the "irreversible damage" book cover is still perhaps the most succinct demonstration of how the laserfocus the detranxiety movement has on muh poor little girls is fundamentally an outgrowth of the general terror about declining (white) birth rates and white woman fertility as a dwindling resource. like, what's actually wrong with the kitschy smiling little girl in that picture? she looks pretty content for someone "mutilated." is she missing her head, brain, heart, limbs or what? anything that would obstruct her in living out her 8 decades on this earth? hell no, it's much worse than that. it's something that actually matters. she's missing her ability to produce White Babies. you're telling me we've spent decades working to overturn roe or at least make it as difficult as possible and now that we succeeded they've found a way to weasel out of being a reproductive resource anyway? that just won't do.

kissy kissy

You know,

FUN FACT: GPS has an official logo

and it's this terrible MMORPG badge sort of thing.

(It says "NAVSTAR GPS" because the original name was Navstar GPS. It might still technically be so, although Wikipedia thinks it has been renamed to just the Global Positioning System)

i saw your post about GPS receivers and i was wondering how they work well for like. Aviation. my GPS receiver is SBAS and WAAS equipped. Does that happen to do something different from a phone receiver? or does it work similarly to cell towers

So those both work by having extra satellites with newer protocols (GPS was originally designed in 1973!)

They both transfer the data much faster/accurately, so your GPS receiver gets started fast by listening to the info from them and then combining it with the slow GPS satellite datastreams.

They're similarly passive, though. Your GPS unit doesn't need to transmit anything to pick up those signals. It just needs different decoding circuits and maybe an extra antenna.

[Well, you do enough talk, my little hawk. Why do you cry? Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook Burn. Or the 4th of July. We're all gonna die.]

I have heard a British person refer to the 70s Southern Rock band Zed Zed Top.

Do British people refer to Jay-Z as "Jay-Zed"?

british people are unfamiliar with music or musicians

get your power then reblog and tell everyone in the tags!

Note: Powers only work with enthusiastic consent!

Foone they exposed your Twitter blue check!!!

Is this because I met Elon Musk and didn't shoot him? why is this happening. I haven't used my twitter account for anything other than reblogging my kofi or reposting something for a friend since... november 2022?

the annoying thing is that it actually IS, but I'm too broke to do it at the moment

born to use switches and knobs arranged in a cockpit, each one offering a tactile sensation as you flick it and the mech you're in lurches into action

forced to use touchscreens at your desk

speaking of weight gain, I'm happier I draw Hitomi with a bit of chub now!!!

Someday I'm gonna have a computer I have to climb into and strap myself down. Flip on all the switches and let the turbines spin up, put on the eye-tracking helmet. There'll be multiple screens, but half of them are small monochrome CRTs with little buttons around their bezel.

born to use switches and knobs arranged in a cockpit, each one offering a tactile sensation as you flick it and the mech you're in lurches into action

forced to use touchscreens at your desk

Yeah! So GPS fundamentally is listening to several satellites broadcasting a weak time signal. You can do that on its own, and it'll work, but it's slow. It's slow because you need to know where all the satellites are, so you can calculate how far you are from them.

The GPS satellites are constantly broadcasting that information, but in a very low-speed manner, with a weak signal. Your GPS device has to wait until it can download a full ephemeris (precise orbital information) and almanac (list of satellites and rough orbital information). This could easily take 12 minutes even with good reception: if the signal is bad, it's gotta wait for the next re-transmit, which takes a long while.

So, how do we speed it up? Well, they do some tricks. Your GPS unit usually saves the old info, so at the beginning of session it can use the old data, which hopefully helps it get started right away... But it's still going to be slow the first time, and if it's been too long since you last used it, the set of satellites visible might be completely different, because of varying statuses and new satellites being launched. So that helps, but it's not great.

So enter A-GPS: Assisted GPS. Basically you solve this problem using your cellphone's data connection. When you open the navigation app on your phone, it starts listening for satellites, but it also talks to your telco and says "hey give me the GPS almanac and also where am I?"

Because the almanac takes 12 minutes to download from the GPS satellites, but it's only 14 kilobytes. Your 5g connection can transfer that in milliseconds. And your telco knows where you are, roughly: that's how the "cellular" part of "cellular phone" works: the world is divided up into cells defined by which cellphone tower is closest.

So with AGPS, your phone gets a quick almanac and a rough fix on your location from the cellular network, then switches to using regular GPS. This means you get a quick initial position, then you get your later movements from the GPS satellites as usual.

So it's active in the sense that you're already being tracked by your telco, and then your phone has to send a "HEY I NEED TO NAVIGATE, HELP" signal to get started.

But if you're not doing AGPS, like you're using a standalone receiver with no network connection, or you have turned off AGPS (I think some android phones have an option?) , it'll be fully passive and untrackable.

Thank you to @sleepnoises for making the original poll & for giving us the idea to to this :)

Sorry if we couldn’t get your favorite on here, we were limited to only 12 options (11 if you don’t include the “other” option).

centaur

(she/him)🏳️‍⚧️