Mario Avila

Aero engineer, aviator, photographer, Guatemalan

[JamesFennell MBE @FennellJW]

The last match up this big between England and Norway was at Stamford Bridge... in 1066...

We won that one, but lost to France in the final. 960 years of hurt..

[Mario Avila @Madpilot44]

@AI_EmeraldApple It would be funny if gamers saved the world on this issue...

[Emerald Apple @AI_EmeraldApple]

It has gotten so bad that physical ownership of the hardware doesn't necessarily even mean you can use it.

An example is the Samsung Gear VR.

Currently, the device is unusable because Meta discontinued the software that allows it to function. What's worse is that it automatically "updates" with a zero-byte update that essentially bricks the VR headset even if you have the compatible smartphone for the device. Without an elaborate 'hack,' to make the device work, and a firewall on the phone to prevent an update, the device is just a paperweight.

Yes, it's 10 years old, and it's really not great compared to the modern VR headsets, but people should be allowed to use it if they own it. All the games, movies, and apps you bought for the platform are basically all GONE, unless you buy a new headset.

There was nearly ZERO cost for Meta to keep this running, as it used the same back-end servers for the file servers that updated their current VR headsets. But the existence of it also meant a lot of people didn't "upgrade" to the new headset because it still worked well enough for VR movies.

It's already happening with smart speakers, where the Spotify car thing was bricked when cloud support ended, or the Oral-B smart toothbrush was also killed after connectivity was discontinued. Same with certain printers, and device pairing forced incompatibilities.

Now imagine the same thing with electric cars, where it auto-updates a bricking update that essentially kills the car from functioning, on a smart TV, or even home appliances.... all because the manufacturers want to force you to buy a new one.

It's gonna get worse without comprehensive consumer protection laws, and the whole thing is that physical media is a small sidebar when it comes to how massive the problem is ALREADY!

The current reality is that even if you own the PHYSICAL HARDWARE, they can still revoke the functionality of it...

[Alex Datos @AlexDatos2]

Por PRIMERA vez en TODA la historia de la Copa del Mundo ni 🇧🇷Brasil ni 🇩🇪Alemania estarán entre los mejores OCHO del torneo

1930: 🇧🇷❌
1934: ❌🇩🇪
1938: 🇧🇷❌
1950: 🇧🇷❌
1954: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1958: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1962: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1966: ❌🇩🇪
1970: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1974: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1978: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1982: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1986: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1990: ❌🇩🇪
1994: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
1998: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
2002: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
2006: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
2010: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
2014: 🇧🇷🇩🇪
2018: 🇧🇷❌
2022: 🇧🇷❌
2026: ❌❌

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The US Navy operates a 50,000 acre forest in Indiana whose entire job is keeping one wooden ship from 1797 afloat.

The ship is USS Constitution, still a commissioned warship with an active-duty crew. Cannonballs bounced off her in 1812 because the hull sandwiches a wall of live oak ribs between two layers of white oak planking, nearly 2 feet of solid wood so dense it barely floats. British 18-pounders hit it and dropped into the sea. A sailor yelled "her sides are made of iron" and the nickname stuck.

Here's the problem with owning a 229-year-old wooden ship: you can't buy the parts. Hull planks run up to 40 feet long and 7 inches thick, cut from single white oak trunks. A white oak takes over a century to grow that big. No lumberyard on earth stocks it.

So the Navy grows its own. Constitution Grove at Naval Support Activity Crane holds trees over 100 years old, reserved exclusively for this ship. Foresters there are managing oaks today that will become hull planking in the 2100s. The maintenance plan literally runs on tree time.

Every 20 years or so she enters dry dock and shipwrights swap out rotted timber. After two centuries of this, estimates put original 1797 wood at maybe 10 to 15 percent of the ship. The Navy keeps replacing her plank by plank because Congress mandated her preservation and because she's the only active US warship that has sunk an enemy vessel.

Every other asset in the Navy has a decommission date. This one has a tree farm.

[En Júpiter @En_jupiter_]

Si México gana hoy no te comportes como pendejo irresponsable.
El festejo dejó unos hijos sin padre y una viuda.

[Iain Cameron @theiaincameron]

Mexico v England is a World Cup Round of 16 tie where one country's water is responsible for heating the other's.

The Gulf Stream is a powerful Atlantic current that originates in the Gulf of Mexico and flows to Europe, warming the climates of the landmasses along its path.

Stay tuned for more cutting-edge, geography-based World Cup analysis.

[The British Patriot @TheBritLad]

Muslims are not a race.

Criticising Islam is not racist.
Islam is an idea, not a skin colour.

Conflating ideology with race is a deliberate tactic to shut down legitimate debate.

In a free society, anything is up for debate.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That "dead" battery is a fiction, and the physics behind this is genuinely elegant.

Lithium cells die permanently if they drop below roughly 2.5 volts. Copper from the anode's current collector dissolves into the electrolyte, then plates back as metal filaments that short the cell from the inside. So Apple cuts you off early. When your iPad shows 0%, the battery still holds several percent of real chemical charge. Zero is a software decision protecting the chemistry.

That reserve keeps the power management chip alive, and with it the accelerometer.

An accelerometer is a microscopic silicon weight suspended on springs, etched into a chip smaller than a grain of rice. Gravity pulls the weight, the deflection shifts a capacitance reading, and the chip knows which way is down. Measuring gravity this way costs a few microamps. The screen draws roughly a million times more.

Run the math. An iPad Pro battery holds around 10,000 mAh. A 3% hidden reserve is 300 mAh. At 5 microamps, that reserve powers the accelerometer for 60,000 hours. Nearly seven years of knowing which way is up, on a battery you were told is empty.

The icon is the final trick. Plugging in the cable wakes a minimal boot firmware that runs off the charger, reads the accelerometer, and draws the battery symbol to match.

Which way is up costs almost nothing to know. So a "dead" iPad never stops asking.

[Ahmed pak 🇵🇰 @Ahmedpak378456]

Abd Allah ibn Sa'd (First ex Muslim on earth”

According to historians, he was the main scribe for Muhammad. After noticing linguistic errors in the revelations and the Muhammad making changes as per Ibn Abi sa’d suggestions, he escaped from Madina to Mecca.

He exposed the Quran as a fabrication and not from any God. Then Prophet ordered his killing in retaliation.

It was the first apostate murder in Islam.

[Carlo Martin @Liberfach0]

🇬🇧 En Londres, en una misma calle donde hinchas de Marruecos prendían fuego ante la vista y paciencia de la Policia, estaban arrestando a un británico que quería impedir que realicen más vandalismo. Esto ya no es una broma, el gobierno británico odia a sus ciudadanos.

[Mario Avila @Madpilot44]

@CTercermundista El problema no es que no hagan nada, el problema es que activamente entorpecen las tareas de los que si quieren hacer, para no dejar hacer nada

[Carnaval Tercermundista @CTercermundista]

Feliz domingo.

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Every summer, the Netherlands splits itself into three zones so the whole country doesn't try to leave on the same day. North, middle, and south each get out of school on a different week. The government set it up this way for one reason: traffic.

Look at the map and you can see why. A thick blue cloud of movement sits over the Netherlands, then drains south in thin lines through Belgium, down across France, over the Alps into Italy, Austria, and Croatia. Roughly the same roads, every July.

A big part of what makes it so packed is the caravan. Dutch families own more of them per person than anyone else on the planet. Around 450,000 on the road, another 20,000 sold each year, at least one household in ten with one parked somewhere. They sit in old greenhouses all winter, then get hooked up to the car in summer. The Dutch nickname for them is sleurhut, which means "dragging hut."

This is a fairly recent thing. Kip, the most popular Dutch caravan brand and also the Dutch word for chicken, sold its first one in 1947 and took off in the 1960s, right as the two-week family holiday became a normal part of Dutch life. Time off helped it stick. Dutch law now gives every full-time worker at least 20 paid days a year.

All of it pours onto a few big motorways at once, and the jam spreads across the continent. France has a name for the worst weekend of the year, samedi noir, or black Saturday, when the roads south lock up. In 2021 the traffic jams inside France hit 1,096 kilometers in one day, longer than the whole Netherlands three times over. The A7 out of Lyon, the old Route du Soleil, backs up for hours. The Gotthard tunnel in Switzerland can add two more. Dutch, German, and French drivers all aim for the same beaches on the same afternoon.

Which is the whole point of the three zones. Spread across three weeks, more than 18 million people can get away without every road grinding to a stop. The dates are set years ahead and printed on every school calendar. The tweet calls it a canonical European event. For a country that rearranges its school year just to get everyone out the door, that reads about right.

[Skscartoon @skscartoon]

Birmingham police arrested the white victim of an assault while allowing the attacker to flee. This perfectly demonstrates how lucky the Americans were to break away from Britain 250 years ago.

[Robert Jenrick @RobertJenrick]

The police now concede it wasn’t a ‘fight’ but an ‘assault’.

They are finally investigating the men they allowed to flee.

This wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the footage shared on this platform.

One of many such cases.

And to think Government ministers are boycotting the platform and trying to control what appears on people’s social media.

This was clearly a serious failure of policing. Why won’t the Home Secretary summon the Chief Constable to explain themselves and why they tried to cover it up?

It’s another egregious case of two-tier policing and it has gone unchallenged by this rotten government.

This nonsense will end under Nigel Farage and Zia Yusuf when Reform UK re-establishes equality before the law.

I wonder if any of the media will ask me about it this morning…

[Hatchling @FoundlingOne]

Birmingham police is lying and covering up their mess. Let the victim go, arrest the criminals and discipline your disgusting officers. @BrumPolice

[Zug the sane @ZugPaints]

Apparently this wasn't one of those occasions that called for immediate police action.

[Queen Bee @KingBobIIV]

Unbelievable.

I was threatened with arrest a month ago for stopping on double yellows to help and old lady out of my car. They then pulled me over with blue lights 10 minutes later, *again* and demanded I show them respect because they "didn't like my attitude".

Meanwhile, these boys deliberately break the law, around the police car, and the coppers just keep driving.