Merijn

1995: PHP is dead, learn ColdFusion
2002: PHP is dead, learn ASP​.net
2003: PHP is dead, learn Django
2004: PHP is dead, learn Ruby on Rails
2010: PHP is dead, learn Flask
2011: PHP is dead, learn AngularJS
2016: PHP is dead, learn Next.js
2022: okay this is awkward

If every country's airspace extended up forever, which country would own the largest percentage of the galaxy at any given time?

Reuven Lazarus

Today's question is adapted from What If 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions, which contains many more What If answers and is available now!

Congratulations to Australia, new rulers of the galaxy.

The Australian flag has a number of symbols on it, including five stars that represent the stars of the Southern Cross.[1] Based on the answer to this question, maybe their flag designers should think bigger.

Countries in the southern hemisphere have an advantage when it comes to star ownership. Earth's axis is tilted relative to the Milky Way; our North Pole points generally away from the galaxy's center.

If each country's airspace extended upward forever, the core of the galaxy would stay under the control of countries in the southern hemisphere, changing hands over the course of each day as the Earth rotates.

At its peak, Australia would control more stars than any other country. The supermassive black hole at the core of the galaxy would enter Australian airspace every day south of Brisbane, near the small town of Broadwater.

After about an hour, almost the entire galactic core—along with a substantial chunk of the disk—would be within Australian jurisdiction.

At various times throughout the day, the galactic core would pass through the domain of South Africa, Lesotho, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. The United States, Europe, and most of Asia would have to be content with outer sections of the galactic disk.

The northern hemisphere isn't left with the dregs, though. The outer galactic disk has some cool things in it—like Cygnus X-1, a black hole currently devouring a supergiant star.[2] Each day, as the core of the galaxy crossed the Pacific, Cygnus X-1 would enter the United States's airspace over North Carolina.

While owning a black hole would be cool, the United States would also have millions of planetary systems constantly moving in and out of its territory—which might cause some problems.

The star 47 Ursae Majoris has at least three planets and probably more. If any of those planets have life on them, then once a day all that life passes through the United States. That means that there's a period of a few minutes each day where any murders on those planets technically happen in New Jersey.

Luckily for the New Jersey court system, altitudes above about 12 miles are generally considered "high seas." According to the American Bar Association's Winter 2012 issue of the Admiralty and Maritime Law Committee Newsletter, this means that deaths above these altitudes—even deaths in space—are arguably covered by the 1920 Death on the High Seas Act, or DOHSA.

But if any aliens on 47 Ursae Majoris are considering bringing a lawsuit in a US court under DOHSA, they're going to be disappointed. DOHSA has a statute of limitations of 3 years, but 47 Ursae Majoris is more than 40 light-years away...

...which means it's physically impossible for them to file charges in time.

[1] Epsilon Crucis has five points, while the others have seven, implying that the view of Epsilon is from a telescope with different lens geometry from the others. Minor symbolic/graphic design choice? Or clue to a secret multiversal alliance between parallel universe Australias? No way to know for sure!

[2] Cygnus X-1 was the subject of a famous bet between astrophysicists Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne over whether it was a black hole or not. Hawking, who had spent much of his career studying black holes, bet that it wasn't. He figured that if black holes turned out not to exist, at least he would win the bet as a consolation prize. In the end, luckily for his legacy, he lost.

1995: PHP is dead, learn ColdFusion
2002: PHP is dead, learn ASP​.net
2003: PHP is dead, learn Django
2004: PHP is dead, learn Ruby on Rails
2010: PHP is dead, learn Flask
2011: PHP is dead, learn AngularJS
2016: PHP is dead, learn Next.js
2022: okay this is awkward

There's a group of 40 year old women who give me the evil eye when I pick up my son, purely because I'm younger. Sometimes I'll put a tight outfit on solely to go and collect him in, because I take great pleasure in watching how irrate they get at their staring husbands.

Nilay Patel points out the obvious and inevitable conflict between Elon's dreams and Twitter's reality #

During lockdown my right hand thumb nail became badly deformed and I told everyone it was a symptom of Covid, it was actually a symptom of spending hours making my horsey run faster in Red Dead Redemption 2

I work from home as software developer. When I'm bored I turn of the lights and play techno music to pretend I'm in a hacker movie.

I'm scared of confronting my wife so when I need to say something that may cause an argument I do it from another room in our dog's voice pretending that it's him so she'll be angry with him and not me. It doesn't work.

Streaming the newest season of Doctor Who has been tricky for years now. While Amazon and HBO Max have played host to past seasons of the NuWho, as the rebooted franchise’s current iteration is called, there was no way to stream the current season until it concluded in the US unless you paid for BBC America in a cable package or bought the individual seasons themselves digitally. However, that is changing as the BBC has announced a major partnership with Disney that will bring Doctor Who to Disney+, with new episodes premiering there outside of the UK and Ireland.

The partnership doesn’t stop at Disney+ playing host to the series either. Disney is working with the BBC under a “shared creative vision” in a bid to regain the global popularity of the brand that was seen during the earlier years of NuWho, which sounds like Disney is putting some money behind this to bring yet another icon under its umbrella. The ramifications should be massive for the series, which should get a budget injection from having Disney help usher it forward and could mean that the show begins to once again try to create its own universe with spinoffs and the like. Doctor Who has seen a ratings slump for years under showrunner Chris Chibnall and is poised to get a dramatic boost in the arm from this.

That’s all the more likely considering the return of Russell T. Davies to the showrunner chair. He oversaw multiple NuWho spinoff series during his tenure before the series contracted back down to just one show. The partnership also comes as David Tennant returns as the Fourteenth Doctor after the shocking regeneration of Jodie Whitaker in “The Power of the Doctor” this past weekend. Tennant will star in three specials on Disney+ before Ncuti Gatwa takes over the role. It’s a perfect way to try to bring the Doctor back to a global audience as people see a familiar face on Disney+ and, theoretically, carry on with Gatwa after being reengaged.

“I love this show, and this is the best of both worlds – with the vision and joy of the BBC and Disney+ together we can launch the TARDIS all around the planet, reaching a new generation of fans while keeping our traditional home firmly on the BBC in the UK,” said Davies.

The BBC also released a “new” logo for the show, which you can see in the video above and the header. It’s a throwback to Doctor Who‘s logo from the series’s heyday in the 1970s when Tom Baker played the Fourth Doctor. It’s another hint that this next series of Doctor Who is going to be looking to pull people back in by leaning on the show’s most popular times.

There’s no word on where past seasons of the series will reside, but you have to believe that at some point they’ll make their way over to Disney+ as well.

Doctor Who will premiere on Disney+ and the BBC in November 2023.

If somebody's pissed me off at work, instead of my usual "kind regards" I'll sign off my emails to them with "regards". Everybody knows a plain "regards" really means "fuck you", right?

After a heavy drinking session, I shat the bed. Told the wife it was the dog to avoid embarrassment. The size and stench was so bad that she took him to the vet, and found out he was showing early signs of stomach cancer. I inadvertently saved my dog but can never take credit.

I listed a free 50" plasma TV on Freecycle just to see what would happen. Everything kicked off, the admin for my area tried to get it for himself and he got sacked.

I got so drunk last night that I forgot I was vegetarian and went home with a large chicken kebab.

Be fair to Liz Truss.

A Prime Minister cannot resign after 42 days. It has to be 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67 etc

I named my son Edward after Edward Elizabeth Hitler from Bottom. I can now shout Eddie at him in Richie's voice with impunity.

I was with my BF for 9 years, every October I would change my groans in bed to ooohhh like a ghost, climaxing in an appropriate way for Halloween. We thought it was funny but I did this on Saturday with my new partner and he's pardon the pun but he's ghosted me.

I'm a strict vegetarian and an even stricter introvert. I was at an Italian restaurant, but there was a clear language barrier. Instead of receiving the pizza I thought I ordered, I was handed a plate of veal liver. I ate it all because I didn't want to be "that customer."

Chatdienst Signal stopt over enkele maanden met de ondersteuning voor sms-berichten in zijn Android-app. Volgens de berichtendienst zorgde sms voor problemen bij gebruikers en bij het ontwerpen van de app. De functie wordt de komende maanden uitgefaseerd.

by law, DragonForce must be in every rhythm game ever made #

all-time Dunning-Kruger champion

I have no idea what any of the symbols on the oven mean. All I know is I have to choose the one that looks like a fan or else my wife gets annoyed at me. I've always wanted to try the one with the cool looking little baker man. They may as well be Egyptian hieroglyphs to me.

The WhatsApp groups I am in with my best friends have got me through the last 3 years. During this time we have been consistently offensive to each other. I will never tell them how much I love them.

An interesting development in the Kim <> Kanye saga

i ❤️ rss

As a Doctor, I know that a lot of my patients ailments are in the mind. They are lonely. I arrange appointments to 'match make' those who I think will get on. I keep them waiting so they have chance to 'meet' in the waiting room. 20 years and 6 marriages. Call me Cilla.

This is a confession on behalf of my daft twat of an ex-husband who tried to iron a shirt while he was wearing it, with predictable results.

When I was 11, I used to type 'ass' into google images and have a wank, then follow it up with a search for 'assassins creed' so my parents thought I was innocently interested in the history of the assassin brotherhood.

David Friedman looks at novel juggling routines #

Texts exposed in the discovery process during the Elon Musk v. Twitter lawsuit have exposed not just a number of high-profile people embarrassingly simping for Musk, but also Musk's ideas about Twitter-but-on-the-blockchain.

In a text sent to his brother, Musk wrote, "I have an idea for a blockchain social media system that does both payments and short text messages/links like twitter. You have to pay a tiny amount to register your message on the chain, which will cut out the vast majority of spam and bots. There is no throat to choke, so free speech is guaranteed." In another message, to the president of his Boring Company, Musk narrowed in on an amount: 0.1 Doge per tweet or retweet. At today's prices, at 0.1 Doge per tweet, 1¢ would buy you about 160 tweets.

Musk's idea that there is some magical amount of money that ordinary people are willing to pay to send out a tweet or a retweet, but that spammers are not willing to pay to spam, seems preposterous. And given that "free speech is guaranteed" and blockchains are immutable, he would really need to hope that he finds this amount, because otherwise there's going to be a lot of spam permanently stored on Web3 Twitter.

As with many of Musk's ideas, the idea for a blockchain-based "free speech" social network is not new. On one of the more popular such services, BitClout, the home page shows posts such as "are there actually real ppl here, or only 'marketing' and ai-generated art?" It costs $0.01 to create a profile or to begin a tutorial on how to use the site. Out of the list of ten top-ranked creators on the site, the top two (Elon Musk and Naval Ravikant) haven't even signed up yet, and another five haven't posted in months.

Musk appeared to later toss out his blockchain social network idea, though not for spam reasons: "Blockchain twitter isn't possible, as the bandwidth and latency requirements cannot be supported by a peer to peer network, unless those 'peers' are absolutely gigantic, thus defeating the purpose of a decentralised network".

• "The Big Takeaways From Elon Musk’s Twitter Texts" , Time
• "Here are some of the cringiest revelations in the Elon Musk text dump" , TechCrunch