When the laptop was new, the battery would last about the indicated time. It's now 6 years old, and the battery capcity is about 80% of what it was originally. Of course, I only put the battery in the laptop when I use it away from an outlet, which only happens once every few months ...

The summary above is highly misleading, possibly because of the bad headline the NYT editor put on the story. The judge didn't rule on the merits at all. All he did is issue a preliminary injunctiion, which forces the drug company to maintain the status quo for the duration of the trial. The judge didn't "block an attempt by the drug company" he just deferred the attempt until the case is over. If New York wins its case, the judge will actually block the attempt by entering a permanent injunction.

In other words: this ruling only reflects a judgement that, until we know who wins, it's better to force the company to keep the drug on the market, which is obvious to everyone. It doesn't reflect a judgement on whether the drug company may legally withdraw the drug.

Now that Google has every reason to crush Firefox, what is Mozilla's market share going to be in 2019?

I agree that the Google being both a competitor and (until now) a sponsor is the major consideration here, not the quality of search results. The question is whether Google really are more motivated to support Mozilla when they are getting revenue from browser searches than when they aren't. Quite possibly the Mozilla Foundation concluded that Google would compete with them in any case.

It will be hard for anyone here to assess this move. Having not used Yahoo! search for a long time, I have no idea about the quality of their search results. It is even less clear whether the typical Mozilla user will care about any possible differences, or the extent to which Mozilla users might change browsers because of this

If I had to guess, I'd say that very few people choose their brower based on the default search engine, and therefore very few will change browers because of this. If the userbase is really fixed then Mozilla should try to maximize their revenue by letting Yahoo! and Google bid for the rights.

Coal is both extremely polluting and costs lives to dig out of the ground. Phasing it out is a great idea.

On the other hand, unless fusion arrives before 2050 (not very likely), fission is a much better idea than "rewneables" like wind and solar which are very expensive and (with wind) environmentally damaging..

I you really let me sit between you and the source of the download, I can mess with your download of the public key, and therefore replace signatures.

In other words, OS updates cannot be attacked this way (presumably OS vendor's the public key is included in the installation). But if you patch my download from www.example.com, you can also patch my download when I get the public key used by www.example.com to sign downloads.

Digital signatures is exactly the technology that solves this problem. If you download binaries from the internet (especially if you have need to use Tor to get them!), check the signatures!

Now, it may be possible to also dynamically patch the signatures when these are downloaded -- but that requires much greater control since signatures can be obtained separately, and since Tor can mitigate the problem by routing different downloads through different exit notes.

Of course, if the experimental vaccine is effective, then we should be keeping people from dying and we don't need a control group. But this is an unwarranted assumption: we don't know yet if the exerimental vaccine is effective -- this is what we are trying to determine, and we won't have the answer until after the experiment.

You say "we already know the death rate of ebola through empirical observation", but the death rate depends on many variables. For example, health-care workers probably have better habits than the average person, but they are exposed to Ebola more than the average person. Suppose after the vaccine we see a lower death rate. Are we sure this is due to the vaccine? Perhaps the workers who got the vaccine were from volunteers from Sweden, and Swedish people are more resistant to Ebola? The point of randomized trials is exactly to account for any known and unknown effects of this type by randomly choosing who gets the treatment and who doesn't among a reasonably uniform population. This way the people who get and don't get the treatment differ statistically only in the experimentally tested property, and we can have some confidence any observed effects are due to the treatment.