Thank you. Once upon a time, tech companies were run by techies. Remember Hewlett-Packard before the suits took over?

\Why is the update not reversible? How about they make it available for download. People copy it to a thumb drive and insert it in the car. Before the new version is installed, the old version is saved on the thumb drive. If there is a problem with the new version, the user has only to restore the old version.

This actually is news. That air pollution is in various ways bad for people's health is not news. The news here is the effect specifically on frailty in elderly people.

This illustrates why host countries should not be given too much power. It's one thing if Brazil or some other country wants put on a unilateral show, but when an international organization is going to have a meeting, it should have an organizing committee that has the ultimate say. Obviously it has to work with the locals, but if the locals propose something stupid like this, the organizing committee should be able to say no, either fix it or we move the meeting elsewhere.

Anywhere in Saudi Arabia would be problematic given the country's restrictions on freedom of expression, persecution of gay people, limitations on the rights of women, etc., but Mecca is out of the question since only Muslims are allowed to enter the city.

The cable didn't fracture due to the movement of the sea floor. It was broken by a large mass of rock and other stuff set in motion by the volcano smashing into it.

Why do pigs require a large area? Pigs are typically kept in small enclosures and do not wander over large areas like cattle.

The link in the post is bad. I think this is what was intended: https://www.theregister.com/20...

I'm surprised that they expose their whole ordering and distribution system. Customers need to be able to send in orders, but they could do that on a machine that does nothing but collect orders. Once a day (or more often if necessary) an employee plugs a thumb drive into this machine, copies the data file, checks that it is in the correct format and doesn't contain anything it shouldn't, and transfers it to the machine that handles accounting, deciding which factory to send the beer from, etc.

This is not an area I know much about, but I wonder what is so complicated. There are multiple good databases capable of handling lots of data and users, and many governments have systems that do pretty much the same thing. So why isn't implementing a new system for a particular government not simply a matter of installing a database system and configuring it with the local information: bank account numbers, business rules, etc.? Is this really something that requires a lot of expensive, error-prone work? Why? It doesn't seem like rocket science.

Evidently we now need Robocops, who will be able to connect a port to the robotaxi and communicate with it.

Based on my personal experience, my impression is that full-sized USB-A connectors are more robust than the others. If, for example, you've got an external device connected to your laptop and you, another person, or the dog may knock the device off the couch or walk into the cable, the cable is less likely to pull out and the connector and port are less likely to be damaged.

Bad analogy. Using drones to seed clouds will have a very small impact on the jobs of pilots - there aren't many pilots who do this kind of work. And it won't have any impact on airline pilots, who are the people who fly airliners, not the small planes that do cloud seeding. Their concern, as the article says, is with drones flying in the same airspace as airliners and with the debris (like "space junk" but at a lower altitude) that the cloud seeding flares generate.

For 20 years, plus or minus, personal computers reversed that idea.

Actually, many plants contain very little protein. Sago, for example, in dry form, contains less than 1% protein. The lack of protein, and specifically, the lack of protein containing certain crucial amino acids, is why it is tricky for vegans for obtain an adequate diet. They have to make sure to consume enough of the minority of plant foods that do contain a lot of protein, such as soy beans.