It's not the coronavirus deaths themselves that are causing the impact. Rather, it's an effect of the efforts to contain the virus, and therefore people staying at home (whether by choice, enforcement or other) -- factories aren't going to run (hence less electricity generation needed, and less pollution caused by said factories and power plants) if the workforce isn't around to do the work. Same with the reduction in domestic flights: less freight (including the self-loading variety, aka "passengers") simply means fewer flights.

A bit of a simplistic explanation, but one which hopefully gets the core message of TFA across.

And if anyone wants to know what the consequences of stalling at high altitude can be, look no further than the crash of Air France 447.

And then you get people like this who decide to go to great lengths to debunk the flat-earthers, using such flights as an example. In the linked YouTube clip, it's: buy a business class seat on the daily Sydney to Johannesburg flight, stick a GoPro on the window and run a GPS logger for the entire 13 hour flight, then compare and correlate with data from other sources such as satellite imagery, FlightRadar24 et al. The clip is well worth the watch, if only for the bit where they fly far south enough that the sun appears to move backwards.

Not that it's going to make one iota of difference to a flat-earther though.

(Off-topic, but the Johannesburg-Perth flights were suspended last Friday due to a crippling strike at South African Airways. I hear they've been able to resume their long-haul international flights since, but domestic ops are still cancelled.)

Of course there is.

... at least, for me anyway.

Back when I was growing up in the late 1980s/early 1990s, I had this precocious curiosity around navigation: my father was a civil engineer with the provincial Department of Public Works based out of Pietermaritzburg, and he'd often need to perform site inspections in far-off rural parts of the province, and often he'd take me (at the ages of 4-5, before I'd started primary school) along for the ride. I always wanted to know where on the road we were, where we were going, and how much further until we could stop for lunch (this was important at age 5!), and I'd "borrowed" (read: expropriated) the road maps from my father's study and taught myself what they meant and how to use them, but I could never read them in the car without getting violently carsick around 15 seconds later.

Thus, I very quickly gained the ability to memorize the paper maps, and so whenever we were on the road, I would then know exactly where we were, which route we should take, how much further we should go, and where all the rest stops were. Totally from memory. I became good enough at this so that, by age 8, I had officially been promoted to family navigator on our road trip holidays.

I'm now 34, moved from South Africa to New Zealand, and paper replaced digital (mostly: I still keep paper maps for a fallback) but I still navigate this way. When I need to navigate to somewhere new (and since I'm a fairly new immigrant, this currently happens a lot!), I'll pull out a map (be it paper or OpenStreetMaps) before I head off, look at where I need to go, and then apply this to my pre-existing knowledge of the area. This technique of mine still hasn't failed me.

I do have a GPS application on my mobile device and will load it up, but for me, it's far more about OpenStreetMaps quality control (I'll observe what the GPS is doing and then use this to improve OSM quality on the route I've been along) and far less about navigation itself.

Doesn't even need to be that -- if I gain physical access to your laptop, there's nothing stopping me bypassing your password entirely by simply removing your laptop's hard drive and plugging it into my own system. Which is likely what happened in this case. Your password controls access to the operating system and everything running on it, but when it comes to the underlying file system, it does sweet fuck all.

Thankfully, there are plenty of tools to do that in this day of age. All non-Home editions of Windows since Vista come with BitLocker, which provides full disk encryption, and the Lenovo-issued corporate laptop would likely have had this tool available (not having it, or an open-source equivalent, enabled is a monumental failure of Lenovo's internal IT policies). There's also VeraCrypt for the open-source world (people I know who have used it speak of it highly), and Wikipedia has a lengthy comparison of disk encryption software if you're interested further.

The summary mentioned Azure and Office 365 as examples where Microsoft gives some form of status dashboard to their customers. In those two cases, it seems rather apparent that Microsoft considers people that use those products as Microsoft customers.

However, given the initial free upgrades from prior Windows versions and the telemetry (or rather, spyware) that Windows 10 incorporates, one can argue the point that, much like Facebook, Windows 10 users are not considered Microsoft's customers, but a Microsoft product (the saying "if you're not paying for it, you're the product" comes to mind). Seen in that light, the lack of transparency (or any due diligence with respect to rolling out Windows 10 updates without show stopping bugs) makes sense: Microsoft apparently does not see themselves as answerable to their Windows 10 users, but instead answerable to those who they provide or sell data about those Windows 10 users to -- those are actually Microsoft's Windows 10 customers.

But that's just the type of place it is. A lot of sexy people not doing much work... and having affairs.

It's also notable for its IT department, consisting of a genius, a dynamic go-getter and a man from Ireland.

Try an 11 hour change in sleep patterns (which I get when I travel from New Zealand to visit friends and family back in South Africa). I guarantee you, there's nothing else that fucks up your sleep patterns as much as a sudden shift of almost half a day.

In fact, I would argue that the trip from here to South Africa is worse than the trip from here to Europe, because when flying to Europe, the time change is over a 25 hour flight, whereas flying to South Africa (via the most direct route for me, which is to first fly to Sydney and then catch the Sydney-Johannesburg flight, QF63) is a lot shorter: the longest leg (being the aforementioned QF63) has a 9 hour change in an 13.30 hour flight time -- and it's even worse on the return QF64 flight as the flight time is 2 hours shorter (QF63 has to battle some nasty headwinds, which become tailwinds for the return trip).

Another fun fact: the Qantas flight attendants absolutely detest being assigned to QF63: those 13.30 hours are entirely in daylight since the plane is quite literally chasing the sun across the Southern Indian Ocean. On the plus side, it routes close to the Antarctic coast fairly regularly as the headwinds there tend to be less powerful than if the flight simply followed the great circle routing, which for us nerds is one of the few ways to see Antarctica short of joining a polar expedition.

So You Want To Abolish Time Zones

To summarize (for people without the inclination to read the whole thing):