Because I am drunk, this Independence Night,
        I watch the fireworks from far away,
        from a high hill, across the moony green
        Of lakes and other hills to the town harbor,
        Where stately illuminations are flung aloft,
        One light shattering in a hundred lights
        Minute by minute. The reason I am crying,
        Aside from only being country drunk,
        That is, may be that I have just remembered
        The sparklers, rockets, roman candles and
        so on, we used to be allowed to buy
        When I was a boy, and set off by ourselves
        At some peril to life and property.
        Our freedom to abuse our freedom thus
        Has since, I understand, been remedied
        By legislation. Now the authorities
        Arrange a perfectly safe public display
        To be watched at a distance; and now also
        The contribution of all the taxpayers
        Together makes a more spectacular
        Result than any could achieve alone
        (A few pale pinwheels, or a firecracker
        Fused at the dog's tail). It is, indeed, splendid:
        Showers of roses in the sky, fountains
        Of emeralds, and those profusely scattered zircons
        Falling and falling, flowering as they fall
        And followed distantly by a noise of thunder.
        My eyes are half-afloat in happy tears.
        God bless our Nation on a night like this,
        And bless the careful and secure officials
        Who celebrate our independence now.

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.

My latest vaccine shots had the 6G upgrade, to take advantage of the higher-speed web access when the networks upgrade, but if they're selling those frequencies to high-power carriers, then I won't be able to walk into any area that handles AT&T or Verizon. :P

Seriously, this will totally wreck the 6G/WiFi6 specification, utterly ruin the planned 7G/WiFi7 update, and cause no end of problems to those already using WiFi6 equipment - basically, people with working gear may well find their hardware simply no longer operates, which is really NOT what no vendor or customer wants to hear. Vendors with existing gear will need to do a recall, which won't be popular, and the replacement products simply aren't going to do even a fraction as well as the customers were promised - which, again, won't go down well. And it won't be the politicians who get the blame, despite it being the politicians who are at fault.

Rollover protection is part of why A pillars are so much thicker now. The first time I drove one of them, it amazed me how much I had to keep moving my head just to keep track of what was across the intersection.

On exactly what the detector is capable of detecting. If they're looking, at any point, for radio waves, then I'd start there. Do the radio waves correspond to the absorption (and therefore emission) band for any molecule or chemical bond that is likely to arise in the ice?

This is so basic that I'm thinking that if this was remotely plausible, they'd have already thought of it. This is too junior to miss. Ergo, the detector isn't looking for radio waves (which seems the most likely, given it's a particle detector, not a radio telescope), or nothing obvious exists at that frequency (which is only a meaningful answer if, indeed, it is a radio telescope).

So, the question is, what precisely does the detector actually detect?

Good point. I'd never thought of it that way.

The problem you miss is that some of us would rather not even pay for the addled video. Prime didn't change its fee when they added video, so give me a video-free alternative at a lower price. I resent paying for something I don't use.

I wonder if anyone has ever done studies of ad effectiveness vs frequency. If they had half the ads which were twice as effective, they could charge twice as much and have the same revenue and happier customers. There must be some sort of Laffer curve. No ads == no revenue but more watchers. 100% ads == no watchers and no revenue. Where is the sweet spot? Some old TV shows were 55 minutes long with 5 minutes of ads, then they switched to 50 minutes and 10 minutes, so they have to chop out 5 minutes to syndicate them.

I bet the broadcasters have done the studies, and 10 minutes must produce more revenue, but I'd really like to see those studies.

When they first bundled video with Prime, I figured it wouldn't be too long before it went south. It did. Series would include the first season only, they dropped a few I was in the middle of watching, they shifted some shows to Britbox and others which had been included.

Then they announced the ads, and I stopped watching. You're going to charge me for something I didn't ask for and can't get a reduction for not using, AND you're going to interrupt it with ads? No thanks. Stopped watching. Well, I was probably watching only one or two shows a week.

But it still annoys me that I'm paying for something I don't want which is supported by ads. I've been watching how much free shipping I get and comparing to Walmart and others. It's close enough that one more screwup and I might dump Prime.

There was a survivor from the plane who described a loud bang before the plane crashed.

This places an absolute upper size on the alien battlefleet seeking to use Earth as a food source.

Trump's abandoned The Wall, as he found that the album doesn't mention Mexico even once, although he found the marching hammers very inspiring.

Back in the days of the Rainbow series, the Orange Book required that data that was marked as secure could not be transferred to any location or user who was (a) not authorised to access it or (b) did not have the security permissions regardless of any other authorisation. There was an additional protocol, though, listed in those manuals - I don't know if it was ever applied though - which stated that data could not be transferred to any device or any network that did not enforce the same security rules or was not authorised to access that data.

Regardless, in more modern times, these protocols were all abolished.

Had they not been, and had all protocols been put in place and enforced, then you could install all the unsecured connections and unsecured servers you liked, without limit. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to actual security, because the full set of protocols would have required the system as a whole to not place sensitive data on such systems.

After the Clinton email server scandal, the Manning leaks, and the Snowden leaks, I'm astonished this wasn't done. I am dubious the Clinton scandal was actually anything like as bad as the claimants said, but it doesn't really matter. If these protocols were all in place, then it would be absolutely impossible for secure data to be transferred to unsecured devices, and absolutely impossible for secure data to be copied to machines that had no "need to know", regardless of any passwords obtained and any clearance obtained.

If people are using unsecured phones, unsecured protocols, unsecured satellite links, etc, it is not because we don't know how to enforce good policy, the documents on how to do this are old and could do with being updated but do in fact exist, as does the software that is capable of enforcing those rules. It is because a choice has been made, by some idiot or other, to consider the risks and consequences perfectly reasonable costs of doing business with companies like Microsoft, because companies like Microsoft simply aren't capable of producing systems that can achieve that kind of level of security and everyone knows it.

In and of itself, that's actually the worrying part.

In the 1930s, and even the first few years of the 1940s, a lot of normal (and relatively sane) people agreed completely with what the fascists were doing. In the Rhythm 0 "endurance art" by Marina Abramovi, normal (and relatively sane) people openly abused their right to do whatever they liked to her, at least up to the point where one tried to kill her with a gun that had been supplied as part of the installation, at which point the people realised they may have gone a little OTT.

Normal (and relatively sane) people will agree with, and support, all kinds of things most societies would regard as utterly evil, so long as (relative to some aspirational ideal) the evil is incremental, with each step in itself banal.

There are various (now-disputed) psychology experiments that attempted to study this phenomenon, but regardless of the credibility of those experiments, there's never really been much of an effort by any society to actually stop, think, and consider the possibility that maybe they're a little too willing to agree to stuff that maybe they shouldn't. People are very keen to assume that it's only other people who can fall into that trap.

Normal and sane is, sadly as Rhythm 0 showed extremely well, not as impressive as we'd all like to think it is. The veneer of civilisation is beautiful to behold, but runs awfully thin and chips easily. Normal and sane adults are not as distant from chimpanzees as our five million years of divergence would encourage us to think. Which is rather worrying, when you get right down to it.

Pretty much agree, I'd also add that we don't have a clear impression of who actually did the supposed rioting, the media were too busy being shot by the National Guard to get an overly-clear impression.

(We know during the BLM "riots" that a suspiciously large number of the "rioters" were later identified as white nationalists, and we know that in the British police spy scandal that the spies often advocated or led actions that were more violent than those the group they were in espoused, so I'd be wary of making any assumptions at the heat of the moment as to exactly who did what, until that is clearly and definitively known. If this had been a popular uprising, I would not have expected such small-scale disturbances - the race riots of the 60s, the Rodney King riots, the British riots in Brixton or Toxteth in the 80s, these weren't the minor events we're seeing in California, which are on a very very much smaller scale than the protest marches that have been taking place.)

This is different from the Jan 6th attempted coup, when those involved in the coup made it very clear they were indeed involved and where those involved were very clearly affiliated with domestic terrorist groups such as the Proud Boys. Let's get some clear answers as to exactly what scale was involved and who it involved, because, yes, this has a VERY Reichstag-fire vibe to it.