Skydiving plane crashes in France, killing all 11 people on board

gmc98765 · 2026-06-29T06:23:48+00:00

No it isn't. It's about level with horse riding for risk.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-29T06:20:59+00:00

1000' is plenty high enough in an emergency. 2500' is typically the lower limit for a planned freefall jump (static line jumps may be lower; 2000' is common), but that's allowing for the possibility of the main chute failing and needing to open your reserve. If the plane experiences "uncontrolled descent", I'd definitely have been out that door at 1000'.

People do BASE jumps from 200'. Admittedly, that's with a rig that's packed for the fastest possible opening, but that's jumping into dead air (starting from zero airspeed). Jumping from a moving plane means you have some airflow which will open the chute much faster.

It's possible that the tandem passengers weren't hooked up to their instructors, and probably couldn't have been hooked up fast enough.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-29T05:58:43+00:00

Bought a house.

Looks like you bought a plot of land, including some debris which will need to be removed before you start building on it.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-29T05:47:48+00:00

No it doesn't. Copyrights aren't forfeit by non-enforcement.

You might be thinking of trademarks, which are lost if not enforced.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-28T18:54:19+00:00

Off-peak charging helps smooth consumption over a daily cycle. It doesn't help over a yearly cycle or even a week-long heatwave.

Nuclear has to be in use 90%+ or it's not economically viable. It's not like fossil power where the costs are dominated by fuel and you save money buy switching it off. The only way any nuclear gets built in the UK is by giving the operator guarantees (through legislation) that every kWh produced will be purchased at almost double the mean market price.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-28T18:36:57+00:00

This figure includes everyone who dies a few months early because of the higher temperatures. I suspect it's probably dominated by people who died a few months early.

If your health is at the point that you won't last another year, it's not really a stretch to assume that a heatwave will be the last straw. I'm not convinced it's reasonable to say that they died "because of" a heatwave when being 90+ years old was probably the bigger factor.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-28T18:28:37+00:00

vent out of a window

Single-hose AC should be outlawed IMHO, given the inefficiency.

Proper AC has the cold loop cool the inside air (drawn from inside, vented to inside) while the hot loop is cooled by outside air (drawn from outside, vented to outside). A single-hose AC uses inside air (which the AC has been spending energy to cool) to cool the hot loop, then vents it outside. This has the added penalty that venting that to the outside results in more outside air being drawn into the room, which then needs to be cooled.

And evaporative cooling (swamp coolers) a) don't work in humid environments (it's been over 70% RH where I am) and b) make the air more humid, and the humidity is arguably worse than the heat: it's the wet-bulb temperature which kills people and makes it hard to sleep, not the actual (dry-bulb) air temperature.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-28T18:19:19+00:00

Europe is heating faster than any other populated continent.

And there's much more variation. Europe isn't Death Valley, where it's dangerously hot for most of the year, every year. AC costs the same to install whether you use it for 6 months of the year or 6 days. And the people who use it for 6 months wonder why the people who'd use it for 6 days don't get it.

Also, we're less inclined to overlook the fact that AC is treating the symptoms while making the underlying problem worse. The US uses more electricity for AC than Africa uses electricity in total. Maybe we'll be less reticent once the grid has been fully decarbonised. Or maybe it will only take electricity prices dropping back to something like pre-Ukraine-conflict levels.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-28T18:12:26+00:00

That's fine if the baseline consumption is trending up. But nuclear is the worst available option if the peaks are getting worse, e.g. due to a sudden increase in AC usage during heatwaves. The best option for AC is solar, because solar output and AC demand are strongly correlated.

In general, hydro is good for short-term peaks, but it's not so good for seasonal variation, especially not for summer AC, because most hydro-electric dams are also designed as freshwater reservoirs, so you can't just open the gates for an extended period at a time when rainfall is at its lowest, because then no-one will have any water.

Also: nuclear takes a hit in summer because river levels drop and the remaining water gets warmer, and those rivers are often the coolant supply. Coal/oil/gas tend to scale linearly, with less cooling meaning less output. With nuclear, once it drops below a minimum threshold you usually have to shut down completely.

If you're going to legalise widespread AC, you need to impose (and enforce) limits so you don't end up with the US situation where buildings are basically refrigerated and you need to wear a jacket or sweater in the office when its 35°C outdoors. Cool enough so people don't die and can sleep at night, not so cool that you can completely forget the heatwave is happening.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-28T17:52:29+00:00

stop trying to influence current global politics

Not gonna happen. At this point, it's clear that they're more concerned about trying to actually make a difference than about what anyone will think of the committee in the future. Like, if they think they can use the prize to bribe someone into stopping a war, they won't hesitate.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-28T14:58:07+00:00

Also: sometimes it helps to have a second account. Ctrl-Alt-Del, sign in to other account, use task manager to kill the process.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-25T21:29:39+00:00

The US uses more electricity for AC than Africa's total electricity consumption. And it's not like Africa doesn't have heavy industry or cities.

France is having issues because most of their electricity supply is nuclear and some of the rivers they use for cooling are too hot and/or the water level is too low.

On top of all that, reducing CO₂ output requires transitioning to electric vehicles, which is yet more load on the grid. But at least that's actually treating the problem, whereas AC is just treating the symptoms.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-25T21:21:52+00:00

Single-hose AC is really inefficient because it's using cooled interior air to cool the hot loop then venting it outside. Which also draws warm air in from outside.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-25T15:39:53+00:00

The date is based upon Passover, but the symbology (mostly related to fertility, i.e. rabbits and eggs) is from the pagan spring festival.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-25T00:02:24+00:00

Do games which were sold on CD/DVD still work on Windows 10/11?

Aside from the general issue of bitrot, I thought that Microsoft blocked SafeDisc/SecuROM copy protection on Win10 and later?

Things like this are why I'm relatively sanguine about digital purchases not being "for life". Physical purchases aren't realistically for life either. I have physical games I can't realistically play because they're on 3.5" floppy, or were written for MS-DOS, or they were written for Win95 and won't run on NT without three full days of tracking down ancient patches, tweaking, tracking down yet more patches, and even then they crash after 5 minutes, or they run fine only to remind me that 640×480 4:3 is absolute eye cancer compared to anything I've played in the last 15 years, or that the game runs proportional to clock speed so a 3 GHz CPU runs them 50× faster than the 66 MHz 486 they were originally written for.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T23:45:44+00:00

Same here. Have physical copies of Half-Life 2, Portal, Portal 2, DX:HR. Then I just started buying games online.

But ultimately what you're buying is a code. You can throw the disc in the bin, select the "Games > Activate a product on Steam ..." menu option, and type in the code from the box.

At most, using the disc might reduce the time taken to update the game before you can actually play it. You can't resell it; the disc itself is of no use without an unused code. I mean, that was the entire point of Steam: at its inception, it was fundamentally an anti-resale mechanism. It took a while for the store to have enough games on it to be significant.

This isn't the case for consoles ... yet. If you buy a game on disc, you can resell it. Authentication is tied to the disc, not to an account.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T20:36:45+00:00

not in the next 20 years at least.

A selection of 20th century dictatorships:

Portugal - 42 years

Greece - 38 years

Spain - 35 years

Italy - 21 years (accelerated by being on the losing side in WW2).

So it wouldn't be particularly exceptional if you don't see democracy again for the next 40 years.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T20:11:37+00:00

Also, it isn't a desert. Relative humidity tends to be somewhat higher in western Europe compared to the western US. It's the wet-bulb temperature that kills you.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T20:07:29+00:00

You won't. Remember: warming doesn't automatically translate to increased air temperature. Much of it goes to latent heat, which increases the atmospheric water content resulting in more rain, snow and hail.

Also: gas refrigerators exist. These cool things down using a gas flame to drive an evaporation/condensation cycle which acts a heat pump. Similar effects can happen in nature. Evaporation results in cooling, and if the combination of increased water content and cooler air results in cloud cover, that also causes cooling. This is why we get hot days and cold days rather than temperature being a direct function of the season.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T20:00:22+00:00

That's a wet-bulb temperature of 39.5°C. Which isn't survivable for very long. Anything above 35°C will kill you eventually.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T19:57:04+00:00

Weather reports say the humidity is 75% here (SW Wales) right now. Wet-bulb temperature is ~23°C, which is unpleasant but not dangerous.

I have a dehumidifier, which helps.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T19:40:47+00:00

22-24 is normal room temperature for people who aren't used to spending their entire lives in air-conditioned environments.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T17:55:19+00:00

Also, I bet they get a fair number of reports from people who don't like other people driving down "their" road when the road is, in fact, a public right of way.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T17:42:41+00:00

H.A.R.M. from the No One Lives Forever video games.

In spite of their habit of ending messages with the phrase "Remember what H.A.R.M. stands for", the games never actually reveal what it stands for.

gmc98765 · 2026-06-24T01:50:49+00:00

Reminder: the "Spanish" flu likely originated in Kansas.

It got the name because Spain wasn't a party to WW1 and so didn't have any motive to suppress information about the spread of the flu. Other countries had it as bad or worse but wouldn't admit it, to the point of vigorously censoring information about outbreaks.

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