ground based astronomy
Advancing astronomy would require more orbital telescopes anyway, which solve a bunch of problems, like atmospheric distortion.
The actual problem is, that we currently fund short term gains (sattelites for communication and navigation) more than we fund long-term societal gains (sattelites for orbital research).
Up until a couple decades ago, basically all religious texts were distributed without getting consent, giving credit or forking over royalties to their original authors. Rhymes and songs, even images, were observed and then repeated or noted down and spread.
By todays definition, that's piracy. Piracy is exactly the same thing, just in a digital world.
Therefore, if piracy isn't halal, most religious texts and imagery aren't halal either.
Now, looking at it the other way around, to confirm that:
Theft is illegal. So the question stands: is piracy theft?
That depends on the definition of theft. The old meaning of theft, so the thing, probably ruled over in religious texts, is: The unlawful taking of the property of another.
Now, can you take something from someone else, without them loosing it? I'd argue: No!
So, piracy isn't theft. Piracy is copying or repeating.
Depends in the goal.
If they are interested in Hardware, there is no better solution, than buying a hand full of cheap, "knock-off" Arduino Nano or RP2040 boards, a couple of LEDs and resistors and then let them Experiment with Arduino C, which teaches C programming in a fun and meaningful manner.
If they should get actual useful skill, start with Python. It's easy to learn. It's widely used for small, single-person projects, e.g. for gathering and analyzing data, running simulations, organizing something, interacting with APIs...
For any project, where I'd say, that it can be done quickly by a single person quickly on the side, Python is usually the best option. Even for experienced programmers. But especially for people that are new to programming or learning. It's easy, approachable and (because everything is handled by some library) quite safe to work with.
It's by far the most useful language for anyone that isn't a full software developer. And it's among the easiest to learn.
Also, when teaching Python, consider teaching with Jupyer documents. It immediately shows, what the short block of code is doing, instead of writing a huge and long script file, then executing it and struggling with debugging where students might not even know, how to start. An easy to host solution to supply Jupyer to a whole class is JupyterHub. If you aren't concerned about your students data, Google Colab is a JupyterHub for free.
And now, finally, if you want a course that has some practical use (e.g. data analysis and math stuff) while also doing fun things and being incredibly interactive because of the use of hardware... Well... It's python again.
Let them write a short branching story using Ren'Py. It's easy and will get them engaged. Go on and switch to Jupyter/Colab and do a bit of data scraping, data analysis/math or image filters. Basically introduce numpy, then pandas, then scipy, beautiful soup or openCV. Pure hard skills, that are applicable in many jobs. But realistically, due to time constraints in normal courses, all you want to do here, is numpy to get into it and automate math homework, followed by pandas, to load and automate excel files. And finally, let them do something with hardware, by programming a RP2040 in microPython. It's not as widely adopted as the Arduino ecosystem, but it's good enough for the simple stuff students will be able to learn, and you don't have to introduce a completely different language.
Unknowingly?
Ingress was quite transparent about the goal of gathering real-world data to allows development of future technologies like self-driving and navigation.
It's the reason, why I started playing it around 2012.
OK, yes, that obviously makes sense, considering the amount of these Charakters.
I know about it, but didn't recognize the code. So I assumed, they encoded some text to make it harder to read. So I tried decoding it.
Turns out, if you decode this in UTF-16, it turns into a japanese sentence
契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈
Which means (according to DeepL)
The sound of the wind rustling through the trees
And now I'm confused, why.
Well, they have a small point though:
By allowing to upload to a third party image host and allowing to embed images from other sites directly into Lemmy, the load on servers could be reduced while also allowing for larger/higher quality files.
This would obviously come with a downside to privacy.
The current solution would be: upload a highly compressed file to Lemmy and then link to the external high-quality version in the post.
An alternative solution from Lemmy devs could be, to allow external sources and hide the image until the user confirmed they want to load it from an external source. Or just... Add a toggle to settings to automatically load them.
I mean, with federation and all, everything in Lemmy is an 'external' source anyway unless you trust every single federated instance. So why not allow external image hosting/file hosting sites as trusted sources.