In the old days when there was a decent severance package, volunteering for layoff was a good way to retire with a bonus. Other than a few specific times there wasn't a formal way to do so, but there was an informal path. Way back when I was on vacation over the layoff. When I came back someone I enjoyed talking with was gone. I found out he had been laid off and left with a smile on his face. (He was quite a bit older than me.)

As a man in his late 60s, I've gotten the impression over the years, and my doctor has not denied this, that every man will die with prostate cancer. Notice I said "with", not "of". My interpretation is that the biological engineering of the prostate just isn't that good - they're failure prone. And let's face it, they're good enough. They practically always get us through our reproductive years. The "bad" cases of prostate cancer - like Frank Zappa and Daniel Fogleberg, hit in the late forties or early fifties. That's after normal reproduction, though still during child rearing years. Usually it's later than that, when the kids have flown the coop.

The other factor is if or when prostate cancer metastasizes. If it does, it's really nasty, one of the nastier cancers, and doesn't respond well to treatment. But catching it early and proper treatment generally keeps it at bay. It's a "maintainable" condition, which is probably why they're looking at re-classifying it.

Yes, my father had it. A friend of mine has it. My brother might have it. I had a scare almost a decade ago but am apparently OK. I absolutely get my routine check on it.

I wonder if the CxO is more readily replaced by an AI bot. The lower level people generally have to deal with other people. The CxOs do too, but far fewer people and they likely do it in more specialized jargon - the type of thing an AI could do well at. They also need access to an inhuman breadth and depth of knowledge - another thing an AI is good at.

There have been many quips about Amazon using algorithms to direct human workers. Maybe they haven't experimented enough yet with moving those algorithms up the chain yet.

> Then the Disease of Greed came along and damn near wiped us all out.

Optimistic, aren't you.

When I was in college in the latter half of the 1970's one of the local alternative rock radio stations was using "paraquat test kits" as the prizes in their radio contests. At the time they were saying that the US government was spraying paraquat on marijuana fields. Unethical growers would hurry up and harvest the fields, getting the tainted product to market before it shriveled up.

Someone felt that using this tainted product was a bad idea and came up with a test kit.

Does this suggest that for cryptographic purposes quantum computing can only go so far?
In other words, does this mean that a future-proof cryptographic algorithm is really possible, rather than a just a race with hardware progress?

Some time earlier I had a VHS of Shada using whatever footage they had plus Tom Baker narrating the missing parts and filling them in. This animated version might be fun. It's been long enough that I've pretty much forgotten everything except that the one scene in the boat made it into the Five Doctors special.

How long ago was that, and have they been tracked for cataracts? UV in general is helpful in developing cataracts.

It does exactly what I got it for, and I'm happy with it. Since installation there have been 42 "events" with a total usage of about a day, the longest 3 hours. Most of the events have been ten minutes or so, just a few longer ones. It's kind of nice to find out about a power outage on my phone, then look out and see the street dark. (numbers off the app on my phone)

I've been in this house 40 years now, serviced by GMP. When we first moved in the power reliability was rather iffy. I'd started looking into a generator and sizing things up - then the reliability got much better. It was that way for a long time, then probably 10 years or so ago the reliability started dropping again. So when the battery option popped back up I was an early adopter.

A few notes that others have hinted about. It's not just a battery, it's got an ethernet cable into my network, so it talks to the utility. It's also got an environmental system built in for both cooling and heating, though sitting in my basement it stays at a pretty constant temperature. Because it's got constant monitoring GMP will know if things start to go south, and I suspect I'd get a notification on my phone. So it's not like the thing is suddenly going to burst into flames with no warning at all - there will at least be prompt notification. More likely it's not completely out of the blue and there are warning signs.

I started a project at work on Python 1.5, and it was a bit disruptive when I had to move it to 2.0, and even 2.1 was some disruption from that. I continued supporting that project for between 10 and 15 years and kept it at Python 2.x even after Python 3 was out.

At the time I figured I would be retired before I needed to move to Python 3, but I was wrong. I ended up moving to 3.x several years before retiring this past spring. Part of the problem is that RedHat Enterprise last I knew shipped Python 2.7 by default. The company also had local installations of Python 3.x, and both versions had semi-overlapping additional libraries, which was quite annoying. I actually had some code that was split between the two versions and passed intermediate data between them.

Or take the money and then run anyway.

Since people here presumably have experience with these things...

My wife and I will be in the market for a new car a few years down the road, and we've been thinking tentatively that it will be electric. One of my bigger concerns is that we live in Vermont. One of the things about internal combustion engines is the amount of waste heat, and that means that heating the interior in winter is pretty simple. Waste the heat inside instead of outside. With an electric there is less waste heat, and that means that heating the passengers means losing range.

I know with electrics they start with heated seats because that's a more efficient use of electricity. I'm wondering how comfortable are electric cars in deep winter from actual owners.