Fiction:

12 books from the Deverry series
The Three Body Problem trilogy
Monkey
Treacle Walker
Various books on Powershell

Non-Fiction:
Linux Administrator's Guide
Linux Network Administrator's Guide
Both OpenZFS books
Ansible
Terraform
Various books on Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL optimisation
C++ manuals
Various Cisco manuals
OpenPF manual

I'm curious what they're going to use up power dragonfly?

  Sure the atmo density should make flying easier* but that distance and air density combine to make solar basically impossible.

*I'm not sure that's as "given" as they make it sound. Low air pressure on Mars meant that even hurricane-speed winds aren't that forceful. At 1.5bar, I'd assume the force of even a gentle breeze will be significant.

Ingenuity leveraged daily solar charging to avoid having to lug hefty batteries around; certainly that won't be an option for dragonfly.

It's not morons.

It's people overwhelmed with multiple crisis scenarios that they can't handle. Most of us wish for a stable society and environment because it makes it easier to plan a future. You wouldn't build a house if you're not sure it's still going to be there in five years.

Calling people morons instead of understanding the actual problem is also a way to avoid looking at it too closely, probably because the complexity is overwhelming to you, too. Easier to just call people morons and be done with it.

Climate change is very much a social, cultural and political problem and the scientists have only looked at the meteorological and biological side of it.

We don't.

It's just not necessary in 90% of Europe. We didn't build mega-cities in near tropical climate. A week or two of really hot weather during the summer is not a problem and you wouldn't install an AC just for that.

Maybe some are, but both in my place and where my parents live (1200 km away, that's 750 miles for the metrically challenged) temperatures have plummeted to near freezing at night and single-digits during the day (in Celsius, that's the 35 to 45 range in Fahrenheit for the temperature scale challenged).

I don't doubt climate change at all. But shoddy journalism that creates headlines where those allegedly affected go "what? not at all, why are you lying?" only helps the deniers.

If you look at a weather map of Europe, like this one stuck in the early 2000s - https://www.weatheronline.co.u... - you'll see that at least right now only the very, very southern tips of Europe (in Spain and Greece, that's in the bottom-left corner and the bottom-right corner, no not the very corner that's already Africa, damn where were you in geography?) has temperatures above 20ÂC predicted for today, and that's not unusually hot for those regions.

We did have unusually hot weather 2-3 weeks ago, but they were unusual only for the season and still well below ordinary summer days.

Please get your reporting right, or you're only feeding the trolls that claim climate change is made up.

I wish, and I would welcome it if they did.

However, as one of the foremost SELinux advocates in its early days, I doubt that the government of all places has the capability to do so. Few sysadmins can configure SELinux halfway decently (i.e. beyond the default policies) and the government (outside the military and secret services) isn't a good tech employer.

Also, MS is far more than the OS. With Office and a bunch of other tools, plus lots of custom software made only for Windows, the entrechnment is really, really deep.

Good flick if you want to get a feel for how Pharma sales work.

I'm surprised it hasn't be Pfbanned yet based on who it highlights.

"He'd like to see the government encourage more competition"

I think we all would like that, but let's be clear that is an ECONOMIC preference and (in essence) an ideological preference, not a security one.

I do NOT believe that the security environment of the US government - a government were a lot of sites (esp internal) look more like myspace pages - would be materially IMPROVED by having a vast array of churning alternative vendors of uncertain provenance being managed by IT depts that can barely keep up with one vendor, either.

No, the 'security-focused' answer is that if I'm putting your (MS's) code on government-critical and security-critical machines, that code is
- transparent
- only accessible to a hot box of HIGHLY secured and vetted A-team of MS coders (ie vetted to the standard of actually working in the agencies it's deployed in)
- every patch is critically vetted by that same team to the last byte, and yes, this means those patches are going to come out slower to the secure ecosystem.

Let's be clear that this has been the experience for a LOT of people in a lot of companies.

My firm is an ardently left-leaning European manufacturer who is all-in about a host of left-of-center values such as sustainability, DEI, etc etc. ...and we too are compelled to move to Onedrive, despite lots of objections and (by now) many examples of Onedrive's shortcomings.

Maybe the point of this isn't political, it's about a shit piece of software that's not ready for the critical needs to which it's being put, management choices that have little to do with actual staff needs, and IT accountability for following those dumb fads.

WHETHER we're talking about an organization led by an orange-colored nutball, or a senescent child-sniffing grandpa.

As someone in logistics, I'm more interested in the actual performance.

Amazon's operations run at scale that is usefully simulative of real delivery-truck operations, more telling than the performative 'tech demonstrations' of other companies (eg a truck or two that they trot out for pictures when the Sustainability C-suite is giving a speech) where it's impossible to discern if the trucks are providing a value/performance that means EVs are *actually* interesting for businesses.

The comments to the OP referenced article are few, but the one is positive:
"The Amazon Rivian vans are great. Quiet in the neighborhood, and the drivers I have spoken with love them. They also carry more packages than their older trucks. "
+ Drivers love them is a huge plus. They could make all the economic sense in the world but on a practical level, if the drivers hated them they're going to find reasons to make them fail.
+ More packages than other trucks is also huge.

In short, this is promising. Local-region delivery vans that can charge nightly, deliver during the days, lots of start/stops (ie the absolute WORST performance envelope for ICE in terms of efficiency, wear, and pollution!) is a great place to see where EVs can leverage their strengths.

So far, so good. But let's be honest: while the costs for this are large in absolute numbers, Amazon profit was $30bn last year. In terms of what they spend on shipping logistics, $200 million could still be a performative, boutique, tech demonstrator for them.

One question I would also like to know is regarding these vehicles being custom-built for Amazon purposes. I am curious if somehow the EV 'frame' is more amenable to easier/cheaper/more varied internally custom body builds than that of an ICE: that could be a compelling plus in favor of EVs as well? Would Amazon's mentioned benefits - driver preference and better capacity for the kinds of loads they handle - have been available in a custom-built ICE vehicle? If not, why not?

Technically speaking the crime of fraud has three elements: (1) A materially false statement; (2) an intent to deceive the recipient; (3) a reliance upon the false statement by the recipient.

So, if you want to lie to people and want to avoid being charged with fraud, it's actually quite simple. You lie by omission. You distract. You prevaricate (dance around the facts). You encourage people to jump on the bandwagon; you lead them to spurious conclusions. It's so easy to lie without making any materially false statements that anyone who does lie that way when people are going to check up on him is a fool.

Not only is this way of lying *legal*, it happens every time a lawyer makes an closing statement to a jury. It's not a problem because there's an opposing counsel who's professionally trained to spot omissions and lapses of logic and to point them out. But if a lawyer introduces a *false statement of fact* to a trial that's a very serious offense, in fact grounds for disbarrment because that can't be fixed by having an alert opponent.

We have similar standards of truthfullness for advertising and politics because in theory there's competition that's supposed to make up for your dishonesty. In practice that doesn't work very well because there is *nobody* involved (like a judge) who cares about people making sound judgments. But still, any brand that relies on materially false statements is a brand you want to avoid because they don't even measure up to the laxest imaginable standards of honesty.

Now investors have lots of money, so they receive a somehat better class of legal protections than consumers or voters do. There are expectations of dilligence and duties to disclose certain things etc. that can get someone selling investments into trouble. But that's still not as bad as committing *fraud*, which is stupid and therefore gets extra severe punishment.

They always rant about Wayland, systemd, Pulse/Pipewire, devops, dkms, quic, zfs, etc.

I used to wonder why they don't just not upgrade their os, but then I realized they are lazy and want somebody else to maintain their old system for them.

I mean, even compiling gentoo with the right use set is too hard for these bellyachers.

Yet the humility never occurs to them that the non-lazy people who actually build distros are embracing the newer technology.

Instead the Old Farts case aspersions and ad-hominems at these hard workers. It's pathetic.

I'm done with their BS and won't help them understand anymore - the arguments are almost universally in bad faith.

Because otherwise they would just not upgrade. I have some Infomagic Slackware CD's from 1993 they might be interested in. Yeah, my first Linux box was over 30 years ago and I competently run all those technologies now. I don't fear change even though understanding new tech takes work and I can't just rest on my laurels.

If I understand your argument properly, you're suggesting that things will be OK with the reefs because "survival of the fittest" will produce a population of corals better adapted to warmer conditions.

Let me first point out is that this isn't really an argument, it's a hypothesis. In fact this is the very question that actual *reef scientists* are raising -- the ability of reefs to survive as an ecosystem under survival pressure. There's no reason to believe reefs will surivive just because fitter organisms will *tend* to reproduce more, populations perish all the time. When it's a keystone species in an ecosystem, that ecosystem collapses. There is no invisible hand here steering things to any preordained conclusion.

So arguing over terminology here is really just an attempt to distract (name calling even more so) from your weak position on whether reefs will survive or not.

However, returning to that irrelevant terminology argument, you are undoubtedly making an evolutionary argument. You may be thinking that natural selection won't produce a new taxonomic *species* for thousands of generations, and you'd be right. However it will produce a new *clade*. When a better-adapted clade emerges due to survival pressures, that is evolution by natural selection. Whether we call that new clade a "species" is purely a human convention adopted and managed to facilitate scientific communication.

You don't have to take my word for any of this. Put it to any working biologist you know.

...at least we know in the hands of Uncle Sam, it won't be abused.

"...They are known for their resistance to heat, water, and oil,..."
"...they are persistent and don't break down over time..."

Feels like the latter is a completely predictable result of the former.