "male olympics". As far as I know, females aren't banned from competing. It is just that they don't stand a chance in most disciplines. The whole point of female olympics is to keep males out.

Can trans male who transitioned before puberty compete in male olympics while being pumped full of steroids legally?

Maybe they should accept that they simply aren't competitive if they can't compete against their own sex. There's no shame in it, most people aren't competitive, certainly so at this level.

That’s not true. Men’s gymnastics and women’s gymnastics are totally different sets of events and men would get trounced in a women’s event.

Confidently incorrect. As an example - a banned Thomas salto had been developed and performed by a male gymnast first, and afterwards women starting trying to do it too. This is an anecdote example, but it shows that gymnastics is not some women dominated sport. As another example - four out of four named jumps in the figure skating are all named by male athletes who performed them first.

Only because they don't practice those events... If men practices those events they would be better at them

I'm not sure that is true. Beam targets flexibility in ways that no men's event does.

Putting aside that you argue entirely by assertion, that is one discipline, which therefore does not contradict the claim about "most disciplines".

Meanwhile the gap is well known to be massive in typical events, e.g.:

* Compare https://worldpowerlifting.com/records/womens-world-records/ vs https://worldpowerlifting.com/records/mens-world-records/ (or for that matter, browse through https://exrx.net/Testing/WeightLifting/StrengthStandards)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women's_100_metres_world_recor... plateaued at numbers seen in men's competition over a century ago; a "sub-elite" female competitor sprints barely ahead of "intermediate recreational" men per https://marathonhandbook.com/average-100-meter-time/ . Griffith-Joyner's record-setting time would not have even qualified her to run with men since at least 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_metres_at_the_Olympics

* I often hear it suggested that women show an advantage in longer races, but even at standard marathon length this is not borne out in results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Boston_Marathon

* National and international level competitive women's sports teams regularly get trounced by teenaged boys in exhibition e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDH_r7-GN4o widely reported on last year and https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-b... from 2017

* The entire history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_(tennis) requires quite a bit of creative interpretation to put women's tennis anywhere near the level of men's

That's just off the top of my head of anecdotes and examples I can recall being casually thrown around in these sorts of discussions.


And McDonald’s is known to be primarily a real estate company. Berkshire Hathaway is meant to be an insurance company. Military aircraft manufacturers are really maintenance companies.

MSFT acquired Skype in 2011, so I would say only a few months:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=GB&q=s...


In the UK, wind is super volatile and isn't viable without LNG. You can have two weeks without wind several times a year. So more wind means more LNG.

And we shall call it "the Great Firewall of the UK".

It is amazing that these guys don't see the irony of monkeying totaliterian states policies, in term of surveillance and censorship.


The UK, like Australia and many of its other offshoots has always had a bit of a totalitarian streak.

[dead]


Oddly that's Zuck doing that. And weirdly, the law would only apply to app stores. I think that's a separate movement from what the UK is doing though. That US law is designed to hamstring Meta's competition not restrict political speech but it can be abused the same way I think.

There is no "US law" there are 45+ pending or passed pieces of state legislation, along with the federal Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) that's yet to be passed.

The PACs that push the one specific law you're talking about also push laws in other states, and federally, that are very, very different and draconian.


The Debian apt repository is a "covered app store" under the law, as is any place that makes software available for download.

They’re going to keep ignoring these issues because the wrong people are pointing them out. The enemy must always be wrong.

Tribalism is awful for societies. There’s a reason Russia put so much effort into amplifying it in the west.


So, the Great FUK for short?

If only it were isolated to the UK. I know a website that does not hold content itself but rather links to other sites. Basically exactly what google does.

And yet, me sitting in Germany suddenly saw a nice banned notice when trying to access the site claiming this is because of "a high court verdict yadayadaya".

Why on earth do I now find ways around a UK court order to unblock a website when I am nowhere near their country? They should at least try and keep things within their jurisdiction.


Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time. It's a historical oddity of questionable usefulness. Meanwhile the house of commons can wipe out any civil liberty with a majority of 50% plus one vote. It is remarkable how a system that seems so unstable and prone to abuses of power has served the longest continuously running democracy for so long.


> Yeah, the assumption is that the non hereditary peers are somehow more representative, but all they represent is being friends of the PM of the time

There is an informal understanding that the government gives a certain number of life peerages to the opposition and minor parties, subject to the government being able to veto individual appointments they find objectionable. So it literally isn’t true that everyone gets one by being friends with the PM-although it certainly helps

Some parties reject their entitlement-the only reason why there are no SNP life peers, is the SNP has a longstanding policy to refuse to appoint any. There are currently 76 LibDem peers, 6 DUP, 3 UUP, 2 Green and 2 Plaid Cymru. SNP would very quickly get some too if they ever changed their mind about refusing the offer. The Northern Ireland nationalist parties (Sinn Fein and SDLP) likewise have a policy against nominating life peers.


So the correction is “friends of the PM, and a few other key politicians”. Still a club of people who represent no one. And more problematic, are accountable to no one.


As Walter Bagehot wrote in The English Constitution: "An ancient and ever-altering constitution is like an old man who still wears with attached fondness clothes in the fashion of his youth: what you see of him is the same; what you do not see is wholly altered."

Absent ideological capture, it is perhaps one of the best forms of government ever created due to its pragmatic nature and its Lindyness is proof.


50% + 1 is called democracy. Civil liberties are more liable to be swept away by minorities that come to power. In the US, the republicans often do this because they have minority popular support but a disproportionate representation in government. So the key is to make sure that it's 50% + 1 but also representative of the real population.

The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.


All other democracies have safeguards against the tyranny of the majority. Whether it is representativity by state in the US or in the EU, a constitution requiring a large consensus to change in the US, or the senate being elected by the elected officials of small cities in France, it is not true that democracy is just 50% + 1 vote.


What you describe is called a Republic. Pure democracy is precisely 50% + 1 vote.


Worth noting that the distinction between democracy and republic that you're clearly advocating here is a usage particular to Americans. It doesn't have much currency elsewhere.

Countries like the Netherlands, Denmark etc all have safeguards the dilute the power of 50% + 1, and yet they are clearly not republics, being monarchies.

Political scientists tend to talk more of 'liberal democracy' (whether republican or monarchical) v 'electoral autocracy' etc. This depends on the classical use of the term 'liberal' of course, which is another word that Americans tend to use differently from everyone else.

> The nobility is another example of a minority with disproportionate power. It's important that they are reduced to ensure civil liberties.

Alexis de Tocqueville would disagree - he believed that intermediate institutions (churches, professions, elites, etc) blunt the power of the state before it reaches average people. A society without intermediate institutions is one where you have an all-powerful state on the one hand, and a largely un-coordinated mass of average people on the other. He thought this was the highway to democratic despotism. (Worth noticing that totalitarian governments focus a lot of their energy on destroying alternative centres of power such as these.)


Your friend founded OVH?


But that means you need to have a different laser pointed at every single individual aircraft right? Doesn’t really scale.


I suppose you can do time-sharing. And use mems-mirrors to quickly move the beam between different targets.



You can probably do phased arrays. (It might already be a phased array.)


Pretty sure phased array LASERs are not yet a thing.


I was not sure, but they are!

https://cga.anu.edu.au/research/activities/laser-beam-steeri...

https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/excalibur

I guess in some ways even the fancy multi diode fiber lasers are phased arrays, just with the single goal of higher output power.


Looks like these are in early development and nowhere near ready like this test was.


Lasers are coherent emitters; you can definitely make interference patterns with them, so I don't see why LASER MIMO wouldn't be possible, in theory.


Yeah but this is research, if they're to come up somewhere, where else would it be?


If starlink satellites get laser downlink, it might work :P


laser downlink to one point, isn't it? Not to 300 moving aircrafts at once.


Accept the cookies and flush them out every time you close the browser. I think it would be naive anyway to assume that clicking no on a cookie banner would achieve much for your privacy.


So-called "cookie banners" usually ask for your consent to much more than optional tracking cookies. By accepting you might be giving your permission to e.g. track you through various fingerprinting methods, build a profile and share it with advertising partners.


If they are aggressive enough to do fingerprinting, what makes you think they would abide to your choice? You do browser fingerprinting when you want to overcome people rejecting cookies.


Usually it's the fine of 2% of total global revenue (not profit)


An additional reason for not browsing the web without uBlock Origin on Firefox or other browsers with full support (not Chrome).


Why even ask for the cookies if denying them doesn’t achieve much?

It’s naive to think that cookies are the only tool used for tracking, but they are the most powerful tool for web based tracking.


Because in some legal systems you're required to ask. You're also required to follow fairly specific rules relates to the user's selection and data, though I can't imagine enforcement keeps up with websites breaking those laws.


Because EU Cookie Law was a flawed idea?


How so? The law doesn't require cookie banners. However, you could argue that tracking/advertisement cookies should have been banned completely and that the law is flawed in that it allows for tracking given user "consent".


I love the EU apologists - “it wasn’t a bad law just because the outcome was bad”


The alternative being to bend over and grab our ankles with both hands the moment the scummy ad-tech industry requests our data?

Sorry mate, the GDPR is there for a bloody good reason; and legit companies obey the law.


The GDPR is theater. An effective privacy law would have prevented data collection in the first place. Data collected will be abused, and a cute little banner won't change this.


Ummmmm.

The GDPR does outlaw unnecessary collection of personal data without explicit opt-in consent. It's baffling you appear ignorant of this.


The consent is the problem. It should be illegal even with consent, so this whole industry wouldn't exist.


Yet, Facebook and Google have a thriving business in the EU among I’m assuming EU companies.

So you can pretend that the law is effective or you can admit that all it gave the world were cookie banners.


The "cookie banners" allow you to opt out of providing your personal data. That is the entire point!

Blame the parasitic ad-tech industry for their existence. Not the lawmakers who protect all our privacy.


Yes because of the GDPR, there aren’t still two trillion dollar+ market cap ad Tech companies.

But at least we have cookie banners everywhere.


More pity to those who (for some bizarre reason) voluntarily choose to interact with those ad-tech companies.


So you don’t use Google and don’t have an Android phone?


It was not a flawed idea, but flawed execution. The law should have mandated to adhere to the user's "do not track" setting in the browser.

That being said, it was very early regulation in this field, and more recent approaches are already better, e.g., GDPR, DMA.


No, shan’t give them the metrics :)


Retire under a bridge...


Did they stutter?!


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