Very few businesses that are involved in IT in any way have anything remotely close to decent security.

Basically, they need to reintroduce the US' Internet Czar, who should have meaningful authority and who should impose meaningful IT security standards. That small companies can't afford to hire security staff is irrelevant as they mostly either work in the cloud using SAAS, at which point their provider should be handling all the security. If you want to roll your own, then you should accept the burden of paying for adequate security. Minimum standards apply to just about everything else in life, and I'd rate getting IT security right just a little bit more important than getting cars to not roll over (you can usually survive a roll) or preventing toasters from spontaneously combusting (you can park electrical appliances away from flammable stuff).

You can avoid catastrophes with defective appliances but you can't avoid catastrophes with defective IT systems.

Considering you can pretty much take any low-end hardware and emulate a C64, or any other 8 bit system, probably the only real challenge is the keyboard. Ironically a suitable mechanical keyboard is by far the most expensive item, with the price ranging from $100-$200.

I've been using LO pretty much constantly for the last two years (even wrote a novel on it). Like any interface, it just takes time to become familiar. In fact, I like the way Writer organizes styles and style configuration far better than Word, and often, even for DOCX files, do initial style set up and layout in Writer and then move to Word if I have to (which is seldom enough).

LO is a damned good office system. Its default UI is older, but since I used MS-Edit and Word pretty extensively back in the 1990s, it feels familiar to me. There is a ribbon interface, but I've only tried it a few times before remembering why it is I actually don't like the Word ribbon.

And he certainly can't be held responsible for Brexit, which is why Britain is in the state it's in now. It's fascinating to watch how the Tories, and their fellow travellers across the pond, hold a government that is only been in power for a year responsible for their own actions.

It means the next time they show up, they'll need a court order to do so.

F = G * (m1 * m2) / r^2

Or as we call it, Newton's inverse square law, where the force of gravity on any two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Space is really really really really really big (the observable universe has a diameter of about 93 billion light-years), so it is literally impossible for any combination of mergers to have any effect beyond an infinitesimal region of the universe. Even a galactic merger which caused two supermassive blackholes to merge would have little or no measurable effect on a neighbouring galaxy as far away as Andromeda is from us (about 2.54 million light years away).

In fact, it's not until LIGO that we have even been able to detect the mergers of super dense and super massive objects like neutron stars and black holes, just to give you an idea of how the inverse square law limits the influences of gravity over very large distances.

Good point. An army that sees all others as subhuman and sees only the next death is one that has to keep fighting. It has no choice. It's the only thing it knows. It can keep conquering more territory outwards, or it can slaughter its own government inwards. History shows those are your two options.

Whether or not Russia conquers Ukraine, it will attack other countries - vast numbers of bored, underpaid soldiers would seek entertainment elsewhere if they didn't.

I eagerly await the follow up articles on the whereabouts of DB Cooper and the identity of Jack the Ripper.

This is what I'm going by:

The report said that in December 2018, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued a special airworthiness information bulletin based on reports from operators of model 737 planes that the fuel control switches were installed with the locking feature disengaged.

The airworthiness concern was not considered an unsafe condition that would warrant an airworthiness directive – a legally enforceable regulation to correct unsafe conditions.

The same switch design is used in Boeing 787-8 aircraft, including Air India’s VT-ANB, which crashed. The report added: “As per the information from Air India, the suggested inspections were not carried out as the SAIB was advisory and not mandatory.”

https://www.theguardian.com/wo...

1. Were the safety guards, which were optional, installed?

2. We know investigators are looking into the computer system, does this mean the computer can also set the switch settings?

If the answers are "no" and "no" respectively, it was likely an accidental bump.

If the answers are "yes" and "no", then one of the pilots lied.

If the answer to the second one is yes, then regardless of the answer to the first, I'd hope the investigation thoroughly checks whether the software can be triggered into doing so through faulty data or the existence of software defects.

There's always Debian.

Just like the subject says, supersymmetry, an elegant solution to a number of problems, in particular the best theoretical extension to the Standard Model, slides closer to oblivion with each large scale and small scale (accelerator) experiment meant to find these large supersymmetrical particles.

Agree with all your points.

It's possible I might have missed these, but they're also major considerations with COVID:

1. It causes scarring of tissue, especially heart tissue. That's why COVID sufferers often had severe blood clots in their bloodstream. Scarring of the heart increases risk of heart attacks, but there's obviously not much data on by how much, from COVID. Yet.

2. It causes brain damage in all who have been infected. Again, we have very little idea of how much, but from what I've read, there may be an increased risk of strokes in later life.

3. Viral load is known to cause fossil viruses in DNA to reactivate silenced portions. This can lead to cancer. Viral load has also been linked to multiple sclerosis and chronic fatigue, but it's possible COVID was the wrong sort of virus. These things can take decades to develop.

I would expect a drop in life expectancy, sometimes in the 2040-2050 timeframe, from life-shortening damage from COVID, but the probability depends on how much damage even mild sufferers sustained and what medicine can do to mitigate it by then. The first, as far as I know, has not been looked at nearly as much as long COVID has - which is fair. The second is obviously unknowable.

I'm hoping I'm being overly anxious, my worry is that I might not be anxious enough.

In fact, it is UNETHICAL to use a placebo control in any clinical trial of an investigational product for which the existing standard of care already includes a product on the market.

In plain English, it is entirely unethical to give participants a placebo to test the efficacy of a new flu vaccine when we already have existing vaccines on the market. Doing so denies participants in the study from accessing effective treatment. If you have to test against a placebo, it will be impossible to recruit participants, because nobody will take the chance to receive placebo when they could just go to the pharmacy and get vaccinated.

There are only two possible explanations for such a position: either gross ignorance of basic scientific and ethical principles for conducting medical research in humans, or deliberate malicious intent to stop all research of investigational drugs. It doesn't actually matter which one is the reason. Both are entirely unacceptable.

The fact that a huge segment of the American population does not understand even the most basic scientific principles is the reason why many people will die needlessly.