The comment I was replying to had a specific scenario - a parent asked why her 2 children who were born in the US and lived here for 3 years should have to put up with the IRS etc etc. My statement directly addressed that case. Even someone in that situation is taking advantage of being a US citizen the second they are kidnapped. It's like car insurance: just because you drove safely and didn't have a single claim doesn't mean you get your money back. You need to cancel your policy.

US citizenship is extended travel insurance. Until it's renounced, the federal government is on the hook to intervene. Cancel the policy if you don't want the insurance.

Are you joking? The FBI has an entire division dedicated to rescuing Americans who are kidnapped while living overseas:

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/how-the-fbi-responds-to-international-kidnappings-050119

And look up David Sneddon who was kidnapped while living in China. Catherine Serou who was abducted in Russia. Those families didn't say "they weren't living in the US, we don't need your help". They want the full force of the US government backing the search.

So how exactly do you cancel your Netflix subscription? Telepathy? The rest of us have to contact Netflix and tell them we no longer want the subscription. In this case, since revoking citizenship is a much bigger deal, you'd want more safeguards in place than an online form.

Because as soon as one of them gets kidnapped while backpacking in Nepal, we can be guaranteed that you or someone else close to them will start screaming "American citizen" in the media, and expect the Marines/CIA/NSA to conduct a billion dollar joint operation for rescue. Same deal as cruise ships who fly an Panama flag, but when they need help, are suddenly good ol' American companies.

It's like a Netflix subscription - if you're subscribed, you have to pay even if you don't watch any movies. Until you cancel your subscription.

I really wanted to watch this Olympics - I spent a week trying to figure out how I could pay for a package online, for say under $100, but finally gave up. The problem is that NBC is still in a 1970's appointment TV mentality, which just doesn't make sense these days. I don't need replays on 3 different "channels" to try to figure out if weightlifting is on NBC-SN or Peacock or NBC. I need them to be in one place. And if it's live, I don't need a talking head narrating every split second, and pointing out every 8 seconds what a HARD LONG JOURNEY IT IS AND HOW TOUGH THEY ARE. Every single avenue for good coverage involved me paying for at least 6 months of cable. Fuck that. I don't know how to get this into their thick skulls, but I've cut the cord for years now, and I'm not planning on enduring more abuse from Charter/Spectrum.

I just don't get it. If it costs $1,000 per participant to do a thorough blood test, we would still only be at $1 billion if we tested 500,000 of the participants a couple of times.

And $1 billion is sofa-cushion-change given the scale of the problem. It would be a no-brainer for any politician, especially given vaccine hesitancy. Are medical researchers really this much "paint by numbers" in their thinking?

But obviously someone has already thought of this. Some hematologist must have said "we should measure the d-dimer values at 2 months and 6 months after getting the vaccine (I'm making up values)". Then the next step is to get some funding for that, and how could you possibly not get NSF funding for the biggest medical crisis of our generation?

But where are those studies? It's like all the medical people want us to focus on this 0.0001% death statistic, and "only 6 people died out of millions". It's like when the magician doesn't want you to pay attention to his other hand.

That document is a great example of what I'm talking about. They talk about all the observable side effects (AEs) like Bell's palsy, DVT, etc. etc. But what about effects that don't show up immediately? I'm talking about something that you can't find from getting the study participant to fill in a questionnaire, like micro strokes and so on. Unless I missed it in the document, there's nothing mentioned about specific blood tests on the people with no bad AEs

Medical stuff is not my area of expertise, so let me put it this way - suppose we did a huge study where we had 500,000 people huff asbestos for 30 minutes. Then we looked at adverse effects and didn't see any beyond normally expected. We gave them all questionnaires and everything is peachy keen. But if we had done lung biopsies on a subset 6 months later, we might have determined that there are long term problems. Isn't this the same case, where a huge number of initial participants doesn't mean anything if we don't know what we're looking for?

Everyone keeps talking about this "intense" testing, but how did they test for side effects without symptoms? What were the specific tests? Did they take blood from people who didn't have any issue with the vaccine, and put it under the microscope? How many samples?

They're both based on the same process, right? That's what the huge red flag is to me.

My big question - which apparently is harder to get a straight answer on than a schematic of a Trident missile - is how did they look for non-symptomatic problems in the trials? For example, how do we know that people didn't develop blood clots unless they had symptoms? So was a large random sample selected, and their blood looked at under a microscope, tested for D-dimer periodically, etc etc? Or was the assumption that if someone didn't report a symptom, the vaccine was safe? And "benign" makes no sense in the wonderful world o' clots. If my understanding is correct, clots can lie dormant for years, then boom, it's the fast train to stroke-ville. This is why I trust most American doctors about as far as I can throw their golf carts. Gatekeeping.

Not bad at all - I haven't had any failures with this setup since I just put it together last year, but on my previous setup which was around the same size, the rebuild ran overnight, and I was good to go the next morning. I've noticed anecdotally that rebuild with a dedicated RAID controller is significantly faster than when I have two hard drives in RAID1 using the motherboard. I think RAID5 is a good solution for home use. We obviously use RAID60 and higher at work, but for less than 100TB of data in an array, RAID5 is the sweet spot.

A failed HW RAID controller is much less likely than a failed drive. That's the point of hardware RAID. Even then, it's not a big deal if it happens. The only reason you think someone is tied to their controller is because their backups are inadequate. If they're running CDP (real-time) or even daily backups, then recovering from backup becomes a routine chore, not an ordeal. Your idea of backup "not being 100% complete" might be true for someone who runs it once a week (or worse) - but then they probably should be focusing their efforts on improved backup, not on RAID.

Decent RAID controllers simply don't fail that often. I'm using a MegaRAID card at home for my file server which cost around $350 for 4 channels, with four 8TB drives in RAID5. If the controller goes out, I'll just buy a new one and restripe. No big deal, and I'm certainly not going to be on eBay trying to match hardware. And I think I still have an Adaptec 3940UW in the basement that ran through most of the '90s without a hiccup. Now if you ask me how many failed drives I've replaced in arrays, I'd have to add them up.

IMHO around 90% of the home users - especially gamers - that are implementing RAID have absolutely no use for it. They see it as something the big boys use, and figure it must be good.

Like many people out there, you have a fundamental misconception about RAID's raison d'etre.

RAID is NOT a backup solution.

RAID is an uptime solution. If one of your hard drives fails on Monday afternoon, you can continue using your system (or NAS) until the weekend when you get time to put in a new hard drive. But at no time should you really worry about things like moving the hardware controller to a different system and recovering data - because you would just pull that from backups.

I continually encounter people trying to find a used Soviet Mik-Sputnik-v7 version 12b hardware controller or something on eBay, because they're trying to get data back from their failed array. That should never ever ever happen. As soon as the hardware fails, you rebuild with whatever is convenient, and restore the data onto the new hardware setup.

But this is a good idea. There haven't been any new languages created in the last 8 minutes or so, therefore there's definitely a vacuum looking to be filled. And with Microsoft's proven track record in reliability and product planning, this is a no-brainer!

I would disagree that it's strongly typed. It might be from a programmer's viewpoint, but definitely not from the perspective of a comp sci major. Consider this code:

rate = input("Enter a rate code from A to F: ")
print( rate )
print( f"rate is {rate} and has a type of {type(rate)}" )
print( f"input has a type of {type(input)}" )
rate = 0.827
print( f"rate is {rate} and has a type of {type(rate)}" )

# few dozen lines later
input = rate * 2
print( f"input has a type of {type(input)}" )

In addition to changing the type of rate without any warning, I've taken the input FUNCTION and redefined it as floating point variable. That's a total abortion in terms of consistency.

I've found that Python apologists try to get around this with a very narrow definition of "strongly typed". But if you can change built-in functions like this, you're just asking for problems.